You are drawing a meaningless distinction.

You misunderstand. Linus routinely personally insults people he disagrees with. That'll get you shot today, in the wrong neighborhood. I am by no means asserting that people didn't cuss a hundred years ago.

Yes, the American frontier was nowhere near as violent as portrayed in Hollywood. But that's a really high bar to squeak under. It was plenty violent.

That's right. You guess. And no, I'm not fantasizing.

I'd rather have a competent town manager who isn't corrupt. Why the Hobson's choice?

It's that the language used is too harsh. A hundred years ago that kind of language would have gotten you shot. The sense in which our society is gentler is that nobody has gone gunning for Linus yet. Personally, I think that's a good thing, but it's no excuse for him to behave that way. It's totally possible to express disagreement without shrieking.

Yup. Those fuckers.

Srsly? My 19-year-old niece swears like a sailor. I've seen no evidence that Kids These Days swear less than we did. But we're not talking about swearing. We're talking about saying things that would get the shit beaten out of you if you said them to one of your beloved manly men face to face. Torvalds would be a bloody spot on the pavement if he said some of the things he's said to people to some guy in a bar.

So let's not pretend that that kind of behavior is socially acceptable. It's not, and the fact that you'd get the shit beaten out of you for saying it to someone's face is all the evidence you need.

In the wild west you would have got shot for saying the things Torvalds has said. And unfortunately, this is a mouth-only apology. The way he worded it makes it clear he's not serious. More's the pity.

Um. No. My town, pop. 13k, had a really great town manager who retired. I know she was really great because I saw what she did. Replacing her was hard. And that's a small town. City manager is a hard job. Of course, you can get a corrupt city manager who does a bad job, but to do the job well requires a lot of skill and dedication.

Huh. So if you ever appear in a photograph that some ignorant person on the internet considers "a sexy picture," even if you are fully clothed, then you are implicitly consenting to have every private picture of you that anybody can get their hands on illegally distributed for all to see. Failing to see the logic here, sorry.

Since you believe the commenter's utterly inaccurate security assessment, I think the person here guilty of serious stupidity is not Ms. Lawrence, but you.

Sending photos on the Internet over an encrypted, authenticated link to a service provider who claims they will keep your data secure is not in any way like sending them in a postcard. It's true that there are potential security vulnerabilities, but what's going on here is more like putting your valuables in a safe deposit box, but not realizing that the bank has a serious security flaw, and consequently having your valuables stolen because of that flaw.

While it's certainly true that some people are sufficiently expert in security to notice the security flaw and protect themselves against it, the notion that every layperson should be that knowledgable is absurd. There is a reason why we have specialists.

There's no evidence to suggest that the FCC wouldn't have helped the other side if they'd had a strong groundswell of support. The problem is that there really were very few comments against net neutrality, and a huge number for it. So there was no other side that the FCC needed to work with.

You are utterly missing the point. I agree with you that when there are two people arguing two sides of an issue, it is possible (indeed likely) that one is mostly wrong and the other mostly right. But what we are talking about here is a political technique that both sides use in exactly the same way. So if you think it's okay when one side uses it, and bad when the other side uses it, you are indeed blinded by partisanship. I say this as someone who has deep antipathy toward the position the Koch Brothers are pushing.

When we argue nonsense, we can't have discourse. It's like the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland.