I’m gonna try this little quickie-post reply window and see if it works - my recent posts must have been quite tasty, as they’ve all been eaten by the SDMB gremlin (or maybe it’s that poor little overworked hamster).
grimpixie, that’s fascinating. I wonder if that’s the origin of the term used in the US? I was taught that it refers to the ‘red neck’ the farmers got from plodding along behind the plow mule all day in the summer sun, so in both cases the word is referring to the same physical condition - a sunburned neck.
Sauron, that’s cool! You grew up right down the road from me! Are you old enough to remember the caverns before they were commercialized? I can remember when they used to lose someone in there once or twice a year, usually teenaged boys doing a little exploring. Fascinating place! Oh, and the races . . . been there, done that, haven’t been to a race in over 20 years. sigh I’m old enough to remember when they built the racetrack, too.
Manda JO, I have two brothers and a sister that live in Huntsville. I can’t even remember where they work, except that it’s defense contractors. One of my brothers works for SAR or something like that - some big company that seems to stretch for about half-a-mile along I565.
Ogre, I could make up several plausible-sounding excuses for why I’ve never attended a BamaDope, but honestly it’s mostly because I have a very difficult time meeting strangers - heck, sometimes I have a difficult time meeting people I know! One of these days I’ll screw up my courage, take a double dose of Paxil, and come along to meet everybody.
Anyway, to hijack the hijack and get back to addressing the OP: I’ve looked at the message boards at CNN, ABC, etc. and they are all mostly the same - a few intelligent comments among the insane droolings of neanderthals. Some of it is pure trolling, of course. Some of it is people getting a thrill out of saying things they would never dare say in real life. And some of it is people taking advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to vent some anger and frustration on an easy target.
There’s a lot of buried anger, frustration, confusion, and disillusionment in the US, and I think in most Western cultures. Not everyone who is screaming ‘Kill the Arabs!’ really feels that way - they just need to scream about something, and it’s easier and safer to scream anonymously on the Internet about Arabs, or blacks, or Jews, than it is to scream at your wife, kids, boss, and/or coworkers.
Of course, some of those people are just plain stupid. Can we blame it all on Bill Gates? After all, if he hadn’t invented Windows (which made computers so easy to operate that almost any moron can use one) it would require some level of intelligence to access the Internet.
