New guy here. You might see me post on an eclectic mix of things, so it’s a little tough to know where to start. Since I have to start somewhere, though, it will be with this ditty I sent to a liberal friend to explain why his hatred for a politician was so useful to me.
It’s reasonable to start off well-disposed to a public figure if he’s hated by the right people.
I’ve been told too many times that I have “the final solution” for a problem, that I want to subjugate women, that I hate black people and want white people to run America, that I hate poor people and just want to raise more illiterates for the maw of corporate machines, that I’m both so ignorant and hateful that I’m irredeemable, and so on. And I mean all of this literally; I’ve been told these things about myself. Not by friends who know me, but by friends of friends who apparently believe they do.
Since I’m described this way even though I’m not evil, and my own experience shows that most people aren’t evil, it’s reasonable to guess that most other people who are described this way also aren’t evil.
Given that, it makes sense to ignore public figures who aren’t hated enough – Dr. Oz in PA, for example – because they’re probably somewhere pretty far away on the ideological spectrum. Even if they’re nominally conservative or Republican, they don’t think the way I do about the issues.
On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to start off with a good disposition toward someone who is strongly hated by “the right people”. If most of the media-political-academic establishment wants to destroy a public figure, then he’s either like me (the large majority of them) or an actually bad person (a small minority of them). I can use media hatred as a starting point to evaluate whether those public figures have earned their hatred by being good, or they deserve their hatred because they’re actually bad.
Nice to meet you all, and I’ll see you again shortly.