Comments Elsewhere

Ghertner:

Charles Johnson already adequately defined it previously in one of these No-Treason threads, and you never responded. I’m not going to waste my time looking up those posts since it will most likely be a waste of time when you choose to ignore it again.

Probably, but I keep links to my offsite comments around, so the marginal cost is lower for me to dig them up. So here’s the definition and the clarification. In case you hate following hyperlinks, the definition is:

bigot, n.: One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

… let’s add the qualifier: a bigot is one whose partiality towards members of one’s own group and intolerance of those who differ is irrational.

Ghertner apparently accepts this definition; I don’t know whether or not Lopez does.

Kinsella:

Here’s what I WILL DO. I will assert NOW that it will be ASSUMED, unless and until you explicitly deny it, that you DO in fact maintain that those who oppose open border are “nativists and racists.”

Lopez:

I don’t think that everyone who is against open borders is a nativist and/or a racist.

That’s Lopez’s prerogative of course. But I’ll be your huckleberry even if he won’t. I think that everyone who is against open borders is against it for bigoted reasons; that’s because there are no non-bigoted reasons to oppose open borders. They aren’t necessarily racist or nativist reasons (there are imaginable immigration policies that are based on socioeconomic class or sexuality or religion rather than race or nationality, for example), but I take it that the general claim of bigotry is what you’re interested in rather than its specific application in claims of racism or nativism.

Does advocating something for bigoted reasons always make you a bigot? I don’t know. Maybe in one sense and not in another sense. I don’t care much anyway.

So everyone who opposes open borders is, therefore, advocating a policy for bigoted reasons. Now what?