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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Hemenway, the most prominent researchers on SDGUs, seems throughout his career to have got funding from general university backing and sometimes federal funding

If this is supposed to be an argument for independence and neutrality, I am not sure how it works. Universities are known for being deep deep deep blue territory, and preventing research that is ideologically inconvenient from happening. Federal funding bureaucracy is no more neutral. I did not research this person specifically, I am just saying whatever you tried to argue here does not work.

it was the gun lobby that banned the CDC from researching the issue

CDC, last time I checked, is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". Guns are not a disease (though they are one of a small number of possessions that have direct protection in the Constitution), and thus CDC has no business "researching" them. Preventing CDC from spending taxpayer money on political quests that are not part of their mission - especially in light of how thoroughly they are failing at their core mission - is not "unfair", and even if it were, it wouldn't be an argument for fairness of other researchers. Even if you proved you point - which you very much didn't - you could only have gotten as far as "both sides may be biased" - which I would have granted you without any effort at the start, if you asked.

how does one even formulate tentative answers to questions about what the fact of the matter is about the public health impact of guns and gun control?

To which I ask, after looking at the literature, producing the pre-determined conclusion colored by ideological bias, how could one formulate answers that would not be tainted by the same bias? And how one would separate those answers from the bias?