A right-thinking friend posted a Facebook status with “There are still good people in this world!” over a photo of a sign that said, in Spanish, English, and Arabic: “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor.” The sign was in a rich person’s front yard in Northwest Washington, D.C.
I replied with
Suppose that a family from west Texas moved next door, hung big “Trump” and “NRA” banners from the 2nd floor windows, put a sign reading “Pro-Life” on the front lawn, and held a bbq to celebrate conservative Christian values? Would the folks with this sign be glad to have that family as a next-door neighbor?
It turned out that the answer was “Not if they were bigots … People here don’t like racists.”
In my experience immigrants are often quite bigoted when they first arrive (it usually subsides with time). Are all bigots persona non grata or just white bigots from west Texas? What if they aren’t bigots and/or are Black? Trump got over 10% of the Black vote in Texas and many Blacks are conservative Christians. What if they are White and say some bigoted things but are still kind and friendly to their Muslim and Black neighbors? If you haven’t actually been defriended, tell them you mentioned their comment to someone who voted for Hillary and thinks Trump is an awful President who had these questions.
I’m so glad to learn that Arabs are not bigots and racists. I was holding back because of this, but now I’m planning to move to Mecca and open a kosher deli.
The problem with bigots or racists as neighbor is that they are a clear and present danger. They might murder your children. They might burn down your house. Here in Boston, just a few years ago they were kidnapping non-Christian children for forced baptisms. And again here in Boston we had a pro-lifer with a rifle going form clinic to clinic murdering people. It is Bayesian logic—the priors trump all other considerations. Frankly, the commonwealth should temporarily close its borders to people from states with a history of right wing murder, racism and assault (Texas , Arizona, Kansas, Georgia, some others) until we can set up an extreme vetting procedure to keep the right wing murders out.
Anyone ever met or know of a really, really smart bigot? (I mean Richard Feynman, Frank Wilczek smart.)
I think people gifted with exceptionally good hardwiring will grow themselves out of bigotry no matter how/where they were raised. Bigotry is a waste of energy and dumb.
@paul Newton was a religious nut and according to his wikipedia article lost a bunch of money invested in a slave-trading corporation’s collapse.
Heisenberg was basically a Nazi and some of his students were extra-strength Nazis.
More recently:
James Watson appears to harbor some retrograde ideas
@Paul K – Shockley?
One definition of bigotry is “intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself”.
By this definition, the majority of folks at American universities are bigots because they can’t tolerate dissent from their opinions regarding, e.g., the merits of Hillary Clinton.
@Paul K: on the level of Feynman, Bohr and von Neumann were bigoted towards anyone who doubted their sacred quantum theory – until they had to re-write parts of it to accommodate the existence of the laser …
“As late as 1956, Bohr and von Neumann, the paragons of quantum theory, arrived at the Columbia laboratories of Charles Townes, who was in the process of describing his invention (the laser) … At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg’s rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully.”
Source Carver Mead describes how quantum physics went wrong
@billg
From your source:
(1) At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light.
(2) Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable.
You are taking the paraphrasing of a journalist interviewing Carver Mead to conclude the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was wrong???
It is obvious that (1) above does not imply (2). The first sentence describes a laser cavity in terms of the wave formalism of the electromagnetic theory, and would describe the photons in a statistical sense.
There is a supplemental reference in the section about the maser in the wikipedia laser article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser
This seems to imply that some prominent physicists were inferring that a laser or maser would violate the uncertainty principle, but it is not clearly expressed how.
The check on the uncertainty principle validity would be a comparison between the spectral width of the laser wavelength and the axial length of the laser cavity. Spectral range could be converted to a momentum uncertainty, and the evaluation on whether the system violates the uncertainty principle would be trivial.
Watson got ostracized for something he said. What he said was a testable hypothesis, but the science loving liberals refused to test his hypothesis. But they are quite certain about global warming, because some journalists have paraphrased what some scientists said. And they do love science!!!
Bigot has been so overused as to become meaningless.
You say I would never want to live in a red state. They are all bigots. We say there is always room for one more.
@Paul, would Francis Crick qualify?