Open bigotry

[steuard]

I'm clearly naive and idealistic, but I continue to be astounded when I see mainstream public figures spewing blatant bigotry and hate and fear. I'm not talking Mel Gibson here: his racist outbursts have generally been publicly condemned by just about everyone (including himself, in a series of increasingly threadbare attempts to apologize). I'm

Comments

[anonymous]

As Nate Silver points, this mosque is neither in/on the WTC site nor it would it even be readily visible from there.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/07/polls-reporting-on-ground-zero-mosque.html
Hence, your analogy of a mime school on the site of the school destroyed by the crazed clowns is flawed.

[kuddliphish]

Your analogy is pretty good, and I think it does reflect the thinking of the people objecting to the mosque, but I feel that I should point out that the mosque isn't going to be built at the World Trade Center site. It's going up a few blocks away--in an old Burlington Coat Factory building according to this article--so it's like your clown school is being built down the street from the old school, which isn't quite the same thing as building on the site itself. It makes me wonder just how far away it would have to be to be unoffensive, which is a rather troubling question

[steuard]

This analogy leaves out some crucial elements, I think. When the insane clown posse blew up the school some of the kids who were killed were clown kids, and many others were friends and neighbors of clowns. Are you really willing to accept that those grieving clowns should be forbidden from attending the funeral with the rest of their community

[stereotype441]

Someone at a software conference I went to a few years ago made this observation:

Every decision everyone makes is because of emotion. Sometimes the emotion is "I love facts". Which makes it seem like the decision was made because of facts. But was still made because of emotion.

It applies to all decisions, too; not just decisions about what to do, but also decisions about what to say, and even decisions about what to believe. It's been my experience that responsible, mature people, who show a history of behaving logically and rationally, even paragons of rationality such as you, me, and patrissimo, will discard logic and reason when facing an emotion more powerful than their love of logic and reason. And the scary thing is, when that happens, they won't even notice that the logic and reason are missing

[steuard]

These are all really good points. Thanks for sharing them.