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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.

It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.

Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.

This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.

These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.

I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?

I’m extremely, extremely skeptical with your general point. I have never met any leftist familiar with those sorts of ideas except with passing familiarity that often misses key parts; better yet, I’ve only seen a few exist online. Best yet, whenever I see discussions online I find that leftists most often miss the heart of the discussion (not here, but elsewhere). Maybe you have found some truly amazing people, who also happen to never participate in online discussions (entirely possible), but I do not think these are typical of even the 95th percentile of leftist argumentation.

MattY is a perfect example of a left of center person who interacts with important right wing arguments, but is unable to engage with them. He will acknowledge all the things that Salier says, but then doesn't adjust anything. I am not saying, he must necessarily change his preferences and goals, but he doesn't even adjust how he'd things things should be implemented to have more success. At most he will say something like, "be quiet we have to do this on the down low," regarding something like defunding police.

In fairness to Yglesias, he at least sidesteps this stuff or will vaguepost some of the stuff he agrees with while ignoring the stuff he disagrees with. I find this a lot less annoying than the ones who know the score and will obfuscate or outright lie about it. Sticking with prolific twitters, I'd say the one who most typifies this is the one with a robot profile pic.

Whos that?

I think he’s probably referring to Noah Smith (noahpinion on Twitter) or maybe eigenrobot

Oh, of course. Noah Smith is the paragon of that. Is that a robot avatar? I always thought it was some Tron helmet or something.

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Don't feel bad, I have no idea either.