“Now we just need to add a clause to the contract to exclude communists and we’ll be good to go”

Apologies if this is the wrong comm, I’m a little confused with the changes still.

Collectivizing some takes from comrades for some counterpropaganda:

  • The paradox of tolerance is a semantic fallacy — tolerance = socially progressive, not pain tolerance: “smuglord Oh, you’re a tolerant person? Tolerate this then! punches you in the face”. To put it another way, tolerating other people (the bare minimum!) is different from tolerance for concepts. Parenti addresses this in The Culture Struggle:

The reason for respecting other cultures is to avoid doing harm to the people who live in them. But what if certain practices within the culture itself harm segments of the population? What claim, then, does the culture have to being above judgment? In South Africa, for instance, police are frequently dispatched to investigate muti killings, murders committed in order to present a traditional priest with a severed hand or genitals or heart so [gender] can cure a disease or bring some business gain to a supplicant. 51 South African authorities seem to have zero tolerance for this sacred aspect of indigenous culture. Presumably so would the murder victims had they been given a say in the matter.

  • The tolerance paradox only exists if you see tolerance as some logic puzzle rule and not a practical outcome for the lives of the marginalized. As this post pointed out, tolerating “all political parties” when some are openly trying to cause harm to others (e.g. actual Nazis) isn’t more inclusive. Unlike actually marginalized groups, political views are, while also a product of your environment, at least something you have control over. In case you think this is just a point of theory, this has harmed trans people previously, for instance.

Consequently, the so-called “paradox of tolerance” can often ironically be used to argue for intolerance.

We don’t need a society where all viewpoints are tolerated. Even well-intended ones often shouldn’t be, as Mao famously put it:

Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn’t that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    Social contract theory, the last refuge of the liberal. Liberals to this day say it’s the fundament of society because some assholes 250 years ago who did zero anthropology said that it’s just what society is.

    As others said, the contract is arbitrary, so this doesn’t work as an answer to anything. The Nazis sure had social contracts, and they sure did “not protect” the people who violated the terms of those contracts. This so-called gotcha has no way to distinguish between that and a decent society.

    Furthermore, this focuses heavily on a logic of a person’s actions being uncoerced by the environment they live in. The thief who gets his hand cut off does not get asked if he had no other way to get bread if some guarantee of employment or welfare wasn’t part of the contract (and it often isn’t). Sorry, you’re just a legal unperson now! Huh, thought it was the totalitarians who unperson people, not us virtuous liberals!

    SCT is nonsense and society should be oriented, by means of unilaterally democratic input, towards the best outcomes for people. Anything else is definitionally providing worse outcomes, or the same outcome in case complete happenstance.