QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: ‘Why does hate thrive online?’ Because of the Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory, of course.

But isn’t this putting the cart before the horse? As Marshall McLuhan noted a half century ago, broadcast media is merely one of man’s tools, an extension of his mind. The hate was in the mind of the writer before it was typed in and disseminated to the world via a keyboard and cable modem. Slate — still owned by the Grahams, who a couple of years ago offloaded the Washington Post to someone who understands Internet psychology far better than they do — is merely angry that “the wrong people” now have access to the tools that amplify hate the MSM once reserved for itself. (QED.)

Related: The Desire to Punish.

More: Betsy Newmark writes, “Ah, the neutrality of MSM employees as one NYT staffer tweets out an FU to Jeb Bush for saying that intergenerational poverty is not due to racism and that one solution would be to have stronger families.”