The Vent Thread

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Kionon
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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by Kionon » Mon Dec 17, 2012 6:36 am

I don't understand hatred. Not really.

Haters gonna hate. But why? Why do haters hate, and why are they gonna hate no matter what we do?

And hate itself is a word we bandy around too glibly. In truth, I only really strongly dislike people, and only a few people at that. I dislike the ideas, beliefs, or actions of a great many people, and maybe that means that I dislike them. But do I hate them? No, likely not. Certainly not enough to wish them ill or wish them dead. I don't have fantasies about hurting people I dislike, although I sometimes consider how I might fend off attacks from people whose views might indicate they might do harm to me. And even my dislike is generally individual. Even when I paint with a fairly broad brush, there are always members of a group which I do not dislike, although such a group may include mostly individuals with ideas, beliefs, or views I find objectionable, unless that group is itself founded on hatred. I doubt highly that I would enjoy the company, or even remain indifferent to the actions of a member of the KKK, as an example.

I find it not just hard but impossible to understand people who honestly believe in killing all members of a race, or an ethnic group, or a religion. But they exist. I do not understand those who would kill all LGBT people, but those people exist too. And then it gets weirder, for there are are those who are in the subaltern position in our societies who propose the same horrendous behavior. LGBT people who hate and even want to kill heterosexual, cisgender people. Women who want to kill all men and set up a world of female clones. Oh, yes, these whack-a-doodles exist as well. And not all of them are trolls, or sock puppets, or performance artists. Plenty of those on the internet, but there really are people who believe these things are morally justified. There are those who would terrorise and kill all whites. And we all know that Muslims and Christians and Jews have been at each other for tens of centuries. No matter the intersection of power and oppression, historical or current, you can find unadulterated hatred.

And the internet makes this stuff easier to find, easier to spread, harder to defend against, and impossible to control, if you would even want to control it, for the free speech implications in attempting to do so are very clear. But it leads me to wonder... why so much hate, and why so many people who hate? Individually, many of these haters would be powerless. However, together, even recognising that they hate each other, the amount of aggregate hate they generate and the damage it does through both physical and mental violence is staggering. And I simply do not understand how they get to this point.

I have a lot of reasons to hate people, or so the narrative of hate would suggest. Whether my reasons are better or worse than others is important to consider, but it's not relevant directly to my questions here. Despite my reasons to hate people, I still think people are fundamentally good, and fundamentally deserve to be judged as individuals. The idea of holding the actions of an individual or group of individuals as some proof of actions or behavioural predisposition on the part of the entire group is absolutely ludicrous to me. And even further, the idea of holding current actions as proof of the impossibility of an individual to change in the future without sufficient evidence of a pattern of repeated actions is equally as ludicrous. Everyone tends to get second, third, even fourth chances with me, assuming a sufficient enough time has passed for me to believe that the individual has been able to change. Yet these people do not find these concepts ludicrous. They find them to be true.

How could I ever get to the point where I believed this idea of justified hate to be true? I didn't believe it when I was five. I didn't believe it when I was ten, even if I understood that some people were "bad" and might try to hurt me, or there were kids who were "bad" and might try to hurt me. I didn't believe it when I was fifteen, because by then I started to understand that discrimination of all sorts was institutionalised, and that many of the purveyors of the "bad" were victims of the system themselves or unaware that their actions were "bad" to begin with. And in my adult years, so far, I still find these ideas ludicrous. Where did I go "right" and the haters went "wrong?" Where is the fork in the road and the road less traveled on the way to hatred? Because no matter how badly I was bullied, no matter how many times I was beaten up, no matter the issues I've had with sexuality or gender discrimination... I have never seen that fork. Never even looked for it. What kind of rational basis would I have to find it?

I like to believe that the haters, especially those that are violent, are a tiny minority. I like to believe that, and then I see just what kind of damage they are capable of doing. How many people they are capable of hurting or killing before they are stopped, usually by being killed themselves. And then I'm not sure I really care how many of them that there may be in relative terms compared to the general population. Clearly, no matter what absolute number of haters exists, that number is really covered by "too damn many." And why do some people end up haters (and killers), and others end up as doers and fixers? Why can you take two individuals from similar oppressive situations and get one who becomes an advocate for love and tolerance, while the other becomes an advocate of hate and destruction as the only means to whatever their version is of peace and prosperity?

I don't understand hatred. Not really.

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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by Otohiko » Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:53 am

Actually, you've probably explained it right here, or rather it would be explained if you dig just a little beneath the logic of it:
Kionon wrote: And then it gets weirder, for there are are those who are in the subaltern position in our societies who propose the same horrendous behavior.
If you look at hatred as a social (or socioeconomic) disorder, then it becomes apparent that it's an important mechanism of misrecognition that keeps people "at war" with "false targets". This is why so much hatred, in fact arguably most hatred, comes people in disadvantaged positions. As a Marxist argument would go here, were these people not distracted by (among other things) empty and pointless hatred, they would have to inevitably turn on resolving the cause of their inequality. That would not be acceptable to the dominant order for obvious reasons. So, the type of hatred that you talk about is one of the crucial mechanisms misrecognition which maintains the status quo. Sadly it is not as irrational, purely emotional or causeless as you might like to think. It is built into our cultural and economic system. Naturally, the cultural system is not a static thing, but some very fundamental changes would need to happen to tackle the causes of this hatred. And since these changes would essentially be going against the economic order which people (mis)recognize as what feeds them, well...

Baby steps. Even within our lifetime already some very important things have happened around the world that have improved the situation. More things will happen, but even in the best case you're not gonna see more than baby steps by the end of your lifetime. Act locally and be happy with what you have the capacity to change. That's all there is, really.
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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by JaddziaDax » Mon Dec 17, 2012 4:11 pm

I think that it might be your connotation or definition of "hate"... because for a lot of people "extremely dislike" is hate. I used to have similar thoughts, then I just resigned to the fact that it's all about connotation.

Hate doesn't have to be destructive either. So, in my opinion, it's more about how a person acts on that hate. I guess what I don't understand is uninformed hate or hating just to hate.

It's really popular to hate on something just because it's popular amongst a group of people. (Take Justin Beiber and Twilight as examples.) To me, if you are going to hate something you should be informed on why you hate it, and not just because you think it's popular to hate it. I find this kind of hate to be annoying.

However, when it comes to stuff like abuse, bullying and eating mushrooms, I think that these things are perfectly valid to hate. And a good way to use that hate constructively is to help people in abusive situations to free themselves from their tormenters, and learn to cook without mushrooms.

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Kionon
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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by Kionon » Mon Dec 17, 2012 4:54 pm

That's why I talked about hate and using it too glibly. I mean Hate. Capital H. Like Hate Crimes. Hate Speech. I'm talking racism, misogyny, etc. I certainly understand finding certain ideas, concepts, beliefs, or views (or actions, like abuse and bullying) abhorrent, but that's not what I mean by hate. Yes, I made a reference to people who "hate on" other people, but that's really not what I'm discussing here, despite the haters gonna hate reference.

I'm talking neonazis. I'm talking violent, supremacist radfems. I'm talking about those that promote or engage in genocide. I'm taking HATRED of people for who or what they are. Not a simple case of preferences.
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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by Castor Troy » Mon Dec 17, 2012 5:27 pm

Car stalled while I was driving today and I assume it's the battery even though I barely bought a new one last year...

Luckily I have a 5 year warranty, but after paying a crap ton of money for my late registration, more car problems are what I don't need right now. :x
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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by JaddziaDax » Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:16 pm

See you didn't specify that, you did mention them, but you didn't specify that. I don't understand hating someone for the color of their skin or their sexual orientation. I can understand not liking specific things about a culture or a religion or actions I personally don't like, but like you I take people on an individual basis rather than a general.

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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by Radical_Yue » Tue Dec 18, 2012 3:05 pm

What I originally thought was an epic situation is turning into a big headache.

With the whole pilot thing we're doing at work, they were originally claiming it was a "retention" thing they were monitoring but it's really a new system test. When it started we originally thought we were ALL going to get tons of calls, but that's not how it's working at all. To test the flexibility of the new program they have people on different tiers, such as tier 1 gets a stupid amount of calls while tier 4 only gets a few (sometimes less than 10 calls in an 8 hour time period).

While it makes sense to me, one of my coworkers is NOT happy. I'm a tier 4 and she is either tier 1 or 2 so she is getting hit hard while at most I take 40 calls in a 10 hour period. She sits in front of me and just about every break she gets she turns around to complain about how it's not fair that she is constantly getting hit with escalated calls while I can chat on my laptop I bring to work. I know she's upset at the situation and not at me but it's starting to really make me feel bad. She feels that they should be cycling people from tier to tier to make it fair, and while I do agree that it would probably be a better stress test for this system the company may spend millions of dollars on, I don't have any control over it.
She's a really nice older lady but it's starting to get me down in the dumps. No matter how much I sit there and agree and try and talk with her about it, she doesn't let up. I've hinted at the fact that it makes me feel bad so she will cool it for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, then she'll be back at it like nothing happened.

I have no control over this ;_; Stop yelling at me and making me feel like I'm in trouble with awesome grandma.

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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by Pwolf » Wed Dec 19, 2012 5:10 pm

Interviewed for my ex-coworker's position on the other side of the cubical wall. I was expecting a more typical type interview with the usual questions. NOPE! I spent all last night and this morning going over stuff inside my head and it was mostly for nothing -_- The interview questions were mostly technical and situational. I flat out couldn't answer two of the questions as well.

Overall I think I did OK but not good enough IMO. Very depressing. Nothing is set in stone yet. My boss is going to be doing a second round of interviews after the new year so if no else stands out, then I still have a chance... assuming the interview panel doesn't throw my application out the window.

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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by dj_ultima_the_great » Thu Dec 20, 2012 2:17 am

I really hate having to decide whether I want to keep saving up for an apartment or blow half of what I have on doctor's appointments for getting prescriptions renewed. In what dimension does it make sense to charge somebody their entire paycheck for the month just to tell them, "Yup, you're fine, carry on"? I swear I feel a few nickels slip out of my purse every time I take a breath of hospital air.

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Re: The Vent Thread

Post by JaddziaDax » Thu Dec 20, 2012 11:09 am

ugh I know that feel... maybe that's why I hate hospitals

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