LJ bans beards in default icons

Not intentionally, but this is too good not to mock:

...Specifically, default user picture icons are prohibited to contain overt violence, or a direct, unobstructed view of any primary or secondary sexual characteristics, regardless of the content of the icon itself.

I'm guessing that somebody thought "secondary sexual characteristics" was a good way to say "female breasts" and didn't bother to look up what it actually means.

Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys, and other myths

Unfortunately, since most kids don't seem to get any decent sort of historical education these days, way too many folk are reliant on Internet History. Which is basically 'selected elements of history, carefully pruned and misrepresented to support whatever point the poster is trying to prove at the time', usually with a healthy dose of jingoism thrown in.

The usual Internet History version of WWII - the European portion of it - goes something like this: Hitler was a megalomaniac who wanted to take over Europe and persecute the Jews. Neville Chamberlain was a naive fool who thought he could appease Hitler by letting him have a few bits of it here and there. [Insert argument-by-parallel about what we should learn from this today.] When war finally did come, the French showed their cowardice by surrendering rather than fighting. Fortunately, the Americans eventually showed up to liberate France, for which the French ought to be thanking the USA every day of their existence.

(Internet History is somewhat fuzzy on dates - in particular, where the US entry into the war stood in relation to all these other events - but it seems to be generally understood that the USA came into the war because they wanted to help out their buddies, ungrateful cheese-eaters as they might be.)

( Those who misremember history are doomed to repeat it in Internet arguments. )