There is no "paradox of tolerance". The purpose of tolerance isn't to push tolerance of every aspect of a person for its own sake. It's to make life better for everyone.

Tolerance is for accidents of birth and circumstance, not beliefs, behavior, or the way one treats other people.

The purpose of the "paradox of tolerance" isn't to argue against freedom of speech, per se. Freedom of speech should be no one's goal by itself. What should be people's goal is the free exchange of ideas, between people who are able to create, hear, and debate them.

Now that standard is quite a bit different, but one of the things that a free exchange of ideas requires is a healthy dose of freedom of speech. That's the whole reason freedom of speech is a big deal, but does not extend forever. You can't talk about hurting people, for example, and expect those people you speak of hurting to react in good faith to your argument.

This intellectual intolerance can be healthy for establishing a trusting community, one that believes that when push comes to shove, power will be used fairly to resolve heated disputes and remove people who seem to be breaking the trust the community has put in them by consistently flaming (personal attacks), or trolling (falsely expressed beliefs with the seeming purpose to get a rise out of people), or other behavior that the community has a consensus on as unhealthy. From the community's perspective, trust is the crucial oil that keeps conversations returning back to neutrality after passions have raised. So intellectual intolerance can be a useful tool in maintaining that trust.

There is an important distinction between this sort of intellectual intolerance, where we state simply and clearly that we do not accept a certain idea that is seen as hostile to as healthy and robust community, and physical, violent intolerance. I would hope that distinction is obvious, but it's worth making explicit: intellectual intolerance physically harms no one. The person whose idea hasn't been tolerated is relatively free to go out and find a community that is more accepting of his or her ideas. Sure, it isn't the Habermasian ideal for discourse, but that's a pretty damn near impossible to achieve end goal anyway. The problem is that we have to get to Habermas' starting point (where all participants are both implicitly and in fact equal in the opportunity they have to influence debate) before we even begin to try his approach.

So this is about to escalate in moral philosophy a bit, and I generally hate getting too in the weeds about these things but your question is basically demanding it. For Jurgen Habermas, ideal democratic discourse requires that no use of force or action is permissible unless arrived at by (1) reasonable discourse between (2) all the participants--and what a high standard that is. I mean, he says other stuff about this, but this is the high-in-the-clouds, lay-person takeaway.

That would mean that to get to a fair understanding of the use of force to protect a community, a democratic ideal would have to be one that has all the participants meaningfully able to participate in reasonable discussion. For us, that would seem to be ~tildes.official discussions on moderation, and what lines to draw in the sand to establish and maintain the trust of each other moving forward. This discussion would also be a meaningful part in that, so long as every user is able to read and participate in it (and in fact, not every user is subscribed to ~talk, but we can assume the negative right has not been denied to them).~

The thornier part is that second bit: all the participants of the thing need to participate in order to justify the action. That isn't meant to be only the people participating in reasonable discussion but all people who would be impacted by the discussion too. Every person who stands to have their life impacted needs to be able to participate in the discussion that would form a consensus about what action to take. They do not need to win the day, necessarily, but they do need to have a fair hearing by their peers and to have their concerns and ideas addressed. Their inaction, if they didn't see the space where they should have contributed, is a failure of the system not of that individual.

Unfortunately, this is a hugely difficult burden to meet not only in person but online, where people are never to be guaranteed to have been able to see the discussion that might impact them, let alone any reading of how fairly heard they might be if they participated in that discussion. The best we can do is try to make it so that people can feel comfortable engaging on a topic with trust that they'll be heard and not attacked personally for their expression.

I hope this reads clearly. Normally any time a discussion tilts into moral philosophy, my writing becomes an unreadable pile of shit.

~ I'm skipping over a lot of the interesting debate about truth and reasonableness here, but trust me that if this wasn't unreadable already, it would certainly be if I went into it.

Edit: missed a crucial starting point.

suggesting that accepting the advocacy of hateful ideologies paradoxically leads to a lack of tolerance for certain speech.

Slight revision here: it leads to a lack of tolerance for certain people's very existence, mainly people of color and LGBTQ individuals.

Paradox of tolerance https://g.co/kgs/4avJQA

Please note the text: any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law. Advocating for absolute free speech does not generally entail persecution, however advocating for, e.g. white supremacy by its nature does entail persecution. That's one way to draw the line.

Canadian law has a reasonable limits freedom of expression, that basically means your specific freedoms end when you threaten or harm someone else's - Your rights end where mine begin. So trying to limit someone else's freedom is not protected.

I don't really see a paradox, but it's also because I believe our rights and freedoms have to be considered together, which may lead to conflict, but not a paradox.

I think this is fits the bill nicely: https://xkcd.com/1357/

The solution is simple; you extend freedom to everyone who supports it.

If a person is against democracy, deny them democracy.

If a person is pro censorship, censor them.

If a person advocates violence, hurt them.

The current standard in the US for speech is that speech is protected unless it is inciting "Immanent Lawless Action." Which is a good standard in my opinion. It seeks to curtail speech at the least invasive point. Which should be the standard for any limiting of fundamental rights.

In any situation where the government is a true sovereign, the government poses a greater potential threat to liberty than any individual, or group. So the question I ask before empowering the government to limit fundamental rights is this: "What would Dick Cheney do with this?" Although now it might be more prudent to change that to: "What would Donald Trump do with this power?"

By expanding the test for non-protected speech beyond immanent lawless action, it would be trivial for the government to hold activists and artists accountable for the actions of others. Imagine if the president could use the criminal actions of illegal immigrants not merely as a dog whistle to advocate for his policy, but as a blunt instrument by which he could limit the speech of those who advocate for more immigration, or worse, imprison them? Imagine if the next time a person of color shoots a police officer, he can use it as an excuse to pull every Kendrick Lamar album from stores? A world where that is permissible frightens me a lot more than one in which some assholes with tiki torches can be racist in public without advocating for direct immediate action.

I'm going to go back to the original Popper quote here, highlights mine:

"“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

― Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies"

However, I don't believe that Popper had any way to envision the power of modern techniques for manipulating perceived reality. While he was certainly acquainted with propaganda, his "rational argument" standard fails in the face of polarized, politicized "facts" that no one can agree on reliably. In the U.S. in particular, the ability to purchase both speech platforms and information sources (research foundations and institutes, publishing houses, companies that sell primary data, etc.) has undermined the ability to engage rationally. We can no longer advocate for "freedom of speech" as if it's "free as air", but rather have to consider who owns the base facts on which we argue, and whether those bases threaten other valuable freedoms.

Also, de-platforming is not force or "censorship". As an extension of the implications of the "paradox of tolerance", if you insist on violating the terms of participation in an online community, in a manner that impairs other users' ability to avail themselves of the community's liberties, that community should have the right to eject you.

There's a good discussion here about how AirBnB arrived at the following guidelines:

If the content or the client is:

Then don’t allow them to use your products.

My 5th grade elementary teacher told me a few things which have stuck with me my entire life. I'm 48. One was...

One person's rights end when they impose upon another person's rights.

My question is, shouldn't there be a difference between speech and action? It's one thing to say, "I don't think gay people should be allowed to marry." It's another thing to use slurs and expletives and angry rhetoric and call for violence.

While I vehemently disagree with the first, I can consider it an honest expression of political belief, however errant. The other, though, is IMO totally unnecessary for any form of expression. If your goal is to somehow change policies through debate, which is the democratic way (and also the anarchist and communist ways, if those are your persuasions), then it is totally unnecessary to do those extra things. They detract from your argument, and they are not a part of advocating for a change.

If one is advocating for a violent change, I think that we can agree that violence towards people based solely on inborn characteristics is not even within the bounds of democratic discourse.

Violence is a terrible line in the sand to draw wrt to limits on speech when those limits are to be enforced by institutions that are inherently violent, and IMO speech is most important in the discussion of politics.

I understand the ancap/anarchist definition of violence but I wasn't meaning to use it there. My apologies. Pretend instead I said physical violence, not including coercion. Physical violence to me is not the same as coercion, and while I can see utility in something like the NAP I don't think it distinguishes the two enough.

Coercion hardly offers a choice, but at least there is some choice, and at least a person is given a chance to save themselves (good choice in some cases) or to be a martyr (also good in some cases). I dislike it, but I prefer it to direct physical violence which offers no autonomy or choice to the victim and disables their voice. Killing someone does not give them a chance to be an existential (or any kind of) hero.

So I'd prefer coercion against inciting or engaging in direct forms of violence, which also tend to dampen minority speech.

I think tyranny and group control over individuals is horrible, and yet I also think that in most cases, I'd prefer tyranny of the majority to tyranny of the minority. On a utilitarian basis, it is far better, but that's not the only argument one could make for it. So saying, "We will ban you if you incite violence against others" is costly, but beneficial on balance IMO. Saying "We will ban you if you voice an unconventional or offensive opinion" is not beneficial on balance, and that is well within the bounds of free speech.