Are People Haters Perverts?

jack

Barnardot said:

If you look at those 2 groups of people haters one just about always goes with the other. That is racialists are also homophobes.

Hello B:

Nahhh...  If you're against black homosexuals, is it because you don't like black people or you don't like homosexuals??  Can you like one and not the other?  What are you if you think homosexuality is fine but believe it's perverse?  Should perversions be illegal?  Do you know any perverted people??  Is masturbation perverse?

Just askin...

excon

MayCaesar

I do not think that hatred is a useful emotion: while it certainly served some biological purpose in the past, in the modern world I struggle to think of a single situation in which hating someone leads one to act more practically than not hating them.

However, hierarchy of preferences certainly is a natural consequence of thinking, and if "hatred" is to be defined as putting something far down the list of preferences, then it is not perverted at all to hate someone. Are people who strongly dislike serial murderers perverted? What about people who strongly dislike those who sell heroin to children? What about people who hate those with beliefs similar to yours? What about people whose favorite movie is not the same as yours? You can see that, at best, there is a threshold somewhere, and where this threshold lays for a given person strongly depends on their values - in fact, there might not even be a threshold, and the hierarchy of preferences does not have to be linear and can be a tree (i.e. it is possible to dislike two people differently, without strict hierarchical relation between them - for example, you may strongly dislike Hitler and Jack the Ripper, for different reasons).

Many people on the West nowadays will say that people who hate those of a different race than them are wrong, evil and so on - yet not so far back, at the very least, not fully considering people of other races humans was commonplace. In fact, circa 1000 AD not being a racist would have been considered morally unacceptable, and if in France you were to strongly and publicly insist that an Arab is no worse in any respect than a white French, you would have likely been killed on the spot. Was everyone back then a pervert? And if not, then does the fact that that point of view has gone out of fashion mean that now everyone holding it is a pervert?

Something that I have always found puzzling is that people tend to judge what is acceptable and what is not not based on intrinsic properties of something, but on how common the view of it being acceptable is. 20 years ago almost no one would even consider that calling transgender people mentally ill is somehow wrong - and many of the same people who today call for criminalization of this back then would have said this very thing. Does the peer pressure change what is true and what is not? It seems to me that what is true does not depend on the timeline, or on the society - it only depends on facts of the Universe, and those facts are completely independent from these things.

That is why I do not really have a particular problem with any beliefs based on my emotional response to them. I only have a problem with beliefs that are based on broken logic, and I do not care when and who has or has not held these beliefs. If a racist, or a homophobe, can well justify his position - and I have met a few of those who could - then I will absolutely respect it: I probably will not want to hang out with him much as we clearly do not share some of the most fundamental values, but I will be happy to have a philosophical discussion/debate with him over a cup of coffee, and I will be the first to defend him before a furious crowd. In contrary, if a person who strongly opposes any manifestations of racism or homophobia has a shaky position full of holes and fallacies, then I will call him out on this - and I will not want to hang out with him much either as people with strongly fallacious thinking I just do not find to be interesting conversationalists.
Who I want to befriend are a) people with highly thought-out views and receptivity to counter-arguments and b) people whose fundamental values align with mine. Who I respect are a), and who I feel warmth towards are b) - notice that these do not go hand-in-hand, and there are people who I respect but do not feel warmth towards, and there are people who provoke a positive emotional response from me, but who I do not hold in high regard as human beings. And for a romantic attraction not only a) and b) have to be present, but there also has to be some degree of "polarity", in that there must be things that make us different, but pushing us towards each other like two poles of magnets.
That said, if I could only choose a romantic partner between people who are a) but not b), and who are b) but not a), I would definitely go with the former. I could grit my teeth and date an Asian supremacist with a very deep position: I would just make sure to keep conversations of the topic off the bedroom. I, however, absolutely could not date someone who opposes racism, and whose justification is, "My teacher once told me that racism is bad, so there it is" - with a person whose thinking is so basic I would run out of things to talk about within a few minutes.