[whichdokta]

"In the name of the great FSM (oh great and merciful one) I hereby declare thumb war upon you and call upon all my followers on hte twitters to hunt you down and dislocate both your opposable appendages for the great blasphemy you have committed in your public and offensive denials that trolls are also sacred to the sacrosanct principle of freedom of speech and thought."

Do you like that now punk?

Thought not.

You see, it stops mattering that they're puerile and reprehensible prats the moment you start to threaten physical violence.

By saying: "I will make you stop saying that even if I have to use force" you have guaranteed two outcomes:

  1) They will _definitely_ not stop saying the thing which is making you so mad.

  2) Any responsible person hearing this would start dialing 911 before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life.

The point of the original article was not to defend the trolls but rather to point out the fact that civil society is becoming increasingly tolerant of violent threats when they are made by members of fundamentalist religious movements.

Given that these threats, in recent years, are all to often starting to turn to action it becomes quite important to ask how much of this behavior we can tolerate before our society too ceases to be civil?

[yummyfajitas]

The point of the original article was not to defend the trolls but rather to point out the fact that civil society is becoming increasingly tolerant of violent threats when they are made by members of fundamentalist religious movements.

I don't think we are tolerant of fundamentalist religious movements; we certainly would not excuse Christians for threatening artists [1]. We are tolerant of bad behavior by non-westerners because we feel that criticizing them makes us racist.

[1] For an example of this, witness the reaction when Guiliani suggested defunding a museum over the "Piss Christ" exhibit.