Karl Popper, Tolerance

Popper’s Paradox And The Corruption Of ‘Tolerance’ - Tom Knighton:

The modern "liberal"  brand lives on fuzzy headed thinking. The linked article exposes a good bit of it relative to "tolerance" and "hate speech".

Tolerance simply means “to tolerate.” Nothing more, nothing less. 

However, leftists seem to believe that tolerance means something more akin to acceptance and celebration.

One need not CELEBRATE a gay "marriage" to toleratre it! Likewise with 58 genders and rising.

According to this columnist, the left then applies the same logic as they look at "Nazis", and consieer "tolerating" Nazis to be "acceptance and celebration" of Nazis, so they validly refuse.

The article points out that actual Nazis and KKK member sorts are exceedingly (and gladly) RARE. They serve largely has an all purpose demon with which to demonize anything that is remotely "right wing" (which of course is another left wing construction that in reality bears no resemblance to the construction) ... in reality, "left" is any form of increasingly totalitarian state control, and "far right" is anarchy. National Socialism ... or the KKK for that matter are very much about CONTROL. Identifying certain groups as "undesireables", removing their rights, and then removing them!

Certainly a free society wants to prevent any ideology that will destroy it -- Islam/Sharia Law, Socialism, Racism, Political Correctness, etc from becoming powerful enough that tolerance is ended. The main risk of that in the US is of the nation becoming a single party state where "The Party" (TP-D) achieves enough dominance that their opposition is demonized to the extent that they can be removed.

As the linked column puts it in closing ...

In other words, Popper had no interest in destroying the right of free speech. He had an interest in preserving a free society, which is precisely what progressives are trying to destroy today. 

So maybe it’s time for liberals to revise their idea of what makes up tolerance, and recognize that you can meet intolerance and combat it, giving it no comfortable place to take root, without becoming the very thing they claim they’re trying to prevent.