What is one fact that someone shared so confidently but turns out to be false?
What is one fact that someone shared so confidently but turns out to be false?
143 comments
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I'm a sword guy. I spent over a decade training in historical swordsmanship (mostly European longsword - a mix of Fiore and Lichtenaur; but also a little kenjutsu).
There are so many bad takes about swords out there, but I think my personal "favorites" are about the folded steel technique used to forge katana.
See, to make a good sword, you need good steel which is iron + carbon. More carbon = harder steel. Harder steel is better for holding an edge, but also less flexible and more likely to shatter. All swords, European, Japanese or otherwise had to balance those concerns.
Anyway, in Japan, their katana forging technique used steel with slightly differing carbon amounts wrapped in layers in the blade. This layering had a couple of important metallurgical effects:
- It gave the core steel a more consistent quality. Since the method they had of producing steel contained varying levels of carbon, the repeated layering, folding, heating and hammering evened it out.
- The layering also increased the strength of the steel. By adding layers of high and low carbon steel, the sword smiths could control the flexibility vs strength of the core.
Ok, so without getting too deep in the weeds, that's (basically speaking) why katana were made of folded steel.
But I have been "informed" by so many people that folded steel:
- Creates an edge like a thousand razor blades!
- Makes katana stronger than modern steel!
- Makes katana stronger than European swords! (steel-wise, it's a wash, though later blade geometry techniques like fullers arguably give European swords the - ha - edge in durability.)
In summary: katana are great - but not magic! The folded steel technique enabled forging swords of high-quality, consistent steel at a time when that was really hard to do. But that's it.
/self looks at rant
Uh... Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
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The funny part is when you remind the weebs how bad the iron commonly found in Japan was just not great quality and purity which they lacked the know how to correct, so the folding technique was developed to make their steel workable. If European techniques had been used on Japanese Steel, you'd have one very shoddy sword.
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I was under the impression the folding technique of Japanese blades was due to the low carbon content and the process of folding included adding carbon to the iron as well as incorporating it throughout the metal.
European iron ore already had larger amounts of carbon which meant the folding and adding carbon process wasn't required to create a serviceable edge.
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It's a little bit of both.
Iirc, Japanese iron was usually in sand form, gathered, rather than mined. So the raw material was smaller and contained less natural carbon than mined ore.
(Though nobody had near the advantage of Indian steel from the Damasc region - Damascus steel naturally had more carbon in their iron and it made for very high quality steel at the time.)
Anyway, at that time Europe had similar techniques for making iron into steel and normalizing the carbon. They would use more resource-intensive techniques, like stacking rods of wrought iron in a furnace with charcoal, then working the carbon-infused rods to distribute the carbon evenly.
That works great when you have access to millions of square miles of forest (for charcoal) and loads of iron ore.
But it's not really about whose steel was "the best", it's just that the "folding" technique was a metallurgical process and had no impact on the quality of the sword (except insofar as it was turning iron into steel).
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Sword Guy, embrace that. TED Talk away, everytime swords are even slightly relevant.
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The whole McDonald's coffee debacle is constantly misreported, but I think it's becoming more known that McDonald's are in fact the bad guys in that one.
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You Americans get so obsessed with picking sides, and finding someone to blame. You miss the point.
In every other first world country, this wouldn’t have been a court case, or even news.
When freak accidents happen we don’t look for someone to blame, we treat any victim’s wounds free of charge.
We have public health departments that study accident trends and make precautionary policies to prevent them from happening again.
Stella wouldn’t have had medical bills to sue over.
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This is such a weird "america bad" take; having universal healthcare has nothing to do with wanting to hold corporations accountable for their shitty behavior.
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When freak accidents happen we don’t look for someone to blame, we treat any victim’s wounds free of charge.
We have public health departments that study accident trends and make precautionary policies to prevent them from happening again.
This wasn't a freak accident and McDonald's had been warned repeatedly about the temperature of their coffee being dangerous. This is why the victim was awarded so much, McDonald's was being intentionally negligent with their coffee to save a few pennies per customer. You act like you can just hit someone with a car in a place with universal healthcare and it's ok because no hospital bill.
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Oh, FFS... Have you ever read what actually happened?
Yes, she politely asked get medical costs covered. McDonald's told her to go pound sand. The ensuing lawsuit uncovered the fact that McDonald's was intentionally serving coffee way above a safe temperature for consumption, and that they'd been warned about the potential for injury. The judgement--most of which was overturned on appeal--was because McDonald's was engaging in bad behavior intentionally that cause injury. Most of the award wasn't to cover medical expenses, but to send a "fuck you" to McDonald's so that they would stop doing something incredibly dangerous.
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freak accidents
At least you’ve made it abundantly clear that your smug little own here is being argued from easily the worst possible position. This was not a freak accident. The event itself was not caused by a lack of government subsidized healthcare.
This event was made an inevitability by a corporation that sees people as barely human. They knew what they were doing, they did not care. Beyond that, expecting the United States government to reign in a multibillion dollar company is entirely unrealistic. Money talks extremely loudly.
And to cap it off - can we talk about how fucked up it is that you read the OP comment, thought about it for a bit, and put that out into the world? Dude. Her fucking vulva more or less completely fused together, and you saw it as a prime opportunity to brag about how great your healthcare is?
If any other first world country had a megacorporation that directly caused traumatic injury to someone? Yeah. It would be news.
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American healthcare is bad and yet you are still completely wrong
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That's a long way to say I don't really know the details of this case and will just follow the narrative McDonald's wants me to...
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Huh. We really are screwed on so many levels. Thanks for that realization.
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That their religion was all about love.
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Which religion lol
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Soooo edgy
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there are a few valid reasons to take issue with certain religions besides just "being edgy" - most have stuff in their scripture and doctrines that's unpalatable to the common unaffiliated person.
This is the short version of my comment where I don't cite a wide range of questionable passages from several religions. I'm trying to hold myself back. If you DM me wanting to get into it I'll be polite
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How is stating a fact edgy?
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I used to work with this old guy. He was one of those dudes that was insufferable, but at work he was a semi-interesting story teller. But really it was because his desk was next to the back door exit. If you wanted to sneak out, you had to do it past his desk. And you had to be on his good side to avoid any leaky mouths…
Anyway, this one time I was sneaking out, it was summer. And he had the door open to let some fresh air in. In its place he had mounted a makeshift screen to keep the flies out. But this screen wasn’t quite tall enough and left the top foot of the door wide open. I had already seen a fly as I came down the hall, so when I saw his construction job, I’d found the reason…
So I said, “hey nice screen.” He says oh yeah, blah blah. Blah blah. Then I sort of point out the missing gap above the screen… he gets real serious and says:
“Flies can’t fly more than 6 feet off the ground.”
I had so many questions. What about flies on a mountain? What about flies inside a skyscraper? My head was salivating for more chunks of juicy knowledge from this guy… but alas I had my sneaky schedule to keep, and I said wow, cool. And left.
But the confidence from this guy could not be matched.
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So, I was curious and decided to look it up. Turns out most flying insects are dependent on air temperature! As long as the air is above about 50F, they can fly in it.
So... If the top of your screen is high enough that it's less than fifty up there, you're good! 😄
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Arguably, the "ground" is relative. Second floor? Theres still a floor, which is a ground if you didn't know otherwise. Presumably this power is not sea level sensitivity.
However, I've seen flies walking on ceilings, which are usually 8 ft. So...
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Maybe as it was walking on the ceiling it counted the ceiling as the ground as it was below its feet, or it counted the floor on the other side as ground. They aren't really the smartest of creatures, so who knows.
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I'm curious to know why he left the gap. Like, was it on purpose to see who would ask so he could flex his worldly knowledge or?
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I can see the possible information he garbled. I can easily see flies not generally flying over a few meters in height. Their food is generally low down, as is cover to hide in. If they flew higher then they would be at risk of both predictors (bats and birds) and cold, for no real gain.
There might have been a scientific paper that noted the fly's (self imposed) height limit. "Generally like to stay below 2m" became "can't fly above 6' via junk science reporting.
I might be completely wrong. But I do find it interesting to try and reverse how the various insane "facts" that some people come out with come from.
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2020 election was stolen.
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It wasn't from a lack of trying...
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He did literally have a team of lawyers and fellow Republicans trying to help with the lazy coup, but he still could have put in a lot more effort.
/sarcasm/Good news, in 2024 it looks like he'll get another chance!/sarcasm/
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That the leader of a bee hive can't be female because the gods don't give women weapons, and that the drones can't be male because they take care of the young.
Not only did Aristotle writing this in Generation of all Animals cause misinformation around this to spread for literally centuries on end, including the presumed gendering of a 'king' leading the hive to be used to argue for a patriarchal dynastic monarchy as part of God's design - the wildest part is he acknowledged that other people were saying that the hive had a queen and the drones were male.
Dude was straight up like "some people say...but this can't be the case because of my commitment to misogyny which ignores things like lionesses existing."
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I fucking hate Aristotle so much. Like, even though I understand that people who lived 2000 years ago have different views than me, he's just so infuriatingly boomery.
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He's also incredibly smart in other ways. It's just the bad parts that get more press. And he's bound be wrong a bit considering the amount of things he wrote about.
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Wow they screwed that all up.
Drones do not take care of the young. At all. Literally all the drones do is eat and roam the hive until breeding season, then they get it on and die alone since their hive won't let them return after they copulated, and if there ever become too many drones the workers chase them out and kill them if they try to return. Different species do it a bit differently but in general the drones are the first to be culled if resources ever get low. The only major exception is if a hive lost their queen, some workers can lay unfertilized eggs which develop into male drones to pass on the genetic diversity of the hive, as they anticipate dying out without a queen and no eggs young and healthy enough to rear new ones.
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Drones die after mating, as the act of mating kills them. It's not the hive rejecting them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
The process of ejaculation is explosive—semen is blasted through the queen's sting chamber and into the oviduct. The process is sometimes audible to the human ear, akin to a "popping" sound. The ejaculation is so powerful that it ruptures the endophallus, disconnecting the drone from the queen. The bulb of the endophallus is broken off inside of the queen during mating—so drones mate only once, and die shortly after.
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Boy, i sure hope someone got fired for that blunder
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I was told two hours ago that Antarctica is bigger than all other continents combined, when I said that's not possible I was told to google it.
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It's the largest desert, and bigger than all other deserts combined (if you don't count the arctic as a desert, since it's [mostly] floating ice). That's the best explanation of their mistake.
Fyi, I did Google it. Antarctica is the 4th biggest, after Asia, North America, and South America. It's also the 3rd smallest.
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You missed the second biggest
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Sounds like something a flat Earther would say
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That renewables are bad for the environment.
Evidence? These dozen or so dead birds next to a wind turbine.
Pay no mind to those billions of creatures that died due to that oil spill in the ocean.
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"Burning wood doesn't contribute to climate change" - Drax power station, endorsed by UK government
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That mechanical watches are more accurate than quartz watches, which is why they're so expensive. It's not even a close race.
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When you buy a mechanical watch they warn you about the accuracy of a second a day.
But these watches are a mechanical masterpiece.
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Like being proud enough of a "chronometer" certification to write it on the front face - congratulations on passing the -4 to +6 seconds per day test, Rolex!
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Glass is a liquid.
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A lot of this myth comes from poor glass making techniques from 200+ years ago that resulted in windows with uneven thicknesses.
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https://www.cmog.org/article/does-glass-flow
They say no, but then they say it would flow 10 angstroms in 14 billion years. So the answer is technically yes but practically no.
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If you get it hot enough..
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I read recently that glass is five times stronger than steel, and its brittleness is because of impurities and flaws caused by the manufacturing process. With modern manufacturing techniques we can remove those and make glass the perfect construction material.
Jury's still out on that one, but I'll be interested to see where it goes.
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Not saying it’s true. But technically you can make a prince Rupert drop that’s stronger than some steel
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It probably depends on the definition of stronger. Concrete is stronger in compression. If weight ratios are used then glass could win due to being lighter.
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I heard this one recently from the person leading a historical tour. I looked around and everyone in the group was just nodding like, "oh, how interesting!"
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This one is kinda sorta true if liquid simply means not absolutely solid. It's kinda like tar, or gum; solid but somewhat malleable.
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A frog that is gradually heated will jump out the water. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
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How did you find out
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Non joke answer, the original experiment basically lobotomized the frogs.
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Basic biology. Frogs are poikilotherms.
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It's still a great metaphor / cautionary tale.
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A friend of mine was convinced that the "middle ear canal" goes all the way through your skull in a more or less straight line, connecting your ears. Y'know, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to hear sounds to the right of you with your left ear or vice versa. Maybe HE had such a thing where the brain was supposed to be...
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Dude heard the phrase "goes in one ear and out the other" and took it literally.
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That butterflies technically can't fly. But that they do proves there's a god, creating miracles.
Modern aeronautics can explain exactly how a butterfly can float in the sir.
Oh, the one random person from my childhood who said that black men looked like gorillas, which means they're stupid and violent. Mexican men looked like coyotes, which meant they're sneaky and conniving. And white men probably had a similar flaw, but since she was white, she didn't know what it was.
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That sir must be very low density and extremely fluid.
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I heard the butterfly thing, but relating to bees.
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I'll add another bee one to the pile; I had a lady very confidently tell me that you don't see bees during the winter because they migrate. I wanted to correct her, but all I could think of was Monty Python. "Are you suggesting bees migrate‽" it's also hard to explain that they also don't hibernate, but create a sort of space heater around the queen.
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“Fat is carbohydrates and people who don’t eat fat get carbohydrate deficiency which causes obesity. You need lots of carbohydrates to stay healthy, so eat fat!” - old man in my office block
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Hmmm.... Now my brain hurts
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There's a kernel of truth here. Carbohydrates are most readily converted to fat when you have a calorie surplus, but I'm not a 100% this mess is try to say that.
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It's so close to being true, like truth adjacent
Simplifying things a bunch, eating carbohydrates spikes insulin, which tells your body hey store this.
So if you eat carbohydrates and you eat fat you're getting a double whammy of store this fat.
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Bet money that man had a beer gut lol
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Christopher Columbus hypothesized that he could reach Asia by heading west, landed on an entirely different land mass, and was so thoroughly convinced he was in Asia to the point of convincing the people who sponsored his first trip to sponsor 3 more trips. This was accepted as fact to the point that when someone else made the trip and acknowledged it as a new land mass, that new guy wound up having entire continents named after him.
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Dude not only thought he was in Asia, he took so long that he thought that he had overshot and made it to India, not China or Japan, India! When in truth he wasn't even halfway there.
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This is also why First Nations/Natives are known as Indians, and grow peppers.
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Yup! This is one of many reasons why I'm thinking it's right up at the top in terms of someone being so confident about something false.
Towards the end of his expeditions there was growing suspicion that it wasn't Asia at all, and if Columbus only entertained that notion and used the resources readily at his disposal (cartographers, people familiar with the flora and fauna of Asia), we'd probably wind up with North and South Columbia as continents. But instead we wound up with stuff like misindentifying and then misnaming the indigenous population, and it somehow stuck for half a millenia.
It's almost like buying a winning billion dollar Powerball ticket, glancing at the numbers on the TV, glancing at the ticket, seeing a couple matching numbers and thinking "it's only a couple bucks, not even worth my time to redeem", crumpling it up and tossing it on the ground only for the next person walking by to pick it up and realize what they're holding. He had it right in his hands lol
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That pandas are too stupid to survive or reproduce on their own. The truth is that breeders couldn't figure out the conditions for them to do it, and that we ignored the ways in which they are incredibly adapted to their environment.
Not only was this falsely shares but also harmful to the preservation of the species by poisoning public perception, and came as a direct result of yellow journalism and misinformation shared online.
For more info I recommend the book "The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife" by Lucy Cooke
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The sun is not a star. It's a sun.
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Sun and Star are synonyms.
Here is the first sentence of the Wikipedia article for
:The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System.
Here are the first two sentences for
:A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun.
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Being able to save 15% or more by switching to Geico.
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I said Google Glass was fake. I thought everything about it was true except the display. I had never encountered this kind of optics before so when they announced it I claimed it was not possible to ship that then. I was wrong.
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Every April fools I will get someone to believe that P!nk has died. Been saying it since 2004, and she is the perfect level of celebrity for it.
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Did you say P!nk died of "Ligma" when they asked?
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Nah. I'd always say it was a motorbike accident because she was riding with her boyfriend/husband that was an extreme athlete.
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A second cousin in the US put out a newspaper ad saying to vote for Trump as Biden was going to take away everyone's guns. He dedicated it to his baby granddaughter, who I assume will be very grateful for this when she grows up.
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Assuming she makes it through her first twelve years of school...
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Blimey
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Well, to be fair, Biden does want to take almost every firearm that isn't a wooden-stocked, bolt-action hunting rifle, or a double-barrel break action shotgun. He's been very, very clear about that. He also doesn't have that ability, because such a bill would never make it through the Senate (unless about 15 more seats flipped Democratic, or Dems managed to end the filibuster, which would be incredibly dumb of them), and the House is currently under Republican control. And also there's Bruen v. NYSPRA to contend with, which is likely going to throw out a lot of bad gun law (see also; Bonta v. Duncan, and Judge Benitez' blistering rulings against the state of CA).
OTOH, Trump is not a friend to any civil rights, including 2A rights. Nor are Republicans in general, unless the rights you want to exercise involve being a white cisgender heterosexual christian, preferably male. The only civil right Republicans mostly get right--mostly--revolve around 2A issues. Shit, Trump is the reason that bump stocks are banned; he literally said that he was in favor of seizing guns first, and due process second. So you sure as fuck don't want to vote for him if you think 2A rights are important.
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My father was once driving with a friend when his friend, Dave, said, "Hey, look at that black Datsun."
My father immediately - and for no particular reason - lied, "All Datsuns are black. That's how they save money."
Years later, Dave wrote him a postcard with one sentence: I saw a red Datsun!
(yes, I'm aware of the Ford quote)
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I've never met her, she's not my type, she's ugly, and she was lucky if it did happen, which it didn't...
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Sounds like sort of mean things to say.
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Belgium is a city and shit
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Everyone knows it's an intergalactic insult.
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Well... Belgium was shit with their treatment of Africans.
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Coalas dont have huge scarry teeth
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Do you mean Koalas?
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Have you not heard of the Coca-Coalas? All the sugar rotted their teeth.
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yes
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That someones religion is right
Even if a religion is right, the others arent
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And usually they have just discovered this religion after a 12 step program. It's their new reality they must share with the rest of us...
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143 comments