Wall of Hate Mail

After reading so many of the hate emails sent to Daily KoS, they (no surprise) seem to read the same after a while: like 10-12 year-old children writing nasty things while their parents--or keepers--aren't looking. And none of them really have anything significant to say. But amidst the noise, certain loaded terms ('trigger words") kept popping out. So I used an online word-cloud service to illustrate this.

No editing was done. I simply copy and pasted the text of each quoted email into the word-cloud generator and clicked "Go." Once the image was generated, I copied it into Irfanview and saved it as a JPG. Then I used the Page feature of Photoscape to assemble the collage. There was no selection process; I added each image as it's turn came up in the list.

I chose the collage as it makes the loaded words pop out, more noticeable. The word-cloud was set to show the most used words in large type. IMO this shows what each hate-mail was really about, what was on the writer's mind.

And it's ugly, just as I knew it would be. No pre-screening, no selection, simply copying, generating the word clouds, copying as images and assembling the collage in a purely mechanical process.

This is what undermines the foundation of conservative philosophy, the "purity" of the far-right. The slick politicians, the clever bloggers, the "sting" videographers, the talking heads: beneath all of their sophisticated presentations and rhetoric is this mass of seething hatred and fear.