Poor Cass

Poor Cassidy:

I feel sorry for our friend Cass, who has managed to enrage apparently half the world. I don't think it's even her fault. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

If you don't read her blog (and you should), a few days ago she tossed off a post in reply to an advice column, which she titled "Idiot."

You wouldn't think a short post that derived from an advice column would generate a lot of heat, but it did. After it went over a hundred (mostly rather hot) comments, she wrote a second post to explain the first.

Today, she had to write a third post to reply to anger directed at the first two.

The problem is this: people are trying to read from the specific to the general -- and, in this case, "the general" is a very dangerous place. It's a place where many people feel very vulnerable, and want to assert boldly in order to cover how uncertain they really feel.

I'm not sure this particular specific, though, holds general lessons. The woman in question is unusually stupid and shallow. It's always dangerous to read general lessons from a single example, but especially when the single example is so far to the left of the bell curve.