Recently someone has started attempting to comment on my posts, with a point of view that most readers of this blog would think of as a “hate agenda”. By that I mean something rather specific.
When you group together any large segment of the population, be it women, or jews, or blacks, or whatever, and take the position that you hate the lot of them, that’s a hate agenda. You are willfully ignoring the fact that you are speaking about a diverse set of individuals, and you are therefore essentially attempting to deny their very humanity.
The next step — which this would-be poster has eagerly embraced — is to then start making up or spreading nutty hateful untruths about the group they’ve chosen to victimize. I suspect that the person who does this sort of thing probably knows, on some level, that all their accusations are false. After all, it’s easy to check actual facts.
But when we deal with hate agendas, we are also dealing with an extreme form of confirmation bias. The Holocaust denier never even glances at the enormous body of evidence documenting genocide. Similarly, the mysogynist and the racist scrupulously avoid looking at any and all facts that would put the lie to their nutty theories.
Whatever drives such people, it is coming from some deep psychological place, perhaps a place of pain, that seems to be beyond rational discourse. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing I can do about people with hate agendas.
Except, of course, not let them use my blog as a forum.