Not just a pedophile: a pedophile who’s acted on that urge – a child rapist.

This is technically true but extremely deceptive if you don’t know the history. From “Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America” (Lauer, 2017; Columbia University Press):

Chapter 3: “By the late 1890s systems for evaluating the credit risk of individual consumers existed in metropolitan centers throughout the United States.”

Chapter 4: “During the early twentieth century millions of Americans came under the watchful gaze of newly formed credit bureaus. But these bureaus were only one arm of the emergent consumer credit apparatus. Their counterpart was the credit department of individual stores, where credit managers interviewed, documented, and tracked customers for their own benefit and that of the local bureau.”

Credit reporting has existed for a very long time in the US. So while a computerized score wasn’t there until the late 1950s (basically as soon as such a computerized score could exist, underscoring how eager banks were to implement it), your comment being technically true has no real impact on the argument of the merits of credit scoring.

It’s reasonably common in the developed world. And it’s a good idea that lenders be able to easily know how responsible borrowers are with repayment. That the US’ implementation of credit scores is problematic in some areas shouldn’t be used as a blanket dismissal of a credit scoring system.

I don’t think most kids would pick up on that kind of nuance (or even most adults), but I agree there’s a valid interpretation that you’re pledging allegience to the Constitution – the Republic – and thus “indivisibility, liberty, and justice”. That is: you remain allegiant to the Constitution. But the current pledge has so much wrong with it that it’s cult-like.

• Obviously get “under God” the hell out of there. Cold War-era reactionary trash.
• There’s no reason to assume from the literal text that what I said is true. Why not just focus on the principles?
• It’s a waste of time for kids to recite a dumb pledge they barely understand; granted they can’t force you and a lot of schools IIRC don’t do that anymore.
• Even if the interpretation is true, why should this specific system of government be so glorified?
• Get it the fuck out of there. It was introduced 100 years after the formation of the US by a Civil War officer as propaganda for children – probably paranoid out of his fucking mind after the South seceded. There’s no reason kids can’t learn to think for themselves when they’re ready to actually understand these ideas.

It’s so famous in fact that it’s frequently heavily exaggerated and distorted via telephone game from people who’ve never even minimally researched this case but decide to cite it for this claim anyway.

@grue@lemmy.world So far this user’s entire activity on Lemmy has been (seemingly targeted) racism against Indian people (here and previous comment), whining about immigrants to Europe (first comment; in this community), and calling themselves “apolitical” despite doing nothing but politics here. Can they be given the boot?

“From time to time” is an extremely disingenuous assessment of the NYT’s record for fact-checking and investigating. But yes, it cannot always be correct; you do need to be mindful if you ever start reading any source entirely uncritically.

Yeah, this post feels like classic splitting. I think Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that more people need to be conscientious of, but that just means you should be critical of what you’re reading. There are few major newspapers I would seriously blanket consider “untrustworthy”, and the NYT is categorically not one of them. Sowing black-and-white distrust in generally reliable press is exactly the bullshit the far-right and disinformation farms (whatever the difference even is now) want.

The “secret messages” part cleanly gives it away.

Entirely correct. Latin Times is owned by the International Business Times who also drove Newsweek into the ground. I don’t think the Latin Times have enough usage yet to get much discussion on Wikipedia, but we consider the IB Times generally unreliable – effectively heavily discouraged against using.

I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines

Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like expressing an opinion that differs from mine being preachy.

“Finally, my time has come.” —the model train nerds

A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined how disproportionate a retaliatory strike could be, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I’m almost certain I’ve seen figures of more than 60,000 nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.

The research was done make sure I wasn’t misremembering, that Greenland didn’t at any point exceed 60,000 (thus necessitating a closer comparison), and that I’m not Senator Armstrong-ing this.

Okay, but the ruling is totally sensible inasmuch as it applies to “purposes of tariffs, imports and customs”. Tomatoes by and large aren’t being imported for their botanical value; they’re being used for food. This ruling exists so corporations can’t “um ackshually” their way out of paying their fair share.

But that’s too sensible; in reality, this unanimous ruling that I never bothered to spend five seconds researching independently (I am very intellectually superior) was just “le Americans uneducated ecksdee”.

(And before you point it out: yes, an “um ackshually” definition of vegetables includes fruits, although this is using a culinary one. So indeed, the original post can’t even pedant right.)

Edit: to totally gild the lily, imagine your country adds a tax to crab meat because overfishing for a luxury good is destroying the Earth’s oceans. Someone sells Alaskan king crab, and they go to the courts demanding their taxes back because “um, ackshually, crabs are infraorder Brachyura, but king crabs are nested cladistically inside the hermit crab superfamily”. You would hope the court would tell them to get lost, because for the environmental impact and culinary uses that the bill is targeting, it’s a crab.

It’s chiefly a UK usage of the word. And happy cake day!

Winston Payne energy. (Like Squidward, it’s even funnier when the flashback shows them losing that hair in a single traumatic incident.)

Ah yes, much like Catch-22 is a strawman of war. Or The Handmaid’s Tale is a strawman of patriarchy and theocracy. You know what, like, themes are, right? Is “dystopia novels aren’t literally reality but are designed to critique existing political structures through an exaggerated late-stage version of them” too nuanced for ML?

Finally, some vegan recipe representation on Lemmy (with some ideas for vegetarians too).

Uh… Yeah? If you’ve never read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s a phenomenal and bone-chilling read, but as a minor spoiler you’d figure out not too far into the book: Orwell, an anarcho-socialist(asterisk), is critiquing authoritarianism through an attack on Soviet-style socialism.