do evil games expect evil prizes, thank you Rainer Forst
edit: this is a pedagogical post, not a philosophical one. i actually fully agree with the paradox of tolerance and its conclusion! i just find that it doesn’t work as well as an educational tool for introducing people to the concept. sorry for any confusion :)
Which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the paradox.
Poppler never said that there wasn't a solution. In fact the solution he offers is, quite literally, "Punch Nazis."
That's the entire point.
Tolerance is a paradox if you believe in absolute tolerance. That's what Poppler is saying. Absolute tolerance means tolerating everything, even intolerant behaviours. It's the "MUH FREEZE PEACH" mentality. Poppler demonstrates that by trying to create a society that hews to absolute tolerance, you ultimately create the conditions for that society to become absolutely intolerant (ie, bigoted, hateful).
Instead - paradoxically - a perfectly tolerant society must be intolerant of one thing; intolerance.
It's Poppler's answer to the slippery slope argument. "If we start censoring political speech, where does it end?" is a common refrain of Nazis, because they know credulous liberals, panicking about their ideological purity, will buy into it. "It ends at intolerance," Poppler replies. "That's the line. Be on the right side of it."