Stop pretending Samantha Bee’s joke and Roseanne Barr’s racist attacks are the same thing.

In a development that nearly everyone saw coming, Samantha Bee’s “c—“ joke on her show Full Frontal is now being conflated with Roseanne Barr’s incredibly racist tirade on Twitter—which led to her shows cancellation. Roseanne Barr’s Twitter storm—which surprisingly enough was admonished by even some hardcore “free-speech” advocates—was a racist attack, that only served to insult and demean Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor to President Obama; while Samantha Bee’s joke, with ill-advised word usage, looked to critique the callous timing behind Ivanka Trump’s photo with one of her children, despite the near national crisis of immigrant children being separated from their parents. When will free-speech advocates, and the right in general, see the wide expanse between racial attacks with centuries of historical context and ill-advised insults?

“The White House’s demand that TBS cancel Full Frontal is an effort to create false equivalencies that foster mistrust of a media they characterize as left-leaning lie mongers. It’s divisive, it’s dangerous, and it’s absolutely par for the Trump-administration course.”

Germaine Greer still thinks rape is just some type of “bad sex.”

The author of The Female Eunuch muddied the waters when she suggested this week that rape is mostly a “lazy, careless and insensitive” sexual act rather than a “spectacularly violent crime,” in, what one can only assume is an attempt to talk about the sexual expectations of women in marriage. But, like with her entire discourse surrounding #MeToo, she hides these critiques under a several layers of victim shaming and absurd claims. She suggests that the very notion of the mental anguish and lasting mental health problems faced by victims of sexual assault is a minor impediment compared to the trauma faced by veterans who’ve seen their fellow soldiers “get blown up by an IED.”

“Ultimately, if Greer is saying we need to take rape less seriously, she needn’t worry…society is already doing a pretty great job of that all by itself.”

The troubling implications of Pusha-T’s Drake diss.

Pusha-T may have “won” his bout this week with Drake after dropping The Story of Adidon, but the sheer brutality of Pusha’s diss, exemplified best by dredging a photo of Drake in blackface, quickly pushed the situation beyond normal protocol of rapper feuds. An appearance of ableism showed itself with a mystifying attack on the multiple sclerosis of Drake’s producer, as if this were somehow a symptom of Drake’s own personal failing, and a connection between Drake’s father leaving, and his own hidden child, brought two of the women in his life as pawns of guilt to be thrown into the fray. Is there such a thing as a line to cross when feuding? No doubt, it’s a thrill listening to Pusha roll Drake, but are we to ignore the hyper-masculinity, the violence, the misogyny, the tired attacks on those with developmental difficulties? Pusha’s old-school values have never felt more anachronistic.

“Anger is a corrosive, malignant feeling; you are much, much healthier when you’re able to come to a less violent conclusion than wanting to whip a table through a window. But if you sort through those feelings and still decide that you’re pretty mad, what you say next can cut to the real, bitter heart of the issue, leaving no doubt about how far you are willing to go to advocate for what you believe.”

California’s “Bird” problem.

In recent months, the hybrid electric scooters known as “Birds” have taken over the beaches and roadways of Santa Monica—although, not without push-back. The black scooters have received heavy opposition from the city’s government due to the ease with which they can be “littered,” or dropped, just about anywhere once a rider has finished with them. As we are seeing with many other forms of technological innovations, especially when it comes to transportation, these products are expected to be flawless, to solve problems that are not even brought to mind when using our current systems—cars, bikes, human behavior in general. Already, cars, large and small, litter the side of every street, bikes are chained up on every possible surface in metropolitan areas—some even tossed on the ground much like the scooters—so why the focus on Birds? We all know congestion is a major issue for metropolitan areas, public transportation is less than reliable—New York City’s is in a terrible state with no end in site—so, when there is an extreme lack of infrastructure funding and support, there needs to be a concentrated effort to look outside for solutions. Why not team with Bird, who can analyze their traffic flow, to better adjust transportation? Why not look to something as easy, straightforward, and small as scooters? There are definitely things that need worked out, and there definitely needs to be more oversight, but if the city officials refuse to improve congestion and other public sources of transportation, then somebody else will.

“What the most annoyed fail to appreciate is how many additional cars might be absent from the road if tourists and locals alike often opted for a scooter in lieu of a two-mile car trip or summoning an Uber to ferry them to a destination down gridlocked streets.”