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On Haters. (Specifically: Who is Allowed to Have Them?)

Down in my Chris Crocker post from yesterday morning, there’s a high-minded discussion brewing about the threshold for claiming to have haters.

Can the common man (and woman) claim to have haters? Or is it a privilege/affliction reserved for the the infamous, the famous, the mildly famous, and the somewhat known in some circles (including the writers and bloggers of this here publication)?

An excerpt:

I have to disagree with robotslave. No matter who you are or how insignificant you feel, there will always be someone out there ready to hate you.

Posted by mattymatt | April 9, 2007 03:52 PM

mattymatt, I think you deliberately elide the significant difference between having someone somewhere out there ready to hate oneself, and actually having so many vocal, antagonistic observers that one can say one “has haters.”

I would never say that most people don’t do anything hateworthy, or that people by and large don’t hate; I am suggesting, rather, that only public figures, or those with aspirations to fame, are at all likely to think they “have haters,” and reflexively use a phrase like “You Think You Have haters….”

Posted by robotslave | April 9, 2007 06:13 PM

And now, a NSFW word from Mr. Crocker on haters. (And another word—actually, a bunch of identical words—from one of his many YouTube imitators. And another. And another.)

Comments (11)

1

Robotslave, of course, is assuming that there is such thing as a private life.

For those of you who feel you are not in the public eye of scrutiny, your haters are far and wide from militant environmentalists to anti-science theocracy pumpers. No one is devoid of haters.

Posted by seattle98104 | April 10, 2007 9:46 AM
2

Don't you have to be a player to have a hater?

Posted by elswinger | April 10, 2007 10:04 AM
3

for one: slog is written by professional haters and commented on amateur haters. haters range from hating the posts to hating the comments to hating everyone and everything. Damm! Why you sippin' on that haterade dawg!

Posted by playa hater | April 10, 2007 10:07 AM
4

Everyone has haters, even Joe Schmoe. The difference between the common person and the celebrity is that the celebrity's haters are known or more easily visible. The common person might have to search a little bit to find their hater. Or look in the mirror, perhaps?

Posted by him | April 10, 2007 10:23 AM
5

We argue and disagree about all kinds of stuff on SLOG, but this seems to be a particularly silly thing to argue over.

I hate that.

Posted by SDA in SEA | April 10, 2007 10:38 AM
6

I used to have haters for a while, and still do on slashdot Global Warming threads, because I insist on telling the scientific truth - which is that it's real , it's here, and they're whining cause they want Fast Cars and someone else to fix things in the enviro for free.

Haters come with insight. If you never challenge anyone, you'll never have haters.

Relish your haters.

Posted by Will in Seattle | April 10, 2007 10:52 AM
7

I hate relish.

Posted by mayo too | April 10, 2007 10:57 AM
8

Well then, spice it up. Mayo is lame.

Posted by Will in Seattle | April 10, 2007 12:52 PM
9

While I would agree with beach hater (a "playa" is a beach, sir, and a player is a "playah") when he says that SLOG is written by and commented on by haters of various stripes, I would also point out that the vast majority of SLOG readers do not comment, and that there is an even wider readership of the paper proper who do not write letters to the editor.

I would also grant to SDA the point that this debate is silly, in most contexts, but I was prompted to raise this issue because I felt that Eli's casual assumption that "having haters" would be a common experience (or even a relished one, Will) amongst his readership is an illustration of What Is Wrong With The Press Today.

Members of The Press (even the "Advocacy" Press that may choose to only selectively play by the usual rules of journalistic conduct, according to one Mr. Josh Feit) are not entirely members of the class of people they write for. I do not use "class" in the economic sense (though there are of course problems there, too, as seen most egregiously in the impossibly weird universe depicted in the Style section of the New York Times and its imitators) but rather in a social sense; even a tiny-fish paper like The Stranger confers a degree of visibility and social standing on its writers (though perhaps not on its ad clerks, administrators, etc) that puts them well out of the league of the bulk of their small-pond readers.

This social condition gives reporters like Eli a different set of day-to-day realities and problems, which in turn give rise to different assumptions, and hence unconscious biases not just in reporting, but in observing events.

And so it is that we a get a piece on the SLOG (and the fact that it's in the informal, unofficial arm of a newspaper— and one that is supposedly informal and unofficial to begin with, at that— makes it perhaps even more revealing) in which a reporter notes the existence of a freak, but does not follow up with the sorts of things one might expect in a conversation with an average Jane, like "What makes that freak tick?" or "How does that freak hold down a job?" or even just, "Hey, what a freak! Look at all this freaky shit! Freaky Freak!" No, instead we are led down the curiously narrow path of "how does this freak deal with his public?"— a choice made no less odd by its leavening of mockery: "ha ha! look how this freak deals with his public!"

This angle is of course a staple of Hollywood gossip "news," ("looky look! another star freaked out at the paparazzi!") but we expect gossip "reporters" to be out of touch— they're actively trying to live inside the rarefied celebrity bubble.

When I see this sort of assumption from a Serious Political Reporter, though, even if it's in a blog attached to a "we're not serious except when we want to be, so don't treat us like a real paper" alt-weekly, I find it a lot harder to ignore.

Posted by robotslave | April 10, 2007 1:46 PM
10

sorry, you lost me.

Posted by Will in Seattle | April 10, 2007 5:03 PM
11

Will, I believe the customary idiom here would be "tl;dr"

Posted by robotslave | April 10, 2007 11:41 PM

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