I have to totally disagree with this statement: > There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud. Just…
PG defined haters as being obsessive and uncritical . By definition, someone who actually investigates is critical, therefore not a hater.
To take the Elizabeth Holmes example from the top of the thread, people were very quick to associate critics as sort of bitter, mysoginist people who were uncomfortable with entrepreneurial women, and the media was enamoured with Holmes even when it became increasingly obvious that something was extremely fishy about the whole business.
If we were living in a world where successful people were heavily scrutinized rather than treated as celebrities then PG's rather dismissive tone of 'haters' would make sense. As it stands haters can often be people who have contrarian and angry reactions for relatively good reasons.
And I'd go a step further. Uncritical hate can be useful in right dosage. Hunter S Thompson is one of the most important journalists of the last few decades, and he made it very clear that the civil, nice, polite, pseudo-critical attitude is often just a way to shield people in power.
"Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."