While it doesn’t work as well with or as your joke, the ATF is actually now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. So we need to add the E as well and we can spell FACET, which is less fun. Or use M for Marijuana and spell FMEAT.

The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.

Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.

Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…

“anti” also doesn’t mean opposite, it means against. The roots of the word, tracing back to the Greek, means against. As it does in French and it’s Sanskrit version. All forms of it mean opposed to. This is why language is important and some checks should be there to counter the “language is malleable” argument that people use as an excuse to not learn how to use words correctly. The idea that anti means opposite has been around as long as I can remember, and definitely longer than that, but it drastically changes the meaning of words.