This was an interesting post and it hit home, although not in a good way (because it caused me to reflect on my own instances of hating on individuals). Althou

This was an interesting post and it hit home, although not in a good way (because it caused me to reflect on my own instances of hating on individuals). Although I'm not sure reality is quite so simple -- take Trump's irrational hatred of Obama, with the whole 'birther' thing being an example of fomenting hater mobs against him. But he eventually succeeded at becoming the president himself. And he seems to have his own haters; I mean people who beyond rightly recognizing that he is a terrible president and need to spend all their waking hours on reddit's r/politics cracking jokes about the orange dude. I am also reminded of Rene Girard's notion of a scapegoat mechanism - perhaps the object of people's irrational hate is a kind of scapegoat to those people