ObjectivityIncarnate

deleted by creator

What do you make of this?

Ok I agree it is very suspicious that Congress suddenly got their shit together for this one thing. But people keep doomposting this bill without actually reading it. And it deserves to be read in all the beautiful airtight glory that it is.

Massie and Khanna anticipated every single excuse DOJ normally uses to bury sensitive records, and they wrote the law to shut all of them down. To be clear, the DOJ will still try to hide, but it’s going to fail.

Here’s what the bill actually does:

They can’t hide anything for “embarrassment,” “reputational harm,” or “political sensitivity.”

That’s an explicit statutory ban. No shielding Trump, Clinton, Gates, etc. The law literally forbids it.

The argument of “Everything will suddenly be classified!” doesn’t work either.

The bill forces DOJ to declassify to the maximum extent possible and if anything stays classified, they must publish a public unclassified summary for each redaction.

That’s not optional.

“New investigations” don’t block release.

The “active investigation” exception is temporary, narrow, document-specific, and requires a written public justification in the Federal Register.

You can’t just open a random investigation and hide whole categories of documents under this bill.

The best part? Congress still gets the full list of names.

No matter what gets redacted publicly, DOJ must give Congress an unredacted list of every government official and politically exposed person named in the files. No exceptions. Not for classification. Not for investigations. Not for national security.

And enforcement is real. This is a mandatory “shall release” statute. If DOJ drags its feet, it goes straight to D.C. District Court, which has zero patience for agencies abusing secrecy laws.

This isn’t a symbolic transparency bill. It’s one of the tightest, most loophole-proof disclosure laws Congress has ever passed — which is exactly why all of their objections on the GOP side were never successful or just weak attempts to attack a statute that defines CSAM.

People can be cynical all day, but the text is the text.

And the text is a brick wall against the usual bullshit.

His spokesperson also assured reporters that it did not refer to Ghislaine Maxwell’s horse, also named Bubba.

Now THAT would have been a story, lol

They seem to, at best, not care enough about child molestation to stop supporting their political ‘team’.

Many, many people are single-issue voters. As one example, if someone genuinely believes that abortion is equivalent to murder, it can be very difficult for them to justify voting against a pro-life candidate, even if they agree with them on nothing else. It’s been found that one’s views on abortion (in either direction) will trump (pardon the pun) everything else for a whopping THIRD of all voters. And that’s just one of the myriad things that could be someone’s ‘single issue’.

Because of the way our voting system works, and the fact that there are only two candidates, it’s very inaccurate overall to equivocate a vote for a candidate to a vote for a specific X that said candidate did or endorsed, etc. The same kinds of rhetorical ‘games’ are played with legislation. A bill has X provisions in it, one of them is a dealbreaker for congressperson Y, so they vote against it, and later, that person is criticized by their opponents for “voting against” any/all of the other X-1 provisions.

I know it’s easier and takes a lot less brainpower to just assume that everyone who votes for the Other Candidate is emphatically supportive of the worst thing that person ever did, but that just isn’t the reality, and only adds to the polarization that is deteriorating political discourse in the present day.

There is no shortage of real things to criticize—there is no justification for these absurd generalizations of massive swaths of citizens.

Actually thinking that there are OVER ONE HUNDRED MILLION people in the US who think FAVORABLY of child molestation is deep, deep brain rot. You’ve dived to a seriously dangerous depth of radicalized dehumanization. And dehumanization kicks the door to atrocity wide open.

You’re literally on the same ideological level as the Pizzagate-rs right now, do you really not realize that?

Do you feel like you need someone to be THAT evil for you to justify opposing them?

Trump is GOP. Group of pedophiles.

That alone is 99% probability.

Are you seriously implying that 99% of self-identified Republicans are pedophiles?

Can’t say I’m shocked that pointing out clickbait and misleading elements in the headline led to a bunch of downvotes. He’s on the Wrong Team, you see, so if you do anything but swallow the headline whole, reading not a single word past it, with absolutely zero scrutiny, you’re defending him, defending child molestation, and basically a pedophile yourself, you know. /s

George Carlin put it pretty well, imo.

This seems alright, no?

The executive order directs the HHS and the Treasury and Labor departments to ensure hospitals and insurers disclose “actual prices of items and services, not estimates” and take action to ensure “pricing information is standardized and easily comparable across hospitals and health plans” including prescription drug prices.

deleted by creator

Well, in a general sense (meaning, to be extra clear, I am not referring to Mamdani specifically), “these ideas won’t accomplish what he intends” and “these ideas will mess everything up” are not mutually exclusive at all. They’re essentially the same sentiment, if you think about it.

I think the confusion is in the incorrect assumption that only the successful execution of a policy/idea/etc. can do the latter, but the same level of damage could easily happen in the course of an ultimately-failed attempt, as well.

That’s enough pedantry from me for now, though, lol.

It always felt a little wrong to me, but as I got older I realized these people are living lives of despair and it’s really just not the biggest problem in society when you have the rich engaging openly in corruption and violating laws while going unpunished.

Sure it’s not the biggest problem, but it’s not only the biggest problems that deserve attention.

Heart disease kills more than just about any other physical ailment, so should we put all research money/resources into that and ignore everything else?

If you’re a White Republican/MAGA/Christian Male, I’m just going to assume you’re a pedophile now.

So if everyone who’s over 7 feet tall is male, by your logic, everyone who’s male is over 7 feet tall.

Hopefully that makes it obvious just how flawed this reasoning is.

The probabilities are just too high.

Mainstream media is the last place you want to learn probability from. It’s the reason that over decades of violent crime rates decreasing, the public is led to believe that it’s been increasing that entire time.

Have you considered that the media you are (or allow yourself to be) exposed to, plays a part in that?

As an example, this took literal seconds to find, and it’s an article from this month:

A North Carolina state House member has been charged with sex-related crimes involving a teenager earlier this year, court records show.

Six-term Democratic state Rep. Cecil Brockman, 41, of High Point, was arrested Wednesday on two counts each of statutory sexual offense with a child and taking indecent liberties with a child, according to a magistrate’s order detailing his arrest.

I bet you’ve never heard of this person, or ever saw this article, right?

Before I explicitly looked, I hadn’t either. But it’s not that it was hidden, really, just that it’s not the data the algorithms put in front of my eyes, without me having to go seek it. Don’t underestimate the impact these algorithms have on what you’re made aware of, and how that controlled exposure can shape, or warp, your sense of reality.

I’ll never forget that graph that showed the comparison of how much violent crime had decreased over the years in the US, juxtaposed with public perception of violent crime rates literally rising in inverse proportion over the same period of time, thanks to mainstream media sensationalism. Ever since that day, I’ve tried to keep myself from making assumptions about how common something is, based on how often it’s reported on, especially when it comes to controversial/shocking subjects like these, as those are the ones where there is the most temptation for an outlet to sensationalize.

Is this kind of absurd hyperbole really productive?

Come on, not all singers molest children.

I feel like the fact that he was a church minister is much more relevant information for the headline. Who gives a shit that he sang a song at a Trump rally once, seriously? Clickbait slop.

a guy that brought his Charlie Kirk flag
‘what the fuck even is a Charlie Kirk flag?’

Well…can you tell us? You’re the one who saw it, lol.

the credit report disclosure clearly indicates that our score took a hit because we don’t carry a balance.

Are you paying your cards off before the statement cycle ends, resulting in your statement reading $0 every month? “No recent revolving balances” means that, as far as the credit reporting agencies know, you haven’t been using your card at all for 3+ months (emphasis added)^[1]:

“No recent revolving balances”—another way to say your credit cards are all paid off—sometimes appears as a FICO® Score risk factor. To be included in a credit score calculation, accounts need to show activity over time. By making a small purchase each month and then paying the balance in full, you will demonstrate that you are a good credit risk. The balance on your billing statement is what is usually shown in your credit report. Even though you’ve paid the balance in full, your credit report would show the balance, indicating activity in your account and helping your score.

You should let the statement cycle end with the balance of whatever you used it for, and then pay it off, anytime between that day and your due date. As long as you pay it off no later than your due date, you’ll still pay no interest, but paying it off before the statement ends prevents the agencies from even realizing that you used the card at all, because the agencies can’t see your actual credit card usage activity. They see only:

• statement balance
• (if it’s nonzero) payment status
  • ‘did you pay at least the minimum?’
  • ‘did you pay on time/by the due date?’

I also have a plus 800 credit score, but it would be higher if I made a habit of paying the bank lots of interest income.

No, it wouldn’t. Interest paid is not a factor at all—the credit reporting agencies literally have no way of knowing what portion, if any, of your statement balance is interest, they’re only provided the bottom line total statement balance.

Also, if you’re over 750, any further increase is ‘gravy’ anyway, almost no lender has a tier higher than that. The highest ‘breakpoint’ I’ve ever seen is 780. Even if what you said was accurate, ‘I’m over 800 but it could be higher’ is a distinction without a difference.

So all available reporting says my credit score went down when I paid off my loans and has remained in this new lower state for months since, but the secret real number used to decide my fate maybe didn’t.

There’s no maybe. I already explained how it works. The only part of it that’s ‘secret’ is the minutia of the score tabulation, to make it harder to game. Loans closed in good standing (i.e. you paid them off) are part of your credit report for 10 years.

Get the fuck out of here with that. Credit scores are purely a value used by lenders to determine how much money can be extracted from a consumer.

This is demonstrably bullshit.

Someone who maxes out a credit card, and then only pays minimum payments, and always makes them late, is, via interest accruing and late payment fees, making the lender basically the maximum amount of profit possible. And yet doing this will result in a garbage credit score, because using every penny of your credit limit is very detrimental to your credit score, and not making payments on time is extremely detrimental to your credit score.

Meanwhile, take me, someone who never pays a cent of interest, because he pays off his card every statement cycle (and on time, naturally), and because of card rewards, I’m the one profiting, the lender is literally the one paying me, and ‘yet’, my credit score is in the 800s.

So how do you reconcile that with your assumed truth quoted above? It’s very hard to understand how anyone can arrive at the conclusion you did, while also knowing (as I assume you do) that late payments simultaneously hurt your credit score and increase profit for the lender, just as one example.

It goes down if you’re delinquent

As it should—the whole point of the score is to rate your reliability in repaying what you borrow.

it goes down it you pay things off early without racking up all the interest they wanted

False. You will never be worse off after paying a loan off early than you were before you took out the loan. Again, I haven’t paid a cent of interest on my credit cards in over a decade, and I paid off the only car loan I ever had, really early, less than a year into it.

it goes down if you don’t run enough of a balance on your credit cards.

Also false. Higher utilization is BAD for your credit score, not good. You’re saying literally the opposite of what’s true, do you realize that? You might want to google ‘credit score myths’ and find an article on bankrate or nerdwallet to educate yourself, you’ve been massively misled about this, honestly.

It doesn’t protect consumers

It gets good borrowers like me lower interest rates, and higher credit limits.

it barely protects lenders

Pretty sure the lenders would heavily disagree with that, lol. For very obvious reasons, anyone who’s considering lending someone money is going to be very interested in what happened the last X times that person was lent money.

it’s purely used to determine how much can be extracted from a consumer’s bank account.

Still false the second time.