America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

I've observed this weird cognitive dissonance with outdoorsmen, since I am quite fond of fishing.

They tend to be a pretty hardcore MAGA bunch, but also don't like pollution because it messes up their sport. When you ask them about stuff like this (how can you support someone who pretty openly wants to mess up your pastime?), they get mad or change the subject.

I get it - people are complicated and can care about many things at once. Nobody likes it when someone is seemingly poking at their belief systems. Still - you'd think it'd give them some kind of pause.

I think everybody has this sort of cognitive dissonance, albeit perhaps in different amounts; we just allocate it differently. And I think society is set up to help that. For example, I like animals and I eat meat. Would I kill a cow? No, but I'm happy to eat a burger. I've worked to get relatively comfortable with unresolved cognitive dissonance, so I can at least recognize my hypocrisy here. But I think it's way easier for people to refuse to think about it.

As with distributed systems, coherence is hard and expensive. Being rational about something, as opposed to just rationalizing, is long, slow work. We don't live in an age of patience. But perhaps one will come again, and until then we can at least try to be exceptions.

Just a side note, but what happened to "hypocrisy"?

It used to mean having behavior that contradicts your stated beliefs.

Now it seems to mean an apparent contradiction between behavior and belief if you ignore real distinctions.

I don't like because it weakens the word and loses an important concept -- we don't have a good way to express real hypocrisy vs. fallaciously construed hypocrisy.

I'd argue there is no "hypocrisy" her because it involves politics.

There isn't the option to micromanage gov policies, there are two options taken as package deals - red or blue.

MAGA react to questions like this as Dems react to questions like "what is a woman?".

EDIT: to be clear, they react as if the inconvenient question is in bad faith.

No, you can still find hypocrisy in politics.

A person can vote for a party while not agreeing with every one of their platform points. They can also vote for a party and then criticize it later for not following through. As long as they're honest about the divergence and can justify it as an overall better choice, it's not hypocrisy, just being an adult.

The hypocrisy comes in when somebody claims to hold beliefs, votes for a party, and then either ignores a contradiction or spouts the new party line.