• The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    I dunno, snopes seems to think that in context this is an exaggeration, but I’m less reliant on them alone these days. The wiki page on Greg does affirm that it seems to have happened, and pegs the source on this as McBrien, Richard (2000), Lives of the Popes.

    So there may or may not be mitigating context here, but from what I’m reading the man was such a grundle that we owe him nothing. Amusingly, it seems he was quite intensely conservative, even as far as having opposed rail, calling them “roads to hell”.

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    16 hours ago

    Let’s go back to the old ways, get rid of street lighting but make it illegal to be outside after dark without a torch.

  • sir_pronoun@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    I would actually prefer this. There are studies that claim that crime and suicide rates go down when cities turn off the lights at night.

    Anyway, I’m not a big fan of many atheism posts here, the Catholic church had good sides, too. But black and white thinking it is, apparently.

    • Ozymandias1688@feddit.org
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      12 hours ago

      There is a difference between “we did this and it might have negative side effects. Let’s reevaluate” and “we should not even try this because we should not try anything new, ever (because my imaginary friend in the sky said so, pinky-swear)”

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      this is actually part of my job, crime, and using enviromental context to reduce it. (as private security,)

      If anyone gives you a blanket altruism about xyz reduces your risks of being broken into or reduces hoodlumism or something, it’s usually safe to ignore them.

      The only exception to that is deadbolts on residential doors. (and read that as “reduces”… if you’re an idiot who parks a $500,000 cybertruck in the open and leaves your front door unlocked, you’re a moron whose going to donate a cybertruck to the ‘I need some joy’ ridership fund.)

      In any case lighting is very contextual. It’s different for parks, different for streetways, and different for residential houses. even different neighborhoods. or between different sorts of apartment buildings.

      • spankinspinach
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        6 hours ago

        You’ve piqued my interest. I had read about something similar to the lights being piloted in one of the Scandinavian countries. Something to the effect of “using blue hued lights and reducing light pollution with scheduled lighting” was correlated with a reduction in criminal activity in piloted neighborhoods.

        Would you happen to know anything about this? I never saw any follow up on it, but as a farm boy that moved into the city I definitely noted a change between dark at night and artificially lit at night

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      13 hours ago

      Yeah, I’m with that pope on this one. Street lighting should be used way more sparingly than it is now.