Examples of the means affecting the end

Something I have learned to be wary of is making the unwise and often downright stupid assumption that the end justifies the means. The current problems with anti-vaxxer/anti-pandemic containment conspiracy fantasists is, in my opinion, an example of that. 

Working in reverse: 

• the current problem and repugnant people are "anti-" largely because they do not trust "authority"/expertise/"the government"; 
• as far as politics ("the government") goes, that lack of trust has been created by problems that became widely apparent back with "Watergate" in the USA, but are perpetuated by all "back room"/"grey" people who advocate for doing whatever is necessary to gain power, thinking they can "fix it up" later.
  You can't - the current problems show how much such attitudes lead to later problems, and the suspicion of voters over things like "small target" campaigning shows how much voter have changed in response to "being treated like mushrooms"; 
• experts also have that problem. We - I am an engineer in my day job, so feel obliged to include myself - have the appalling habit of too often thinking we just have to make a pronouncement, and don't have to explain or justify it. That isn't helped by the rabid financial cut-throatedness of consulting in the neoliberal era, but it is even less helped by experts in one field thinking they don't need experts in other areas (such as communication).
  We have also been let down by failures such as thalidomide, DDT, the West Gate bridge collapse, Chernobyl, the under-design of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the active resistance to implementing car safety measures and addressing the climate crisis, and so on.
  Experts have done an enormous amount of good as well - the COVID vaccines and other medical advances are testament to that - but intellectual arrogance (and sometimes human flaws such bigotry) crops up and is used by experts to shoot expertise in the foot from time to time, to the lasting damage of all in the community.
  

 The end does NOT justify the means.

Governance for ...

Democratic governance is supposed to actually be for all, or as close to it as is possible - that's why rorting and other corruption is inherently wrong.

Valid criticisms such as this show that some people in power are governing for a few - specifically, for those who are in the "comfort zones" of those with power. 

That is, they will govern for those people they like, are comfortable with, or consider merit good things - which, in Australia at least and probably elsewhere, means: 

• fallacies/prejudices about "dole bludgers", 
• hate of those who are feared because of personal insecurities / inadequacies (most notably, the personal insecurities that lead to LGBTIQ-phobias), and 
• the problems of limited perspectives (e.g., parents who taught misogyny and/or racism, possibly using culture or religion as a thin disguise or excuse) or Newtonian world views 

enable abuses such as systemic governmental mental abuse of those receiving welfare (leading to Robodebt and many suicides), racist policies (the Stolen Generations, genocide, the still present and pernicious White Australia "thinking"), denial of uncomfortable events such as the climate crisis and the pandemic which mean cherished life goals and plans have to be abandoned (much as was the case for those experiencing last Century's two World Wars and Great Depression). 

In brief, it means governance for a few (not necessarily elites, but those who the elites and those with some power are comfortable with - "mates") rather than all, or even the many.

PS - from my coming weekly news post on my main blog:
an examination of what is behind housing unaffordability (which ignores people's misconception that homes are for generating wealth, rather than living in);

They knew ...

In my post on the risk of becoming a monster, I referred to the Bob  Woodward and Robert Costa  book "Peril" (Simon & Schuster UK, 2021, ISBN 978-1-3985-1215-3; Amazon). I've now finished that, and I am utterly appalled. 

I was appalled to discover that there are supposedly Democrats in the US with conservative, 1970s, neoliberal thinking about unemployed people - Democrats (or perhaps DINOs - Democrats in Name Only, as I once suggested) who had key, unhealthy influences on negotiations about making people's lives manageable. 

I expected to read of the support of those who are, in my opinion (IMO), lacking in "clear and present thinking" by supporting the narcissistic psychopath #45 - but it is still disturbing to read of it.

But above all else, I am appalled that so many people warned US President Biden of what would happen to women and girls - and others - in Afghanistan, but he still chose to screw the people of Afghanistan by taking the fastest withdrawal option. 

"The military leaders’ and intelligence officials’ warnings grew darker. They had spent decades tracking and studying the Taliban. They knew well what it would mean for the Afghan people, particularly women."

Yes, it was a no-win situation (damned if you do, damned if you don't), but there were other options - and the "gated" withdrawal approach would have prevented the rapid collapse, IMO, as well as giving time for an orderly evacuation of those who were risk for having aided the USA and its lickspittles - including my nation. 

I consider Biden's pain at the loss of his own son overwhelmed his decision making, and he forgot what it is like to lose a daughter.

Biden is the price the USA and the world is paying for the voters of the USA having elected #45 - and anyone who thinks the USA or the world would be better if #45 was still in power is an idiot. No-one else would have got enough votes to defeat #45 - there were better, IMO, candidates, but they  would  NOT  have  had  enough  appeal  to  voters  of  the  USA  to  win!!!

From the book again: 

"Cedric Richmond’s political mentor, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, heard the critics. Biden again? Why not new blood? Shouldn’t Black Democrats rally behind one of their own? But this was not a normal year to the South Carolina Democrat, two years older than Biden and the highest-ranking Black leader in Congress. Trump had to be defeated."

This is a problem faced elsewhere in the world as well - the price the UK is still paying for having elected Thatcher, the price my nation is paying for having elected social dinosaur Abbott, the utterly disappointing Turnbull, and the utterly appalling Scott. 

And just as the USA and the world is better off with #45 having been voted out, we need to vote Scott out - and we may have to pay a price of imperfection, but the price of Scott staying will be worse.

And we, the world, also have to learn never to rely on the duplicitous USA ever again - some of learned that decades ago, many of us were wary, but enough is enough: never again.

And it could get worse ...

Cross-posting: Post No. 2,031 - Monsters and the risk of becoming one

This originally appeared on my main blog at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2021/09/post-no-2030-monsters-and-risk-of.html.

*** 

In the same way that no-one can be completely "beyond  the  Pale" (our souls are eternal, after all, and those drama queens who think [and I've made this error] a few millions years are significant in the context of eternity are wrong - which is also why hate is such a problem: hate someone and you're going to have problems when you inevitably come into contact with them again, maybe a few thousands or millions of years hence), so too is the thought that people can evolve beyond ever being "evil". 

If they're alive on this world, people can always potentially backslide. 

I've been thinking about this as I've started reading the Bob  Woodward and Robert Costa  book "Peril" (Simon & Schuster UK, 2021, ISBN 978-1-3985-1215-3; Amazon) (I don't normally buy books that cost as much as it did, and the previous two in the series were too depressing to contemplate, but this one was so well written, from the free e-book sample I read, that I broke my budgeting rule), about the election of Biden and the transition from #45 to Biden. I haven't got to the section about the attempted insurrection on 6^th January, 2021 yet (I'm only about a third of the way through it), but there are a few things that have struck me. 

One is the comprehensiveness of preparation and thinking of Lt. General Mark Milley ("We Were Soldiers Once - and Young" also gives a good accounting of the thorough research, thinking and preparation of good soldiers, as does the War on the Rocks blog .. and it is interesting in a trivial sort of way that the Lt. General and I are of a similar age). 

Part of that preparation included getting advice on how to handle a narcissistic person like #45. The advice included not humiliating that sort of person in public (which explains some of the run-ins I've had with people I've stood up to in the past), and the amount of effort that goes in to keeping #45 as close as possible to rationality is staggering - and terrifying (FFS, USA - catch up with the LATE 1800s and GET THE F RID OF YOUR BLOODY STUPID ELECTORAL COLLEGE SYSTEM!!!). 

The only point, which has led to this post, is that #45 was initially heading towards admitting that he had lost the election, until the evil and/or insane (they are COMPLETELY out of touch with reality - I consider the word fits) gophers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell got their claws into him.

Sure, #45 was also evil, but he had an opportunity ... and chose to go down the wrong path. And it makes no difference that others were advising him badly - he was also getting good advice, and actively chose the former over the latter.

That can happen to all of us, and I'd like to review some of the reasons that can happen - there are others, and there will be others I haven't heard of, but this is a start to maybe stimulate some thought on your part, Dear Reader. 

To begin with, there are lifestyle vulnerabilities, which I wrote about here. I won't rep[eat that content here, this is just to stimulate some thought and, maybe, research, so ... do Lt. General Milley proud, and click on the link 😁

The next point is failing to work with (not "manage" - these are valuable tools) emotions. See here, and especially the links there (don't forget to keep Lt. General Milley proud 😁 ).

Next, consider: 

• fear of complexity; 
• being "flummoxed by the unfamiliar"; and
  
• the concept of negative learning.
  

The other risk factor I have become aware of as I age and my health declines (partly due to work pressures/expectations in our neoliberal poisoned society) is that of exhaustion. 

When you are young, healthy, and feeling strong, it is easy enough to take on a task ... but it is another to keep at it after a half century of a challenging life, a life exposed to the bigotry that is society's underbelly, combined with lifestyle vulnerabilities, family issues, and the effects of appalling governance from neoliberals and authoritarians. 

This is part of why I am aiming to finish the Magickal Battle of the World series by the end of the year: that will allow me to take fuller advantage of the end of the year work break. 

But I can now well understand how people who are desperately, desperately exhausted, ill, or afraid, can make decisions that they may regret - in some cases, even seconds later.

For those not in such situations, please consider that we need to be kinder, gentler, and generous to each other - and ALL sentient life. 

I know I'm going to think more kindly of those who try to change or manage problem situations / systems "from within".

Some thoughts on thinking

Back in the 1980s, I had a colleague who worked as a sub-contractor, rather than as an employee. He talked me into wanting to change from being an employee to a subbie, largely on the basis of the extra money. My manager at that time listed all the problems: no super, no holidays, etc - the higher money was supposed to cover that, and greater insecurity. I favoured security, so chose to stay as an employee. 

Fast forward a few years, and the same manager was trying to talk me into shifting from being an employee to being a subbie ... because of the higher money. 

The insecurity issue was basically laughed at: "oh you'll be OK". 

Anyone in that situation who starts to look at the minutiae of the second "offer" without considering the broader context and what this all meant for them is not thinking properly - I would go so far as to say they were being stupid. 

I challenged that manager quite bluntly, asking if he was lying then or now, and he was so flustered he couldn't think of a response to that - other than a blatant lie that he was trying to look out for me.

What he was looking out for was what was the company considered best for the company - and there had been changes in employment law and business management thinking where they considered worker insecurity - which they misdescribed as worker flexibility - was "better" for the company. 

In my opinion, all it did was relieve the company management of the need to think ahead, plan, and manage the business's needs and the workers reasonable expectations. Instead, they could lazily respond to the currents of the day and things as they noticed them. 

Yes, this was the start of neoliberalism, when the competence and quality of management started degrading. 

Getting sucked in to the manager's worldview (or "the premise of the question") would have been flawed thinking. 

Giving in to that flawed thinking would likely have been as a result of unacknowledged emotions. 

Unacknowledged emotions leads me to the next example, roughly a couple of decades later, of "flawed" (non) thinking, which was a notoriously sexist (to the point of misogyny, at times) male telling a trans woman that he had "naturally" assumed she would have lived her home life as if she were male.

It showed that male's bias towards a false view that being male was somehow "better" - that is, it was sexism personified. 

It was also utterly stupid, as it showed no mental effort whatsoever had been expended to come to terms with the FACT that the woman was clearly NOT of the view that being male was "better", and the assumption that a woman would arrange her home life as if was male was utterly moronic.

All of this came about because of that arrogant male's incompetence with emotions - to the extent that he was unaware that he had emotions. 

However, knowing and being comfortable with emotions doesn't automatically mean one is a clear thinker, either. 

Chronologically between the two events is one where I helped a (then) friend help her friend (all of us female) escape from a domestic violence situation. 

Friend's friend had to go to court to get a court order, and the two of us accompanied her for support. I don't remember the details now, but the aim was to get an order relating to personal property. The judge pointed out that the orders did not normally include one form of support friend's friend wanted, but he would specifically include that in this case, and they just needed to tell the court officer. 

This is where friend and friend's friend emotions overwhelmed their mind: their "thinking" was along the lines of "well of course that is right and just and proper, and friend's friend deserves that, so the law SHOULD be providing it and therefore it does". 

The FACT that the law didn't provide that was swamped by the emotions on the topic of what they both considered - and they were morally right on this, albeit not legally - friend's friend should have. 

When talking to the court officer, who said "no, the law does not require that", instead of saying "the judge told us to tell you he had added - please read the order a bit further on", they reacted from a view that what they thought should be was, and were angry - to the point of cutting me off when I tried to explain that. (They understood what I was saying hours later, that evening - and were so insecure they still resisted it.) 

Clear thinking in humans is not just a matter of developing powers of logic, induction/deduction, etc. Humans also have emotions - even, and perhaps especially, in the ones who deny or try to control them (as evidenced by some judges' decisions being overturned on appeal, I suspect).

As I wrote in April, 2020: 

You can not
shine from your mind,
unless you first
shine from your heart. 

A plea for ideology-free, character & EI & clear thinking developing education

In my opinion, a major part of the problem with denialist and other anti-lockdown fantasists is flawed thinking. Loss of trust is a key part also, true, but if the denialists were thinking clearly and understanding their emotions, they would understand that they have wrongly conflated expert medical advice with all government pronouncements, whereas those that are enacting expert medical advice are different. 

This happens for two reasons, also IMO:

1. Parents being unable to break free of the conditioning they had which limits their emotional intelligence (EI) and ability to think clearly; 
2. Education systems that have been poisoned by ideology - neochristianity for millennia, neoliberalism over the last four decades, and a general warped view that - effectively - people are economic cogs and nothing else ... which is shown particularly by every single teacher who is uncomfortable with the notion of teaching EI and/or clear thinking (both of which lead to a better character) in schools.
   

We need better education - and it is going to take three generations before such change is embedded into society, so, allowing for lobbying time beforehand, this may take a century or more. 

We don't have that much time, so adults are also going to have be taught these traits. 

The good news is, many either have these traits, or are open to them. It is the minority that have been most damaged by ideology that most need - and most deserve - help on thee aspects. 

Trying to provide that help in the midst of an inflamed, combative situation is obviously not going to work, but as soon as we get out the other side of the pandemic, we - the human species - need to start working on this. 

On Scott's "nucular" / "our" nuclear submarines

In a discussion on Scott's "nucular" / "our" nuclear submarines this morning, I heard a comment that submarines are not a deterrent. I actually disagree with that: having weapons systems that provide effective defence well away from borders does provide some deterrence, but I also disagree that the submarines are about either deterrence or defence at a distance (defence in depth): they are about enabling a projection of power to chummy up to the USA by echoing and participating in their views of defence in the hope that the USA would provide sufficient clout to defend us against "any external threats" (currently China, but used to be Indonesia). 

However, the USA is NOT a stable, reliable ally - Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that, as did Vietnam and the US abandonment of the Philippines when Japan invaded it in 1941/42. South Korea (and the Korean War is actually the USA's longest war), is a better indication of the USA's potential to be reliable, and that relates to being useful to their views of what is in their national interest. And on THAT note, us allowing more US bombers and troops to be stationed here (also part of the deal), in addition to the US spy base at Pine Gap, is more more likely to ensure the US will defend us than nuclear submarines in the Pacific. 

Better use of diplomacy was raised. I agree with that, but we should NOT be such moral cowards who are afraid of antagonising China that we do not stand up to China on human rights issues. If we stop doing that we might as well apply to become Chinese denizens. 

Also, thinking - or arguing - that no defence forces are needed is naïve. That's just  not  going  to  happen with the world as it is now. In fact, all it does it put off potential supporters who decide you must be impractical, out-of-touch with reality, or just stupid. 

However, instead of defence at a distance, should focus smaller, local subs for defence of our coast - especially inside the Reef and other forces also adapted to our defence of territory needs. 

Once we have that, we can take a proper perspective on politically motivated force projection spending. After all, no-one is likely to invade China, but that's not because of their force projection at a distance, it's because they have a credible defence of territorial integrity force.

The power of listening

It is disappointing to reflect on the fact that many of the problems the world is going through now could have been avoided had people been listened to. 

People - including me, but others as well - have been urging action to address health risks with air conditioning since - in my case - the 1980s, but it was dismissed as being too expensive. Of course, the blind dinosaurs at that time were obviously not counting all the sick days that came from flu every year, and now that we have an airborne pandemic, I get the sense that those same groups of people are trying to avoid admitting they were wrong with a whole swath of excuses. 

Similarly, many people have been warning of the climate crises for decades - back into the 1800s, in some cases. Again, the dollar and profit was paramount, and people were viewed as expendable economic cogs, and now not only the economic system but our very survival is at risk. 

In my case, I've been arguing with architects over the need for things like eaves or verandahs to protect the walls of "modern"  (the old Queenslander style was better and, I would argue, more "modern") Australian houses from heat waves since the 1980s - with ****head responses that are effectively along the lines of "we can burn as much coal to generate power to run avoidable or minimisable air conditioning to cool houses that have been overheating because of architecture's sick obsession with no eaves or verandahs". 

And now the airline industry, which has been treating people like cattle, is being forced to address the complaints of its human cattle made since the90s because of the pandemic. Where would we be if those complaints had been treated with respect (which includes accepting their validity, and that they have at least equal weight with profit) in terms of minimising the spread and impact of the pandemic? 

The USA is still self-centric on Afghanistan

Recent criticism of the USA's withdrawal from Afghanistan has been focused on US citizens left behind, and the possibility of new risks to the USA. Despite comments that the new Biden administration has "inherited a decision, not a plan", there is still little about the women's human rights and safety and the cultural diversity that is being destroyed by the misogynistic male violent extremists. 

There is some commentary, which shows that the US still has a core of decency amongst at least some people, and I am mindful that the opposition to past abusive US Presidents has often been strongest in the USA, but their self-obsession, staggeringly high crime and poverty rates, and simplistic responses to issues show how little the USA, following the damage done by Reagan, can be relied on - or even trusted. (The damage done by Nixon and his cohort was also significant, but was more internal than outward-focused.)

We also have our problems here in Australia, with a national government that is secretive, simplistic in its views (especially on misogyny), prone to climate change denialism (based on their lack of action), facing concerning numbers of accusations of corrupt conduct, and enabling racism, xenophobia, transphobia and other 18th century flaws - but we have little power to influence anything except the climate crisis, where we could, with a little business vision and competence, go from enabling massive GHG emissions to exporting renewable power. 

The USA still has a power in the world that is not matched by an appropriate moral maturity - it's as if they want to be able to thumb their nose at the rest of the world for being powerful, but then just sit on their hands and not do anything with that power. 

Afghanistan is just the latest example of that.

Poverty is a thief

I've written quite a few times that poverty robs society of the skills of those who are trapped in it (e.g. "how many Michaelangelos, Eleanor Roosevelts, and Albert Einsteins have been lost to the world in extreme poverty?", from here). 

Poverty also robs two groups of people of their dignity. 

The first are those who are suffering poverty - fairly obvious, I would hope, given that they are not in charge of their own destiny, and suffer a range of harms from living in poverty. 

The second - less obvious - group is every one of those repugnant, paranoid misers who oppose aiding the poor or addressing the true causes of poverty. 

The second groups is truly an utterly contemptible group of people ... but they are people, nevertheless, and while the harm they are actively perpetuating MUST be contained and revered, in the long term their need for assistance on their mental and emotional flaws should be addressed - but their victims come first. 

PS - I have come across an eloquent and elegant quote to concisely convey what I am trying to get at in this post: 

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Stephen  Jay  Gould

Cross posting: Post No. 2,011 - Bigots and their legacy of trauma

This post originally appeared on my main blog at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2021/09/post-no-2011-bigots-and-their-legacy-of.html. 

*** 

I recently posted a definition - on my online glossary - of "bigots / bigotry". Normally I would just include the link (https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2021/09/bigots-bigotry.html), but I'm going to copy the definition here and then provide some additional commentary. 

Bigots and their bigotries are a subset of conspiracy fantasists/fantasies. 

The bigotries that bigots hold to - whatever form it is (sexism / misogyny/misandry, LGBTIQphobia, racism, classism, etc) - is WRONG because it is based on:

(a) wrong perception of reality (e.g., thinking a few people are representative of a class, failure to comprehend the effects of discrimination, etc);

(b) incorrect perception (confirmation bias, F.E.A.R., etc);

(c) suffering from FBU;

(d) taught hate / fear; 

(e) personal flaws (e.g., personal insecurity about own sexuality / gender identity);

(f) arbitrary ideas about inclusion / exclusion or access to particular groups (which applies to all forms of sexism, racism, and transphobia - and classism);

(g) etc. 

Bigots have the same sort of inability to think that right wing extremists have also been shown to have - the same sort of mental ineptness that conspiracy fantasists have (which is why I now use the term conspiracy fantasy, not conspiracy "theory" - they haven't done enough thinking to justify the word theory). 

People in a number of powerful positions / organisations who have ANY form of bigotry are unfit to be in that position - and I am thinking particularly of intelligence services (ASIO was notoriously LGBTIQphobic, but the sort misogyny portrayed in the film "Snowden" shows a person is so flawed in how they perceive reality that I would doubt everything they said). 

On the other hand, anyone who (and any organisation that) is genuinely making an attempt to deal with, or at least manage, what is these days termed "unconscious bias", deserves at least the benefit of the doubt. 

Other bigots don't, and should be ignored on everything.

My life has been made, too many times and for too long, an abusive horror by bigots - not only the obvious ones (misogynists, etc), but idiots who are prejudging me and getting even with me for abuses they experienced from others - not me, or idiotic assumptions that my life was better than theirs because of irrelevant & inaccurate factor X. Such people tend towards jealous, snarky, sarcastic, or passive-aggressive behaviour. 

That sort of behaviour is bigotry just as much as physically bashing people. 

Pseudo-intellectual arrogance is another form that has been especially problematic in workplaces. In fact, it is my experience of such behaviour that eventually led me to suspect that bigots are flawed intellectually - they cannot think (I've given some of the recent links on that above, in the transcribed definition), and they do not acknowledge (and possibly aren't even aware of) their emotional baggage, such as blind loyalty to an idea because their parents or some other significant other said it was good when the bigot was young. Because of that blind loyalty to long past, unacknowledged emotional "warm fuzzies", such people are utterly flummoxed by the unfamiliar (FBU). 

As an example, I've had such people try to justify their personal preference on how to do things on a computer as being better because "it just is". 

Wow. Power of debate, baby - and that was a professional engineer with decades of experience (now long retired, I'm pleased to say [the world and the STEM professions will both be better when certain people of my age bracket and older retire and/or die] ).

Others have made transphobic statements such as "I just naturally assumed that X would be living in a male way" - about a trans WOMAN, but, IPOC, there is nothing "natural", "normal", or even logical about such an absurdist statement, a statement that drips with unconscious bias including misogyny as well as transphobia. Such a statement shows you haven't even thought about the issues involved (I am very glad that particular person has also retired). 

The worst example of this problem I've encountered was someone in another company change the recommendations I had written in a report to the opposite of what I had written, and had to advise the company I worked for at the time to consider legal action. Actually, hinting at taking "further action", without being specific at whether it is internal, legal or via the Engineers Australia ethics committee has at least got IPOCs to stop pushing their particular line of stupidity and actually listen to and consider what I was explaining, and, in one instance, led to a company (decades ago now - the company no longer exists) not proceeding with an unethical action. 

Similar to that is the arrogance of assuming that other people won't have thought of obvious issues (especially in relation to gender diversity, it seems) because the bigot hasn't pointed the specific matter out personally to the other - which, as well as being staggering personal arrogance, is also an indication of the bigot's stupidity and belittling of other people.

I've written about such workplace problems on my political blog, and the intellectual arrogance and inflexibility has too often manifested as both professional problems and bigotry. At least companies are generally getting much better at managing such risks - QAQC standards (introduced here from the late 1980s) have led to better use of checks and things like project definition, which deals with the problems of mental inflexibility, and the growing interest of companies over the last 15 years or so (here) being inclusive has led to much better prevention and management of many forms of discrimination. 

But the trauma caused by decades of bigotry and abuse - both in and out of the workplace - still remains.

Here's a few more examples of bigotry - from outside the workplace - that shows how intellectually inept and inflexible bigots are: 

• thinking misgendering is not transphobic (do they think people are discriminatory only when they are physically violent? Do they not know destruction of identity is a crime against humanity under some circumstances?); 
• following a misgendering event, a corrected "traffic controller" a mocking bow and a "I meant no offence" in a derisive tone rather than the normal "Sorry, ma'am" (the construction industry is particularly prone to bigotry - I know people who won't walk in public if construction is happening, and the incident just cited is likely to wind up being the subject of legal action or at least complaints); 
• thinking forcing lesbians to dance with men while refusing - as a heterosexual (and clearly heteronormative) woman - to danced with women is acceptable (this was someone I knew when I was living on a boat - a period of life which showed just how nasty, spiteful, and small minded some boat people can be); 
• an IPOC thinking that, because said IPOC liked their parent, trans people being subjected to misgendering by the parent should be overlooked by the trans person. (On that, I've even had weak minded bigots assume - quite wrongly, if I have to state it - that the reason I advocated for changed ways of doing things was that I hadn't heard the "normal" way of doing things explained in the way their parents had when the bigot was a child [which is so staggeringly lacking in emotional intelligence it should be a crime].)
  

Some trans people do not help this with things  like not admitting how harmful misgendering is, and there are problems within women and minority groups (e.g., some gay men being sexist, some lesbians being transphobic, and almost all others being biphobic), but those issues are minuscule compared to the ENDEMIC bigotry of those in power.

Politics is another area where intellectual ineptness and inflexibility are problems. Some of it manifests as the sort hate shown by some conservatives on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, and socio-economic class (I have to conclude that some such conservative bigots really do want anyone they fear or hate dead);
some shows as the absurd ongoing support for demonstrated idiocy of "trickle down" economics";
ALL of it exacerbates and perpetuates the trauma women and members of minority groups experience. 

In other words, ALL of it is evil.

At some stage I'm going to be recommending "The Exorcist's Handbook" (Golem Media, 3rd edition, 2010, ISBN 978-1-937002-43-5, Amazon), by Josephine McCarthy, who is also responsible for this website. That book covers evil in a dispassionate way, and the harm that can be done by possession, psychic attack, etc (especially indirect psychic attack), albeit much of that from a Western Mystery Tradition perspective.

Such nonphysical harm is fairly obvious and widely accepted as "evil". Bigotry, on the other hand, is a bit more prosaic but it is a just as, if not more, harmful form of evil - and actively creates and perpetuates an ongoing legacy of trauma (writing this post is one part of me dealing with my share of the trauma such bigotry has caused me).

So, in a nutshell, bigots cannot think, and MUST be distrusted on all matters of the mind as well as all matters of the heart. The problem can be addressed, but even better, it can be prevented by making sure we teach children clear thinking and emotional intelligence. 

And while that is being done, we need laws to constrain bigots' evil.