Subject: Poisonous insults. They're used both to signal to your own ideological troops or to tar your critics with an invidious brush. If you can tell me what the hierarchy of venom, let me know. (Whatever the ranking, I think the whole world needs to take a freakin' time out, or their mothers will be called.) Here are some options:
* Nick Denton has been writing more about this (pretty serious, considering weblogs apparently "are not media").
** One summer, Katie, a girl at college with me, worked at Nordstrom in DC. She said at that store, the salespeople used "Canadian" in place of "Jew," (specifically, "Potomac Jew") so that they could "make fun of 'them'" without getting in trouble. So. Whether we're repeating 1991, 1941, or 1914, it's a cold freakin' bucket of water in the face of anyone who thinks we've made any progress as human beings in the last 100 years...
