I’ve never used the word shylock and don’t know for sure if I’ve ever even heard it prior to recent events, but until you mentioned it now I never made the connection to the word shyster, which i have used before. Although maybe it was more along the lines of sheister. Never really thought about the spelling or etymologyof the word. In any event I am not antisemitic and don’t have any issues with Jews at all. They are normal people, who do good things and bad things like anyone else. My problem is in the pearl clutching that happens anytime something like this comes up. Trump got called out for it just like Biden did, and now he knows better. I guess we will see if he continues to use it. I don’t think Biden has since his incident, probably because he isn’t antisemitic and simply made a poor choice of words out of ignorance. I try to go by hanlons razor in these situations, “never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance”.

Yeah ok, failed purity test, got it.

It’s not obvious at all. It used to be a commonly used term for dishonest bankers, and it’s still defined as such in most dictionaries, though many of them also note that it is less common now because of more awareness of the harmful stereotype.

What if he used a term for crooked bankers to describe crooked bankers and didn’t consider that it propagated harmful stereotypes?

Was he racist in 2014? While he was vice president to a black man? The point is that some terms that old people use don’t mean the same thing to them that they do to average people today.

Edit: lol, oops. Yes, Obama is black and not Jewish. I guess Biden could be antisemitic and not racist against black people. Or I suppose he could be racist and still work closely with a black man and appear convincingly to be on good terms with him. In any event it doesn’t prove much about Biden being antisemitic. I think he just used a dated term because he is old.

I agree. There are a lot of terms like that. People used to use them commonly, but now there is more awareness of the harm in these stereotypes. A lot of old people have a hard time adjusting. Someone I know used to use the term cottonpicker until I pointed out how racist it is. Somehow he had never made the connection, which seemed crazy, but I actually believe him.

Do you think Biden was also being racist when he used the term? Or was he using it in a more general sense, as a term to describe immoral and unethical bankers in general?

Not sure I follow. He did say Shylock right? Clearly referring to the Shakespeare character? What else could he have been referring to? Or is Shylock somehow associated with Jews otherwise?

That’s kind of weak… He’s obviously comparing them to the character of Shylock, and the fact that he’s Jewish is more of a criticism of Shakespeare being antisemitic. Trump might be antisemitic, but this isn’t a very good example.

Why would the goal be to make women miserable? Like what’s the point?

Any time it mentions kids or safety i get suspicious that it really means spying on us or giving a bunch of money to cronies.

Lol what is this map? We need some fact checking…

Well it doesn’t look like a net good right now. We have a million oversized trucks everywhere. We could have the same number of trucks, but smaller, for the same or less gas consumption. It would also be less dangerous to pedestrians and easier on the roads. Less tire wear and tear, and so on.

Not sure I see the connection between margin and truck size.

Truck size growth is driven at least partially, if not mainly, by gas mileage regulations, where you can have lower gas mileage on larger vehicles, an allowance that was made to accommodate work vehicles. So people who want a powerful vehicle are forced to go bigger. If these regulations were relaxed or eliminated, we would have much smaller but still powerful trucks. I’d be interested in something like that…

This meme is not even close to theologically accurate. It’s just a meme.

Dude the edgelord routine is brutal

You can’t use logic based on a belief and simultaneously write it off as mythology if you want to be logically consistent. You first assert that Christianity is mythology, but then reference Christianity itself to “prove” that people who believe in it are sinners, framing them in terms of the belief that you just asserted was false. Your whole thing is nonsensical.

Well your logic doesn’t do much to prove your assertion…

Way better to have foreigners working for less than a living wage, earning 2 cents per hour and giving birth to more factory workers, am I right? But for real, the right answer is that nobody should live like that, so how do we change things? What steps can we take to wean ourselves out of the consumption driven economy? Tbh this might do it, or at least push it in that direction.