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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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It's always hard to understand populations. We can't just get into their brains and observe what they really think. We can see survey results, but those are tricky and sometimes only get what people think they're "allowed" to say. See also the constant discussion of "shy Tory/Trumper". As such, one ought to be very sensitive to the fact that much of the population was really just bullied into a position on the topic. It's extremely difficult to actually tease out how many people really believe it or have really internalized it as true. It is entirely possible that as people see that the exact same specious arguments are being marshaled in favor of the T (with the expectation that folks actually believed and internalized it WRT the LGB, and thus the further expectation that it will be slam dunk successful), they will find it less and less social suicide to simply reject the entire fallacious underpinning. They won't even have to immediately say, "...and yes, rejecting this underpinning means also rejecting it in the case of LGB, also." At least, not at first; not overtly. That could come more slowly, as it becomes more socially acceptable. Or, of course, as we've seen on some other issues, it could come quickly in a preference cascade.

It's just extremely difficult to know which of those possible worlds we live in, given the obviously impossibly difficult measurement problem. Obviously, any public group that is organizing and trying to build political momentum is going to focus on the issues where they think they are the strongest, but along the way, they'll be pushing for underlying worldviews that have implications. It is common for them to know what those implications are, to believe that those implications are, indeed, true, but to not want to draw attention to it until they have succeeded enough where they are strongest and subtly changed the nature of the conversation along the way.

EDIT: I forgot that I should also point to the fact that those same people are forthright about the fact that they did just bully people into believing something in order to win political victories, that they didn't really believe it themselves, that many people don't actually believe it, and they'd love it if we could just kind of forget that their sus claims were "critical", because they'd really rather that no one go back and reconsider in light of reality.