Cigarettes were marketed as actively healthy and good for the lungs. They used doctors to sell them. And wanted everyone to know that the only reason that smokers kept dying of lung diseases is because cigarettes are good for lungs so of course people with bad lungs were smokers. Duh.

When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push Smoking

You think there’s going to be civil war and also, you want to maximise the numbers fighting for the fascists. Cool, cool.

Because handing election victories to fascists is a really, really bad idea.

I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.

But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.

Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.

Because there is no mirror image.

@pjwestin@lemmy.world has given you a good description of fascist methods. They’re not available to the opponents of fascism because they are not fascists.

Fascism appeals to the worst parts of our nature. It gives permission to those feeling fear, humiliation or shame to lash out in anger and destroy the people that make them feel that way.

You can’t deploy the same tactics to make those people want to be on your side instead. If you try to shame them, they will just hate harder.

You should, of course, expose and ridicule the grifters who lead fascist movements and punching fascists is encouraged. But you need to distinguish between authoritarian leaders and the people they seek to lead.

You should not pander to the billionaire-funded leaderships (take note NYT), but you must not sneer at the people they are trying to lead (take note centrist Dems).

Advising a parent to torture a child over food is piss poor advice to start with but when the parent has identified possible autism, you realise you know less than nothing and shut the fuck up.

I don’t know which jurisdiction you’re in but, while it isn’t illegal in the UK, you’re absolutely right about it being a bad idea and you are correct about the reason. In the event of a crash, it could count against you (in the UK, at least).

So the fuck what?

What did you think this bit meant?

(He’s likely on the spectrum.)

The data showed that the chance of scoring rose when teammates showed their support through touch. The effect only appeared after a failed first shot, which makes sense because such a scenario is likely to spike stress levels.

Of course, the data is not shown. And the study is not able to draw causal conclusions. In this case, they’ve hunted around and found a subset of shots (second shots after a first failed shot) where it’s true. And it’s easy to make up reasons after the fact why that might make sense.

It does seem very reasonable to hypothesise that supportive team mates make it less likely you choke on the second shot. But they haven’t shown this is down to touch (they just used that as a proxy for supportive team mates). Nor that the percentage of successful second shots after a failed first shot would be improved by more touching regardless of whether team mates are genuinely supportive or quietly seething…

Yes. I never said any different. It was adopted as a descriptor by gay men, not bigots trying to denigrate them.

These two examples are quite different, I think.

Gay was not originally a slur, AFAIK. It was adopted as a less clinical descriptor by gay people, especially gay men (again, AFAIK). There have been concerted efforts to make it into a slur and it is often used in a derogatory fashion, but it does not have a pre-history of being used as a slur.

Queer is the opposite. It was used as a slur and it is a rare example of successful reclamation of a word. A slogan in the 1980s on Gay Pride protests was “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous, get used to it”. At the time, queer was very much a slur so the chant had a bite that you wouldn’t hear in it today.

Amazing scientist and all round decent man. I’m glad he lived to see his particle found, or probably found, or whatever the current state of the debate is.

I especially appreciate him for saying these sorts of things, to colleagues, journalists and anyone else who might listen:

Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system

A long life, lived well. RIP

Exactly this.

AFAIK it’s good coffee because (wild) civets select perfectly ripe berries to eat. Captive civets just get fed berries.

You’re nitpicking the headline while agreeing with the article.

“What is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, and that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.”

I’m going to be a pedant and note that recorded history is only ~6k years old, for those parts of the world that had by then started writing shit down in non-perishable form (at the time, or at least before the spoken memories were lost forever). And much shorter for others, obv.

This question is difficult to frame accurately, but “events from BCE” might work, if you want examples that occurred multiple thousands of years ago.

“Someone else will do evil if I don’t agree to do evil so I might as well do evil myself” is a bullshit argument. And your point is directly addressed in the article:

By resigning publicly, I am saddened by the knowledge that I likely foreclose a future at the State Department. I had not initially planned a public resignation. Because my time at State had been so short — I was hired on a two-year contract — I did not think I mattered enough to announce my resignation publicly. However, when I started to tell colleagues of my decision to resign, the response I heard repeatedly was, “Please speak for us.”

Africa is more diverse than the rest of the world put together.

Which particular Africans are you referring to?

If you are forced to use them:

1. Do not use the app
2. Find what you want on the website
3. Copy the description with a reasonable amount of detail
4. Paste description into your less evil search engine of choice
5. Click through and buy

That way, Amazon has to pay the search engine.

I must be missing some context because I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about.

Who wouldn’t tell who what and why does that matter?