Rex Kerr
1 min readJul 12, 2023

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What defines bigotry most clearly is not anything that you said but rather unjustified contempt. Whether a belief is justified or not does not depend on its truth-value, but rather what one knows about its truth value. Thus, bigotry is not merely a matter of being mistaken, but if one is mistaken, holding the mistaken beliefs in an unjustifiable way (e.g. by being willfully ignorant, by believing low-reliability evidence over high-reliability evidence, and so on). Furthermore, contempt is necessary but must be unjustifiable, either because the bigot is correct in their factual beliefs but responds with a wholly disproportionate level of contempt; or because the bigot has unjustifiable beliefs that if true would warrant the level of contempt but which would not survive any reasonably impartial survey of evidence which is reasonably accessible.

I think this view also leaves Uygur and Kasparian in the clear, from what I understand (which is not very much: I don't follow TYT closely at all). But I think your analysis misses the key features of bigotry that separate it from other types of opinion.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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