Listen, you horrible little man, I am better than you. I am taller, stronger and prettier. Your face resembles the misformed hindquarters of a small yapping dog. Your so-called friends pity you and your dog likes you only for the food you provide. The oxygen you breathe cringes from touching your lungs and your blood is sluggish with its apathy regarding keeping you alive. Your clothes fasten with velcro because buttons are beyond your capability. You smell. Your mother smells. In fact, every member of your extended family including second cousins smells. You cause racism and third-world conflict. You sank the Titanic and crashed the Hindenburg. You were Adolf Hitler, Attila the Hun and Hannibal Lecter in your past lives. And what's more: you make spelling mistakes.

What inspires people to spew forth such tirades of vitriol? On the visage.cx boards Zoe told us all about some hateful messages she'd seen directed at those of a gothic persuasion, and the details of an email conversation she'd entered into with the attacker. It was an example of such blind, unreasoning and spiteful hatred that it literally took my breath away. There was no style, no finesse in these attacks, merely red-in-the-face-from-screaming effort and strings of furious expletives. I imagine someone with such a roiling centre of pure hate that it consumes them, and I wonder how these people can ever function in normal society, and I am saddened because I realise they can probably fit in (on a fickle level at least) than the so-called "freaks" they are waxing vitriolic about.