I can't speak for anyone else but for me, at pretty much the top of the privilege ladder, if I don't push back on the people who want to hurt others for their own gain, I'm just as bad as them. Which does make me openly hostile to racists, misogynists, homophobes, etc., yes but, I'm hopeful, also on the right side of history (and, yes, atoning for past sins when I was less understanding.)

I didn't "admit" any such thing. My post is there for everybody to read.

> can you really blame people for seeing that decision as irrational?

I don't care what people think of my choices, but I never blamed people or complained about what they think of me. On the contrary I was quite explicit that a large segment of the population sees subservience to authority and following the herd as positive things and can simply never comprehend an objection to authoritarianism or see anything wrong with medical coercion "for the greater good, according to our betters". Clearly they will think my decision is irrational.

There are two different point here:

- describing the flow events leading to hate generation

- pretending that that hate can be defined has a rational thing

The former seems completely legitimate to me. The latter seems to me to result only from confusion. Hate is an emotion, which to my mind means that is not rationally grounded. Not everything need to be rationally grounded to be considered legitimate. Rationality itself is not rationally grounded obviously.

> It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.

Sure, rationality doesn’t come with moral integrity hardly bounded. I think "rational" is a bit polysemous here, as it is might be heard as "ethically sound", and not purely "logically sound".

I don't think you understood. I wasn't making an argument -- as far as I'm concerned, it's self evident that "getting a vaccine" is the moral position and "ratting on your neighbors for hiding Jews" is not the moral position. You're not being argued with; you're being excoriated for having such a ridiculously warped worldview.

That seems like nonsense to me. And if it wasn't, if they had an actual need for that, who are you to criticize it?

Yeah, so HN rules of civility go out the window when you start talking like a tinpot little Hitler. "Qualitatively separate", indeed. To this, I say: go fuck yourself.

You're the evil one here. You guys go ahead and enact your dream of putting us on boxcars, we'll see how that works out for you. Just test us, asshole.

It is far too easy to label people you disagree with Nazis and white supremacists.

I'm unsympathetic to people who think it's ok to gas Jews etc - but I don't trust the media, or YouTube, to accurately categorize people.

I certainly don't trust political activists.

If they were harming myself or a third party, I would leverage the remedies society makes available: the courts, the cops, etc. If not, and I were motivated, I would attempt rational debate about the matter, which can be started as simply as stating that [IMO] their words or actions are inappropriate (which is not what you were suggesting before). In the event that doesn't make a difference, I would simply walk away.

What I find shocking and disturbing is how intent you seem to be on harming someone just because you disagree with them. There are perfectly nonviolent racists out there who know how to mind their own business who I'd rather associate with than someone like you...

The notion that people shouldn't be judged by their voluntary membership of a bigoted organisation in 2023 is nonsense.

You're an adult whose continued support and membership enstrengthens a group which has subjugation and discrimination against large swathes of people based on medieval culture at their core.

Please stop feeling sorry for yourself.

I am not. The word "and" isn't the same as "equals."

> As for hate being effective, these people got a "kill the gays" bill passed in Uganda, so it seems that was pretty damn effective.

It is really? Uganda is being ostracised as a result. Did this law convince anyone, or merely galvanize the opposition?

> These are in no way equivalent and the juxtaposition seems to be implying that if we're OK with one we need to be OK with the other.

If be "we," you mean "society" or "governments" (as opposed to individuals), I am, indeed, implying this, and that's almost my entire point.

The basic problem is -- at least on at a societal level -- that we have deep-held moral values, but we have no way of knowing when we're right and when we're wrong. There is no algorithm, policy, or law which can distinguish between views of homosexuality circa 1980 from those of 2020.

The basic value here is “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” or the more recent (in the historical scheme of things) and more eloquent “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”

The way we make progress is by tolerating outliers. The majority of those will be wrong in small or horrifying ways (flat earth, kill the [insert minority group], anti-vaxxers, etc.). The next major group will have different values (e.g. a Muslim living in a Christian country or vice-versa). A tine minority will be challenging the status quo and be pushing us forward.

Unless you have a clear rule for distinguishing between those, eliminating the bad means eliminating the good, as there is no oracle to distinguish between the two.

Keeping that tiny minority which pushes us forward (as well as tolerating different values, at least in a pluralistic society like America) is far more important than crushing the bad actors. Otherwise, as in this example, we'd still be stuck with 1980 views of homosexuality.

That's not really a good example, IMHO.

Especially since, as far as "morals" are concerned, despite the fact that many folks in one labeled "group" or another may espouse certain behaviors as "moral" or "immoral," morality isn't a team sport.

Rather, each individual makes their own moral choices when situations that require such decisions are presented to them.

The moral choices that individuals make are an individual thing. As such, attempting to paint any group with a broad brush like that is foolhardy at best and nasty and hateful at worst.

I evaluate people based on their individual actions, not some made-up group label. You must have me confused with somebody else.

I'm not really sure where you get the idea that I'm painting with a broad brush, or vilifying anyone. I expressed my confusion about why a specific set of people who assert that "the government lied when they said masks didn't work," then refuse to wear masks.

It doesn't make sense, as it's logically inconsistent, as the claims are diametrically opposed to the behavior.

And the argument that such folks "don't trust the messenger" doesn't really hold water since the "messenger" has been on both sides of this particular issue.

If you were to argue that people are taking a "don't fucking tell me what to do!" position, I would understand that better. I often take that position (not about masks, but in many other circumstances) myself.

But saying "they lied when they said masks don't work!" strongly signals that such an individual believes that masks do work. To then turn around and refuse to wear a mask seems like some heavy cognitive dissonance.

As such, is it a surprise that such behavior confuses me?

The people he's talking about are beyond the pale. He's fine disagreeing with people, he even likes to have his point of view challenged- it's just that these people are a step too far; they're not just wrong- they're evil.

An answer is: I've found the people you ACTUALLY disagree with. Insofar as you can be said to hate anyone, it's the people you would gladly exterminate- and feel good doing so. Disagreement with someone on a matter of import automatically causes some small amount of dislike for them. You can still like someone overall! But if they're a great person, except e.g. they think abortion should be illegal, you'll still think less of them than you would have otherwise. My argument is that this dislike scales with how much you disagree with someone; and so, all else being equal, the people you hate most are the ones you disagree with the most strongly- to the point that a will awakes in you to engage against them in righteous wrath.

You see it in the twitter mobs and the witch hunts of old: If people decided to crucify someone, say by going after their livelihood- if, somehow, they thought that was the best way to improve the world- they should do it with their eyes down, shaking their heads, crying "If only it didn't have to come to this- but if we didn't do this, you would have caused even more pain than we. This course of action is a tragedy; but any other would have been worse. Forgive us, but for the good of the nation, you have to die."

They don't- they go after people with glee. It's fun, it's exhilarating; it's a fox-hunt. You can read it in people's testimonials about being part of a twitter job-lynchmob: Everyone enjoys it till they're the one on the chopping block!

Real Disagreement, as I would call it, is that kind that honestly provokes the aforementioned emotion: the desire to see someone destitute and homeless, if not dead, and the frame of mind where you could look at the result with pride. I'd call that hate.

(You can hate people for other reasons, of course.)

Cool, I don't really believe you, but if that's the case, you're in the extreme (nonexistant) minority

>People who hate will come to experience it as the truth.

Literally every human who has ever lived hates things. I think you probably perceive what you're saying as profound, but it's actually meaningless. I hate Nazis for the Holocaust. I'm not coming "to experience it as the truth". I hate them because it is the truth.

>You don't address my arguments, you just create more groups of people to hate and to feel better than

LOL yes I did. You can reject basic reality, but I did address your "arguments"

> don't care if you hate me, by some old group definition or by something you've just made up, and you need way worse insults for me to hate you back

Bro bro, your victim complex is out of control Did you somehow skip to a later part of your canned argument? What makes you think I hate you? I can guess that you're probably a youngish radicalized white guy, but I don't know enough about you to hate you. Can you stop trying to manufacture drama and focus on doing something productive?

> I choose, as a matter of personal morality, going forward to have nothing but disgust towards them and will not cooperate or affiliate with them anymore than I would with Neo-Nazi Skinheads.

Every man considers the group for which he fights oppressed and the group that fights against him a “hate group”, and every man has cherry picked statistics to show it.

> Everyone has a choice. Everyone identifying as conservative can point at the white supremacists in DC and say "Those are my people" or "Those are not my people".

And the same applies to the the more extreme and violent parts of the b.l.m. movement.

As is usual, and as I criticized, you cherry pick the most violent parts of “the other group” to make your point, while showing the more moderate of your own to front them as the good guys.

Maybe, but then somebody has to make that call and get it right. Who's going to do that? You? The mob?

Giving all ideas the same platform and letting it sort itself out isn't the worst strategy humanity has come up with. You might even call it democratic.

And I don't remember refusing to judge something being the same as ratifying it, I thought that was tolerance. But I guess you're either with us, or against us - there can be no other option. /s

If letting a few people talk about hate is magically going to convince a large majority, either that's condescending or we're fucked as a species.

I wouldn't say it's distasteful, but I would say that it's comically oversensitive that you wouldn't want to associate with people just because of political opinions. There is no such thing as a wrong political opinion.

If you're saying that groups of angry people always lead to senseless violence, you're wrong, and there's no history book that will back you up. Yours is the typical argument against the concept of anger in defense of of a person who has inspired anger. Completely empty.

To say that a particular reaction isn't justified in a particular case is one thing. To say that to react to anything in anger makes one dangerous and therefore bad is silly and an argument that can be directed at everyone on every side of the argument with equal vacuity.

Was the lynch mob the one that decided not to use or support the use of a particular product, or was the lynch mob the group of people all over the country who combined forces to help defeat an element of gay rights in a single state? Answer: neither. No one was lynched, people weren't prevented from expressing themselves, and people weren't prevented from expressing objections to those expressions through their own personal choices: Eich got to donate money to help keep gays from getting married, and people stopped using Firefox because they didn't want the company that makes their browser to be run by a homophobe.

If you wanted to use Firefox twice as much to show your support for people being able to express any view (or even just the views you like) without personal consequences, you were always free to - Chick-Fil-A, Duck Dynasty, Cracker Barrel, Hobby Lobby, and Paula Deen still do good business.

That is a bold, unfounded, unappreciated accusation. I do not support hate. I support gut feelings borne in truth. I will continue to not give free car rides to homeless people and to offer to help carry groceries out to the cars of little old ladies in front of me in line at the grocery store - because yes, stereotypically, the homeless are more likely to be drug addicts, mentally unstable, and have a criminal record, and little old ladies are more likely to need assistance carrying things. I don’t hate homeless people nor do I hate little old ladies or consider them inferior. But please, feel free hire someone with face tattoos to be your child’s bus driver in the interest of ignoring all prejudice at all costs. The rest of us will continue to make decisions using common sense, regardless of what Twitter has to say about the matter.

> The (general) lack of prejudice where I live works wonderfully; the bigotry - almost always from outsiders who have no experience with the people they hate - is the only problem. If they all went away, we'd have one less problem.

Could it be you’re wrongly conflating prejudice with hate? Don’t discount peoples’ life experiences either. Furthermore, your example is anecdotal. There’s a plethora of widespread non-anecdotal data to back up “prejudice” being accurate and helping people make wiser decisions.