Sequence: someone posts a joke on Facebook.  Someone complains about the joke because it is ****-ist—fill in your own asterisks, your own –ism.  The number of asterisks need not be identical with the number of missing letters.  Someone else slams the complainer for being hypersensitive.  Someone else explains how the joke is inaccurate, as everyone know **** has three, **** rather than four.  Yet another has a sister who has lived as a(n) ****, and (this should end the argument) she had four.  Yet another (I usually come in at this point; thus do I cop to participating in patterns) points out that it’s a joke, and while it is at the expense of ****s, it was posted by a(n) ****, and it appears to be a bit of good-natured self-deprecation—ha, ha. 

Really?  This is what’s keeping you from your real life?

I chose to make the isms and the details of these conversations asterisks because everywhere online--Facebook, news websites, any forum on the Internet,-- the same combative, hypersensitive, deliberately hurtful threads of exchange occur.  As I develop this post, I will add information about the psychology of anonymous rage online, but for now perhaps these questions will serve for pondering:  How do I strike a balance between maintaining courtesy, and leaving unconscionable activities or statements uncommented upon.  How do I avoid letting evil triumph by doing nothing, but also avoid fanning the flames of sniper rage in the cybercosmos?

“Do a quick trawl on the blog sites and comment sections about most celebrities and entertainers – not to mention politicians – and you will quickly discover comparable virtual rage and fantasised violence.”[1]

With the Internet has come the ability to converse with an incredibly wide community, and with it has come the ability to be incredibly nasty.  A sample of the nastiness: “On a related note, I'd like to thank the Gideons for changing the grade of paper they use in the bibles they leave in hotel rooms. I haven't had to buy toilet tissue in years, and it's saved quite a bit of money. So the 2,000 year old bible, written by primitive scribes who didn't know what a germ was or how stars form is useful in a day to day context, but not as reading material.”