ID: A scene from Legally Blonde of a conversation between Warner and Elle in the corridor at Harvard, in 4 panels:
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Warner asks “What happened to the tolerant left?”
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Elle replies, smiling “Who said we were tolerant?”
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Warner continues “I thought you were supposed to be tolerant of all beliefs!”
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Elle looks confused “Why would we tolerate bigotry, inequity, or oppression?”
I like this but I’m not even sure it’s such a paradox - if you are tolerating people who do not follow that social contract then can you call yourself a part of the tolerant group yourself? It is a necessary part of being tolerant to reject the intolerant.
It’s not a paradox because nobody says that absolutely anything anyone does is fine. There are always rules to acceptable behavior in society. The “paradox of tolerance” is a strawman.
This doesn’t eliminate the paradox. Why does the contract exist in the first place?
It’s a moral standard. If moral people didn’t decide that tolerance was a good thing for society, the contract wouldn’t exist.
So yes, thinking about it as a contract sidesteps the paradox, but the paradox still exists.
So Karl Popper was still right and society shouldn’t tolerate the intolerant.
You just need to tolerate their life and continued living, don’t need to give them anything more.
Sounds exactly like how someone might justify things like internment camps, forced sterilization, and segregation.
“Hey, they’re alive and continuing to live, so what’s the problem?”