I’m black, and I don’t buy this argument.

I don’t use that word, I find it offensive and hurtful just so we’re clear here. Singing along to a song that gets me going is another thing altogether. And you don’t get to choose what words people can say or use, you know, whole free speech thing. Likewise, none of us are free from the consequences of our use of…

You’ve got Japanese and South Korean kids using “nigga” as an all-purpose greeting amongst themselves and singing lyrics with the word in it like it’s going out of style. And you really think they are facing consequences?

In singing song lyrics, you are essentially quoting someone. If you think it would be fine to use that word for purposes of quotation, why the redaction?

It’s a word. In a song. Words only have meanings if you assign them meanings. We used to tell kids “I’m rubber, you’re glue”, now we tell them to violently shut up anyone they disagree with like Fascists.

It’s not about an “excuse”.

If you wanna call people the n word go ahead, just own it.

So when I’m getting down to my N.W.A. or Wu-Tang, which I’ve been listening to and singing along with for 20 damn years, you’re saying I can’t say the word that they say in the song? That’s ridiculous. It’s a song.

And I don’t give a shit.

“people are adults and they routinely trade things that others consider degrading or power-imbalanced for consideration.”

As someone with supremely fucked up skin on my feet and teenager like pimple growing acumen in their thirties, don’t you dare try and take away my cyst draining videos. I will burn this website to the ground.

Team Lee.

She’s right; she is normalizing something a lot of people are embarrassed about and therefore less likely to seek medical attention for. There’s nothing exploitative about this since (at least in the ones I’ve seen) the videos don’t ID the patient.

From the very first line - “Why would someone from Milwaukee, Wisconsin come all the way down to Missouri for college?” - I was extremely skeptical of this post. A better headline would have been “I Am Not Getting the Recognition for Going Here That I Deserve.”

Are you underestimating the significance of daring to journey from Wisconsin ALL THE WAY to Missouri?

This is the whitest, most college-student-y post of all recorded history.

“Some of Ballard’s troubles became more widely known in late February of that year after he sent a hostile e-mail to a tech artist that was CCed to everyone at the company”

Sounds more like they fired him because he was bad for morale and filing a bunch of HR claims that apparently had little merit if they were willing to risk the potential legal fallout. We may never get more details, so who knows.

It sounds like he had the breakdown (which required HR intervention, at this point as far as anyone else knew, for reasons unrelated to harassment at the hands of a superior), they planned to fire him, and, not unreasonably, he made his allegations the same day (and they formally fired him the next).

Not to discount what happened to him, but I think I see why he was fired from all the accounts given in the article. When he came back, his performance was not very good, they asked him why he was underperforming compared to his previous employment with them, and he started filing complaint after complaint rather then…

The story pretty much lacks credibility. Then again, you’re asking the defendant to give evidence to his own case. If HR is to serve as pseudo-legal intermediary between employees it should be managed by a tertiary party or at least be legally obligated to keep records of all conversations.