{"id":4397,"date":"2013-02-09T23:13:26","date_gmt":"2013-02-09T22:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=4397"},"modified":"2013-02-09T23:13:26","modified_gmt":"2013-02-09T22:13:26","slug":"do_normal_people_hate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2013\/02\/09\/do_normal_people_hate\/","title":{"rendered":"Do normal people hate?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThere is a debate going on in Swedish media right now about <i>n\u00e4that<\/i>, &ldquo;net hate&rdquo;: hateful, threatening, demeaning comments to bloggers and journalists, especially women. Death threats, graphic descriptions of sexual violence, harassment online and offline. The trigger was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.svt.se\/ug\/hotades-att-stenas-och-valdtas\">an episode of a respected investigative TV programme, <i>Uppdrag Granskning<\/i>, that focused on net hate<\/a>. As an extra twist, a trailer for that episode got so many hate comments on YouTube that comments were turned off.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI feel as if those people must be a different species, not entirely human. How is it possible for a seemingly normal human being to feel so little empathy, so little kinship with another, that you can either (1) seriously wish to torture and kill them because you don&rsquo;t agree with their opinions, or (2) imagine that the target for those threats <a href=\"http:\/\/www.svt.se\/ug\/jag-tror-inte-hon-bryr-sig-sa-mycket\">&#8220;probably doesn&rsquo;t care much&#8221;<\/a> because it wasn&rsquo;t seriously meant?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI don&rsquo;t hate anything or anybody, and I cannot even really imagine the feeling. There are people towards whom I feel contempt, disgust, anger. There are people without whom the world would be a better place, and I would be glad if they ceased to exist &ndash; mass murderers and such.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nEven from such negative feelings, there is a huge leap to wishing great humiliation, pain and suffering on those people. Not just wishing them gone from the world, but wishing that they died a painful death, or spending time and energy on harassing and humiliating them.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI can sort of imagine, very hypothetically, that I could possibly feel such hate in response to some great harm done to me or my family &ndash; if those mass murderers had killed my children, say &ndash; if I wasn&rsquo;t really in my right mind.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBut in response to a blog post with which you don&rsquo;t agree? What could fill those commenters with so much hate?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOr perhaps it is me who is not entirely normal. (Well, I knew that already, but perhaps this is another aspect of it.)\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIs it normal to hate?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a debate going on in Swedish media right now about n\u00e4that, &ldquo;net hate&rdquo;: hateful, threatening, demeaning comments to bloggers and journalists, especially women. Death threats, graphic descriptions of sexual violence, harassment online and offline. The trigger was an episode of a respected investigative TV programme, Uppdrag Granskning, that focused on net hate. As [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current_affairs","category-observing_the_self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4397"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4400,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4397\/revisions\/4400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}