For some reason you reminded me of this.

Flex Loans offer borrowers up to $4,000 at 279.5% interest, trapping thousands of people in debt that can land them in court.

Payday loans in the states are horrifying. It got so bad that the US government stepped in to limit the interest rates they could charge military members.

Certain tribes are exploiting regulatory loopholes and charging 600%.

Oklahoma prefers DUI hires.

Hey - don’t stand so close to me.

Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.

“Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre- Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlost are, for instance,” cheap," “sham,” “smutty,” “highfalutin,”“in bad taste.” dignity - all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of “sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place.”

Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?

How’d that work out last time?

How hard would it be to piss on Reagan’s grave?

But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

It is so goddamn frustrating. I had one on here claiming that the US had not deported US citizens, while linking the article saying that the US had deported four children who were citizens!

I read fast and have been following this shit for so long that I can call a lot out. But it never changes their minds, they never concede defeat. They just jump from place to place. Or “you libs always assume i’m MAGA” is a funny one I keep seeing on here - like, if you are supporting Trump’s policies, you are a Trump supporter. It’s so goddamn slimy and disingenuous.

TERFs are the worst about it. They’ve started spreading Holocaust denial. I saw one claim the the Nazi government issued transvestite passes! Like no! It was the Weimar Republic! The Nazis used those passes to track down and kill trans people!

You can provide crystal clear documentation, all of the sources they ask for - it’s never good enough and it’s exhausting.

Nabokov seemed to think that the fog was important. I guess it’s a novel about a legal case, and maybe the metaphor is the “fog” of legal confusion.

Sorta like how “awesome” and “terrible” in their current usage are very weak words.

A youth pastor and Cotton Mather could both say “God is awesome” and mean very different things.

Tbh, it should. American educations don’t touch Africa barring a dip into Egypt, which usually compresses the dynasties in a way that does nothing for a deeper understanding. Even as someone with a BA in history, that watched the course listing like a hawk for “history of the Sahel” or “history of the Mali empire” or some lovely 3000-4000 course - nothing.

I should have been taught who Nkrumah was. And Léopold Senghor, and Kenyatta…

Instead, I lean on The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith. Which is a good book, but by a journalist, not a historian.

Pre medieval knitting bothers me immensely. Stockinette is too recognizable and too taken for granted to not be driving me crazy constantly.

Look up who Alec McGuiness played in Lawrence of Arabia.

Fun story - I went to a troubled teen facility, and we had “group.” There was no actual qualifications required for the people running “group.”

We watched Tyler Perry movies. (Also at one point Ip Man which is a goated film.) I learned the phrase “give head” or similar while watching How Did I Get Married. I was asked to think about the lessons that this movie could apply to my interpersonal relationships - I had never considered how the frequency of oral sex would decease after marriage.

Tbh - if you do any academic study of history, that’s what it all starts to look like.

I tried to watch Spartacus because Kubrick and… I couldn’t. Those fucking hairdos. The depiction of Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator upset me - like no, the man was not a proto Thomas Jefferson (and even the IRL Jefferson made his money on child slavery and raped children.) Wuxia is so much fun but there’s never going to be a period accurate Three Kingdoms (which is a 14th century novel anyway)

Medieval history especially…. That’s pages and pages, and I’m not even really that much of a medievalist.

Halle Berry, or hallelujah

Klarna? The usury company? The “preys on kids who failed the Algebra 2 test on interest” company?

This is a thing on social media already.

Lots of bad faith conservatives will just output AI garbage. They don’t care about truth, they just want to waste your time. You spend time researching their claims, providing counter evidence - they don’t care, because they don’t even read what you say, just copy and paste into an LLM.

It’s very concerning with the Trump administrations attack on science. Science papers are disappearing, accurate/vetted information because sparser - then you can train Grok to claim that all trans women are rapists or that global warming is just Milkanovitch cycles.

It is and has been an info war. An attack on human knowledge itself. And AI will be used to facilitate it.

My mom took away my orthodontic care as a punishment when I was a teenager, so I ended up removing my own braces.

Remember teeth are luxury bones that you need a separate subscription for in the US.

So - this started as a John Bircher thing right?

I’ve just been befuddled at the purpose and the point of this conspiracy theory. I guess Alex Jones’s dad is a dentist (and a Bircher) but I doubt that dentists conspire for us to have bad teeth.

Just generic “I don’t like the gubmit”? Was it a Jewish person who suggested that we improve dental health on a population level? What’s the initial bit of skin or hair that this stupid booger coalesced around?

I guess these weirdos have always been around. We just didn’t put them in charge of health.

Do you have to have a certification? I’ve done some accounts payable type stuff before, I just don’t know how to approach that field.