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Passion guided by reason's avatar

> "And while I think most of the people who write this nonsense understand the game they’re playing, a depressing number of readers end up falling for the grift."

That's one of the questions I wonder about, but cannot in general discern any answer: how many people like that are conscious deceivers knowingly using a ploy?

Thanks to cognitive dissonance, I suspect relatively few are consciously playing it as a game; I suspect it's almost always unconscious. Or more accurately, that it resides in a grey area, whether they sorta believe it (um, they want to believe they believe it, so that they are not hypocrites or deceivers), but part of their mind may know it isn't so simple.

Call it the cognitive dissonance swamp. People can be lost there for years.

Does Trump really believe that he was cheated out of the election? I think it's likely in the same gray area - he probably has sort of convinced himself of it, but part of his mind likely knows otherwise.

Do Critical Social Justice ideologues really believe that 'Trans Women Are Women' is literal objective truth? I think some may also be in the cognitive dissonance swamp, caught between what they are incentivized to say, and what cognitive dissonance translates into "really believing" so they will not conscious deceivers.

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Lucy's avatar

“if we want our children to inhabit a society that is less racist than this one, we don't do that by making young white children who are guilty of absolutely nothing feel resentful and anxious about the colour of their skin.” How can something so obvious as vilifying children’s skin color be a subject for debate? It’s not about right vs left, but about right vs a special type of harmful wrong.

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