I fully agree with the author of the article. Blatant examples reaffirming the author's article can be seen here on Hacker news, for example, where any questioning and doubt of popular opinion can lead to profound distress, implied and open threats, as well as excesses of emotional angst. Write anything that does not amount to high praise and one might suddenly find oneself in very hot water. Examples on the Internet at large are even more extreme.<p>If I write that I grew up in a highly competitive environment, where toughness, both physical and intellectual was constantly challenged at all levels and was what we lived by, and that the current state of affairs deeply disgusts me, is that going to land me on the censorship track and cause all kinds of emotional angst?<p>I've been on the Internet since 1993, long before most of generation Y could even use this medium, and long before the commoners (more angst! Oh the impudence!) made the intellectual cesspool out of it, and I've noticed a disturbing trend: write a dissenting opinion and count on being labeled a troll. Back in the day when you told someone that they're a lamer because their decompression routine sucks and needs 80 bytes and they told you that you're an incompetent asshole who just spews crap, you wrote a 51 byte routine that was at least twice as fast, and told them where they belong; sometimes the little flower would get so bent out of shape that they meet you with a bunch of their friends and then get the living daylights beaten out of all of them. And the world still turns, the Sun still rises, and sometimes you meet those people and have coffee with them today, laughing about the good old times. I really wonder if my generation completely or just partially failed at parenting, raising "special flowers" which cannot deal even with simple opposing opinion, let alone someone writing faster and shorter code, or having better grades than them. What kind of panic would reign if they decided to climb a tree without a carabine or a helmet, completely unattended?