The Nuance of Tolerance

Earlier this week Daniel Roe wrote a blog post called "Don't be nice." It's a short read so you should just take a glance at it, but the TL;DR is that someone joined the Nuxt community server with an avatar of a man wearing a Nazi uniform, and the offender was swiftly removed. The point of the post was that there are times when you shouldn't be nice when it comes to standing on your values of how people should be treated. As the closing line says, "Nice? It's better to be good." In the replies, a few people mentioned something called "The Paradox of Tolerance." It states [^1]: 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…