[happytoexplain]

There's definitely a large cultural problem both with people being overly defensive and overly offensive (and I think a majority of people who seem to fall into one of these camps actually fall into both, just depending on the topic). On both sides, there's a gradient of behavior with no practical definition, and at the extremes of each, harsh reaction to that behavior becomes inevitable, since we're humans. On the defensive side, this is the transition between "I disagree but support your right to say it" and attacking a person who has said or done something that isn't particularly hateful or violent. On the offensive side, this is the transition between a harsh but grounded joke aimed at somebody's flaws as a way of making a point, and naked hatred (which may be framed as a joke, as all things can be).

I think we absolutely must address both problems somehow, but I also think that the movement of the offensive tendencies toward their respective extreme is much more damaging and more directly at fault for most of the current breakdown of human interaction. If person A mocks person B and implies that they should be lynched, and person B punches person A, they have both crossed the lines of reason on their positions (A: offensive, B: defensive), but boy am I not overly worried about B's behavior in context (that's a broad analogy, and a representation of my perspective rather than a universal example - it's not a comparison to the article's subject, which is a much more grey example of hatred vs reaction).

Of course, people will always see their group as reasonable and "the other" as unreasonable, especially when the "groups" are so broad that there's no room to stand outside and look in. It's all about as subjective as can be. Unfortunately, that doesn't make the practical outcome of such subjective interpretation any less concrete or unavoidable. I'm not sure what will end up causing this to deescalate, since both sides are utterly dug in.