SPG wrote:Stop being so hateful.
canpakes wrote:I believe you’ve confused hateful with factual.
"Hateful"/"hating"/"hater" are words that have changed their sense over the last few years, at least so far as I have observed them in internet discourse by US English speakers.
Once one might have said "He hates Jews/Mexicans/Californians/white people" to refer to someone who had a deep and settled hostility that had a strong negative effect on his interactions with and overall attitude to the target group, and to his verbal expressions about them, all in a way that it was next to impossible to get him to change his mind about. In such cases, being Jews/Mexicans/Californians/white people is enough: the people involved don't need to possess any other qualities to get hated. When the hate is directed to an individual by a person not mentally ill, it is common for there to be some reason or at least pretext: "A hates B because B ran over A's son while drunk"; "C hates D because D got the job C wanted".
But now if you say the you have some to the conclusion that Joseph Smith made up the Book of Mormon out of his head, you are told that you 'hate Mormons'. If you say that Trump ended up borrowing money from Deutsche Bank (a bank notorious for laundering money for Russian oligarchs) because no other bank would touch him due to his poor credit record, you are told that you 'hate Trump'.
The original idea of doing this was no doubt to taint critical speech or writing as some kind of moral defect. But now everyone knows how 'hate' is used in such contexts, all that has happened is that 'hate' has been so hollowed out that it is considerably less effective in its (useful) original sense. Pity.