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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I don't think you've even justified that 2 is true let alone that progressives are in it. I live in a Red Tribe area but i work mostly with Blue Tribe progressives in academia. My interactions with all of them indicate that they do care about the things they say they care about even when their opponents claim their actions show otherwise.

I think you are simply put wrong. I've given you reasons why they don't behave as you expect they do. I think those are correct and you yourself are hopelessly stuck in 7) Because everyone is tempted to think they are in G and their opponents are in G' their ability to unbiasedly evaluate the evidence is hopelessly confounded, even when they think it is not.

Whereas, I don't think there is a difference between G and G' in this respect at all.

I thought #2 was self-evident. Perhaps I was mistaken. Do you believe it is false?

I think it is probably false, but there is no-one who is unbiased enough to make the determination fairly in any case. My experience is that people of any ideology are largely very similar. A conservative or progressive born at the right time in the right place in Germany would probably have been a Nazi. A Nazi born in revolutionary France may have been wielding a guillotine or fleeing to England depending. Very few people choose their ideology, it's built out of their social experiences, from what their family and community believes.

People are just people, they are largely socialized into their ideologies and can be socialized into entirely different ideologies in different circumstances. Some of them are more or less committed, some of them are more or less informed, some of them are nicer and some of them are more selfish. You get gossipy small town church ladies and gossipy office HR ladies. I've lived in 3 different countries, visited dozens more as part of my work and I have yet to note that any particular ideology has more or fewer intellectually honest people. In fact I don't think most people even particularly care or think about being intellectually honest in whatever country or ideology they may be. There are so few people that do, I have no idea how you would even be able to determine if it differs per ideology, the numbers would be so small, and the methods of determination so vague.

If pushed I might say that Libertarianism seems to have the greatest number of people who think being intellectually honest is useful or good, but I can't say that I've actually seen that they actually are in practice any more than Rural MAGA Christians or suburban progressive soccer moms or any other group.