[barik]

I think what's more frightening to me is how non-systematic this sort of thing is. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to who wins the "doxing lottery". I was looking at my own Facebook and Twitter feeds and realized that I (and maybe most of us, unless we live a pristine life) could just as easily have been Justine Sacco.

We could argue that people shouldn't make posts like these, but in doing so, we ignore our own humanity. We're not robots. Humor is an essential cognitive mechanism for building neural structures so that we can understand the world around us. It helps us to recognize and make sense of subjects that otherwise would be too emotionally difficult to face head-on. This is part of the reason I think that faux news shows like the Colbert Report have been so successful. By denying this sort of expression, we are essentially denying an important cognitive tool for understanding.