So, over at /r/Englishlearning there is a weekly "What is this thing" post

[conuly]

The goal is to herd all the "What do you call this?" posts into the comments there. It never ever works. However, they do occasionally get comments like "Here are the answers to the questions you asked rhetorically as an example" and "Why do you keep posting this and asking the same questions" and "There is no such thing as a pork burger".

Yes, Virginia, there is a pork burger. This is why I have a picture of pork burger patties on my phone, so I can post it every time somebody says that those don't exist, or that they "really" mean a breakfast sandwich or a pulled pork sandwich or a ham sandwich or a BLT.

I always want to ask these people who, I guess, don't get out much why they're so sure that anything they haven't personally heard of before must not exist. It's a big old world, but apparently, not so much for them.

(I suppose I can be forgiven for being a bit snippy this time around, I mean, given everything.)

***********************

500 Years Later, Scientists Prove That Leonardo da Vinci’s Bridge Design Works

The Unlikely Story of an E-mail Time Machine

How Taiwan Made Cashless Payments Cute

Orcas team up with dolphins to hunt salmon, study finds

Can Jollibee Beat American Fast Food at Its Own Game?

A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language

The ‘Race Against Time’ to Save Music Legends’ Decaying Tapes

I don't trust Chrome anymore — here's what pushed me over the edge

Washington state takes stock of flooding damage as another atmospheric river looms

How a US home insurance fix is becoming a problem

Zillow Doesn’t Care If Climate Change Destroys Your New Home

Trump Calls Groceries ‘A Hoax’

Child deaths projected to rise for first time this century, as aid cuts reverse decades of progress

SARS-CoV-2 Leaves a Lasting Mark on the Immune System

Comments

[conuly]

Right!?

[moon_custafer]

I can understand people reacting with suspicion to, say, descriptions of a really weird-sounding plant or animal species; but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen comments like “today in Things That Never Happened” or the more benign “I don’t even care if this is fake, it’s a great story” in response to anecdotes that are neither physically impossible or culturally implausible. I’m talking stuff like “mildly amusing interaction with a neighbour” or “little kid makes funny/unexpectedly perceptive remark.”

[conuly]

A while back I saw a reddit post - two, the original and an update - about a woman who unexpectedly gained custody of her husband's girlfriend's baby after the girlfriend died. And she ended up breaking up with the husband, because he refused to take responsibility for literally any of this, and even tried to present his cheating as a favor he did for her while she was recovering from a difficult birth!

And the comments were full of people asserting it had to be fake because... "you don't get custody of a child that easily".

Except, honestly, that was the most believable part of the whole story! Either Dad just wrote out a change of custody and got it notarized or, since social services was already involved and had already approved OP as a foster mother, when Dad decided to nope out of parenting any of his three kids, the social worker said "Okay, well, if you still want her that'd save me a lot of paperwork".

It is so easy to get custody of a kid, for real. But pointing that out got a lot of "Wow, you really want this story to be not fake!" (No, I really want people to stop kidding themselves about how this process works. It is trivially easy. The USA is not a surveillance state. The government just doesn't care where your child lives unless you make them care. Even actual surveillance states don't care that much.)

[moon_custafer]

Yeah, if the mother was dead and the woman wishing to adopt was married to the father (who didn’t care), that shouldn’t have been too hard.

[conuly]

If social services is not involved, all it really requires is for the parents to write out that they're handing custody to X person until Y date or indefinitely, and ideally to get it notarized. It's super duper easy.