Do you consider people to be either inherently evil or inherently good .. or is there always a number of facets of characters

[Twiglett]

sometimes MN confuses me.

Full of liberal, intellectualised, PC look for the cause behind the action, consider the whole person. Full of empathy and humanity. Full of rationality.

Then someone pisses someone off in the outside world, or a schoolgate clique is mentioned. And SLAM .. out goes the humanity .. in comes the single-faceted they're all bitches, drop and run, what a wanker

odd innit?

Very true, Twiglett, very true. [pondering-the-nature-of-humanity emoticon]

I think that's just human nature - we all have our inner bitch, however much humanity we also have.

And I think a lot of the "chase him/her/them out of town with pitchforks" threads are just the result of a lot of people talking about the same thing, egging each other on. So while you might read an OP thinking "Blimey, that's a bit off", by the time you've read 30+ posts building up to "That's Fecking outrageous - how dare she?", you start feeling the same. It's self-perpetuating. What I'm trying clumsily to say is that most people are really quite suggestible.

are they?

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Twiglett- MN is often aggressively PC, and that's a shame because it doesn't always make for great debate

I don't think the two (examples in OP) are mutually exclusive actually.

Just we is women innit and therefore pretty good at judging what our friends need to hear and when.

So we are rational and humane and rightly seek equality and fairness(or pc if you prefer ) most of the time. But then if someone has upset our friend and is needing a pick me up we are not so up our arses we can't say "oh yeah them pah they're wankers! all of 'em" If someone started to take those comments seriously I'm sure the intellectualise response would be back and apologies made, but I think most people get that sometimes that isn't appropriate.