Absolutely 100% correct. This has been discussed at length by Hegel, Sartre, and many others less famous. If it wasn't fat people, or trans people, or black people, or arab people, it would be someone else. It seems that humanity is in constant need of an "Other", a bogeyman. Much of this has to do with how we define ourselves. It is actually a difficult mental task to define ones self by what they are, and significantly more simple to define ourselves by what we are not. "I don't know what I am, but that is NOT it," as it were. As a Canadian, it is interesting to see how much of Canadian culture is built on the premise of "Not America", or "Not the UK". Our "Others" represent what we see the need to define ourselves as not being. It is even easier to do so when that "Other" is a faceless thing, a caricature. I don't know if this is because of, or if the two concepts are related in how they are treated by the brain, but language has a similar problem. without visual context, how do you explain what the word "Large" means? when it comes down to it, "large" generally means "Not small". "Small", on the other hand, means "not large". Large could also mean "heavy", but what is heavy but "Not light"? A lot of our descriptive adjectives are defined by what they are not, rather than what they are. Just like us. Edit: mk, I'm still getting a lot of 502s these days. Is it my connection?The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other."