It’s okay to hate other humans though how you express that hatred may be legally limited. Last I heard children were human. Until society decides to declare children non-human (a move I could support under the right circumstances), it’s fine to hate children.
I don’t think it’s particularly OK to hate an adult, frankly. Give them counseling, send them to jail, execute them, whatever, but let’s do this out of a reasoned and rational response. It is reasonable, to take measures that will prevent them from harming other people.
But hate? Revenge? We need to leave hostile emotions behind. Punishing someone out of hate makes you little better than a bully yourself. You’re not making good decisions if you’re driven by an emotion like that.
What’s the point of hating a child?
As in, what do you hope to accomplish when you look at a video of a child bullying another child, and deciding that you hate the bully? What’s in it for you? How does it help the kid who was bullied? How does it make the world a better place?
And all this talk about “bullies” and “victims” ignores the fact that bullies are often victims of bullying, and victims of bullying frequently bully others. And that people remember all the times people were mean to them, but tend to not remember nearly as strongly the times they were mean to other people.
Reminds of how one of the guys from Penny Arcade realized that he used to be a bully. He was a scrawny nerd, so he didn’t bully people physically, instead he bullied them verbally. And if he annoyed someone into punching him, it was a win for him, since he got to feel like a victim of bullying. Read here.
If hating bullies and being mean to them would solve the problem of bullying, then why are there still bullies? It turns out that hating bullies and being mean to them is also known as “bullying”. It’s the same thing, only it feels good because it’s you dishing out the punishment instead of taking it.
What’s the purpose of your emotions? When you feel a strong emotion and indulge yourself in it, how does that change the world? How does it change you? Does it make the world better? Does it make you better?
Being able to honestly accept your emotions is a lot healthier in my opinion than constantly having to suppress them.
Depends on what you mean by “accept” and “suppress”.
There’s the folk belief that if you get angry, the best thing to do is to act on that anger. Yell, scream, punch a mattress, act out, because if you don’t man, you’re uptight. You’re gonna explode one day from all that suppressed emotion.
Except research shows the exact opposite. The best thing to do when you get angry is to forget about being angry. Expressing your anger just makes you angrier. Being calm makes you calmer.
If you’re always bubbling with rage underneath, then sure it’s a good idea to try to figure out where that rage is coming from, and deal with what’s causing the rage. But if you’re always angry because your boss is constantly jerking you around, the way to deal with that is not one day punching your boss in the face, or screaming at him, or posting on Facebook how angry your boss makes you. The way to deal with it is to quit your job and get a different one, and forget about your annoying former boss. It might be helpful to figure out, “I’m angry because my boss treats me like crap”. But indulging your angry feelings won’t make you less angry, lashing out at your boss or third parties won’t make you less angry, punching a pillow won’t make you less angry.
People who are angry always find things to be angry about. People who are easygoing always find ways to be easygoing. The outwardly-calm but inwardly-quivering-with-rage guy doesn’t need to express his ANGER, he needs to deal with the reasons he’s angry.
If the reason you’re angry all the time is that people are mean to you all the time, have you ever considered that maybe you’ve got the causality reversed?
I’m not saying you have an emotional investment, I’m saying the thought processes behind “It doesn’t seem logical that a child as old as 12 who is bullying the weaker would grow up to be anything other than a shit.” were done using the emotional parts of your brain, the parts that thinks “seems logical” is a sensible place to stop the thought processes.
I’m not sure what you mean by the last sentence. I don’t think all bullies grow up to not be bullies, I just know several of the worst bullies in my school did. How? Through the process of growing up, which changes most of us. Where’s the logic in some types of behaviour being totally exempt from that universal process?
Why assume hatred is always a conscious decision? Why assume hating people is always done for the benefit of oneself or the world in general? Why assume hatred needs to have a “point”, as opposed to simply a cause?
When my close friend of ten years tried to physically coerce my then-girlfriend* to kiss him, knowing she didn’t want it, because he was mad that she had fallen for me instead of him, I didn’t say to myself, “I think I’ll start hating him now.” Instead, my hatred came as a natural response to an action that was both a blatant betrayal of my friendship and, arguably, a sexual assault. He didn’t help the case any when later on, without ever having apologized even to me, let alone to her, he claimed he didn’t understand why we couldn’t move on and “get past it” as he had so we could all be friends again.
So yeah, I hate the guy now. Do I use that hatred to lash out at him? Do I bully him? Do I track him down and hit him, or yell at him, or post ugly things about him on Facebook? None of the above. I just avoid him. I have better things to do than let my hatred of him define my life. But I do hate him. I didn’t decide to. I don’t claim I’m making the world a better place by hating him. I don’t even claim I’m improving my own life by hating him, though I do think my life is improved by no longer having such a person in it. Maybe some people would say I should forgive him, even without an apology. Maybe others would say that it’s good to have him out of my life, but that I’m only hurting myself by actually allowing myself the emotional response of feeling hatred toward him. But I’m hard-pressed to see how my life is any worse for hating him. It’s just an emotion that I feel. If I don’t use that emotion to do destructive things, I don’t see why it should be considered harmful or immoral to feel it.
Granted he’s not a child, so this doesn’t address the actual topic of the thread. But I don’t accept the attitude of “You shouldn’t bother hating people, because you’re not helping them or anyone else by it.” Some people, I believe, earn hatred, and deserve to have it. And to the extent that hatred can cause positive results (ejecting toxic people from your life, for example, like my former friend or an abusive spouse or a power-tripping boss), it can be a good thing. I think hatred, as a concept, is morally neutral; it’s what we do with it that, as with so many other things, makes it good or bad in reality.
*The incident in question is not why she’s no longer my girlfriend. We later happened to break up for unrelated reasons. Under the right circumstances, I could conceivably forgive what he did to me, i.e., trying to steal my girl, whom I am no longer invested in. But what he did to her is beyond the pale, I think, and still deserving of hatred.
Well, there’s a difference between hating a person you know who did something harmful to you and people to love, and as a result of that hatred no longer having any contact with that person. That’s very reasonable.
But note that your response your hatred of your ex-friend is perfectly reasonable, according to me. You don’t think about him, you don’t dwell on what he did, you don’t store up the memory and use it whenever you want to make yourself feel self-righteous. You just hate him, and never interact with him in any way. You aren’t walking around years later still seething with anger. Maybe you’d be angry if he showed up at your house uninvited, but as long as he’s not there you’re not angry.
What’s not reasonable is hating a kid you’ve never met because you saw a youtube video about him. Apparently this kid picked a fight with another kid once, and the other kid smashed him. And that makes this kid horrible, and the other kid a hero. Except how do we know that’s actually what happened? What’s the point of hating some kid you never met? If there’s a kid being a jerk to the kids you know, then feeling some emotion about it would be reasonable.
But I’m tired of the internet outrage machine, which exists to make people feel good by creating self-righteous anger. It makes you feel like a good person to be angry at this bad person. Of course the bad person could be anything. The liberal outrage of the day, the Republican outrage of the day, the outrageous thing a Muslim did, the horrible thing a black guy did, the evil thing a cop did, criminals did this today, the cruel thing a 12 year old kid did.
My wife somehow signed up for a “Republican outrage of the day” email list. And like clockwork, every day it turns out there was some new outrageous thing that some Republican did, and it makes her upset. Why doesn’t she unsubscribe? Because she likes feeling upset, I guess. At least she’s smart enough to not watch local news.
That’s what irritates me about the anti-bullying zealots. They act like they’re perfect and have never been a d*ck to someone else ever. I hate bullies, but I hate self-righteous people too.
I say that any child who abuses an animal is probably going to turn out as a sociopath and ought to just be done away with, the earlier the better. But kill? Hmmm, who would do the execution? Maybe stick 'em on an island with all the older animal abusers. Heh heh.
I say we stick all the murderous animal lovers on an island with lots of cats and no cat food.
Ask that to any child who was within pistol range of the young Adolf Hitler.
Hitler I think is a pretty good example. I DON’T hate him, I’m simply too distant from him to feel that level of emotion. I find him a fascinating yet appalling historical figure.
I used to hate my dad, because I knew him well and he did lots of hatefull things. But he mellowed out over time and he’s been dead for more than 10 years, and I don’t hate him anymore.
I think if you hate someone who has done neither you nor your community any harm, you have some problems. The person you hate probably does too, but those are different problems.
But the thing about hating Hitler, is that there are easily dozens or hundreds of people in your town who would turn out as murderous as Hitler, if only they were leader of a militarized country.
Hitler wasn’t anything special. He was a small-time small-minded asshole who somehow catapulted himself to leadership of Germany at a critical time and made a serious of disastrous/murderous decisions that ended up with his country bombed flat and occupied by his ideological enemies.
I’m sure Hitler was a total asshole when he was a kid, and thoroughly unpleasant to be around. There are lots of assholes in the world, but shooting every other unpleasant jerk doesn’t seem to be a particularly sound method of preventing the next World War.
Generally, I agree. Hitler was just another kook whose trigger was the suposed treachery of Jews. What continues to amaze me is not him personally, but the millions of so-called rational people of Germany who allowed themselves to be led into catastrophe.
Thought this case might make for some interesting discussion:
I think most people would probably want him dead, tbh.
Go watch a movie called “Mikey” and you will KNOW the answer to be yes. It is perfectly fine and reasonable to HATE a child. Some kids come out rotten, so rotten that even interventions are barely enough to contain the horror within. Some people are just broken, Adam Lanza, Jared Loughner, these are not creatures to feel neutral towards. HATE is appropriate. Death is appropriate. I don’t care if they are young, I don’t care if they are crazy, so was old yeller but he still needed to be put down.
That’s like saying some of the most evil creatures in the world are lions. They eat baby elephants alive. But it’s not that (young) children and lions are immoral, but that they’re amoral.
Anyway, yes it’s ok to hate children. Fucking bastards the lot. But it’s not ok to act on your hatred. As long as you have a meaningful definition of childhood. But the USA seem to have some fucked up notions of how long childhood lasts. Like when you put guys on the Sex Offender lists for having sex with their 17yo girlfriends. Some times childhood even is said to extend into the 20s. As far as I’m concerned, for the sake of moral culpability, it stops around 14-15.