Anyone but me foolish enough to go to check out freepville and see their

[Southsideirish]

odious, sophomoric jokes about Rachel Corrie? See this is why we can NEVER "dialogue" with these people. Of course I know the posters there are the total scum of the planet but still I couldn't even be remotely on the same side as "people" who think like that.

They remind me of the lowlife boys in the back of the class in my grammar school who did all sort of crude body function "jokes" and none of the girls would ever dance with at dancing class.

[Orsino]

1. The opinions of two hundred angry white guys...

...posting from their parents' basements are not important to a nationwide democracy. We don't need to dialogue with them, and certainly not in the context of their favorite web site. In person, however, non-anonymously, many of them might be more reasonable and reachable than they are when you catch them in mid-stroke, so to speak--just as with the boys in the back row of the classroom:

[Ohio Joe]

2. No

When I first started lurking here I made the mistake of going here just to see. It gave me a headache and I decided it was simply not a place I ever wanted to go to again.

[noonwitch]

3. That is probably the only thing I am offended by at FreeRepublic

I'm pretty thick-skinned, having grown up liberal in a conservative community. Some of the things over there are very funny, such as the Viking Kitties. I don't even always disagree with them on every issue, like Cindy Sheehan, who gets on my nerves.

But the Rachel Corrie jokes are really tasteless. What happened to her was a tragedy. I don't know what will end the Israeli-Palestinean conflict in the long run, and I don't blame the Israelis for her death (it was an accident), but their sick jokes about it are very dehumanizing, as if she deserved to die for being a liberal or something. That is truly disturbing, as it makes me wonder what other liberals they'd like to see die, other than Hillary Clinton. They've made that one quite clear.