&gt; As has been shown by recent scandals involving Nobel biologists ... we are all of us now in the same boat as the politicians, one failed joke away from pariahdom and unemployment.<p>Watson had been increasingly &#x27;a pariah&#x27; over the last few decades because of a long series of racist and sexist comments. It was not due to &quot;one failed joke.&quot;<p>&gt; apparently in the Nobel biologist&#x27;s case only one person in the audience chose to interpret his remarks literally<p>What does a literal interpretation have to do with anything? If I say that someone is &quot;a son of a bitch&quot;, no one thinks I am literally saying that a human was sired by a female dog. Yet it will still cause many to be mad with me - using the terms of this essay - because I &#x27;said something offensive.&#x27;<p>&gt; The internet has enhanced our free speech in an imbalanced way<p>There is nothing new about the internet for that. The telephone, newspaper, radio, tape recorder, phonograph, and television have all been imbalanced in exactly the same way. Look to all the gossip columns of a century ago for examples of people spreading accounts that may originally have been meant to be limited to a select few.<p>Hunt&#x27;s comments were made in a room that included international journalists. Ever since the 1880s (I use Krakatoa as my date), journalists have been able to publish stories that made it around the world within a day. There&#x27;s nothing special which required the internet to make the Hunt story happen.<p>The essay uses &quot;shame mob&quot; many times, without describing what that means. If someone does make horribly racist comments, what is the appropriate way to respond that cannot be described as a &quot;shame mob&quot;? Avoid making comments on the internet?