These are the people in charge.
If they were accused of racism for saying someone was black rather than a person of colour, and they said that was silly. That seems more reasonable.
And while perhaps being rude, I don't think being of a certain colour gives or removes any authority or expertise you may have on the subject. If you want to identify as purple, can I not comment unless I also identify as purple?
It adjusts the implicit context of what is being said. Which is heavy when it comes to white men telling Black individuals how to perceive themselves. In any case, calling someone's provided identity "silly" is hard to construe as anything but an attack. The best case context here is that you have assumed it is not important to them and thus harmless to denigrate. Which comes with its own loaded baggage of how people of privileged social classes don't consider how or why identity is so central to disadvantaged groups because they never really need to think much about being a "normal" person.
It's not a particularly malicious attack. But it's needlessly abrasive. No, don't comment on someone's identification as purple. Nobody asked for your opinion. If you want to ask them about their identity that's probably ok.
Where did you tell off this person? How did PayPal catch wind of it?
That sure sounds like intolerance to me. Otherwise what are they tolerating?
Imagine, one day, one of your own beliefs becomes lumped under the umbrella of facism. Imagine that you disagree with this categorization, but nonetheless, the categorization is made.
How would you feel about someone telling you about the paradox of tolerance in this case? Don't you think it's a bit more complicated than this?
>> That sure sounds like intolerance to me. Otherwise what are they tolerating?
> Just gonna put this here for no reason…
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Since you aren't being very clear, I'm going to assume your point is that the "Paradox of tolerance" justifies PayPal's actions. That's obviously missing the point. IIRC, the "Paradox of tolerance" only argues for intolerance in very specific circumstances, not a intolerance at your "sole discretion" of categories of things you find odious.
1) It’s a blanket justification of suspending the rules when you believe the rules to be threatened, which devolves to “the most fearful have the fewest restrictions on their behavior” which I’m sure you can see is a problematic paradigm.
2) People often take it as a given that the assumption in the paradox of tolerance, that “tolerance fosters intolerance” is true but that’s not actually clear at all. It might as easily be untrue, or more untrue than not. It could be backwards for all anyone knows.
That's an incredibly eloquent way to put it. I'm going to use that going forward with your permission.
I've been saying for years, it feels like many orgs in the US are run by cowards, NIMBYs and BANANAs, so the pace of change is abysmal. You can watch your grandkids grow old before those kinds of people ever agree to make a change.
"freedom of speech is so important that paradoxically, the government must ban a small part of it (of those who want to restrict it, like Paypal and HN commenters) to preserve the rest."
The Paradox itself works in this regard, that freedom cannot be absolute. But we can have larger and smaller degrees of it.
Lenin's tolerance matrix of other ideologies is something like this (S = Self, it's a me!, Y = Yay, O = OK, M = Meh, N = ehhh... K = kill):
S-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K
He just wants communism and everything else is disallowed. The situation is obviously awful.
You could have a different kind of ruling ideology:
S-O-O-Y-M-O-N-N-K-N-N-Y
It more or less likes a couple other ideologies that don't really conflict with it, and can allow at least some form of a lot of other things, but would gnash its teeth. But it kills Lenin, because you have to.
This would be a much better situation, but not one of complete freedom.
The problems with the Paradox as used today are not that the Paradox's logic doesn't work when we near some limit of ideological permissiveness.
The problem is that most of the woke and progressivists who incessantly cite the Paradox ARE LENIN-TYPE ACTORS THEMSELVES. They don't actually, in practice, tolerate anything but their own ideology, as we constantly see with DEI loyalty oaths propagating everywhere and people arguing against eg. pushing young kids into gender reassignment surgery getting deplatformed while hospital speakers, behind closed doors, celebrate how it's possible to fund entire clinics on phalloplasty alone). They are the exact sort of people against whom Paradox censure should be applied.
There is a second question wrt to ruling ideologies, separate from their tolerance matrix, which is how disastrous and mistaken they are. Part of the reason we should ensure that Lenin won't win is because he wasn't simply peddling his ideology in a really intolerant way. It was that he was trying to institute communism.
Communism is not bad simply because it has a kill-all nontolerance pattern, but because if the ideology rules, the results are abject garbage: One dystopian society after another and mountains of the dead. As E. O. Wilson put it, Marxism "is a nice idea, but for the wrong species."
Meanwhile, much of Europe was Christian for centuries, and while the religious tolerance pattern was the nastier one, Christianity overall seems much more compatible with flourishing human society than eg. communism is, and in fact resulted in societies that were the envy of the world. It is much more tolerable to live under a sane ideology than one that's incompatible with humanity, all else being equal. (NB for those who need it: I am a lifelong atheist and would chafe under fervent Christian rule)
Woke progressivism, in my view, has that same misfit problem communism does, although it's less actively murderous than its predecessor. Humans are tribal, status-seeking, competitive, religious apes and woke doctrine is essentially weird ostensibly secular Harrison Bergeroning.
But that's neither here nor there, the tolerance matrix thing was the point, and the observation that it feels off because we at least subconsciously know the lefties pushing it are Lenin-pattern kill-allers.
Obvious examples like unabashed white supremacists aside... what happens in less clear cases, like when a Palestinian rights organization starts posting BDS stuff, and Israelis respond by calling them a terror group?
One more justification for uncensorable, provably non-inflationary digital currencies.
What I take issue with more than anything else is the idea of a private business expropriating money from people based on the contents of their speech, as a change of contractual policy, buried deep in the terms of service, that many laypeople cannot be reasonably expected to read and comprehensively understand.
I'm also concerned about this policy being weaponized by bad actors. Say someone impersonates a PayPal user online and posts genuine hate speech, complete with calls to violence. Or someone sends a payment to an innocent PayPal user with a memo that implies the PayPal user was engaged in hateful or malicious conduct. What happens when someone is having a mental health crisis and says some awful things on Twitter due to genuine mental health issues? What happens if a PayPal user's online account on another platform is hacked and used to post hateful content? What safeguards are in place to ensure that only those who are actually guilty are financially penalized?
It's fine to dislike crypto, there are valid reasons, but let's be factual here.
By contrast sometime around 2140 the final Bitcoin will be mined, and we're already reducing the number mined per block. Inflation can still happen for reasons besides supply, but it's generally much less probable.
To me, it sounds like someone is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith for them to suggest that there are no digital currencies which are non-inflationary. BTC will never exceed 21 million bitcoins in circulation.
To address your other concern - the "problem" being addressed is a private company seizing your money over the contents of your speech. With self-custody of digital currencies like Bitcoin, it is not possible for third parties to expropriate your funds, provided you have protected your private key.
You own your body. Your labor is just you consciously deciding to operate your body in a manner that fulfills the needs of someone else in exchange for something of value. The value of your money being diluted is, for the worker, no different from wage theft by an employer - the rightful compensation from your productive labor being taken from you without your consent.
Those rights are not a given either. In fact this is a first time I hear those are "rights".
If I pick an apple from a tree using my productive labor, somehow apple doesn't seem to care about my rights and starts to rot.
Are you sure you're not confusing rights with desires?
In what form? Wait until people start losing $2,500 at a time for questionable reasons?
Is your contention that we should wait to see if PayPal abuses this policy, or wait to see if PayPal rescinds it?
Even if this was communicated in error, it shows how far this policy went internally to show up in customer facing copy. This calls into question any benefit of the doubt I’d usually be tempted to extend.
We absolutely need to criminalise banking discrimination, but ultimately we are not going to because quite a lot of politicians quite like banking discrimination against their enemies.
Surely the judiciary has a monopoly on punishment of 'crimes'.
But I agree with your overall point. Payment processors should be seen as public utilities that people have a right to. It shouldn't be up to private companies, who has access to that.
Not in the slightest, and has been actively encouraged since Operation Choke Point and FOSTA/SESTA.
And although it's not hard to get a merchant account per se, it is 100x harder than getting a Paypal account which takes 5 minutes and doesn't require any underwriting or paperwork. So people and businesses still use it (and Stripe, Square etc) rather than going through the hassle of getting a merchant account.
You don't want a welfare state? Must be because you are intolerant to the minorities that use it. 2500$.
You don't want to see a biological male pummeling a woman in a cage fight? obviously rooted in discriminatory ideology! 2500$.
You questioned the election results? You are intolerant to democracy! Oh wait, you were referring to a special election in Georgia? Our bad, we've reimbursed you for our erroneous detection and applied the usual double standard.
You are vocalizing autonomy and authority over your own body? Antivaxxer detected, docking 2500$. Oh, dang, the automated system didn't realize you were referring to an unwanted baby so we've reimbursed you.
