I didn't really follow this subject, but I saw a lot of crude and frankly pretty racist joke images voted up to the front page.

I didn't see any racism, unless you consider characterizing her as communist dictator Mao Zedong to be racism?

"There will be death threats in almost any large-scale, heated discussion."

Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here: no, no there will not be death threats in any large scale discussion. Not among adults at least. Little kids fight all the time but when they grow up that's called "assault and battery". Maybe in your world little kids threaten to kill each other over the Internet all the time, but when they grow up that's called a "death threat". Maybe the problem here is that society has more tolerance for that sh*t in children, which I suppose can cause some confusion when they start interacting with the Real World.

That really is the case. Completely asinine, but if you are a public figure, the masses can be shockingly awful. There is an interesting article where Penn and Teller compare their rather large influx of death threats with Richard Dawkins[1], and from what I know, pretty much anybody in the public eye has to deal with this.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10836833/Penn-and...

Just because it is true doesn't mean we need to take it as the new normal.

So there will not be, but there was?

It's my estimation that if there are hundreds of thousands of anonymous or pseudonymous discussion comments it's very likely that a few individuals will a make death threat (which are likely not intended to be taken seriously). My point is that stating that death threats were made is not particularly interesting, as that's not a rare occurrence when we're talking about very large number of comments by very large number of people, some of which are anonymous or pseudonymous.

"Dude, seriously. And I'm pretty sure "dude" is appropriate here:"

Could you refrain from sexist comments like that?