What I'm having trouble making sense of is that JB used a word in a sentence.  He didn't call anyone this word.  He just used it in a sentence.  Yet, for some reason a lot of people have gotten their panties in a knot, now claiming that JB is somehow racist for using this word.

For the love of Pete, get a grip folks!  How in the world have we become so thin skinned?  It's a word.  That's it.  IF he used this word to point towards a specific person, then there might be something to get worked up over, but he didn't.  No, instead we have people reading about what he was supposedly to have said, not  what he said and getting all upset over absolutely nothing.  Damn, what a bunch of whiners.

Maybe there's a scoreboard somewhere for infantile internet behavior.

Watch an actress's accidental porn - 10 points.

Download a movie before you can buy it - 20 points.

Slam a celebrity on their own message board - 75 points.

Have any more?

I think a lot of people are ignorant when it comes to the impact of racial slurs. I still run into people today that refer to African Americans as "colored". While it might not have the history of the "n" word, many white people use the term "colored" and think it is perfectly normal. Could it be a stretch to believe that someone ignorant enough to use the "n" word might also be ignorant enough to not fully grasp the impact. Spike Lee tried to show in the movie Bamboozled  that some white people want to use the term like black people do, to show they are cool. Or if they are married to a black person it makes it okay, in their mind, to use such a slur.

Wow, 9 pages of rancor because JB used an inappropriate word as an example of something that's ...erm... inappropriate. Didn't 'use' the word, merely showed it as an example of something that's, well, wrong.

If I understand correctly, the outrage from all these fresh faces and part-time usual suspects (this time around) is his sense of comparative scale.

Am I the only one who thinks this is silly? That this is a pointless argument feeding on itself?

Is it possible that different people have different senses of scale? Would anyone care had I said it, or is there a certain amount of 'Byrne said...' to consider here?

Well, I'm not really after answers to these questions.

Edited to add: Topic closed by me.