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Idiots like J-Mo aren't equipped to handle Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

There is no paradox of tolerance. Let's recall what Popper actually wrote on the paradox:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Tolerating intolerant beliefs doesn't imply that one tolerates murder in the streets. While there may be ameliorating context outside of this paragraph, Popper commits a serious slippery slope fallacy here that tolerating intolerant beliefs then segues into tolerating physical attacks and such even though by no stretch of the imagination are they legitimate means of discourse, and then equates any flavor of intolerant belief with the subset of intolerance that settles disagreement with violence. Finally, he doesn't consider how this intolerance can be abused. I think we're seeing a taste of it today, where rival beliefs can be declared to be "intolerant" (often without regard for the content of the beliefs) and hence, fair game for preemptive intolerance.

That I think is the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Once you do it, you and your beliefs fall solidly in the category of things against which you are supposedly intolerant. You should be intolerant of yourself and your beliefs! Not going to happen in practice, of course.

Instead a far better approach (one which I might add has been rather successful with respect to dealing with discrimination in the workplace) is to tolerate the belief, but don't tolerate the observable, harmful behavior. That eliminates most of the Orwellian facets of the Popper approach. Often it also means that you don't have to care what people believe. If someone assaults another, it doesn't matter what either of them believed (except perhaps as a means to further demonstrate guilt of the attacker in court).

Let's consider that quote a bit. First, I'm quoting it out of context so there might be some nuance I'm missing. But so has everyone else who brings it up. My rebuttal is to the bare argument, but I think that reasonable given that no one else goes any further.

The core of my rebuttal is in the paragraph after the above quote. There are three serious flaws in the quote that need to be considered. First, a slippery slope argument that assumes the presence of intolerance will eventually avalanche into widespread intolerance. A rival viewpoint here is that exposure to tolerance can make the intolerant more tolerant.

Second, there is an conflation of intolerance with violence. However, this doesn't explain cultures that are intolerant in various non-violent ways. For example, there are a variety of pacifist, isolationist religions (for example, Amish and Hutterites). They qualify as intolerant since they eschew a great of contact with the outside world, but that intolerance never rises to the level of violence, much less the "fists and pistols" of the Popper narrative.

Finally, is the whole problem with this idea, the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Sorry, just because your bigotry is against some out-group that happens to be intolerant (or worse, wrongly perceived to be intolerant) just means that you're engaging in the very same intolerance. It's not only hypocritical, it's continuing the problem.

My take is that engagement is the better approach. Consider this. Every wacko cult follows similar playbooks: they isolate their followers from the rest of the world so that everyone is in the same screwy environment. Only the true believers are allowed to interact with the outside world in any way. Many other intolerant beliefs operate in the same way - creating an "us versus them" mythology, echo chambers, and similar means to cut off the believers from exposure to experiences that could undermine the beliefs. The strategy of intolerance versus such believers enforces this isolation. It makes the problems of intolerance worse.

So not only is the paradox of tolerance critically flawed on multiple levels, it makes the basic problem of intolerance worse.

MartyB always did an awesome job with the fundraising updates. As he can't be here, I figured it was time for someone to gently remind you guys and gals...

According to the front page we're just $782.06 from our Base Goal of $3500.00. We can do this!

These are undoubtedly strange and often difficult times for just about everyone. That's all the more reason we as a community should carry on carrying on, with sharing our tech knowledge, experiences and jokes of varying and disputed quality. Let's keep this place going together! :D

Do you ever look back on code you wrote when you were young and maybe start to feel a little queasy in your stomach? A feeling of abject horror strikes you as you cast your eyes over the thrown together mess of naive kludges and cringe inducing comments, full of cocky, misplaced bravado. You might even have a similar experience, perhaps to a lesser extent, with code you wrote ten years ago.

You ask yourself "What the fuck--I mean what the actual fuck--was I thinking, when I wrote that code?" Back in those days, your ego was huge; you were sure you were a coding deity that could do just about anything. Your code was the best. Now, the scales have fallen off your weary, partially deteriorated eyes, and you realize you utterly and hopelessly fell victim to your very own Dunning-Kruger effect. Hang your head in shame, dude!

The flipside of all this in the present day is the loss of a certain amount of confidence. With experience, you set higher standards for the code you write today, but there's a danger of going too far the other way and falling into perfectionism. If you got things done back in the day by throwing them together quickly, you'll probably find it takes a bit longer now to write code the "right" way. For me, open source certainly focuses the mind on spending a lot of time on trying to make it clear, readable and to have some degree of sanity.

I tend to want to get things right first time, as much as I can, when I write code today. I know that taken too far, that goes against the principles of rapid (iterative) application development, but I don't like the idea of leaving code I might be a bit uncertain about in place, where it might end up being forgotten later. When I have to do that, I'll leave clear TODOs for myself to pick up later.

I just feel like crap that I don't get as much time for hobby coding as I used to, and when I do find moments to spend on it, because I've set the bar much higher for myself in the code I write, and I feel a bit less confident than I used to, it feels like it's that much harder to get into it and make progress (even if the progress I had in my youth was illusory).

"Through confidential sources, undercover agents, and clandestine recordings," the Justice Department announced in October 2020, "law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap" Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and "acting in furtherance of that plan." But it turned out those individuals included the government's "confidential sources," who pushed the half-baked scheme and orchestrated acts "in furtherance of that plan" even when the defendants resisted it.

The appearance of entrapment, coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing between fantasy and criminal conspiracy, explains the embarrassing outcome of a federal trial that ended last week, when jurors acquitted two alleged conspirators and failed to reach verdicts for the other two. It was a well-deserved rebuke of investigative methods that crossed the line between prevention and invention.

Two of the six original defendants, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution, saying they willingly participated in the kidnapping plot. But the record compiled by the government shows FBI agents and their informants were determined to advance a narrative that would justify their efforts.

Remember how I repeatedly warned about historical entrapment schemes by the FBI? This outcome is why. Even with two alleged co-conspirators pleading guilty and testifying against the rest as well as the testimony of four informants and undercover officers, they still couldn't make the charges stick against anyone.

They can retry the remaining two, but it's not going to look good when two cohorts have been acquitted of similar charges.

And as I noted, this same sort of problem holds for the would-be insurrectionists of January 6. It's much of the same failed tactics, particularly in relying on people to testify in exchange for lighter sentences.

Another example is the Rittenhouse trial which blatantly ignored the obvious self-defense argument. Unfortunately for the prosecution in that trial, the jury didn't ignore it as well.

It's time to understand why these high profile court cases didn't succeed as expected. The big one is a disregard for law. It's not merely incompetence. These trials are showboating and we see the consequences of that, such as the above lack of convictions.

[Pav:] You don't seem to want to realise no mainstream source will ever give you a reason to believe anything that would make you less willing to pay taxes to defence companies. Perhaps you own some shares, or feel you benefit in some other way? I suppose it IS within the realm of possibility, though only by cosmic accident. It IS strangely fascinating and amusing talking to someone who is a true believer in the broken window fallacy (probably in the form of post WWII parables).

If you look at Pav's other postings on this, it's a remarkable dysfunctional chain of this crap. Even when he cites links, not a one supports his claims. For example:

[Pav:] Right.

This post contains Pav's defective arguments in a nutshell. It's just a story about the Ukrainian Prime Minister whining about his allies' statements with counterwhining from sources associated with the allies. What we actually had been speaking about at that point in the thread was violence, psychopaths, and corrupt oligarchs, none of which found their way into Pav's source.

Here's another example. MSNBC gets photobombed (they showed uncritically neo-nazi symbols on the uniforms of the soldiers involved in the video) by the Azov Battallion, which a genuine neo-nazi military unit in the Ukrainian military. So what? This is far from the first time covert product placement has been a thing in military news.

Another example is a blogger link from this post. It's just a few pages of pulling stuff out of the author's ass confidently. For example:

Ukraine’s President Zelensky told visiting US Senators in early June that the country’s military defense against Russia and the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline are inextricably intertwined.

Once the project is completed, Ukraine will be deprived of the funds required to fund defense spending and defend Europe’s eastern border.

“Nord Stream 2 will cut Ukraine off from gas supplies, which will cost us at least USD 3 billion per year.”

Zelensky, always the joker, wants Russia to pay $3 billion per year so he personally can defend Europe from Russia who is paying him.

Notice how the author smoothly transitions from a fact - that Zelensky stated that closing a particular pipeline would cost the Ukraine a lot of money - to the unsubstantiated claim that Zelensky then wants Russia to pay for it. This is then further logically mangled into the idea that it somehow explains the Ukraine-Russian friction we're seeing now.

Zelensky’s Ukraine is shuffling Europe, NATO, and the US closer and closer to the line where one mistake in diplomacy, one stupid move by any of Ukraine’s infamous Neanderthal nationalist volunteers, and bang!

Let us further note that such infamy is only on the Russian supporters side. Somehow everyone else has come to grips with the reality that there's a small number of fascists/neo-nazis in the Ukraine military. My favorite quote of this batch:

In response to this, Ukraine mobilized over ½ its army or over 170,000 troops to the frontline with all the heavy weapons at its disposal accompanying them.

This force was a supposed counter to the Russian invasion army, which again, was just over the border.

In reality, the Russian army staged planned war games near the city of Yelnya, 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border. You read that right, the Russian army was160 miles away from the Ukrainian border even though every major western publication made it sound like they were already in Kiev.

As I noted at the time, now those "war games" are inside the borders of the Ukraine. Looks like the Ukraine was right on that one!

While I didn't say it at the time, if the author is so horribly wrong about the "war games" and the infamy of Ukrainian troops what else is he horribly wrong about? This isn't the alternate media source I'm looking for.

Then there's the king of one liner putdowns:

[fustakrakich:] "Your" take is just mass media propaganda. Nobody wants war but the US

And yet we see Russia making those aggressive moves towards war. It also furthers the propaganda narrative that this is merely a showdown between Russia and US with Ukraine interests being completely irrelevant.

Also that Runaway journal was about some academic blaming the US or possibly the Western world for the conflict. At one point Runaway claimed:

[Runaway1956:] You didn't listen to the man, did ya? The "west" engineered that coup. Mearsheimer doesn't say so, but I'm aware that the Koch brothers were prime movers in the coup. We quite literally backed fascists and neo-Nazis in the coup.

In other words, there was no support for Runaway's assertion there from his source. In fact, I've googled this subject a bit and never found Runaway linking to a source for the Koch brothers accusation - though if he had, I would have stated that it shows good taste in revolutions on their part.

Anyway, I think this illustrates some of the weirder failures of the pro-Russian side in this conflict. Namely, obsessing over sources of evidence rather than the evidence itself. But given how unflattering that evidence is, maybe this is the best they can do?

All I can say is that it's probably a lot safer to complain about media bias than to defend Putin only to have him stab you in the back a few weeks later. But it begs the question: why is imaginary CIA/MIC involvement enough to completely torpedo a media source, but not being horribly wrong and/or irrelevant?

Using powers granted under the Emergencies Act, the federal government has directed banks and other financial institutions to stop doing business with people associated with the anti-vaccine mandate convoy occupying the nation's capital.

According to the regulations published late Tuesday, financial institutions are required to monitor and halt all transactions that funnel money to demonstrators — a measure designed to cut off funding to a well-financed protest that has taken over large swaths of Ottawa's downtown core.

"Financial institutions" aren't just banks.

The government is also ordering insurance companies to suspend policies on vehicles that are part of an unlawful "public assembly."

These financial institutions can't handle cash, issue a loan, extend a mortgage or more generally facilitate "any transaction" of a "designated person" while the Emergencies Act is in place.

The regulations define a "designated person" who can be cut off from financial services as someone who is "directly or indirectly" participating in a "public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace," or a person engaging in "serious interference with trade" or "critical infrastructure."

So basically, the Canadian government chickened out and mandated instead that the banks and insurance companies to do everything. Then rat out their customers to the government once they're done.

Banks also are required to "disclose without delay" the "existence of property in their possession or control" or "any information about a transaction or proposed transaction" related to a "designated person" to both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

"Those authorities are now in force and they're being used," said Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. "It's incredibly important that we follow the money."

It's not "incredibly important" for anyone interested in rule of law, due process, or proportionality of punishment. And the final part:

The Emergencies Act and its associated regulations are in effect for only 30 days; that period could be shorter if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet revoke it or if Parliament scuttles it after a vote. But a senior government official said there could be long-term implications.

"For the most part, financial institutions can decide who they do business with and they may decide to cease offering financial services," the official said.

Mark Blumberg is a lawyer at Blumberg Segal LLP who specializes in non-profit and charity law. In an interview, he said that while the Emergencies Act gives banks time-limited powers, these institutions "may just decide to shut the person's account down" because there could be "huge risks" for banks servicing these customers in the future.

So rather than deal with the protest in a sensible manner (they're breaking the law, right?), the Canadian government has put forward this ridiculous "emergency" and deputized a bunch of businesses to go crazy with legal immunity (but only if they toe the government line). In the meantime, the protesters can lose their insurance and freeze finances. So what's going to happen to protesters of any sort in the future, if banks and insurance companies see them as liabilities due to this emergency?

Now imagine if Trump and US financial institutions had this kind of power over BLM protesters. Wouldn't be a problem, right?

Hopefully, this will get reversed in the Canadian courts, because otherwise it's a huge move towards tyranny, particularly of the fascist sort.

UPDATE: Since I posted this journal entry, new allegations against aristarchus have been made public by the site staff. If these new allegations are true, then I can only say that I am very disappointed in aristarchus. I consider the alleged behavior unacceptable regardless of any possible justification.

I am leaving the original contents of my journal entry below (in the "spoiler" section), as the words reflect my views based on the information that was publicly available to me at the time I wrote them. I also want to restate my belief that mobbing someone by following the actions of your peers and downmodding comments based on the author rather than the content is unethical.