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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply!

I can only speak for myself, but I was so bewildered by trying to judge if that comment was even serious, that I just scrolled past without interacting with it in any way.

But also, I'm reminded of a post I read somewhere on the internet about how a lot of good scientific work came from monks, in part, because they had to seriously engage with the heresies of the day in order to figure out how to merge them into a christian worldview, so at a given day some christian would be reading and thinking about a lot more anti-christian or problematic arguments just so he could avoid embarrassing himself in a debate. In that sense, I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right. The level of in-depth pushback you can get for progressive arguments in this place is just far above what you'd get elsewhere. And then you either put in a lot of time and research to convince some people that your culture tells you cannot be convinced and should not be listened to, or ... stop engaging.

I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right.

I think this hits the nail square on the head. For example, I think there are some good arguments against strong HBD based on evolutionary biology, but you never hear those kinds of arguments articulated by people on the left because it would require them to actually listen to the pro-HBD arguments and think carefully about them, which most are not willing to do.