If you want to laud yourself as tolerant and pure, and then do bad and intolerant things, one way to avoid the obvious inconsistency is to furrow your brow and say, "well, it's a paradox," and then change the subject.
Look, I was in the Army. My job was to close with and kill the enemy. I can say, "well, a peaceful society sometimes has to make war, it's a paradox!"
Or I can cut the bullshit and accept that we're really not very peaceful.
> Or I can cut the bullshit and accept that we're really not very peaceful.
I'm peaceful. But I'd violently defend my peace - I think it's a paradox.
The "paradox of tolerance" was formally defined in 1945, at the height of WWII. It's the result of grappling with a complicated moral issue - how do you remain peaceful when Nazis are dropping bombs on your city so as to march in and start rounding up minority populations for extermination? You have to abandon your peace value, at least for a moment.
"Cut the bullshit" is an extremely dismissive thing to say about a highly debated philosophical moral concept. Maybe it feels good to say, maybe it feels like an intellectual high ground, but I say it's intellectually dishonest. It's the imposition of your philosophical viewpoint as "right" because you claim your viewpoint is more "simple" or "natural."
If you want to laud yourself as tolerant and pure, and then do bad and intolerant things, one way to avoid the obvious inconsistency is to furrow your brow and say, "well, it's a paradox," and then change the subject.
Look, I was in the Army. My job was to close with and kill the enemy. I can say, "well, a peaceful society sometimes has to make war, it's a paradox!"
Or I can cut the bullshit and accept that we're really not very peaceful.