There are very long-term culture wars, from before the term was invented. Consider:

* Hippies. They were great in many ways, but also fucking stupid, man.

* The New Age movement of the 90s, obsessed with dolphins and crystal healing and mystic composting toilets, and anti-human except when the humans sit in drum circles. Actually these days I've come to quite appreciate the music of Enya. But this cultural movement was also fucking stupid and very enamoured of performative environmental concerns, which fed into a sort of industry of selling concerns to New Agers. There was a lot of guilt tripping involved for anybody who wouldn't recycle, or whatever. So naturally that made me highly suspicious and unreceptive.

* The climategate email scandal of 2009. This one actually swayed me in favor of climate scientists, because I got to see what the emails from inside the echo chamber looked like, and to see how badly they were behaving when motivated by their careers and status, and actually the answer was "not all that badly", and the massaged figures, though shameful, weren't all that massaged, and their attitudes, though biased, were actually fairly sincere. But they were part of a biased "us against them" sort of struggle, where they wanted belief.

So you get ongoing skepticism just because of, you know, backlashes, pushbacks, people rightfully wanting to be independent thinkers in the face of other people who apparently want them to conform mindlessly. The idea that it might all be a popular delusion is plausible because there's always been a lot of popular delusions around, so you've got to respect analytical doubters, if they truly are analytical.

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