I said 'it goes beyond censorship', that means that censorship is a part of it but that it goes well beyond that point.

Here is the dictionary definition: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."

If we follow your logic then killing someone or jailing or intimidating them is just censorship. But the bar for what is censorship is much lower than that. So if the bar for censorship is met by just targeting the media (for instance: youtube, to tell them to pull the account and not to let her back in) then that would be censorship and it wouldn't require threats of harm or restrictions on movement. That's active and possibly violent intimidation. Xi's government gets a free pass from the West because (1) we like the goodies and (2) he's not as bad as some of his predecessors. But meanwhile he's a thug and his government is acting in very thuggish ways to achieve their goals and the casualness with which censorship escalates into other forms of abuse is telling. And that's why we have different names for those other abuses. Those abuses are not there in the service of censorship, censorship is just one of the elements from a palette of abuses that a state can visit on a person.

More telling is how apparently a fragment of the HN audience insists they see nothing more than the control of information. Trust me on this: if your internet connection is severed and/or your online writings are officially erased that's bad enough, having goons come to your house, threaten you and threaten your significant other that's another level altogether.

Censorship doesn't require guns, does not require goons and in general doesn't have a prerequisite of violence. But threats of harm, or being sent to a 'reeducation camp' (I hate that term) especially in a country where people tend to just disappear aim to influence not just your writings and your media expression but your general behavior and serve to cow an individual completely, apparently successful. So censorship is only a sub-goal, and a minor one at that. This is all about behavior and coercion, hence the travel restrictions and targeting of groups of individuals.

Agreed that private entities not posting your tweets is not censorship.

But I will stick to my guns that there is much more at stake for people in China that don't behave in the way the government wants them to than just being censored. 'to stop doing something' is doing the heavy lifting in your comment and what the 'something' is can be limited to media expressions and then I would agree it is censorship. But this goes much further than that: it is not just what you write. It is also how you behave, and about what your ancestry is, which activities you are allowed to engage in (and which activities you have to engage in).

Censorship is just about expression. This is full-on coercion, anti-LGBT policy and racism. To make it explicit.

You should read the Wikipedia article on what censorship is:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

"Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies."

I trace tolerance in general back to the religious tolerance introduced by the Peace of Westphalia, and the centuries of religious war that preceded it. It obviously goes much further back, but that's the archetypical example for me.

Seen in this light, tolerance is somewhere between symbiosis and mutually assured destruction, and much less wishy-washy than everyone thinks it is.

In America it is legal to advocate for Nazism. This is legal and simultaneously a non-threat because our system of checks and balances prevents them from overthrowing the government. They are not denied their first amendment rights, and yet they're abject losers. The US government is simultaneously tolerant of them and not threatened by them.

The supposed paradox of intolerance says that silencing people who would silence you is the only way to prevent yourself from being silenced, but this is demonstrably not true.

> Again and again the empirical outcome of tolerating bad faith weaponized speech is the sharp reduction in the diversity of ideas and perspectives actually present in speech, by violently silencing or eliminating those who hold other perspectives.

So the problem isn't 'tolerating bad faith weaponized speech' but rather tolerating 'violently silencing or eliminating those who hold other perspectives.'

The second does not follow on from the first.

Also, what is (and who defines) 'weaponized speech'?

Likewise, who defines 'bad faith'?

> Government policy ideals from a small handful of European men in the 18th century may be noble but I value more the documented modern observable effects of policies than their inspiration and goals.

The proof is in the pudding, the American system of political tolerance has an excellent track record and leads to better outcomes in the long run.

The 'paradox' of meeting violence with violence is the most mundane "I'm 14 and this is deep" shit. I'm pretty sure this is not what people are actually talking about when they talk when they bring up Poppler's "paradox". The "paradox" is used to persuade people that authoritarianism is okay when they do it because everybody thinks of themselves as the good guys. The whole point of tolerance is that you don't meet words with violence, not that you should be a pacifist who refuses to meet even violence with violence.