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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Wouldn’t that only be true if the third party was running a brand new slate of candidates? If the Republicans and Democrats are in secret talks to form a third party, it’s likely that a whole bunch of incumbents plan to break off from their parties to join the third party. They don’t need to win an election to do that, they could do it right now.

    Of course their old parties would try to defeat them in the next election, but if these incumbents have been getting elected for many years then they’d still be hard to unseat even in a different party. Especially so if these members’ electorates are already disgruntled with the existing parties.






  • Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.

    You can’t draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that’s separate from their arabic brothers and sisters

    Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.

    That’s what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.

    The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.

    I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.


  • Nobody contends that the “shared identity” of Israel has no right to exist

    That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.

    You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.













  • The handful of well-intentioned docs are the exception, not the rule.

    I wouldn’t be so quick to judge the intentions of doctors who do over-prescribe. Consider this scenario:

    You are a doctor. Your patient comes in with severe pain from a herniated disc caused by an injury at work. None of the ordinary painkillers or muscle relaxants you prescribe are working and they keep returning to your office to complain about constant pain. You know that opioids will be extremely effective at reducing or eliminating their pain but you also know that these drugs cause addiction. You explain this to your patient and they are adamant: they are 100% willing to risk becoming a drug addict if it means they can escape their severe chronic pain.

    What do you do?

    Personally, I find this dilemma so troubling that I would not want to be a doctor because of it. I have other reasons for not taking that career path but even if it were the only reason it would be enough to stop me. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that you can just ignore a patient in severe pain and say “I’m sorry, I won’t prescribe this legal drug which will alleviate your pain.”