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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It sounds absolutely great in theory, but in practice it could never work.

    Say I want to build a house: As a society, we’ve come up with mandatory building codes that tell me how to build a house that’s going to be safe for everyone.

    Suppose we got rid of this regulation for libertarianism’s sake.

    Most people would still build to code because that’s just the smart thing to do but a small proportion of people would build it the cheapest way possible because it is now their god-given right to do so.

    When that house inevitably fails at the worst possible time, I don’t care too much about what happens to the guy himself. He understood the risk and did it anyways. But in a worst case scenario, he could’ve been hosting a kids party that day or something.

    Now apply this analogy to… Basically any regulation you’d want to get rid of.

    It’s kind of always a balancing act between stopping people from killing each other from sheer stupidity, and letting them do and say whatever the fuck they want when they’re between their own four walls, and pure libertarianism doesn’t allow for that.







  • It gives an air of legitimacy to those thoughts.

    Those people are LOUD but they aren’t nearly as numerous as we, or they, think.

    Most people, by and large, just want to do their little thing and want to be nice to others, and want others to be nice to them. Most people don’t care that their neighbors are a black gay couple, as long as they’re nice.

    When we let 10 people who post a 100 racist memes a day drown out the 100 regular people who post 10 times a day gives everyone the impression there is more racism than there really is, which breeds more racism, and drives out regular people who don’t want to be on a racist platform.

    (Using racism here as a stand-in for whatever form of bigotry you feel passionate about)






  • As long as you have clear boundaries as to what’s acceptable or not, a population with critical thinking skills will always be able to tell what’s going on.

    I had this debate with a friend a while back. He said we should tolerate nazi flags because “what if the government decides the pride flag is a hateful flag”. Well, the nazi flag (at least coloquially) stands for “Kill all jews”, while the pride flag stands for “Be proud of your sexual orientation and gender identity”. One of these passes the hate speech/incitement test, the other doesn’t.

    There just needs to be consistent and well thought out rules in place. If it’s the case, I’m not scared of authoritarians using the paradox of tolerance to their advantage because it’s so transparent.