April 29, 2020

"'Haters keep saying they hate Diamond and Silk, but you can’t hate what you ain’t never loved!' the sisters, whose real names are Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, wrote..."

"... on their shared Twitter account Monday evening. Trump shared that message Tuesday morning, writing online: 'But I love Diamond & Silk, and so do millions of people!' The president’s social media post came after CNN reported Saturday that Fox Nation, Fox News’ digital streaming service, had not uploaded a new episode of Diamond and Silk’s weekly show since April 7, and they had not appeared on the network’s broadcast since March.... Although Fox News retains a stable of pro-Trump commentators, the president has grown increasingly frustrated with the network, despite its opinion hosts’ almost unflinchingly positive coverage of his administration. '@FoxNews just doesn’t get what’s happening! They are being fed Democrat talking points, and they play them without hesitation or research,' Trump [tweeted on] Sunday."

Politico reports.

Was there an existing saying "You can’t hate what you ain’t never loved" (or "You can’t hate what you never loved")? If not, great aphorism. But is it true?

I found a discussion on Quora: "Can you not hate what you don't love? Why or why not?" The top answer, written in March 2018, brings up Donald Trump, whom the writer hates:
For example, I utterly loath Donald Trump.... Even with all that, I can honestly say I do not hate the man. The way I see it, hatred is the first step to dehumanizing somebody else. Trump may be a shitty example of a human being, but he is still human...
But he doesn't get into the meat of the question. Is love the precondition for hate? If it is, we are strongly defended from hate! And we have fantastic insight into the haters. Do all those people who really hate Trump actually have love in there somewhere?

It's hard for me to answer, because I don't feel anything that I would call hate. Hate. I do sometimes feel an unaccountable love for Trump — perhaps because I'm seeing him hated, perhaps because Jesus said:
You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love (agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love (agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? — Matthew 5:43-46, RSV
But back to the Diamond and Silk aphorism "You can’t hate what you ain’t never loved." It had a ring of truth for me. I'm thinking hate is such a strong emotion that it only counts as real hate if it's a reversal from love. They're saying your rejection of us is nothing because you never liked us in the first place.

78 comments:

Darrell said...

No bigger racists than Lefties.

stevew said...

"You can't spend what you ain't got, you can't lose what you never had."

Not sure who wrote it, I know it from listening to Muddy Waters.

Anonymous said...

Someone once said, "Hate, I can handle. If you hate me, it means you still care."

Bob Boyd said...

They say there's a thin line between love and hate, but it's only thin in one direction. It's so common to go from love to hate it's a cliché, but once someone's crossed that line how often do they go back the other way, back to love?

"There's a check-valve between love and hate" isn't very poetic.

Kevin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kevin said...

Do all those people who really hate Trump actually have love in there somewhere?

They love that they feel superior to him.

You can read it in their comments at Althouse.

Kevin said...

The opposite of love is indifference.

The least indifferent people to Trump are the haters.

BUMBLE BEE said...

The statement makes their point exquisitely. I didn't watch Trump's TV show. I just can't get my brain around this rabid hatred of him. Even if one were to allow for the distinctly Cloward-Piven style aspect of the hectoring, these haters hardly pause to take a breath. I see it as a facet of their personality. Corrosive in the extreme.

Fernandinande said...

loath = "reluctant".

Oh course you can hate something or someone you never loved.

"On the off chance that it’s not all that much difficulty share what you know or represent a request about this article by leaving a comment underneath. Check the comment territory underneath for additional information, if there is any."
H/T Lileks.

Kevin said...

How can you hate people you don’t even know?

In this case, people didn’t even know their real names.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

On its face it doesn’t make much sense to me. However, I find your rejection hypothesis workable because the story has an element of rejection, of FOX turning on the pair. That kind of rejection is very personal because there was implied acceptance before, where now Fox is rejecting them. (One of the reasons Fox hiring Donna Brazile rankles me is their implied acceptance of her cheating ways,) So Diamond and Silk’s phrase makes some sense in that rejection of such a personal sort implies a change from Love to Hate But their rejection came from Fox who never really loved them anyway. It actually reminds me of Trump reducing people to two sets of people, “They love Trump” and the others, “They don’t love me so much” in one group.

Fernandinande said...

"There's a check-valve between love and hate"

How about a diode?

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Nice catch, stevew. Muddy says it well.

Oso Negro said...

Althouse said "I do sometimes feel an unaccountable love for Trump — perhaps because I'm seeing him hated..." .

I was never for Trump in 2016. But the man's irrepressible fighting spirit has won me over. It's been the kind of performance that people remember long after the warrior is gone. I don't know that I "love" him, but I think it will be an irredeemable disaster for the country if he is not re-elected. The forces arrayed against him deserve another four years of him.

elkh1 said...

Fox news does not fall for Democrat talking points, it has the Murdoch brothers in control, a neverTrumper Paul Ryan on the Board.

Lurker21 said...

Good question. People do come to hate things they once loved. The enthusiasms of youth come to be embarrassing once one has reached maturity. Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited is a good example, at least according to his wife. That may also account for how I feel about Woody Allen or Monty Python or Tom Lehrer, and all those 70's comedians. What seemed sophisticated and adult when we were young looks callow and shallow and immature when we get older. If there was some idealism in our early enthusiasms we learn soon enough that the world doesn't work that way and ashamed of our naivete.

Then there's the other phenomenon of hating something so much that one develops a strong emotional bond with it - hating something so much that it becomes a part of one's life and something one needs, something one will miss if it goes away. When we hate we reduce things to caricatures, and there can be something endearing in the cartoonish figures we make of those we hate. There can even be a secret sympathy or affection growing up between enemies or rivals.

The best example may be spy movies, where the two spies or spymasters having pursued each other for so long, find that they share something - a connection or bond - that others don't possess. Terrorist movies work here as well: when people have been chasing someone or running from someone for forty years, both hunter and hunted are living in a world of memories, very different from the world of other people, and common struggle, even on opposite sides can bring people together when what the fighting was all about has been forgotten by everyone else. An even better example: Les Miserables. What happens to Javert once the Valjean case has been wrapped up?

Laslo Spatula said...

Perhaps it is a restatement of "The opposite of love is fear, not hate."*

(*Yoko Ono, a person who divides people in a Trumpian way*).

(*But Trump didn't break up the Beatles*)

(*Yoko didn't break up the Beatles, either*)

(*It was the Russians. Obviously.*)

(*Or maybe the Chinese.*)

(*If you go round carrying pictures of chairman Mao, etc etc*)

(*Christ you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me*)

(*Trumpian lyrics)

I am Laslo.

tim maguire said...

There is a saying (or observation...assertion?) that the things that really bother you about others are the things that reflect what bothers you about yourself. Which is similar, if not exactly the same.

DanTheMan said...

So, do you have to love Hitler before you can hate him?

tim maguire said...

Here we go, from something called the Thoughts Catalog:

A quote by Marian Keyes has always stuck with me: “The things we dislike most in others are the characteristics we like least in ourselves.” Likewise, Carl Jung said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” When someone causes you no harm or slight yet you still dislike them, chances are they stir some kind of insecurity or uncertainty deep in yourself.

gilbar said...

you certainly have to care about something before you can hate it

"i don't give a sh*t whether you live, or f*cking die"
is NOT the same as:
"Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!"

So, did Sméagol LOVE the hobbits? ENOUGH TO GIVE HIS LIFE FOR THEM!!

Limited blogger said...

Not a big fan of their shtick, but appreciate their support of POTUS, and wish them luck.

Howard said...

Those of you who think that hate and love are related or somehow two sides of the same coin or are opposites have never really felt true love that is sad.

Queue Melvin Udall:

I *hate* pills, very dangerous thing, pills. Hate. I'm using the word "hate" here, about pills. Hate.

He takes what he hates for love. I get weepy just thinking about it

Wince said...

Women Democrats will be told when it's time to start hating Joe Biden.

Until then, it's love.

JML said...

The difference between not liking someone and hating them is that hate takes effort.

Birkel said...

The network that employs Chris Wallace, self-identified Democratic, does not support Trump.

Certain commentators on the network do support the president.

Lurker21 said...

That analysis of Lord Marchmain may be by his mistress, rather than his wife, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a quote in the book about not being able to hate something you never loved.

We're used to finding famous names to attach to quotes, but now that so many people are on the Internet, aphorisms and memorable quotes are likely to come from nobodies like you and me. Maybe a lot of them always did and circulated orally until somebody wrote them down and got the credit for inventing them.

An interesting variant: "You don't get to hate it unless you love it," from the movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco. The character hates what the city has become because he loved what it was so much (and maybe he loves what it was so much because he hates what it has become).

Michael K said...

Fox News is now run by the Murdoch boys who want acceptance to that LA party life where one of them bought a $150 million house.

rehajm said...

I just can't get my brain around this rabid hatred of him.

Yah. He does seem to expose the derangement in what were once thought to be rational people...

Decide your own fractions of the following:

Thanks to Twitter we're all political spin doctors
They told us a million times Hillary was 'inevitable'!
The media is on our side and people will believe what we tell them
He was supposed to be gone after that Clinton Telemundo operative was offended
None of it is working!
Russians!!!

traditionalguy said...

Love and Hate are both emotional “ intercourse” with another. The graduate level evil talent is the ignoring of another as if they don’t exist. By analogy the MSM interact with Trump , but they will often choose to ignore their real enemies such as Tara Reid. She does not exist.

CJinPA said...

Is love the precondition for hate?

If the answer is yes, all the "hate crime" laws and "hate speech" censorship can be turned on their heads.

gspencer said...

"You can’t hate what you ain’t never loved"

It didn't make sense to me either. Nevertheless, I like the two of them.

Lots of actors, ballplayers, and so forth, are often called "has-beens." But is that really true? To qualify for Has-Been status, you had to have been a Once-Were. Most weren't.

WK said...

Maybe Fox will pick up the Hodge twins or Terrance Williams..... they are on Twitter a lot.

virgil xenophon said...

"If love is the opposite of hate, what comes in-between?"

Ans: "A sort of calculated insincerity"

------Curls in ans to Peter in "B.C" circa mid 70's

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Althouse said ...
I do sometimes feel an unaccountable love for Trump


Strange days. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

roesch/voltaire said...

You don’t have to hate or love D and S to realize they peddle a lot of BS not worth paying attention too.

Amadeus 48 said...

Come on, Althouse. You know what is rattling around, just below the surface:

"You ain't got nothin'/You got nothin' to lose."

Amadeus 48 said...

These days, the people most likely to lose their platforms are to the right of center, particularly if they are challenging the dominant narrative.

Sigh.

Dust Bunny Queen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Black Bellamy said...

That's just some stuff people say when they want to sound profound. It's completely meaningless and trite. You can't do this unless you do this! Oh look how wise I am.

Rory said...

"For example, I utterly loath Donald Trump.... Even with all that, I can honestly say I do not hate the man."

Hate can be unravelled through understanding. Contempt (loathing) is much more difficult, be it's rooted in the contemptuous person's need to look down on someone.

Fernandinande said...

"Love your enemy, it will scare the hell out of them." -- Mark Twain

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I think the more accurate axiom is that "You can't hate something that you have never known"

If you have never seen Diamond and Silk, how can you know if you "hate" them. You have no exposure to or knowledge of them. To hate a person that you don't know or only have "heard" bad things about is just bigotry in action.

You need to KNOW to hate. Not just take other people's opinions or propaganda as the basis of your hate.

How many people say they HATE Jews (or insert other religious/ethnic group) and have never met or been around anyone Jewish? Plus even if you have met some objectionable Jews (or others) that doesn't make all of that group hateful.

Bigotry and ignorance, lead to terrible things. People who play off of that bigotry and ignorance, like some of the media and politicians for instance, are pure evil.

Fernandinande said...

How can you hate people you don’t even know?

By their actions, e.g. a burglar who stole your stuff and trashed your house.

Amadeus 48 said...

Yes, yes.

I feel contempt for Democrats--never hatred.

narciso said...

minitrue must be retroactive, hbo did julianne's bender, showtime did a film about someone who had Obama iconography all around him

Howard said...

Amadeus 48: Joe Rogan and Tim pool talk about how Google has changed the algorithm to deplatform wrong think and right-wing views. I hate to admit it but you guys are right on this issue.

that plus the recent portal podcast with Eric Weinstein talking with James O'Keefe covers a lot of the same ground

rcocean said...

You can hate those who threaten those you love.

Lurker21 said...

"The more we love, the nearer we are to hate."

"We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish."

Two quotes from François de La Rochefoucauld.

Some politicians are like corks. You can't keep them down. Just when you think they've permanently ruined their careers they are up on top again. This infuriates enemies and makes them hate the politicians with a particular zest. But there's also a little affection, a little admiration at how the rascal evaded unmasking and disgrace, and that makes the enemies hate them all the more in order to suppress the positive feeling.

Trump, Obama, Clinton, Bush become so much a part of their haters mental lives that there can be a vacuum when they're gone. You may remember the meme of smiling W. Bush walking away with the caption "Miss me yet?" I don't miss him, but writers at New York and the New Yorker may have. Whatever they felt for Obama, was it really as deep and intense and authentic as what they felt for Bush or feel for Trump? Love comes with questions about whether it's really love and whether the beloved is worthy of one's affections. Hatred is rawer and purer - or it seems that way when one hates.

n.n said...

Fond of Diamond and Silk. Love Lynnette and Rochelle. #HateLovesAbortion

narciso said...

it was considered crimethink to blame Obama and Clinton for anything, the converse is true,

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

“They love Trump” and the others, “They don’t love me so much” in one group.

Has anybody else noticed Trump switches from first- to third-person depending on whether he is expressing positive or negative opinions and feelings?

Jupiter said...

I don't recall ever having loved Communists, but I would love to push one out of a helicopter.

Bilwick said...

You can't hate what you never loved? A dubious proposition.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

"Unconditional Hate" for all things Trump = TDS

Nancy said...

The rain falls on the just
And on the unjust fella
(But mostly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella).

Amadeus 48 said...

"I don't recall ever having loved Communists, but I would love to push one out of a helicopter."

The only thing being pushed out of helicopters these days is bundles of $100 bills under the aegis of the CARES Act.

Krugman gets his dream!

Lurker21 said...

Then there are people who say "I don't hate you! I despise you!" It seems like that line comes up in dozens, if not hundreds, of movies, though I haven't been able to find one where it does.

The assumption seems to be that despising is different from hating and in some way better. The thinking may be that despisers look down and judge on the basis of objective standards, while haters look up and hate those they suspect of being superior to them, or that haters are obsessed by the object of their hatred while despisers don't even think about those they despise.

That doesn't seem to work. It takes hatred to mean envy when there's more to it than that. If the core of hatred is reducing people to something less than human, that's something despisers do all too well, and despising and disgust look like forms of hatred (or vice versa). Look hard enough and it's often hard to separate out values from personal wounds: the two can be very closely tied together. And it does look as though people who despise are more emotionally involved with and invested in those they despise than they like to admit. The feeling is much stronger than mere indifference, and sometimes stronger than what they would call hatred.

The Crack Emcee said...

They were Black Lives Matter "activists" before the Trump grift.

Paul J said...

" "There's a check-valve between love and hate"

How about a diode? "

A sphincter.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

For Dems, post election:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loathed and lost,
Than never to have loathed at all.

Valentine Smith said...

All I know is that hate is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

buwaya said...

Hitler in Mein Kampf makes it clear that his very personal and very genuine hatred of Jews came from personal knowledge of and frustration with (unnamed) individual Jews. He seems to have then stoked it by noting hearsay and published cases to add to his mental model of "Jews" as a general category. Mein Kampf is well worth reading, the first three or four chapters anyway.

CJinPA said...

They were Black Lives Matter "activists" before the Trump grift.

That would not surprise me, if true.

If it is, I like their current grift better than the old one. I can live with that.

Drago said...

Howard: "Amadeus 48: Joe Rogan and Tim pool talk about how Google has changed the algorithm to deplatform wrong think and right-wing views. I hate to admit it but you guys are right on this issue."

Of course we were right, and here's where it gets more and more "fun".

As time passes, that threshold for google and others to alter their algorithms will continue to be lowered until soon the Joe Rogan's of the world find themselves insufficiently "woke" to the whatever the left is pushing that day and find themselves algorithm-ed out of digital existence.

This has always been in the plan and its good that many in the middle and on the left are beginning to see that this danger inevitably effects them every bit as much as the deplorables.

JackWayne said...

What’s the functional difference between hate and fear?

bagoh20 said...

"There's a check-valve between love and hate"

"How about a diode?"



Prison guard.

bagoh20 said...

"They were Black Lives Matter "activists" before the Trump grift."

It's better to be big fish in a small pond.

KellyM said...

Blogger Dust Bunny Queen said...
"....To hate a person that you don't know or only have "heard" bad things about is just bigotry in action."

You can almost see the Mean Girls-like scene unfolding before your eyes. A group of catty 14 year old girls using classic shaming tactics to advance a hidden agenda of spite and exclusion so they can stay at the top of the popularity ladder and keep the "lessers" from advancing.

The pathetic part is that our "betters" employ this regularly, acting as if they'd never gotten over the real or imagined slights inflicted upon them in their past.

Wince said...

How many times do I have to tell you?

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ROW1Jph3Bg

mikee said...

Hate is not the antithesis of love.
Not caring at all, is the antithesis of love.
Hatred requires caring about that which one hates, to the extent of reviling it.
Not loving means one can do without, utterly not giving a damn what happens next.

See, for example, the last line by Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind."
He once loved Scarlett. Now he doesn't give a damn. He no longer loves, he no longer cares.
He doesn't hate her, he is just completely done with any feelings for her at all.

Richard Dolan said...

"Is love the precondition for hate?"

Is hate the precondition for love? Or instead is that word game just a bit silly? Very doubtful that life is so neat and symmetrical.

A Voice of Reason said...

One clue to the puzzle is that hate is similar to anger, and anger is always preceded by hurt.

A Voice of Reason said...

This, from Spinoza:

"From what has been said we can clearly understand the nature of Love and Hate. Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the [image of the thing that caused the pleasure]: Hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the [image of the thing that caused the pain]. We further see, that he who loves necessarily endeavors to have, and to keep present to him, the object of his love; while he who hates endeavors to remove and destroy the object of his hatred."

Leora said...

Almost everyone I've encountered who really hates Trump seems to have confused him with her father or some other strong authority figure (old boss, school principal, domineering former husband). This is hate as distinct from dislike or despise or.

J. Farmer said...

It's a very Taoist conception. When things reach an extreme, they become their opposite. Love and hate. Pleasure and pain.

Bunkypotatohead said...

Don't know anything about them, but "You can’t hate what you ain’t never loved." is the way the Section 8 ghetto woman across the street from me speaks.
Good riddance to them.

Paul Mac said...

Been reading a lot of WWII stuff lately. I'd say a strong counterfactual is how a generation of American servicemembers hated the Japanese and Germans, probably most didn't really think about them much before, certainly not love them. Probably about as true today among those who serve regarding radical jihadists ISIS, al-Qaeda, etc.javascript:void(0)