So this is a treat;

Usability specialist, tech writer and "female", Kathy Sierra had to withdraw from being a workshop chair at ETech when people started trolling her blog, uttering death threats and in fact started a whole new set of "meanblogs" just dedicated to posting hateful, humiliating or offensive material about notable people in the blogosphere.

Kathy was one of their targets and subject not just to rude material, but shockingly vulgar and violent material. What surprises me is the sophomoric hatred leveled at this woman, who is clearly only threatening to people because she is intelligent, successful and powerful.

Is it a human weakness to wish to humiliate and degrade anyone who looks like they might be drinking more profoundly from the cup of life. I think so.

I am not going to get into the gender politics of this, I don't know enough about it - but anyone who gets a rape threat for having technological expertise says more about her detractors than her qualities as a human being. The people uttering threats, or setting up blogs where threats can happen, are so far away from acceptable collective social practice that maybe the tech community as a whole needs to go back to "human-kindness bootcamp" and or get it's mouth washed out with soap.

Ecch.. I feel angry and ashamed just thinking about this. And I wonder what's next? I always worry that these kinds of incidents aren't aberrations they are what's really going on for a small angry group of people, but it only sometimes gets out into the open.

If you want the whole story it's here:
Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)