The polygraph is what raises a red flag for me. They’re bullshit, other accusers have rightfully not bothered with them, and as you mentioned she passed it independently and before filing a police report.

Wouldn’t “sexual assault” fairly quickly become the new trigger if it kept being used as a synonym for rape?

Either his side has actual “overwhelming evidence” or it doesn’t, and I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. Ironically, the thing that actually gives me pause about this one is the emphasis of the polygraph test, as polygraphs are bullshit and (rightfully) no other recent accuser seems to have considered them relevant…

People make this assertion all the time, but are there actual reliable scientific studies on this that demonstrate it? Human psychology is ridiculously complex and saying something like this can always be simplified to “it’s not about sex, it’s about power” seems absurd to me, but I’m happy to learn if there’s actual…

Your interpretation of the quote is obvious and the headline is misleading. Should we be surprised?

If everyone knew exactly what an audience will or won’t find funny, nobody would ever bomb. Audiences also aren’t monolithic entities, contrary to what this site would like you to believe.

The point isn’t what is or isn’t offensive, the point is that you can find a dozen or so tweets expressing every possible opinion on anything—it’s offensive, it’s not offensive—and that tracking down these dozen or so tweets and putting them in your article is utterly worthless.

Just a few days ago, in one of their news link collections, John Del Signore wrote “Farmed fish is toxic” with an uncritical link to some awful quack charlatan doctor’s website. They had a lot of garbage writers/editors.

This is the same writer that said Tommy John surgery is for the“ulnar bilateral ligament” and that it affected the shoulder.

The bar for what passes as funny or clever on Twitter is embarrassingly low, so I mostly hate it for that reason. Even more annoying are the people (often here...) outright telling others to not use it. Use whatever you want.

Well that is a Gawker level response to criticism of the site, to be sure.

Hey, that’s a good explanation of what mansplaining is, and I bet it does happen pretty frequently. Now, without knowing anything about this guy, why do we assume we know what he assumes? “You’re a sexist mansplainer” is a serious charge that apparently involved being shamed by thousands of people on the internet, but…

Hey, why take the time to write a clear, well thought out essay when you can just toss something off then tweet out disingenuous clarifications later?

Racism obviously exists, but the logic that a celebrity would maybe attract more “report this post” clicks than random nobodies is pretty sound. I couldn’t find the examples of non-banned hate speech they’re talking about—if any of them are as explicit, and coming from a celebrity of approximately Lil B’s popularity…

Were the white people celebrities that thousands of people would be hitting “report” on?

Norm Macdonald had a good throwaway joke on his podcast about it:

The main point here though, is, how many fans are sending death threats or yelling at McDonalds vs. to what extent it blows up the entire news cycle, comments sections, etc.? Is it massively out of proportion? A few idiots being assholes on twitter shouldn’t be worthy of a news article, but somehow it’s become a…

Every single person on the internet should read this, because it’s fucking dead on. Online media—both social and commercial—has evolved over the past 5 years or so to feed almost exclusively on this bullshit and it’s awful.

How many people was it, and why is it newsworthy?

The replicants in the original movie have absolutely no qualms about killing dozens of people violently and without remorse. Yes, they wanted to be free and left alone (and live longer), but they were more than willing to murder anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.