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Notes -
There are many out there, mostly progressives in my experience, who confuse open mindedness (verb) with open-mindedness (noun). The noun version of it often assumes that open-mindedness refers to a set of specific outlooks and convictions, and not the simple act of being open to new and/or different views.
I'll second the comment that this isn't enough meat to justify a top-level comment. But to build on the post, I think this is a part of a larger pattern I see, where some people believe in principles and some people don't.
A personal anecdote I've brought up here in the past is me noticing - and being surprised by - around 10 years ago how common it was for people in my leftist progressive circles to describe ideology and behaviors they disagreed with (usually right-wing and conservative) as "gross." This was immediately after the previous couple decades of us fighting for gay marriage and more broadly gay rights and acceptance under the reasoning that personal disgust reaction was something that ought not to carry any sort of moral weight, and thus all those conservatives who found gay people icky had no ground in refusing to accept gay people just as much as they accept straight people. Yet the exact same people - often the exact same individuals - were using their own personal disgust reaction to something as a way to denigrate it.
Around that time around 10 years ago was also when Atheism+ was formed as an offshoot from the existing atheism/skepticism online community. I believe this was the blog post announcing this intended schism, which I quote:
This was intended as a contrast to the existing community which was really just that last bullet point in its core, though I would actually describe it more as "Atheists as a result of using critical thinking and skepticism." Most of the above bullet points have nothing in principle to do with atheism, but are rather sociopolitical positions that were popular among online atheists at the time (and likely still today). I came to realize that, for many of my fellow online atheists, the reason they had arrived at atheism wasn't so much due to trying to reason about the existence of a god as it was due to being a way to contrast their own beliefs against the religious conservative beliefs they disagreed with.
Going back to the gay acceptance issue, more recently, I had a conversation with someone here (can't recall whom, and this was several months ago) about liberalism and gay acceptance, and I tried to make the point that if someone doesn't viscerally find gay people disgusting or degenerate or whatever, then supporting gay marriage/acceptance doesn't indicate anything about their support for liberal principles (rather than the liberal side of the liberal/conservative sociopolitical divide in the US); it's only by supporting rights and acceptance for something that one finds personally disgusting or otherwise negative that one can actually meaningfully indicate their support for liberal principles. I recall not being able to make an argument that was convincing to that person.
My thinking is that this is partly/largely an influence of postmodern thinking. In a very real sense, the people that I found surprising are stepping one meta level above where I am; I take one step up from the object level and relying on principles, and they're taking one step up from that and picking and choosing the principles that allow them to arrive at their object-level preferences. I haven't thought about this much beyond this and how to resolve the turtles-all-the-way-down problem here, though. I also wonder if this issue is just as common in other sociopolitical circles, since humans have human failings everywhere, but I notice it more among my own circles. But postmodern discourse and way of thinking tends to be more dominant in the leftist world, so maybe not.
One of Scott's best posts is relevant here
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