You could also say that "tolerance" is not just one item that the social contract may contain, nor even the key item, but is the contract itself. "Tolerance" may be the mechanism by which a "social contract" functions. If you aren't tolerant, you've stopped following the contract. It isn't only that other people might stop following it vindictively because of your behavior; it's that there is no way they can function tolerantly if they're the only ones doing it.
The intolerant will begin by criminalizing others. Then they'll say: If you criminalize me, you could criminalize anyone. Fact-check: The intolerant person has already criminalized others. That's enabled by power and a rejection of the social contract. Reequilibrating the power dynamic and reinforcing the social contract is not going to broadly criminalize everyone; it will adjust the problem of large numbers of people being unfairly crimnalized, because it identifies the actual criminal.
The intolerant will also blame you for standing up to them in any way.
"Just imagine any outlet that employs Jack Posobiec or Laura Loomer being convinced to let them go because of bad behavior. Or imagine anyone at Fox News deciding not to platform Chaya Raichik anymore because she's a stochastic terrorist whose minions make death threats to her victims. 'Maybe we shouldn't put her on the air anymore because we're tired of children's hospitals getting death threats.'"
"It's a completely asymmetrical thing, and this is always the issue with authoritarism, far-right authoritarianism vs. truth. Because, at the end of the day, it's not a competing political view — necessarily, entirely — it's also — it's a competing vision of reality. And so, when you have that as the dynamic, we run into really immediate problems that ripple out in really unique ways."
— Episode 151 - What we (still) haven't learned from Gamergate w/Karl Folk: Sociologist Karl Folk and I break down some of the inauthentic methods that the American right wing outrage machine uses, and suggest some solutions to prevent mainstream media complicity. Griff Sombke, Aug 19, 2024 (5:30–6:25)
In this 2023 video by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason (it's 4 min), he says that Christians are authentic (and avoid hypocrisy) when they directly say that they disapprove of others being trans. If people (in general) should be allowed to be authentic, he says — what is normally a trans-inclusive stance, he notes — then Christians should be allowed to be anti-trans, because that's authentic for them. This is an example of the paradox of tolerance. As part of the discussion, the speakers discount the the importance of being "nice" to others by respecting their gender, and they assert that their own authenticity is rooted in displaying the (allegedly) obvious reality of their sex. Thus he begins the video by explaining that they don't wish to share own their pronouns in casual conversation because they believe that they (and most people) are obviously male or female and that pronoun-sharing normalizes being transgender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz6MNA_Ep_c
“We should be able to disagree on politics but still be civil and respectful” isn't for a candidate who won't accept the outcome of the election and tries to incite a race war. If you support that candidate, people might shun you and you might deserve it. /1
— Scott Stein (@sstein.bsky.social) September 16, 2024 at 9:44 AM
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I used to be far more willing to debate almost anything and try to see someone else’s point of view, a professional and dispositional habit/hazard. That went out the shifted Overton window, along with any naïve assumptions of good faith I still had, on January 6, 2020. 2/2
— Scott Stein (@sstein.bsky.social) September 16, 2024 at 12:12 PM
Aisha Harris: "I can see into the future, and it’s a hell of a lot of 'Here’s how to get along with your fascist family members at Thanksgiving' articles over the next several weeks" Bluesky Oct 27, 2024
Here's my advice: don't. As long as you are financially your own person, just go on and make shit real awkward. Earnestly ask them to explain their racist jokes. Earnestly ask them if they believe children are getting surgery at school.
— Shepherd (@neolithicsheep.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 9:07 PM
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Earnestly ask them innocent questions. If they want to talk about radical leftists start asking them to define terms. Earnestly. Innocently. Ask them, earnestly and repeatedly, "so like... You *really* *believe* this?"
— Shepherd (@neolithicsheep.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 9:12 PM
See this discussed on Philosophy Terms.
If someone has "broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by it, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.
inspired by 'Tolerance is not a moral precept' by Yonatan Zunger"Post by Dwight (DB) @dabertime@mstdn.social (Mastodon)
"I think you caved. I don't think you showed the fight this party needs right now, because you're playing by a rulebook where the other party has thrown that rulebook away" -- here's the full clip of Sunny Hostin confronting Schumer today on The View
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 18, 2025 at 6:30 PM
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"I have not only been thinking about a cult of abuse accommodated by a culture of abuse, but also because I've been circling around the question of how we oppose a culture of abuse without becoming abusive ourselves—which, I'll argue, is exactly what Democratic leadership has done.
Today I want to begin to answer that question, by putting a newish spit-shine on an old idea generally known as "the paradox of tolerance." I offer this to hopefully illustrate why the Democratic/centrist fetishization of bipartisanship and norms, and their capitulation and "reaching across the aisle" have been so enervating and disastrous, and to provide a way of thinking about what we must now do instead.
* * *
Citizens themselves, braver than most of their leaders, have already started the non-cooperation game; refusing to serve members of Republican governments or their death squads in restaurants and businesses; following the death squads and impeding their work; playing loud music to keep them awake; making them and their abuses known and shaming and shunning and excluding them for daring to murder their neighbors. Any of us can participate, when the opportunity presents. It can be social shunning and ostracization. It can be losing paperwork. It can be deliberately misunderstanding instructions. It can be purposefully dawdling. It can be tripping somebody up, getting them lost and turned around, obstructing the gears of brutality, sabotaging the engines of murder.
It's not murder, and it's not retributive; it's removing all the benefits of human cooperation from all humans who play the murder game—not because we hate the humans (though it's difficult not to hate people who would murder their neighbors, and I don't shame those who can't manage it), but because we hate their vile murderous game.
It's refusal to cooperate in any way with people who play the murder game—and it can go up to and including an unwillingness to accommodate their belief that they are the heroes of our country's story rather than the villains, or that the murderous game they play in order to defend that belief is normal and acceptable.
* * *
The problem before us should not be: "How can we find common ground with racists?" We should ask more uncooperative questions, like: "How do we find common ground with everyone else to better exclude racists, as long as racists insist on making their racism core to their identity, as long as they make race an exclusionary principle?"
We cooperate with anyone willing to play the cooperation game.
We never cooperate in any way with those who play the murder game.
Cooperating with the murder game would make us become exactly what we'd most seek to avoid: one who sets out to oppose abuse but instead becomes abusive themself."
— A. R. Moxon, Hating the Game; The cooperation game, the murder game, and acting in good faith with people you know are acting in bad faith, The Reframe, Feb 8, 2026
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