I got the post through by trial and error, deleting one paragraph after another. The paragraph whose deletion finally did the trick had two unusual terms in it, and I decided that whatever the program _said_ was the offending word, it was one or the other of the unusual ones that was the real culprit. One was "Disney World" (I can't imagine now now why I was mentioning that) and the other was some insult word.

You're dead on about the Internet. This forum is civil compared to most of them - not to mention the blogs. For some reason the Internet turns all its users into 14-year-old ch*rls.

If you follow U.S. politics, you may remember when two aides to one of the early Presidential contenders were brought to book - and I think ultimately dismissed - for stuff they'd posted in blogs on the Internet. The controversy engendered a lot of discussion, but it was totally along party lines. What wasn't mentioned was that what they'd written _was_ offensive by traditional standards, but was the norm for the Web.

I remember one forum discussion about someone who'd been horribly injured in a car wreck, where one of the posters wrote something like "she probably deserved it, she was probably drunk anyway." As it happened, this was bollocks, and the girl's sister or best friend, who happened to be following the discussion, replied and said so. The writer apologized, but in a "Hey, I was just saying" kind of way that was almost worse than no apology.

It's the culture. It's a sh*te culture. Younger people (and some older ones evidently) see nothing wrong with it. I'll read a post so obviously scurrilous and unfair that it infuriates me, somebody else writes in and calls the poster an asshole for having written it, and the poster, instead of expressing remorse or indignation, answers, "Lol, you're right, I'm a real asshole, I write stupid sh*t all the time." The unfairness or untruthfulness or what they wrote doesn't bother them. And they keep on doing it.

Ten or fifteen years ago, a feminist group was trying to get Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh barred from the airwaves. If they had been out to get Stern for obscenity, that would have made some sense, but their objection was to the ideas that he and Limbaugh promulgated. At the time, I saw this as another proof that everybody is in favor of censorship as long as it's something which offends them that's being censored, and that the notion of any idea that either Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh could ever come up with being so radical and original as to skirt the outer edges of permissible speech showed how unused Americans are to hearing open debate.

But now I think the feminist group may have had something. Those two guys were early bellwethers of the current culture. And they weren't malign: if anything, they were offensively good-humored. But a lot of the imitators who came after just spewed hateful venom, much like a lot of rap music. A couple of years ago, a hiphop DJ who got fired after he threatened, on the air, to r*pe a competing DJ's six-year-old daughter, called her by a racial slur, described what he was going to do to her, and offered a reward to anyone who'd give him her address. (He wasn't fired at the time, only after a local councilman complained.)

All this stuff - insults, threats, character assassination - has found its perfect home on the Web. Traditional standards of courtesy don't exist. It's all the verbal equivalent of p*rn sites: I never got to do this before but now I can and so I will. Which is just what fourteen-year-olds _would_ do.

Maybe it's an outlet that prevents the same negative energy from breaking out in more destructive ways.