You can't debate someone that isn't arguing in good faith, and these people never ever are. Yeet and move on, save your energy for the people that have just been mislead by the altright and may actually change their opinions.
All you can do is force them to face their convictions. What happens after that is up to them. Just do what Tim Walz did to JD Vance when he asked about the election results, and bluntly ask the root question.
“Do you think migrants are less important than citizens? What about men vs. women? Or gay people vs. straight people? Or trans people vs. cisgender people?”
“Do you think that the government should force people to follow your religion? If the government picked a different religion than yours, would you just agree to follow it?”
To everyone pearl clutching in response to this correct meme with one of the following phrases:
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"That's how you create an echo chamber"
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"paradox of intolerance doesn't say how to fight fascism"
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"This is about silencing opposing thought"
I would like to take this moment to remind you that the paradox of intolerance isn't about exiling those who disagree on economic policy; it's about recognizing and directly opposing those who are trying to harm or disadvantage others and doing so in a meaningful way that will actually change the outcome. You can't debate Hitler out of doing a genocide, but you could have jailed him before he gained power.
Being too spineless to call out and fight intolerance enables fascism. The longer you live wrapped up in your civility politics, the overton window shifts further right, and it strengthens the fascist support. It happened in pre-WW2 Germany, and it's being repeated in dozens of countries worldwide. If you feel the urge to block me, go ahead...
...but know that this is your fault
Edit: spelling
The paradox of intolerance is not a paradox. Tolerance is a social contract, folks who demand us tolerate intolerance are violating the social contract and should be ignored.
I'd argue it's not a paradox because it relies on two different definitions of tolerance.
- Tolerance 1: Intolerant opinions should be allowed to exist without criminal punishment.
- Tolerance 2: Everyone should treat intolerant opinions like other opinions for the purposes of platforming, how you feel about the speaker, etc.
Tolerance 1 is basically the kind of free speech principles adopted by most democratic societies and is probably necessary for such societies to remain free. Tolerance 2 is just silly. If you're in a forum specifically for debating deplorable opinions, fine. But there's no reason that a politics forum needs to cater to deplorable opinions.
"Paradox" doesn't mean it's impossible to resolve. Mathematical paradoxes, such as Gabriel's Horn (a horn that takes up finite volume, yet you would not be able to paint it) or the Banach–Tarski paradox (where you can take a sphere, break it apart, and reassemble it into two spheres identical to the original), do have resolutions. They're just not obvious and can be hard to get your head around.
The original Greek word directly translates to "against belief", and basically means something unexpected. It doesn't mean it's logically contradictory, just that it might seem to.
So yes, the Paradox of Tolerance is a paradox. It's not obvious to all people what the resolution is, but explaining it as a peace treaty rather than an unchangeable moral imperative tends to work.
THANK YOU. In a Post about banning Germany's far-right Party AFD, some people wrote such delusional nonsense! It's unbelievable how far some People go to defend POS like the AFD.
I was recently reminded about the caveats that Germany has on the "no Nazi parties" rule. It's truly insane that it's essentially (this is hyperbole, but less than you'd think) "you can ban a party from running if they're Nazis... As long as they call themselves Nazis, and they've won an election, and the leader is called Hitler, and the leader went to art school. All other parties must be allowed to run"
The people who came out against banning afd are the same ones who absolutely will not have the balls to do what you need to do to a nazi party you don't ban in time as well.
You all should see the shit going on in a post about Gisèle Pelicot where they are literally saying that the tiny fraction of women who commit sexual assault is an excuse for decrying the (absolutely understandably angry) women holding signs that say "NOT ALL MEN BUT ALWAYS A MAN".
I really fucking despise these false equivalencies.
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Why does everybody online insist on misusing "centrist" and "moderate" when they're talking about spineless, bitch-ass accomplices? An actual centrist in America in 2024 would be very progressive relative to most of the country. It's a good place to be.
They attack centrists to maintain the two party divide. If you don't agree with one side, you are seen as an ally of the other.
I am mostly euro-centrist. In America, I would be far left.
i've actually been thinking this recently. what actually is a centrist? i feel most who claim themselves to be centrist are actually conservatives...
There's an old joke. The parties change but the message stays the same.
A group of Nazis have cornered a group socialists when a centrist comes along. The centrist listens to both sides, how the Nazis want to kill all the socialists and how the socialists don't want to die. Thinking long and hard on it, the centrist says that there's a compromise to be had, just kill half.
I would say a true centrist is nothing. No beliefs on whether the means of production should be held by private companies or the people. Aka, they either cannot exist or have not formed an opinion on it making it so that their opinion wouldn't matter.
The problem therein lies that we try to tie other things into it that aren't about government, and instead about human rights, and it clearly diverts from being a line to a multi dimensional graph that all means next to nothing when it comes to claims like left right.
Both someone on the left and the right can want to subjugate parts of the populous without having to leave their belief on who owns the means of production.
Not a paradox. Tolerance is a social contract and need not be given to those who don't tolerate others.
"Faschisten hören niemals auf, Faschisten zu sein
Man diskutiert mit ihnen nicht, hat die Geschichte gezeigt"
"Fascists won't ever stop being fascists. You don't argue with them, history has shown that"
Wenn du friedlich gegen die Gewalt nicht ankommen kannst, ist das letzte Mittel das uns allen bleibt Militanz
Wenn du friedlich gegen die Gewalt nicht ankommen kannst, ist das letzte Mittel das uns allen bleibt Militanz
Ich denke exakt diese Worte werden von beiden/allen Seiten verwendet, die sich im Recht währen. Das macht sie am Ende alle moralisch gleich.
English:
If you cannot peacefully combat violence, the last resort that remains for all of us is militancy
I think these exact words are used by both/all sides who claim to be in the right. That makes them all morally equal in the end.
Hypothetically there could be bigots you could have a rational debate with, but they tend to not remain bigots for long.
Aka the bigot to UwU pipeline.
The fastest way to an echo chamber is to ignore everyone who disagrees with you.
You should be intelligent enough and convicted in your understanding of any point you argue strongly, that you will be able to identify an irrational or false argument.
Otherwise when someone you disagree with has a good point that improves your view point, you will miss it.
Take the show always sunny in philadelphia. The characters are all examples of absolutely terrible people. We use their idiocy, bigotry, racism and general prejudice to further confirm our beliefs and views on any topic.
It is healthy to listen to bad takes.
The fastest way to an echo chamber is to ignore everyone who disagrees with you.
This isn't about the entire set of people who disagree.
It is a waste of time to engage some kinds of people. They are not acting in good faith.
There's a Sartre quote about it
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Found another one of them.
Just in case it's not clear, there are indeed people with ideas so toxic and so dangerous they need to be removed. Otherwise they will ruin it for everyone. When you tolerate the intolerant, tolerance is eventually seized and destroyed by the intolerant.
This isn't a case of disagreeing, this is by far the most common misrepresentation that centrist apologists use to try and vilify the banning and ostracizing of bigots and harmful ideology. There is no comparison to disagreeing about flavors of ice cream, to not wanting someone who hates trans people in your community where trans people hang out. Any attempt to do so is a bad faith comparison, because they are not equivalent.
How do you know what a toxic idea is if you never hear one. It is helpful to know what is wrong when trying to determine what is right.
I never said let people with bad takes in. I said hear them and disagree with them. Having such terrible takes in the air is a great way to strengthen your position when you are able to point out the absurdity of the bad argument.
If we close ourselves off to all the arguments we dont like then we run the risk of becoming so entrenched in our own opinion being the only right one that we never let anyone tell us we are wrong.
Finding the right path is a group effort, and it takes good and bad views to get there.
Just look at your agument, its so matter of fact. It feels like you have determined the correct position so all other views are wrong. The opening sentence "found another one" is enough to see this. You arent right automatically because you have had enough people agree with you. Especially whn you reject any opposing or even slightly different view point.
there are indeed people with ideas so toxic and so dangerous they need to be removed.
Probably. But the argument is about who gets to decide who they, not whether they exist.
Nazis are identified by their affiliation with the Nazi party. People you think are Nazis are identified by your opinion of them and absolutely nothing more.
If you could provide an objective definition of these 'apologists', we might have something to discuss, but clearly there can be no such definition, these are not facts like the shape of the earth or the speed of light.
We (almost) all agree that some levels of intolerance should not be tolerated, what we disagree on is which opinions confer such a status on someone.
You should be intelligent enough and convicted in your understanding of any point you argue strongly, that you will be able to identify an irrational or false argument.
yeah, no.
"identifying irrational and false argument" takes time and we have only limited amount of it here on earth. also, once you have identified irrational and false argument, there is no need to do it over and over again. we are under no obligation to sort through a pile of crap just to show we are the better people (whatever that phrase means for anyone)
and i say that as someone who was recently banned for "trolling" by some kid on a power trip to protect his cult from my arguments, so i should have understanding for your line of reasoning, but i don't.
as always in life, it is a matter of degree and it can be relative (which is the phrase that irself can be used to excuse almost anything, 😂)
You do realize this is an argument for an echo chamber right? Banning Centrists and Opposition means you only have Supporters.
Edit: After much consideration you're right most of this thread is getting blocked.
I 100% believe the lemmy developers' firm belief in this policy is why the platform was able to take off eventually. In the early days we would frequently have people join and then stomp their feet about free speech and the slur filter and then fuck off to whatever variant of voat was en vogue (...that was wolfballs for a little while). It was a small community, discussions were heavily (but not exclusively) tech and communism, but I don't think it would have been an appealing landing spot if that kind of toxicity had been allowed to grow.
Absolutely no question there's more hostility in the conversations here after redditors came here, but more users will do that. The exodus has made it a lot easier for me to abandon some of the smaller subreddits I was still active on.
But I like seeing the rational debate!
So I can practice spotting fallacies and facepalm when people completely miss the point and counter with something that might be logically sound but is practically terrible.
There's no reasoning with dishonest bad faith actors
