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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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We have to draw the line somewhere and if that line is not at believing in astrology and practicing magic, I don't know where it is.

I don't think that's a particularly good metric. You're tossing out almost the entirety of human culture - you're throwing away Plato, Isaac Newton... hell, you're tossing just about the entirety of pre-Renaissance cultural output into the bin. Moreover, I view a lot of modern beliefs as having substantially less truth-value in them than astrology or magic - say what you will about astrology, but it produces less incorrect information than modern social justice theories, antiracist activism and a decent chunk of both libertarian and communist ideology. The fact that a lot of insightful and compelling writers believe in nonsense like tabula rasa doesn't mean that they can't produce great work in other areas.

i wouldn't consider that standard to apply to people like Plato, Newton etc. They were just around at a different time, which just didn't have the same level of understanding of the world, so a lot of ideas and thoughts about the world were given room to be elevated. I'm not going to fault someone for not knowing space is a vacuum when they lived thousands of years before we went to space, for instance. Just like I'm not going to fault someone for believing something wrong about the spread of disease prior to the invention of germ theory.

I would agree with what you're saying about things like social justice, antiracism etc. But those are really low quality modes of thought. Exceeding that standard, which I'm not sure astrology does but it's certainly not substantially below that standard, does not lend credibility. That's not good company to be in.

Also disagree that a writer should be regarded as being capable of producing great work in one area and nonsense in another. If those areas are substantially different, that's one thing. And there are always exceptions to the rule. But in analyzing the world, if they indulge in nonsense that's a good indicator that their critical thinking abilities and abilities to discern the true nature of things are probably fairly weak.