Thatcher’s Techbase, the Doom II mod where you take down Maggie Thatcher is out

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: DuncJust to be clear: anyone who openly dedicates a work to people who hate, or defends that dedication, surrenders the right to complain about “hate speech”. Period.

Nonsense. Category error. Laws about, and discussion of, "hate speech" are not about individuals. There's plenty of perfectly legal talk about individuals that would be considered hate speech if it was about some identifiable group. What you can't say about individuals is governed largely by things like slander and libel laws, which mainly proscribe false factual statements, not expressions of hatred as such.

And there are good reasons for this, both in terms of societal health and in terms of whether such speech can be morally defensible. Obviously, it can't be accurate to ascribe some negative feature to all members of a group, since on average people are people. For a constellation of reasons of which "it just can't be true" is only the beginning, it clearly can't be morally defensible to preach hate against all members of some racial, religious or other whole category of people. It is also damaging to society to set groups within it against each other.

Hatred of individuals is a rather different story. To take a somewhat extreme example, where I live in British Columbia there have been a couple of notorious serial murderers, Clifford Olson and Willie Pickton. Everyone hates their guts, obviously, because they are (or were, I think Olson finally died in prison) horrible, vicious people without conscience who did monstrous things. So nobody's going to complain a whole lot about hating those two guys, or expressing that hatred, saying very bad things about them and so on. But say someone wasn't an actual murderer--say they were a con artist who bilked old pensioners of all their savings, leaving dozens of people destitute and in some cases homeless. I think the case is pretty strong that it would still be OK to hate that person, express hate towards them and so on. So the question isn't whether it's OK to hate individuals, or say bad things about individuals because you hate them; the question is where the line should be drawn between people that it's OK to hate and people that it's not OK to hate.
Then there are people one knows personally--the horrible boss, the school bully or whoever. I find it hard to say nobody should ever be allowed to hate anyone personally.

So, then, Margaret Thatcher, and politicians. Should politicians be exempt due to the particular nature of what they do? There is often a sort of presumption made about politicians that, no matter what their expressed ideology, they should get a pass of sorts because they should be assumed to believe that application of that ideology and their policies will have net positive effects, no matter how absurd it might be to believe such a thing. It's rarely expressed this explicitly, but politicians are assumed to be acting in good faith--or at least, even if we have doubts that they really are, we should sort of pretend to believe it unless there is proof to the contrary. And having assumed that they are acting in good faith and that their chosen policies are intended to benefit everyone, or at least the most people possible, in the long run at least, we can then follow a logic saying that one shouldn't hate them for those policies, no matter how damaging they might be: The politician was doing their best, they didn't intend to do damage, so hate is not legitimate.
(Incidentally, this may be one of the reasons for the outrage much of the political and commentator class had about Trump--he made it so incredibly obvious that this professional courtesy was not deserved, with the transparency of his willingness to say absolutely anything that was convenient for him in the moment)

I question both ends of that. First, many politicians are quite consciously engaged in deception, trying to convince the public to embrace policies and ideologies that they know perfectly well will harm most of that same public, because it benefits them personally or a relatively small group they consider themselves to belong to. They are virtually identical to the confidence trickster above, only on a mass scale. It is clearly as legitimate to hate them as it is to hate anyone causing major harm for profit.
Others are in an odd middle ground . . . they believe in their ideology, more or less, but deep down they know there's something dodgy; they tell lies that they know are lies in specific, but tell themselves that the spirit of what they're saying is true; they carefully avoid looking at the impact of what they do, or thinking about anything that may make them feel uncomfortable. Hypocrites, cowards, just not looking at the side their bread isn't buttered on, but not quite consciously doing damage for profit. Should one hate such people? Perhaps not, although I'd find it hard to object to "contempt".

But even if someone is completely sincere, just how much damage should they get a pass for? At what point does stubbornness become an insufficient excuse for dealing death? Which brings us to Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is clearly responsible for a mountain of excess deaths and mass impoverishment--far more than any serial murderer or confidence trickster. It is possible to persuade oneself that she sincerely thought this would in some way be for the best in the long run, but it's hard to persuade oneself that she cared. Thatcher was callous, apparently utterly lacking in empathy; she may not have been enthusiastic about the damage she caused as such, although there were times it seemed she thought anyone crushed by her policies deserved it, but she clearly was at best indifferent to the suffering and death she caused, and she encouraged others to be similarly callous. Any non-politician who caused as much damage as Thatcher did with as little conscience, there would be no controversy about hating them. Should she get a pass because she was in politics?

I think not. And indeed, I think serious excoriation and hatred of people who do that much damage serves a social purpose: Discouraging other people from getting ideas about doing the same. Oddly, I don't personally hate Thatcher. I think she was evil, but I'm a Canadian--my relationship to her isn't personal enough for hate. But I'm not going to say hating her would be illegitimate. I'd probably really hate her guts if I was British.