I don't think we're wasting each other's time. Certainly I don't feel as though you are wasting mine, and I hope I may prevail upon your apparently strained patience to the extent of responding to this comment of yours, because I think there's some value to be had in my so doing. Should you wish me to desist thereafter, I will comply without further demur.

> today "bigotry against outgroups" looks a lot like yesterday's "bigotry against outgroups"

In every case, bigotry against an outgroup relies upon defining members of whatever outgroup is targeted by their membership in that outgroup, and nothing else. People being basically decent as we are, the only way to support the argument that X outgroup has got to go, is by first establishing in the mind of one's interlocutor the certainty that membership in X outgroup is so bad, so utterly and uniquely exclusive by nature of every possible countervailing virtue, that in this specific case it is reasonable - indeed, that it's righteous - to mete out to members of X outgroup treatment whose infliction upon anyone else would be iniquitous in the extreme.

Such a concept is not easy to establish, people being basically decent as we are. Recent history recommends one method as especially efficacious toward that end - that of inventing or selecting a name generally used in reference to a given outgroup, and then investing not the members of that outgroup directly, but rather that name in itself, with all the opprobrium that can be laden upon it. The nature of the name isn't so important; be it a demonym, an ethnonym, a name of choice, or a slur, what matters is that it be generally understood outside the targeted outgroup that the group is the object of the name. Then, by making people despise the name, you can make people despise the group, as well.

There is a subtlety here - it's very hard, people being basically decent as we are, to convince one human being to look upon another not as a fellow deserving of at least some basic modicum of decency, but rather as a disease upon the body politic, meriting excision therefrom by methods otherwise too brutal or mean to be seriously contemplated. But language is the tool we use to understand the world around us, and it should be hardly controversial in the modern age that, by modifying the way we understand language, one may modify the way we understand our world. By investing a name with contempt, therefore, we can heap contempt upon those whom that name describes, much more easily than we could achieve the same end without the same semiotic indirection.

Don't you think it's interesting that you've spent your entire participation in this thread inveighing against "racists" and "sexists" and "bigots", and making very clear that those whom you so describe, you have no problem seeing excluded from social and professional life by means which you'd consider totally unacceptable if applied to those whom you do not place in the categories those names describe? I think it's interesting.

But, as you've rightly pointed out, we are getting awfully abstract, and should bear in mind the situation we're actually talking about here. In that connection, I also think it's interesting how broadly you define these categories you're using. We are, after all, talking about some eighteen-year-old jackasses, which is to say some eighteen-year-old men, who have posted some deeply tasteless and shameful meme pictures on Facebook, mostly in a private group.

That such behavior should be firmly discouraged, we agree; I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I would regard disciplinary probation - that is, preemptive advancement to strike two of the notional three, with one more incident of misconduct resulting in summary expulsion - as a proportionate response. Where we part company is in that you find such a response arrantly insufficient. Nothing will do by you but that these young idiots be, not given the opportunity to learn from the gravity of their error, but instead totally and permanently ostracized, from society and from the professions - which is to say, they should be permitted no friends, and they should be permitted no opportunity to pursue whatever careers they might have gone to Harvard to begin. Because they posted some deeply tasteless and shameful meme pictures on Facebook, mostly in a private group.

You're right that we shouldn't forget what we're talking about here. But I think that's precisely what your words show you to have done. You're not talking about some eighteen-year-old jackasses who have perpetuated and played into some truly shitty stereotypes in front of God and everybody, and should be firmly swatted for so doing - but should also be given the opportunity to demonstrate that they have derived a salutary lesson therefrom. You're talking about "racists" and "sexists" and "bigots" as though the subjects of the discussion were, not some young damn fools who, like most young men, enjoy shit-stirring and seeing what they can get away with before someone reins them in, but rather a klavern of hardcore Klansmen long since beyond susceptibility to reason. You speak here as though there were no distinction to be made between the former and the latter, and that simply is not true.

You seem a sensible and thoughtful enough person, and I can't imagine that you are simply not at home to nuance in general - rather, I think the names you're using, and the opprobrium which attaches to them, have blinded you to the nuance which obtains here. Do you think that's very likely to be the only nuance to which you've made yourself blind?

But, of course, that's your problem, to which you'll attend or not as you so choose. It's not the sort of thing with which I'd be comfortable, or one which I could easily compose with a desire to understand, as best I'm able, the world as it actually is, the better that my actions therein be more virtuous than the converse. Should I so err, I'd like to think someone would bring it to my attention. But perhaps you feel otherwise, and in any case I've probably abused your patience just about long enough. "Just about" - one last point and a link, and then I'm done.

You may at this time be inclined to argue that, while I'm not wrong in general about the fashion in which outgroups are demonized by means of those names which apply to them, I am wrong to be concerned with your having done so in this specific case, because, in this specific case, the group you so attack actually deserves it.

And I'm sure you believe that's true! So, after all, has everyone else who has ever deployed this method against anyone. But perhaps this happens simply to be the first time in human history that that claim has had merit.

Finally, the link - I'm hardly the first person to speak on this subject, to say nothing of well respected. If you won't hear it from me, then, perhaps you'll be interested in this not totally dissimilar formulation, which predates mine and originates with someone who I gather is generally held in good regard: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...