The thing is, whenever you invoke Popper, you're calling the person you disagree with a literal Nazi who wants to liquidate millions of people.
Anything short of that and the logic falls apart -- there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
I'm afraid I don't know what "invoke Popper" means.
> there's no threat in tolerating some disagreeable person unless they go on to take over the government and forcibly outlaw all disagreement with them.
If that intent is demonstrable, there's no reason to assist them in their goals.
Karl Popper's the original author of the paradox of tolerance meme.
The paradox isn't "you don't have to tolerate intolerant people because they're bad and tolerance is our goal", the paradox is that tolerating people who then proceed to seize power and outlaw all disagreement with them undermines tolerance.
Unless there's a credible threat, it's a misuse of the quote.
If you're talking about anti-Nazi laws in Germany, fine, but I see the quote trotted out all the time to justify eg twitter banning some alt-right-adjacent nerd for having bad opinions.
I suspect what has changed is that such "alt-right-adjacent nerds" are increasingly seen as credible threats.
Nobody paid much attention to what that guy on gab was saying to like-minded folk on gab... Until he grabbed a gun and massacred everyone in a religious building.
When the threat evaluation models aren't trusted, the spread on evaluation of "credible threat" increases.
I mean, even a mass shooting like that doesn't trigger the paradox of tolerance. It's a terrible tragedy, and a law enforcement issue, but society as a whole is not less tolerant for it -- we all agree, don't shoot up a synagogue or mosque, that is extremely bad form in our society.
The paradox of tolerance would be if we decided to be tolerant of a pro-mosque-shooting political party and they took power and instituted mandatory mosque shootings every Friday. We would have messed up in that case.
It's not, "I demand people who disagree with me on less clear-cut issues be silenced because they're bigots, according to me".
Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Do we all agree? I think a lot of people do. There's a disturbingly large number who do not. And there are corners of the Internet perfectly willing to entertain their fantasies of establishing such a political party.
I think whether one should cut that off at the knees by monitoring such sites and, when necessary, squelching the channel or one waits until someone has grabbed a gun to act on the ideation is an intensity slider on paradox of tolerance that reasonable people can disagree on.
Given the sliding scale, it's probably a case-by-case issue. Hard to come up with a general principle that's going to universally apply; give an example of something people have been silenced on that they should have been allowed to continue, and there's debate to be had, but on the general principle, both sides can probably agree that there's times to silence and times to not.
I think it's a fallacy to assume that spree killers are trying to seize any kind of political power. The Columbine killers could not care less about educational or school policy: they were simply extreme nihilists who hated everyone and everything, and they were ready to prove it in the most self-aggrandizing way.
Mind you, I'm not saying that we should tolerate such folks, either; and once you get past their tiresome, narcissistic self-aggrandizement, it's not like they have anything worthwhile to say. But that's a different argument than Popper's; it assumes the existence of some minimally basic ethic of thriving, and says that no, you can't aim to destroy the world around you even if you would be quite OK with everyone else doing it back to you in return.
It almost feels like one could, if one so chose, synthesize out a "Societies interpret self-destructive nihilism as damage and route around it" statement. Or something near to it.
I'm not sure how satanism factors into it; let's table that.
> Would you also support banning hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?
If we're talking no-platforming, I don't think the question is whether society bans it; I think the question is "Would you compel Wal-Mart to sell hip hop albums that talk about shooting cops or other violent crime?" And I would not. But it's a sliding scale which is, as you've noted, tied to the likelihood of the group in question seizing enough power to concretize their ideas. In the US at least, hip-hop artists aren't an organized political structure intent on overthrowing the US government.
White supremacists are another story entirely. It's pretty unambiguous what "blood and soil" or "Jews will not replace us" mean. And a lot of Americans are deeply concerned with the risk that that ideology has its tentacles extremely deeply embedded in one of the two primary parties at the federal level in the US.
The conclusion was that parental advisory stickers are cool and will help sell your album, and I'm glad we got there as a society.
Incidentally, Wal-mart in particular was on the conservative side of that culture war episode, and they did in fact refuse to sell those albums while also selling entire racks of guns.
> Incidentally, Wal-mart in particular was on the conservative side of that culture war episode, and they did in fact refuse to sell those albums
Indeed they did. And the US government did not compel them to sell the albums, nor should they have. The albums found their audience in spite of some channels deciding it wasn't a kind of speech they would tolerate on their premises.
Similarly, some of the speakers who have been no-platformed will find their audience without a university's help; that doesn't imply the universities should be compelled to help them. And some toxic moderators and editors will continue to be toxic on some other site; that doesn't imply that site must be Wikipedia.
There's an argument that certain information systems have become 'common carriers' in a way that wal-mart never was, and maybe we should regulate them differently.
But I was mostly just nitpicking improper usage of the paradox of tolerance. Righteous censorship of 'bad' ideas might feel good but it's probably not a great instinct to have in the long term -- this cultural moment will pass, the meta-ideas about when it's ok to censor are longer-lasting.
Wal-Mart carries plenty of stuff, though. If you're going to move towards that kind of regulation for free information services, there has to be some other basis for it.
I don't know the solution, but I definitely wouldn't want my phone carrier deplatforming me for counter-revolutionary speech.
There are plenty of other places to go if Wal-Mart doesn't sell a CD. Not so much in Twitter or Wikipedia's case. Some alt-right 'competitor' with 30 users isn't really a substitute.
I think you implied an analogy between your phone carrier and Twitter / Wikipedia that doesn't hold water.
Your phone carrier is a service provider that is constrained by the FCC. Twitter is one of many broadcast sites one could go via a phone carrier. But the US, to my knowledge, has never recognized anything approximating a right to broadcast. Not even freedom of the press implies freedom to spew signal over the airwaves, for instance (because the radio spectrum is finite and shared).
Freedom of the press has never implied freedom to use someone else's press, and telecommunications hardware providers aren't in the same category. If your phone carrier cuts you off, nobody on the Internet can read your signal; if Twitter cuts you off, they've merely taken their megaphone out of your hands.
Yeah, I used 'common carrier' in reference to when Ma Bell was a monopoly and wasn't allowed to just not do business with people.
We don't have jurisprudence saying so for websites, because this is new, but it could be argued that a number of websites have reached a sort of monopoly status. Facebook is probably closest, but Twitter and Wikipedia both occupy unique places in society to the point where it's not, just, "go start your own website".
As far as business freedom, remember the gay wedding cake guy? Where were all these "you're not entitled to Twitter's megaphone" people then? On the exact opposite side of the principle, mostly.
Production of tangible goods is in a different category from either being allowed to use Twitter or having a cell phone. Denial of production of tangible goods by a local provider conjures up the grim specter of Jim Crow laws in the United States. And discrimination regarding sexual orientation is an understood protected class in the US, where political opinion is not.
I think people having different attitudes regarding the three categories of service is reasonable.
I personally think of no-platforming as almost the last tool. Where I think a lot of people disagree is here:
lacking any chance of success...
Fascism can take over a government faster than people think, and we're in a global cycle of democracies dallying with fascism again. This is not a safe time.
I don't think fascist takeovers of governments are that hard to anticipate; I don't think they're likely in most of the cases that people advocate censorship for. Admittedly this may be hindsight bias.
Germany has sharply limited censorship laws. I do not oppose them more out of respect for the victims of Nazism than any genuine agreement that they do good; but I will oppose their expansion. I do not think they are useful; I think they are limited in harm.
> Germany wrestled its censorship laws from hard history lessons.
Citation needed.
Germany has had strict censorship laws since forever. They obviously did not stop the Nazis. If you're arguing that censorship is required to stop the Nazis, that's a point you should address, especially given that they had specifically added censorship laws against right-wing extremists in the Weimar Republic in the Republikschutzgesetz.
What I'm missing is signal on how those laws were enforced. The Weimar constitution included (translation) "No censorship will take place," which does make me wonder how effective the existing laws were.
Emergency decrees could freely override any such provision, and became increasingly common during the Weimar Republic (particularly so in the early 1930s) as a result of gridlock within Parliament. The no-censorship provision, while real, was not enforceable as a matter of fact.
The rule of law, combined with the broadest possible free speech, is the best defence as had been shown in Western democracies for quite some time now. Democracy in Germany in the thirties was in a very weak condition for a variety of reasons which allowed the Nazis to undermine it fatally.
Notably this law perpetuates on a daily basis the Nazis' coercive and violent appropriation of a number of traditional religious and cultural symbols, and with it their unnatural exploitation as emblems of the most evil and despicable ideas ever contrived in modern history. All things considered, a very fitting example of parent poster's point.
Indeed; there's nothing "natural" either about taking a symbol that has literally been used from time immemorial throughout the Northern hemisphere (including in Europe up until the early 20th c.!) and treating it as an inherent reference to a bunch of folks who anyone sensible regards as enemies of everything that civilized society stands for. But that's not what one would assume, given that this law exists!
This is not the problem here. The problem is that traditional ideas (those that rules the world until very recently and that are still applied in a lot of countries including some top world powers) are being systematically suppressed both on and offline. Moreover speech is now evaluated on who says it instead of the content itself, and if the locutor is not in one of the privileged groups, it is dismissed or even casted as an aggression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance