David McElroy

On the public radio show “This American Life” last week, there was a segment in which an American Muslim family discussed how the last 10 years have affected them. A year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks happened, a girl in the family started being harassed at her suburban school. The mother first refused to believe the anti-Muslim sentiment she was seeing could be typical of Americans, but after years of experiencing it, she’s come to accept that America is just bigoted against Muslims.

I have a different view. I’d say it’s misguided to say that intolerance is an American thing or a Christian thing or an Arab thing or a Muslim thing. Instead, it’s really a human thing.

I’ve seen plenty of misguided bigotry against Muslims over the past 10 years, although we’ve been seeing it for decades (going back to the early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict). I’ve heard casual bigotry against Muslims from people I’ve known, but I’ve never seen anything that would rise to the level of violence or even direct confrontation. It would be wrong to deny it’s there, but’s it’s also wrong to pretend that it’s anything except an ugly part of human nature.

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Ron Paul won 45 percent of the vote in a straw poll in California over the weekend, and his supporters are beside themselves with joy. What I can’t figure out is why such bright people are so fooled about something so meaningless.

There are three kinds of political polls. (Well, four, if you want to count election day voting.) Let’s talk about what they are and which ones matter, because many very bright people don’t understand which ones are potentially worth getting excited about.

The first of the three is the opinion poll with a statistically valid, randomly selected sample of the likely voting population — and this is the only one that matters. These are the polls done by the big polling organizations such as Gallup and Pew and various others done for major media outlets. These are expensive to conduct, but they tend to be very useful and reasonably accurate. The results can be skewed slightly one way or another by the wording of questions or by the selection of the random sample. Various pollsters make slightly different assumptions and calculations about who likely voters are going to be, but their results tend to be reasonably accurate — especially if you average all the polls.

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I’ve never been good at telling whether kittens are boys or girls, so I didn’t realize Charlotte was a girl for a long time. From the beginning, she was the dominant kitten of a litter. She was so dominant, in fact, that all of us thought she must be a little boy — trying to boss her sisters around.

It turned out that all of the kittens were girls. Charlotte was just a bossy young lady. (That’s her as a kitten in one of the drawers of my desk on the right.) The dark fur pattern of her forehead at the time led several people to remark that she looked like a Vulcan — with their angled eyebrows — so her early nickname was Mr. Spock. She lived up to the fearlessness of the fictional Vulcans from the beginning.

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