Hate: in my opinion it is bad

It strikes me that well-meaning people with committed heterodox political views who invest a lot of their energy and personal identity in politics tend to indulge quite a lot in words like 'despicable', 'pathetic', 'vile sewer rat' 'Maggie Maggie Maggie, die die die' etc. See this blog for plenty of examples. These are words that people use when they want to encourage hate. I don't think this is a good idea.

First a qualification. While I generally tend to think that puzzle-solving is a much better metaphor for world-improvement than fighting/struggling/resisting etc, there are doubtless a lot of hate-worthy people out there, and hate-fostering can certainly be a useful tool in some circumstances. Still, I think it should probably be done less for the following reasons:

1) It often has the wrong effect. Personal attacks generally bring everyone down, causing witnesses to lower their opinion of both the bully and the bullied party. I think there is research into US political adverts that backs this point up and will link to it if find it. Worse, hated people often become afraid of the people who hate them. This is bad on two levels: broadly, groups of frightened people often develop strong group identity, making their members less likely to change sides; narrowly, people are way more likely to be violent when they are afraid. Sometimes you want to be disliked and for people you disagree with to bond and become violent, but more often I think you don't.

2) It can be misleading. There is a part of most people that wants to solve problems by asking themselves the question 'where are the bastards and how can I hurt them?' even when asking other questions is a better idea. Maybe it is because of zero-sum game situations featuring quite a lot in our evolutionary history or something. If you spend your whole day talking about what bastards some other people are and how it's time to fucking declare war man, even if this is a good idea in terms of its effects on other people, it is likely to encourage your inner warrior and bias your thinking, making you worse at world-improvement.

3) Non-activism reasons. There are reasons to do things other than world-improvement considerations, and I think these overwhelmingly favour a presumption against hate-fostering. It is really ugly, arbitrarily limits the range of people you can interact with, causes depression and paranoia, reduces your and others' ability to think independently and most importantly is wildly inaccurate, in the sense that genuine hate-worthiness is rare and really hard to gauge. Things which make people inaccurate, non-autonomous, unhappy, isolated and ugly are best avoided.