I can be bigoted over culture and religion

I have yet to meet a Utah Mormon whomst I didn’t want to feed to the Joshua Trees.

I'm always thrown back to the Southpark guys when I think about lay Mormons. The whole "All About Mormons" episode (nevermind the Book of Mormon stage play) absolutely eviscerates the philosophy. But their attitude to actual religious practitioners is inevitably that they're just nice, simple-minded people. And going after any individual Mormon for their faith is a bit like going up to Santa Claus exhibit at the mall and screaming "Fake! Fake! It's all bullshit consumerism! Your parents are buying the presents!"

There's definitely shit people who are Mormon (Mitt Romney being the ur-example). But then there's shit people in every religious and philosophical niche. My cousin is married to a practicing Mormon and he's an absolute marshmallow sweetheart. All smiles, great with kids, quick to help anyway he can. Soft spoken, non-judgemental, a shameless teatoddler who is always happy to be the designated driver. You can raz him for being a bit bland and he'll laugh at your jokes, then maybe tease you about having had one too many coffees.

It's the people who are easy to bully and scare and intimidate that can make for a very dangerous "Silent Majority", because they'll just kinda go along to get along. But they're also fundamental to a peaceful, productive, and happy society when benevolent and visionary leaders are at the helm. If your society is all contrarian, belligerent, hard-drinking, fist-clenching, radical revolutionary/reactionary agitprop breathing soldiers of fortune, what you get is just endless fighting and misery and slaughter.

Tyler Robinson is alright

It's a product of lazy thinking.

Instead of evaluating people on an individual basis it's categorizing them based on some physical trait. That has nothing to do with their behavior or personality.

This is why bigotry is the game of the lazy thinkers.

Lazy thinkers are not intelligent because to foster intelligence one must delve into things. Consider things. Contemplate how things work.

Not just accept crude rules because it's easy.

This trait is called. Need for cognition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition

It's highly correlated with intelligence.

I don’t see intelligence inversely correlated with racism either.

I do. Racism is in direct conflict with Empathy and Empathy can be biologically explained by Mirror Neurons, which influences how learning works. At least the Learning by Example type of education.

I don’t see intelligence inversely correlated with racism either.

Increasingly byzantine rationalizations for why you're an asshole used to be the centerpiece of conservative intellectualism. You could get a PhD in racism if you worked hard enough. The SCOTUS and the appellate courts are packed with people who can tie an argument in knots to justify some new level of human misery. The Pentagon and its contracting affiliates are stuffed with top tier engineers and logistical savants and IT professionals fully inducted into the white supremacist worldview.

Some of the most impressive feats of social engineering have occurred in order to perpetuate social anxiety between ethnic groups.

It's obviously not a strict one-to-one relationship but I do think more intelligent people are on average slightly less racist.

And yet you keep defending Elmo's nazi salute...

What is actually rattling around inside that head of yours?

I've seen how people vote. I'd take the chances with the dogs, so maybe a bad example. I feel like they might be able to better know who's a piece of shit than most humans can.