Dave, thanks for the link. I really enjoyed your post on this issue and am glad to see people begin to take a more practical approach to this. Just like pretty much everyone, I am outraged and disgusted by what was written, and think Kathy was right to post about it (though, as some have mentioned, it might’ve been better had she more clearly separated the threats from her general admonishing of the blogosphere), but I am also afraid that her cause will be taken too far and rather than fostering genuine discussion about these issues, we’ll see censorship and hate speech whose effects will be insidious.

And you’re right to point out the cultural shift. Bloggers and internet users in my generation and below might look at such speech with a shrug because it is all over on sites like YouTube and MySpace. This fact, however, does little to make things better. Instead, doesn’t this mass-desensitization mean things might be worse than we expected?