'Schrodinger's Leftist' Simultaneously Misunderstands Both Schrodinger & Leftism

Schrodinger's leftist: a leftist who is simultaneously a cowardly snowflake and a violent thug.

Popular cultural terms alluding to Schrödinger's cat (like Schrödinger's immigrant) can be quite effective because they take a small liberty to reveal an apparent contradiction, while playing on the nature of a superposition of possibility - something that's easy to grasp if you properly understand Schrodinger's thought experiment.

For those less familiar, the thought experiment called ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ by Erwin Schrödinger proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, with its life or death being dependent on the randomness of radioactive decay breaking a container of poison and killing the cat. With the Copenhagen interpretation*, Schrödinger's conclusion implies that the cat remains both alive and dead because neither possibility has any reality unless it is observed.

That is to say, unless we open the box, the cat remains in a ‘superposition’ state of being both alive and dead, because in the everyday world events are governed by probabilities, and whether through decay a radioactive atom will emit an electron is down to probability.

So with something like Schrödinger's immigrant, the point being made is that sections of society as a whole are trying to have their cake and eat it by painting immigrants in a 'superposition' state of being bad for the country because they come here to work and take jobs, and at the same time here to laze around claiming unemployment benefits (which is a contradiction - at best an immigrant can work and have his or her pay topped up with benefits).

Those who have been lauding the Schrodinger's leftist meme are not seeing either picture, as there is no contradiction at all between a leftist being both a cowardly snowflake and a violent thug. Once you remind yourself how easy it is for them to be both, it'll be easy to see the defect in the perceived contradiction.

As we're seeing far too often these days, many on the hard left quite seamlessly fluctuate between the two extremes when the matter suits them. When encountering people that disagree with the views and beliefs they are promoting, they become whiny snowflakes determined to take offence, regularly attempting to censor or shut down opinions they do not like. However, when encountering people promoting views they disagree with, they take to the streets in mobs, often becoming intimidating and aggressive towards people that stand in their way.

There is more than enough cognitive dissonance and internal dissension in the average hard leftist for them to house in their cranium cowardly snowflake traits and violent thug traits, and unleash them in whichever way suits their cause. There need be no contradiction at all.  

 

* The Copenhagen interpretation says that because we require photons to detect electrons' positions, and this then alters their momentum, the uncertainty principle is actually a failure of our measuring ability, and an artefact of the observer effect/wavefunction collapse. The ‘hidden variable’ interpretation maintains that there is an incompleteness to our ability to work with quantum systems and that in actual fact elements of reality are sufficiently hidden, prohibiting us from identifying a more deterministic system. With the Copenhagen interpretation there are two levels of uncertainty going on; the uncertainty due to the intrinsic disorder of the system but further uncertainty by our disturbing the system by hitting electrons with photons.