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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • 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


  • They definitely didnt help, nor did the right wing media or the Labour Party centrists undermining him

    But ultimately he lost because of Brexit.

    In his first election, despite the pressure against him, he took the Tories to a hung parliament and forced them to make a deal with the DUP. Cos people were sick of Austerity and liked his domestic platform

    But when managing Brexit became the main issue in 2019(?), Johnson had a really strong message of ‘oven-ready brexit’, ‘get it done’, and Labour didn’t have a coherent strategy. They didnt want to go full ‘reverse it’, cos lots of votes for Brexit came from Labour seats. They also didnt want to go full ‘get out deal or no deal’ because generally the left and progressive voters were anti-brexit.

    Corbyn was elected to the leadership on the strength of his domestic and anti-austerity policies, and when the focus shifted to Brexit he was out of his comfort zone.

    That’s my analysis anyway. I liked Corbyn’s foreign policy, but it wasn’t what built his popularity


  • I was sceptical of this claim so I did some research - 700,000 is almost certainly too high, but other than that it’s disturbingly true:

    The 700,000 number comes from a Russian parliamentarian in 2023, and refers to orphaned and abandoned children Russia has ‘protected’ from conflict zones in Ukraine. A later Russian report walked this back a bit, and claimed that most of this number were children accompanied by family voluntarily escaping the fighting by feeling into Russia.

    Obviously we should be sceptical of what Russia says about this, but this is not the same number as the number of children abducted - not even Ukraine alleges it to be this high.

    The number of children abducted and forcibly deported was officially reported by Kyev to be 19,000 to 20,000 at the time of the above claim based on the data (nearly 30,000 now). The real number is almost certainly higher - many Ukranian officials believe the actual amount is higher, with one saying it may be into the ‘hundreds of thousands’. A US report in 2022 estimates that Russia has “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported… 260,000 children, from their homes to Russia”

    Even if we take only the low amount that can be fairly positively stated as abductions, that’s nearly 30,000 children. Various reports have shown some of these children being given new Russian identities and false birth certificates, and being put up for adoption in Russia. Some have testified to being indoctrinated and shown pro-Kremlin propaganda.

    This broadly constitutes Cultural Genocide - whether it technically is or not is for academics to argue over, because the legal definition of genocide is complicated and so much is unkown.

    Whether or not you want to call it a Genocide, it is undeniably a War Crime. The ICC has issued arrest warrents for Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over this.


  • 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.