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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Which “actual accusation” are you referring to? I obviously agree that the expansion of “hatred” to mean “supports policy positions which are less-than-maximally-optimal for some specific group” is a transparently bogus rhetorical trick.

The "actual accusation" would be that Harris "genuinely hates white men.". Which would be roughly equivalent to, "Kamala Harris feels similar antipathy for white men as is claimed about Trump feeling antipathy for women when his haters accuse him of 'hating women.'" Once we get to the colloquial definition of "hatred," we're not dealing with the accusation, but something stronger.

If she still did, I find it highly unlikely that the “compartmentalization” or “cognitive dissonance” which you propose exists would long ago have broken down and some inciting incident or slow buildup of aversive incidents would have caused the breakdown of the relationship.

We have very different intuitions around the power of compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, it seems. It's hard to get rigorous empirical evidence around this in general, but my experience is that there is no such thing as overestimating its ability to allow people to hold self-contradictory beliefs. Even presuming the colloquial definition of "hatred," I've seen it happen too many times that someone absolutely hates someone that they also love, and other times someone that they convincingly act as if they love, and I've seen it happen for decades at a time. But for the deranged meaning of "hatred" being invoked in this topic, I'm absolutely certain that the stress of this level of cognitive dissonance would just be noise relative to the general stresses and suffering of everyday life.