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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Well, it was never going to look like the Americas even if it was true. The claim is that they discovered the land, not that they circumnavigated it or were able to chart the coasts with Renaissance-level precision.

    There’s no good or compelling evidence. But there’s lots of ‘evidence’ that while dismissed by most academics, can be used in support of the theory in a vacuum, for example the existence of a pre-Colombian carving in Arabic (which isn’t actually that, but was believed to be by some).

    The idea isn’t based on the map alone, it’s only one piece of the corroborating ‘evidence’.

    Again, I’m not arguing that it’s a true claim, just that it’s not on the surface insane


  • Al-Masudi was a very able cartographer, and his 10th Century map of the world is really impressive. And yes, it includes a continent to the West of the Old World.

    Obviously this doesn’t prove a genuine knowledge or discovery of the New World, but its a noted oddity.

    The theory that a Muslim population discovered and settled in the Americas is widely discredited and shouldn’t been taken seriously, but it is a published theory and supported by at least some academics. Most though dismiss is as either ‘psuedo-history’ or even ‘propaganda’, so yeah…

    This theory might be ahistorical, but how sinister it is is debatable (“Yeagley believed that Shabbas and the other authors were simply trying to gain acceptance for Arabs, further integrating them into American culture by making them ‘native.’”). The American myth making around Colombus might be more based in fact, but lets be honest, there’s a lot of fake history there too.

    The word ‘admiral’ does come from the Arabic ‘amir’, - circuitously via medieval Latin and Old French.

    So yeah the post is untrue, but I wouldn’t call it ‘insane’ necessarily. Its a reasonably common, and interesting, myth.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masudi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/did-muslims-visit-america-before-columbus



  • 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


  • 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.






  • This just isnt true. I’m not saying this to defend Israel and their actions in Gaza - its just really important to not get swept up in falsehoods, particularly at a time when legitimate criticism of Israel is being portrayed as antisemitic.

    There are allegations that Israel administered a birth control drug - which has to be readministered every three months - to Ethiopian immigrants without informed consent. The investigation into this was flawed, but there is literally no evidence to suggest that anyone was forced or coerced into taking this.

    What does seem plausible and even likely based on the facts is that doctors often made little or no effort to overcome language and cultural barriers and make sure that consent was fully informed and patients were completely aware of the effects of the procedure.

    This is definitely an issue in and of itself, and is a level of societal racism. But what it is not, is ideoligical forcible sterilization.

    Further, when you say ‘Ethiopian Jewish women tried to invoke the Law of Return’ the implication is that Israel was really against Ethiopian immigration. In reality, the Israeli government worked with the US to actively enable this - in 1984 Israeli covert forces worked to evacuate the Beta Israel community from Sudan to Israel during the civil war there (this is known as Operation Moses).

    Basically, there is so so much to legitimately criticise the Israeli government for right now. Repeating misinformation like this just straight up doesn’t help.






  • Pavlov’s dog is not notable for showing that dogs could be conditioned (bell = food time)

    What it did was show that a conditional response (bell = food time) could cause a reflexive response (saliva)

    Classical conditioning is not the same as associative learning.

    Pavlov’s dog is not about associating Thing A with Thing B - that didn’t need a russian scientist to prove.