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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Is this a standard you apply across the board?

Yes. I might think they don't take their avowed belief seriously (but then, who does?), but if, e.g. there are tens of millions of people saying they think abortion is murder I can probably guess that they actually believe a rough approximation of that rather than somehow coordinating tens of millions of people to lie about their motives.

It might not be their only motive, since social desirability bias encourages people to put their most acceptable justification forward, but we can pretty safely say they're mostly sincere about it.

You'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's opposed to mass immigration (esp. illegal immigration) who admits that their opposition is based on hatred of foreigners

No, but it's quite easy to find people who will admit that they think immigrants (or particular groups of immigrants) are lazy, dirty, criminal, parasitic, etc... or that they don't consider their lives to have equal value. Holocaust deniers won't generally just say "I hate Jews" and most of them probably don't hold that belief in so many words, but they will then go on to make some very sketchy claims about the character of Jews. And I'll be honest, it's not that hard to find people who will say that they think homosexuality is evil.

Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.

Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.

So why is my judgement (that many Democrats who claim to support mass immigration, open borders and sanctuary cities are insincere virtue-signallers who only support these policies when they don't affect them personally) unreasonable? Aren't their reactions to Abbott and DeSantis's bussing stunts entirely consistent with them being insincere virtue-signallers?

Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.

The Democratic Party believe in "race conscious" policy. By your thinking, they have already agreed that racism is good and an acceptable basis for government policy.

These policies were supported with low epistemic standards, and they want to make them race-based content mandatory, so they even agreed that low quality racism is good and acceptable for institutional policy.

In what way do they have any moral standing to complain?