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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • While this prosecution was completely fucked up and was 100% linked to the criminalisation of abortion (and therefore miscarriages and pregnancy in general), the issue was that following the traumatic premature birth she didn’t immediately remove the baby from the toilet

    Moving north wouldn’t have helped on paper, as the alleged crime of letting your baby drown is still illegal

    That said, possibly a more progressive state might have had the good sense to not prosecute or even treat this as a criminal matter. On the other hand, the DA where this happened was a Democrat according to the article

    A grand jury declined to indict her, so it ended ‘okay’, apart from all the unnecessary additional horrific trauma inflicted on a grieving mother and being a harrowing sign of dark repressive times





  • There was a really good article on this and unfortunately I can’t find it now to share

    But the gist was that Titan exploited a bunch of loopholes, among other things. The paying customers on the sub were in fact ‘marine researchers’ who coincidently made a donation, and things like that

    Some of the people who were at one point involved but left due to safety concerns raised the issue with OSHA (? - or whoever the more specific body was) who repeatedly failed to investigate or take any action

    So for me, whether or not they are able to charge the company, the industry regulators and government bodies overseeing them need to face some questions and judgements too (though it would take a more knowledgeable person than me to know what exactly that looks like)







  • Just in the spirit of pedantry, its not really true to say that the US system predated most parliaments.

    Like, maybe its technically true now due to the expansion of democratic and republic systems in the post-colonial era, but parliaments in Western Europe were plentiful and long-established in 1776.

    The first American government was notable in that is was completely divorced from a hereditary Monarch, and I don’t wanna downplay that, but a system in which a representitive body of land-owners is elected by an enfranchised class to decide policy and even pass legislation existed in, for example, Iceland since the 10th Century, Catalonia since the 12th, England since the 13th. It was arguably the standard during the enlightenment in Europe.

    My two cents, the US system does seem to be remarkably inflexible. I guess it’s complicated to unpack why exactly, but a combination of myth-making, bad-faith originalists, and the sheer size of the country probably all play a part in it


  • It’s very debatable if trump’s EO would have capped the price of Insulin or Epipens in a meaningful way - and its factually wrong that it was the same cap and legislation that Biden put into place.

    Trump’s EO meant that Federally Qualified Health Centers would have to offer Insulin and Epinephrine to “Low Income Individuals” without health insurance "at the discounted price paid by the FQHC grantee or sub-grantee under the 340B Prescription Drug Program” plus a “minimal” fee.

    From your own link, FQHCs already had a requirement to not charge anything to people in poverty, so “If ‘low income’ is defined as under 100% of poverty, this may not really change anything. Even if the income level is set somewhat higher, most patients likely would still have been protected by the sliding fee scale without this change”.

    This link, like your others, is from 2020. I don’t know how “low income” would actually have been defined since it wasn’t scheduled to come into place until Jan 22nd - during Biden’s administration.

    It’s true that Biden froze this - as others have mentioned in this thread, he put a 60 day freeze on all pending legislature when taking office, which is a fairly standard practice.

    Biden’s own Insulin cap was part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and capped the price of Insulin to $35 monthly for products covered by Medicare D.

    So yeah I concede that it’s an oversimplification to say that Trump did nothing and Biden did everything, but… the Insulin cap is Biden’s legislation. Trump did not cap Insulin or Epipen prices during his 4 years in office.


  • The last time I was in Berlin, the year before Covid, they had set ups in some of the parks which were like painted lines and ‘boxes’ on the floor

    Weed dealers were allowed to sell within these lines (probably not actually legally, but with an understanding that the police would leave them be? Not sure of the specific rules) but not outside of them

    This meant that people who weren’t interested wouldnt have their park time marred by shady people coming up and trying to sell them drugs, and people who were interested could just go to one of the dealers in the lines

    It was just a better, safer way of doing things. Everybody won.

    Actual legalisation is the next step of course. Criminalisation of something as minor of weed just creates crime and danger, it doesnt reduce it. So this is good news




  • No sitting president has ever lost their party’s primary

    LBJ dropped out of his party’s primary, and although it was far too soon to say if he would have lost, he faced strong opposition in New-Politic anti-war candidates Kennedy and McCarthy. He is on record as worrying about the primary and it doubtless played a big part of his dropping out

    Kennedy of course got shot, and the more conservative Humphrey ended up with the nomination over McCarthy (or late entry McGovern), sparking riots at the DNC. The situations and systems were quite different, but i think there’s some parallels with Biden/Clinton vs Bernie there

    I think Truman also dropped out rather than fight a tough primary, but i don’t know so much about that



  • Because its really not about whether or not the historical Jesus was or could have been white - its about the fact that white cultures will almost exclusively portray Jesus as being their own race for reasons that have nothing to do with historical interpretation of demographics is the middle east in ~0ad

    People calling out White Jesus arent doing so because of a ‘notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearences’, but instead because of a hypocrisy of many Christian groups - in particular in the evangelical American right - to almost literally whitewash Jesus to look more like themselves, while often dehumanizing the people that look like Jesus ‘probably’ looked like.

    Its really not about a historical question of the average middle-eastern skin colour two millenia ago. I assure you that the vast majority of ‘White Jesus’ portrayers have not engaged with that question and do not care about the answer. So to look to that as a refutation of the criticism is really missing the point.