Excrubulent

Huh, I actually didn't know this was a thing, I just noticed that it works.

And a polite greeting is pretty simple. I just offer my hand limp and palm down for a sniff. If you get a nuzzle then it's petting time, baby.

Come now, Vivian, don't be like that.

licks arsehole

Yes, and they go pretty hard at it, and do you know whose side the gendarmes are on when people strike? There's a reason workers' unions don't have solidarity with cops' unions.

Frankly it's pretty ballsy for French cops to protest anything given they rely on the protection of the state against the people who hate them. I guess they think all the tourists will dampen the chances of an uprising, so they're using them as cover.

So therefore the community rallied around and pelted rocks while the fire-fighters set themselves on fire and charged headlong at them? Because the French know how to treat the cops.

I had to do something to heal the psychic wounds I got from trying to read this.

Okay, well that's actually quite a simple summary, and would've fit a headline quite nicely, I appreciate it. I have no idea why this article is so infuriatingly obtuse.

Okay, see this actually makes sense of this - it's a deeply politicised back & forth of people running smear campaigns on one another, and they're arguing over whether either was a justifiable smear, and this article is so breathlessly relating the latest tidbits that it fails to inform the reader of any of the context in a way that can be followed.

Also as I understand it the issue she was effectively forced to resign over was the plagiarism one, not the antisemitism one.

You said she failed to say it was a "violation of school policy". After reading into this issue, I can see a number of right wing publications wording it in this exact same way, but that wasn't the question she was answering.

She wasn't asked whether it violated school policy in general - if Harvard has a policy against hate speech then surely calling for genocide is against it - but whether it violated the policy against bullying and harrassment in specific. That's a different question.

The nuance that is left out here, which both women I saw questioned attempted to explain before being shouted down by the Republican asker, is that harrassment is a set of actions, not words. If someone were to approach a specific person and aggressively say "good morning" every morning for a period of time, that could be harrassment. If someone were to call for genocide in the privacy of their own dorm room amongst other people who shared their awful beliefs, that would not be harrassment or bullying of anyone because no person in particular is being targetted by those words in particular. It's certainly hate speech, but it's not harrassment. If you said it to someone's face, particularly a Jewish person, that could easily be bullying and harrassment.

In other words, it very much depends on the situation, which was exactly their answer.

Hence the overly specific question of whether it is against the harrassment policy gets transmuted into the much more general question of whether it violates any policy, and they can use this to claim she said something she didn't. It sounds like the Republican who was aggressively grilling them on this issue chose her words very carefully to target this ambiguity so that it could be misrepresented. Similar to the plagiarism accusations, it's not like they give two shits when their side is guilty of it, so they'll happily confuse the issue in order to weaponise it against their opponents.

So... I only clicked on this because the title was so convoluted I wanted to see what kind of situation made sense of it.

This single headline has five layers of linguistic recursion. You have to hold all five in your head in order to make any sense of it, and they've hidden even more actors within the folds of each clause.

Just on the first attempt to read it, there is:

1. A woman

2. Who is married to a critic

3. Who

4. Who was the president of Harvard

5. Business Insider

6. reported on the critic (1)

7. A review was conducted on Business Insider (5)'s report (6)

8. The review (7) did not cause Business Insider (5) to retract the report (6)

Is that right? The first paragraph says it's actually a woman who is married to a critic of the ex-president of Harvard, but it's still a confusing mess. Why are all these details headline worthy?

I've tried reading the article but it just keeps on piling on the actors, and every sentence has a similarly obfuscatory construction, and if you get deep enough in you find the review (7) was conducted by yet another party that Business Insider (5) won't disclose.

What was the content of that report? Where can I find it? Why should anyone care about this? The author doesn't seem interested in these basic questions of the story. It reads like middle school gossip, and is about as gripping.

This is someone who wants to hide that they don't have much to actually say, if I had to guess. If the facts of the case were something they wanted to explain clearly, then they could do that. If this is an actual attempt to convey information then this person should not be a journalist.

I smelled bullshit and as I dug into the article, that smell only got worse. If anyone actually knows what's going on here I am still vaguely curious, but not enough to wade through all this.

What is the logic here? A disaster has not yet occurred, therefore the danger doesn't exist?

In other news I am currently alive and can therefore never die.

Source: Putin told me so I have to agree or he'll make me some polonium tea.

It is not in any way compelling unless you're just looking for excuses. Take your bad faith genocide apologia to someone gullible enough for it.

EDIT: Also just take a moment to notice how fucking wild it is that "Yeah, I was totally wrong but the other guy was also wrong I reckon so it's fine also I think what I said was good actually," was their defense. That sure was a bunch of words they said.

Again, the fact anybody liked this comment is a definite sign of brigading.