this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
1026 points (93.1% liked)
Political Memes
5515 readers
1150 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're just doing the "all language is nihilism" thing.
Really, the logical issue is that the comic is taking a descriptive premise (tolerance of intolerance can, or perhaps is likely to beget intolerance) and forming an unqualified prescriptive message from it.
The reality of the matter is that all philosophy is local. Obviously descriptive ethics define prescriptive ethics, but rarely at a universal scale. "Tolerance can be dangerous," "radical tolerance can be dangerous," and "asbestos tolerance can be dangerous," all express very different propositions. The better you can qualify the danger, and the more you can constrain the object, the better you can act on the statement.
You can argue that here, the comic does qualify its "bar" for intolerance with the nazi example. The semantic way of reading this is that the author is defending intolerance of Nazis, or some related abstraction. I therefore don't think it is semantically correct to say that the author seeks to apply this ethos broadly.