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Remember "creeping Sharia Law" that far-right hysterics were warning about 10-15 years ago? Of course it was always ridiculous, but now something pretty amusing has happened.
‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags
What stood out to me was the support of right-wing activists from nearby towns. So this isn't just a moslem issue, even white Republicans are joined up. Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.
For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.
Another ironic twist is that the supposed "Great Replacement myth" is largely what facilitated this change. Moslems are now a clear supermajority in the city and the change happened relatively quickly. Liberals were demographically replaced by the people they brought in and now feel like they've been hosed. Can't feel much sympathy for those who use immigration as a political weapon against their domestic political enemies.
I can think of no better term to encapsulate this phenomenon than the paradox of tolerance. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Islam can tell you that moslems aren't exactly friendly with gays, i.e. they are intolerant of the LGBT crowd. So what happens when you tolerate people who are intolerant of gays? You end up with the intolerance of gays, exactly as predicted.
And liberals mistake this for some sort of solidarity, when in reality, it's ludicrous to expect people with a vastly different culture and a vastly different set of values to ally with you. The only justification I've seen for why they would want to "join" them was that they were a minority in the same vein as blacks, trans people, etc. which is simply not how it works and has never worked that way.
Not this interpretation of the paradox of tolerance again!
For reference, the original Popperian paradox is more limited and much less explicitly progressively coded, and describes tolerance of people and ideas that refuse to be discussed.
The issue with the common misinterpretation is that it’s not much of a paradox at all.
Interesting, and not something I've considered before. Is there an article or blog post that I can link to the next time someone brings up the progressive misinterpretation of the paradox of tolerance?
Just the Wikipedia page on the paradox of tolerance suffices, which features a direct quote from Popper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It's fairly clear that Popper's original formulation of the paradox of tolerance was in large part about being intolerant of people who are themselves intolerant to open, rational debate and who are ready to win arguments using force. You cannot have things like free speech if you aren't willing to suppress people who would take it from others.
Now it has been warped into "Tolerant people accept all [attributes]. So people who express opinions which aren't accepting of all [attributes] need to be suppressed by any means necessary". And it should be noted that what constitutes "not accepting" under the progressive formulation of the term covers an absolutely massive scope. Belief in aggregate group differences that create differential outcomes, disbelief in progressive narratives of intergenerational guilt, and even opposition to actual race and sex discrimination promoted by the woke coalition are all categorised on a scale of intolerant to Literally Denying People's Right To Exist. At this point it covers practically every instance where someone disagrees with progressive talking points.
The hilarious part is that in Popper's original formulation of the paradox, the very people quoting him would be the "intolerant". They misuse Popper's paradox of tolerance to justify silencing the speech of their outgroup, and don't see how this makes them exactly the type of "intolerant" people Popper was talking about in his paradox.
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