Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-72). Also available on the Internet.

Hating is an activity which can be useful to human endeavors. This study is a Pragmatic inquiry, and, as such, attempts to answer the question: What difference can our hating make to our projects, goals, and aspirations? We treat hate as an emotion, bracketed from any moral or ethical concerns, which might cloud a philosophical investigation. At the very least, the difficulty in choosing only one ethical or moral perspective from which to examine the usefulness of hate is inconsistent with Pragmatism's pluralism. Through exploring the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, we find hate to be a strong, problematic emotion. Central to Nietzsche's philosophical corpus, hate is something felt by weak people who seek to discharge this emotion, in acts of revenge, onto stronger people - but who cannot because of their very weakness. The impotence to discharge this hate turns into ressentiment, a general hate for the world at large, on the order of rank which places the hater at the bottom and the hated at the top. Nietzsche claims that weak people of ressentiment joined together in an effort to overturn the natural order, and they created a new order where meekness and humility are virtues and where pride and strength are "wrong." This new order of values is the Christian Church, according to Nietzsche. There are solutions to the problem of hating that we find in Nietzsche's writings. The first is to hate the right enemies, that is, to hate stronger enemies. When we struggle against people who are stronger than we are, one of two outcomes are possible. We are either destroyed, or made stronger. Ergo, one way in which hate might be useful for Nietzsche is for us to hate stronger people and become stronger as a result of this struggle. This is understood in the context of the will to power, which Nietzsche claims is all life itself. The will to power wills one thing: power. For Nietzsche, an increased feeling of power brings with it an increased feeling of life. One might posit the equation: more power = more life. Nietzsche's other solution is also rooted in the will to power and is something of which we find the seeds in Concord, in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche writes about something he calls sublimation. Sublimation begins when we repress an emotion and prevent its discharge. For Nietzsche, emotions exhibit a type of energy, which is expended when the emotion is discharged. He advocates that we repress some emotions in order to retain the energy and then use our rational faculties to discharge them in such a way that we thereby increase our power. This type of self-control and employment of the emotions would amount to actually using our hate to increase our power and, as such, to increase our feeling of life. William James, another thinker who was influenced by Emerson, presents us with something similar in his writings on energy and in "The Moral Equivalent of War." He claims that there are energies that enable us to act into which we can tap by means of some stimulus or act of the will - much the way that marathoners experience a second wind when they apprehend that they might overtake the lead runner. James works with the example of war, wherein a nation is able to achieve certain "manly virtues," such as strength, courage, and solidarity. He seeks some way for us to obtain the benefits of war without military conflict. In short, James claims that we can harness the energy from some stimulus and redirect this energy onto some object or toward some goal which we freely choose. To be sure, this is different from Nietzsche's sublimation precisely because of James' belief in free will. James' redirection of energies enables us not only to choose our goals - which for Nietzsche are always power - but also to choose the manner in which we will discharge this energy. There are instances wherein our hating is not something we would want to sublimate or redirect. When we hate the "correct" object, we should hate. The correct object of our hate is, in short, whatever stands in the way of our projects and goals. We examine Batman Begins and V for Vendetta, both recent films wherein the lead characters hate those who destroy their societies. Batman hates the criminals who infect Gotham City, but he lacks the conviction to do what is necessary and destroy them, since he is fettered by his own moral code, which he values more highly than the destruction of his enemies who stand in the way of the peaceful society for which he longs. V, on the other hand, has no such moral scruples. He successfully destroys his enemies (the corrupt state itself) by the end of his story, illustrating along the way Nietzsche's sublimation in his decades-long revenge and redemption.

Does regulating hate promote racial equality? This dissertation proposes a method for beginning an empirical examination into the benefits and burdens of anti-hate laws. Since prohibiting hate speech necessarily invokes the penal system, a promising approach involves measuring the effects of criminalizing similar conduct, i.e., hate crimes. The effects of criminalization are particularly important given the U.S. history of racialized and colorblind justice and some evidence indicating criminalization may harm racial minorities. Chapter 2 examines whether hate crime laws have the unintended consequence of promoting racial inequality by contributing to racial disparities in arrests. It finds that while police are more likely to recognize assaults as hate crimes when the suspects are white, African Americans are nonetheless significantly overrepresented among hate crime arrestees. Chapter 3 examines how race affects victim perception of potential hate crimes, and how this, in turn, affects police response. While research suggests people tend to have a preconceived notion of the quintessential hate crime in which African Americans are victims, it also shows a negative racial bias in which people ascribe greater culpability and are more punitive towards African Americans. This study looks at how people act under the real-world stresses of crime. Findings provide clear evidence of a tendency to label African Americans as hate crime offenders and to report them to police at significantly higher rates. Further, while African American suspects experience relatively high arrest rates generally, the magnitude of this effect is significantly greater for hate crimes. Chapter 4 explores the nefarious uses of hate crime laws, examining how they may be weaponized to inoculate police and undermine movements for racial justice. Specifically, it looks at the case of “Blue Lives Matter” legislation, which extends hate crime protections to police. Findings reject the officer safety rationale: States with BLM proposals do not differ significantly from other states in terms of violence against police. However, African American arrests do predict these bills, indicating they are a continuation of past police repression. Further research is needed to fully understand how officials enforce hate regulations, and the reverberations of this enforcement on society.

This thesis contributes to the debate on hate speech by arguing for a compromise solution. It breaks with the absolutist solutions under which either all hate speech should be banned or all should be protected. The prohibition of some hateful expressions is assumed to be legitimate. This follows the European constitutional tradition. However, the prohibitionist norm should be reconciled with the right to political speech. This flows from the normative importance of free political expression that is widely endorsed. The research relies on three theoretical pillars. First, it defines the strongest democratic justificatory case for political speech in liberal democracies. Then, it argues for a richer understanding of what should count as political speech. The proposed approach assigns more weight to the political circumstances than to the sheer content of speech. The argument then proceeds through investigating the strongest objections against protecting hate speech. These prohibitionist arguments assert that hate speech incites against, silences or vilifies vulnerable groups, moreover that hate speech harms democracy. The thesis disputes these objections as applied to political hate speech. The conclusion is that political hate speech narrowly defined should be an exception from the otherwise legitimate ban on hate speech. In the final two chapters, the theoretical findings are applied to the case law of the ECtHR and to the United Kingdom's statutory hate speech regulation. The critical evaluation of hate speech judgments and statutes is coupled with suggestions how to reform the broadly prohibitionist position that these jurisdictions had come to endorse.

In South Africa, despite constitutional safeguards, research has shown Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ+) individuals who experience hate-related incidents based on their sexual orientation and gender identity expression (SOGIE) do not report their cases to the police for fear of secondary victimisation. Much of the complaints against the police cite homophobic and heterosexist work cultures that leave victims feeling disenfranchised from accessing justice. While this may be the case, little to no research exists regarding the perceptions, experiences, and challenges faced by frontline police officers in policing LGBTQI+ hate crimes. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 police officers from five police stations in the Cape Metropole, South Africa, this research investigates the dynamics underlying the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes and the ways in which personal, institutional, and national cultural identities intersect. The research finds that police officers' perceptions of policing LGBTQI+ hate crimes are influenced by societal and institutional culture. Within these spaces, police officers are constantly negotiating parts of their identity to fit society and the SAPS' organisation cultural narratives. The research finds that discretion is central to how police officers conduct the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes. Discretion is observed in processes and how they define what constitutes criminality. The research further finds that the policing of LGBTQI+ hate crimes occur in spaces with limited resources. Resource constraints combined with burn-out and low morale negatively impact the SAPS service delivery standards. The research concludes with recommendations of a SOGIE-based hate crimes education for all, improving LGBTQI+-police relations through community liaisons and reducing police officers' stressors to improve employee wellbeing.

My thesis focuses on how true-life events resulting from hate crimes have been theatricalized for the stage. My research discusses hate crimes that have occurred throughout history. My primary research centers on Ragtime (1897-1918), The Diary of Anne Frank (1939-1945) and The Laramie Project (2002), which deal with racism, antiSemitism and homophobia, respectively. My intention is to highlight how theatre impacts the ideas and thoughts of audiences and transforms thinking and points of view forever, as well as impacting cultures and our world. In addition, I discuss the historical measures that led to these events and progression in modern times. Music, art and theater are known as "performing arts" which enrich our lives and leave us feeling complete. They also have the power to influence people and open minds and hearts to different ways of thinking about the world and its people

Social media has become an important place for modern people to conveniently share and exchange their ideas and opinions. However, not all content on the social media have positive impact. Hate speech is one kind of harmful content that people use abusive speech attacking or promoting hate towards a specific group or an individual. With online hate speech on the rise these day, people have explored ways to automatically recognize the hate speech, and among the ways people have studied, the Bert-based approach is promising and thus dominates SemEval-2019 Task 6, a hate speech detection competition. In this work, the method of fusion of sentiment features and Bert-based approach is proposed. The classic Bert architecture for hate speech detection is modified to fuse with additional sentiment features, provided by an extractor pre-trained on Sentiment140. The proposed model is compared with top-3 models in SemEval-2019 Task 6 Subtask A and achieves 83.1% F1 score that better than the models in the competition. Also, to see if additional sentiment features benefit the detectoin of hate speech, the features are fused with three kind of deep learning architectures respectively. The results show that the models with sentiment features perform better than those models without sentiment features. / Master of Science / Social media has become an important place for modern people to conveniently share and exchange their ideas and opinions. However, not all content on the social media have positive impact. Hate speech is one kind of harmful content that people use abusive speech attacking or promoting hate towards a specific group or an individual. With online hate speech on the rise these day, people have explored ways to automatically recognize the hate speech, and among the ways people have studied, Bert is one of promising approach for automatic hate speech recognition. Bert is a kind of deep learning model for natural language processing (NLP) that originated from Transformer developed by Google in 2017. The Bert has applied to many NLP tasks and achieved astonished results such as text classification, semantic similarity between pairs of sentences, question answering with given paragraph, and text summarization. So in this study, Bert will be adopted to learn the meaning of given text and distinguish the hate speech from tons of tweets automatically. In order to let Bert better capture hate speech, the approach in this work modifies Bert to take additional source of sentiment-related features for learning the pattern of hate speech, given that the emotion will be negative when people trying to put out abusive speech. For evaluation of the approach, our model is compared against those in SemEval-2019 Task 6, a famous hate speech detection competition, and the results show that the proposed model achieves 83.1\% F1 score better than the models in the competition. Also, to see if additional sentiment features benefit the detection of hate speech, the features are fused with three different kinds of deep learning architectures respectively, and the results show that the models with sentiment features perform better than those without sentiment features.

This thesis calls for a reconfiguration of hate speech as a primarily normative phenomenon. All hate speech strives to weaken the social-moral normative status of its targets and in doing, justifies violence against its target. In light of this normative function, the harm of hate speech is reconsidered. Against traditional defenders of hate speech regulation, I claim that individual and collective harm is a highly likely, but not a necessary consequence of hate speech, while intrinsic harm and reckless risk necessarily follow from hate speech’s normative capacity. In light of the normative origin of such harms, a societal response with normative clout is required. However, while individual responses are insufficient to block the normativity of hate speech, I suggest that the legal system is characteristically well-suited to do so. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The aim of this study is to research freedom of expression and its content and value. The focus has been to find answers to where freedom of expression has its limits, if it has any. This study has three aims: to research what freedom of expression means; to research the arguments for it; and to research if there are any limits to freedom of expression. Due to the aim of understanding the limits for freedom of expression, two questions regarding whether freedom of expression shall be restricted by prohibiting racist organisations and hate speech are being answered. Political philosophers Ronald Dworkin, Elena Namli, Thomas Scanlon, and Jeremy Waldron’s theories on the limits of freedom of expression are analyzed through the eyes of the theorists John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin. My conclusion from the research is that freedom of expression should not be limited by forbidding racist organisations, but instead that it shall be limited by prohibiting hate speech.

Web 2.0 opened up for a lot of opportunities, digital spaces became open for everyone to participate. But if groups of people get harassed and threatened in this spaces, how does that affect participation? Threats, hateful comments and harassment is a phenomenon that appears to be a common part of life online. Some groups of people may experience this more then others. To investigate this further a qualitative study was conducted using two different methods of internet research; observation and interview online. I wanted to study how cyber hate take the expression against female bloggers that write about feminism. The women that participated in this study have all been harassed and received threats online of various kinds. The blogs that were observed all write about subjects that question and criticize social structures and norms that many take for granted. This seems to spark hatred and threats against these female bloggers. The interviewed bloggers had different strategies for dealing with cyber hate they received. One example of this is that they all review the comments before posted on the blog. A problem that a majority of the bloggers expressed was that general public and the justice system did not take cyber hate seriously. Some people that threats and post hateful comments do that with their full name exposed.  The study indicates that anonymity didn’t play that big part, as first expected, in how people expresses themselves online.