Agreed. The post is excellent.

And the "free speech" issue is absolutely bogus. A first year college student wouldn't make that mistake. Free speech means you are prohibited from saying something. That certainly does not mean, must not mean, that we don't value certain kinds of speech more than others, and try to dissuade people from saying certain kinds of things.

For instance, I could go around posting, "everyone from middle america is a ignorant, bible-thumping, hayseed." I think every intelligent person, regardless of their political affiliation, would regard this the kind of statement that serves no good. It doesn't advance any understanding of anything, it just makes people angry. I can't go around saying, in response to the criticism I receive from stating this, that THAT'S CONTRARY TO FREE SPEECH. It's not that I'm going to be thrown in JAIL for saying it, it's just that the general community will disown me for being such an idiot and generally bringing down the level of the discussion. This is precisely what the poster does above in the "can't take the heat" argument.

The cover is quite typical New Yorker-style wry humor-that-isnt-meant-to-be-th­at-funny, which is, to be honest, why it works for its target audience. Read the "how I got my cartoon blurb accepted" article a while back they had in Slate. But let's me serious - a good percentage of people in America couldn't even understand the New Yorker, let alone figure out it's wry humor. It's a magazine with a very particular niche of college educated upper-middle class readers. Look at the census - that describes like 15% of the country, tops. To put it inside the magazine would have been fine. It would have been a cute send up that its audience would understand. To put it on the cover is necessarily to do the cause of aiding and abetting ignorance in our society. It may be sad that we have to talk down to a good deal of the population because so many have never even had a decent high school education, but until that changes, that's the world we live in. Just look what happens whenever we have an open discussion about something complex, like immigration - idiotic slogans.