The actual transcript:

But [Dick Cheney’s] daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face, you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee. Well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy, but she’s a stupid person. And I used to have, I have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.

I’m no fan of Trump but this is unambiguously not a threat. The clear meaning is that she would would change her mind if she was one of the soldiers who would be fighting a war that she supports, not that Trump would threaten her with a gun until she changed her mind.

Not all older people are sexually attracted to other older people. A 70-year-old friend of mine confessed that he’s sad and frustrated because any woman he is attracted to is way too young for him. (He’s not a creep who would actually bother younger women.)

I worry about this myself. I’m still young enough that I think women my own age are attractive, but to be honest I can’t imagine being attracted to a retirement-aged woman unless she is one of those celebrities who have a hidden painting that ages instead of them.

I think “freedom” resonates emotionally in different ways for different people. If you try to pass a law making it illegal to drink bleach, I will oppose that law. I certainly don’t want to drink bleach, but right now I have the freedom to drink it and you would be trying to take away that freedom. It has value to me even though I intend never to exercise it.

Taxes, unlike drinking bleach, are a matter of trade-offs. I’m not categorically against them. However, I don’t buy into the argument that I shouldn’t oppose them as long as I will never have to pay them.

A caveman would just use his finger and then lick the salsa off of it.

I did a 1000-calorie daily deficit for a few months, in order to lose two pounds a week. I got used to being hungry all the time after a couple of weeks, but having a lot less energy and being sleepy during the day were harder to deal with. My body was trying to conserve calories that way, but pushing through it was possible.

The hardest part was actually accurately counting the calories. It was relatively simple for off-the-shelf food, but a lot more annoying for things someone else home-cooked for me. I had to ask for the recipe every time, weigh how much I ate, and then track the calories per ingredient on a spreadsheet. Restaurant food was effectively impossible to count, but that didn’t matter much because I was so focused on filling food that I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. I’m a vegetarian, so I ended up eating mostly beans, tofu (which is also beans, now that I think about it), and vegetables. Other things weren’t as filling per calorie as those foods.

Have things really gotten that bad?

A house can’t literally be branded, so the use of “brand” in that context must be metaphorical. People, however, can and historically often have been branded quite literally.

As for othering: it is irrelevant to the point I was making, so your reference to it here is a good example of how people make a false and inflammatory statement, and then when challenged about it, those people retreat to a much weaker, uncontroversial claim. Meanwhile the public has seen the original, false, and inflammatory statement but not the challenge or the retreat.

No one would care if the headline said “Israelis see Palestinians as fundamentally different from themselves” or even “Israelis sometimes don’t treat Palestinian prisoners with respect.” However, what the headline does say is that Israelis physically mutilate Palestinian prisoners. Here in the comments you make a pitiful argument that the claim of physical mutilation is in fact just a metaphor, although even then you try to sneak in a comparison between Jews and Nazis. Jews aren’t tattooing anything on anyone, but apparently they still have less decency than Nazis according to you.

I think they’re almost certainly deliberately using ambiguous language to push an agenda. (Either that or both the author and the editor are incompetent.) And I would add that the language isn’t even actually ambiguous. It’s simply deceptive. “Brand” in this context would be interpreted literally by a normal reader and claiming it’s a metaphor is disingenuous.

Are there a lot of Ukrainian Americans voting for Trump? The ones I know tend to be relatively conservative by American standards and a couple of them are voting for him, but most of them support aid to Ukraine and so they support Harris.

Finally, a day when it is acceptable for me to lure children into my van!

They had to prove themselves worthy by fighting the oven with nothing but their bare hands, man to microwave.

My impression has been that Harris is indicating that her economic policy will move in the opposite direction with her talk of “price-gouging”. Is there a reason to think she will do what this article suggests, other than the fact that some donors are asking her to?

societies have utilized shame in order to shun unwanted or undesirable opinions forever

Using shame isn’t new. Using shame in this particular way at this particular time appears to be a poor strategy. It’s deliberately divisive and conservative reactionaries aren’t the only ones who are motivated to vote against it. By now many people who call themselves liberal and have a history of reliably voting for Democrats oppose it too. I think Nate Silver does a good job of expressing why in the context of Israel, although he’s looking at a much bigger picture. Most of these people are still voting for Democrats, because Harris is a centrist and Trump is, well, Trump. It’s still not helping.

Lemmy is a place where it often seems like leftist views are almost universal among Democrats, but Lemmy is not representative of the large majority of Democratic voters. I don’t think most Harris voters (as opposed to just the vocal Democrats online) despise Republicans.

If you’re a billionaire intent on becoming even wealthier, that usually implies that you really enjoy being a successful businessman. I don’t see why business success for its own sake would be inherently less satisfying than other sorts of accomplishment.

The police are thinking that too.

Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

In either case, the actions of one person don’t prove much about the larger movement that he intends to support.

This law was already not being enforced. Only 463 people actually got in trouble for breaking it in 2023, so the odds of being punished for jaywalking that year were about the same as the odds of being murdered.

I do wonder what effect repealing the law will have on civil suits. If a driver hits a pedestrian, are there now new situations in which the driver is liable? The article says

People may also still be liable in civil actions for accidents caused by jaywalking

but that’s quite vague.

I think that’s quite a stretch. Girdusky’s comment is clearly a response specifically to Hasan’s expression of support for Palestinians. What’s the connection between “all supporters of Palestinians are terrorists” and being an Arab?

The answer does say

The reason isn’t some special string of A’s, G’s, T’s or C’s found in dad’s DNA.

It’s true that two same-sex parents of either sex have the basic genetic information to create a female child (a male child needs at least one male parent) but the natural process of embryo development is a big deal!

My problem with Windows is that when I want to eject a USB drive, Windows refuses to do so, refuses to tell me what program is apparently still using the drive, and certainly refuses to kill that program. I am removing the drive. I can’t just not remove it!

On Monday’s prime time show, after Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan stated that he supports Palestinians, conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky responded, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.”

The remark is offensive, but how is it racist? The implication was that Hasan’s ideology is similar to that of Hezbollah, which isn’t a race.