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litano.bsky.social
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@litano.bsky.social
130 followers 780 following 310 posts
Professional health policy guy, amateur medical history nerd. I've also got severe hemophilia A, so hmu if you ever need help managing nosebleeds
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litano.bsky.social
guess what, Christian baby? The boots (or cleats?) are on the other feet now
Quora question asking "Atheists, imagine you're a famous baseball player and are about to bat the winning hit. Accidentally, the pitcher tosses a Christian baby at you. Would you still hit the baby out of the stadium and win millions, or spare the Christian baby?"
August 24, 2025 at 2:17 AM
litano.bsky.social
You should read the article- it does a good job of showing how many of these "criteria" are defined and applied in such a vague way that they're practically non-existent (as well as the movement to lower these standards even further).
Canada’s MAID law defines a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” in part as a “serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability.” As for what constitutes incurability, however, the law says nothing—and of the various textual ambiguities that caused anxiety for clinicians early on, this one ranked near the top. Did “incurable” mean a lack of any available treatment? Did it mean the likelihood of an available treatment not working? Prominent MAID advocates put forth what soon became the predominant interpretation: A medical condition was incurable if it could not be cured by means acceptable to the patient. This had made sense to Li. If an elderly woman with chronic myelogenous leukemia had no wish to endure a highly toxic course of chemo and radiation, why should she be compelled to? But here was a young man with a likely curable cancer who nevertheless was adamant about dying. “I mean, he was so, so clear,” Li told me. “I talked to him about What if you had a 100 percent chance? Would you want treatment? And he said no.” He didn’t want to suffer through the treatment or the side effects, he explained; just having a colonoscopy had traumatized him. When Li assured the man that they could treat the side effects, he said she wasn’t understanding him: Yes, they could give him medication for the pain, but then he would have to first experience the pain. He didn’t want to experience the pain.
August 14, 2025 at 9:35 PM
litano.bsky.social
I think John Ganz's piece on the fascism debate managed to synthesize all of this in a pretty compelling way. www.unpopularfront.news/p/there-was-...
But this lesson goes for me, too. Adorno’s lesson is that thought always goes beyond its object; it can never fully coincide with it. The concept of fascism is “wrong” in that actual reality never fully accords with our concepts. This is a necesssary and unavoidable part of intellectual activity: it’s always speculative and imaginative work. The temptation now will be to take the fascism analogy too literally and insist on its absolute validity. But this was never really my contention. Analogies are always imperfect and need to be refined. I ultimately thought the fascism thesis was what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “progressive research programme:” that is to say, it could make certain strong interpretations and even predictions about what was going on and it had a fairly good track record in that regard. There are other frameworks for understanding the present that might be more subtle, more sophisticated, and more accurate. But I do believe that this idea has earned its place in any serious consideration of the present. The work will now be to synthesize it into a broader horizon.
July 25, 2025 at 2:24 PM
litano.bsky.social
God, the comments on that video
Onion article titled "Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Even Know He Still Had"
June 23, 2025 at 1:23 AM
litano.bsky.social
www.esquire.com/news-politic... Charlie Pierce "The Cynic and Obama" series made this point beautifully almost 20 years ago.
The cynic will admit that it's all great politics. Tell America that it is a great country that has simply lost its way for a spell. Tell the American people that they are a great people who are better than those hucksters who come to divide us. It has a marvelous aesthetic appeal. Swirl down those clouds of memory and forget that the country allowed itself to follow George Bush over the cliff not merely because it was shocked by the attacks of September 11, 2001, but because it was too pissing-down-the-shoes scared to do anything else. Forget about how eagerly the American people cheered the brutish and the nasty, how simple it was to sell raw animal vengeance dressed up as geopolitical wisdom, and how dumbly everyone followed until well after it was revealed that the people selling it didn't know enough about the world to throw to a cat. This was the era of complicity. Can Obama end it, thought the cynic, without admitting it ever existed? We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we'll think we got the better of the deal. We'll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster's trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self evident-- that all men are out to get what's ours. Obama will find this out, the cynic thought. He will discover exactly how much he overrates the country as a democracy and its people as citizens. It will happen. He may not even understand it until it happens to him, but it will happen. The cynic just happened to be there when it began.
March 10, 2025 at 6:54 PM
litano.bsky.social
One of the few things I miss from old twitter was your running Eric Adams thread. I had Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone as my discord username for months
Map of the "Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone" with a cartoon leg coming out of the Zone's name and kicking a betrayed-looking rat across the river into New Jersey.
March 3, 2025 at 4:02 PM
litano.bsky.social
But if the PA can't do anything to assert control over the territory and the UN won't do anything to guarantee Palestinian borders, then there is actually no "territorial sovereignty." That's the whole point! You're talking in a vague, "ought-to-be" way where I'm talking about facts on the ground.
Definition of territorial sovereignty reading "Territorial sovereignty refers to the exclusive authority and control that a ruler or state holds over a defined geographical area, as discussed in the context of modern states and their territorial boundaries."
February 25, 2025 at 4:51 AM
litano.bsky.social
Incredible things are happening in the reason.com comments section
Reason.com comment that reads: "My Hypothetical still stands, Mrs Osama Bin Laden, who managed to escape OBL's tortuous rule, shows up on Amurican Soil, September 12, 2001, and promptly gives birth to Osama Bin Laden Jr. So Osama Bin Laden Jr is a Full Amurican Citizen, with all the privileges that it entrails? Could even become President Osama Bin Laden Jr?? While Elon Musk, although a naturalized Citizen, can never be POTUS, because he wasn't born here?? Something's rotten in Denmark Frank"
February 16, 2025 at 12:27 AM
litano.bsky.social
At the risk of doomposting, maybe Lippman was right. Certainly there are lots of political questions of momentous import that I do not personally feel qualified to weigh in on! And like you, I'm a sicko for this stuff.
February 12, 2025 at 5:46 PM
litano.bsky.social
Oh wow, I remember this line! I was reading Mort right around the time I read Charlie Pierce's The Cynic and President Obama and I remember being struck by how close these two got to one another. www.esquire.com/news-politic...
The cynic doesn't believe that history is an arc, bending inexorably in any particular direction or another. An arc is a geometric figure tightly circumscribed by mathematical formulae. For the cynic, history is a river, wilder than most, with eddies and whirlpools and backwaters, and an original course to which it always seeks to return. What the cynic has learned over the past twelve years is the truth in Faulkner's observation that the past is never dead, it is not even past. Nothing ever sinks in the river for good. Everything is thrown to the surface again. He believes that the river churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface. He believes we can get caught in backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps. The cynic also believes that the river can run clear and fresh and soft. But not often. Most of the time, it seeks its original course, and occasionally, despite all the levees and dams and locks we apply to it in order to govern ourselves, it overwhelms them all and floods our pale attempts at civilizing ourselves. That, the cynic thinks, is what...
February 8, 2025 at 6:51 PM
litano.bsky.social
Some awareness of these issues in Ganz's latest piece. There are still dots to be connected (For instance, what does this mean for the left? Is it desirable or possible to ameliorate the anti-democratic features of online life?) But I think he's getting there. www.unpopularfront.news/p/lets-get-r...
Technically, a Coup Trumpism having passed through a failed putschist phase before moving into a legal approach to power that would seem to recommend an analogy with fascism, but again, the critics will not countenance this dynamic. The current seizure of the payments system of the Treasury Department reminds one fascist journalist Curzio Malaparte’s observations in his 1931 book The Technique of Coup d’Etat that the most successful modern coups are not frontal assaults on the institutions of the state, or bold military uprisings, but seizures of the state’s technical “nerve centers:” …the problem of the modern coup d’ Etat is a technical problem…Not the masses make a revolution, but a mere handful of men, prepared for any emergency, well drilled in the tactics of insurrection, trained to strike hard and quickly at the vital organs of the State’s technical services. These shock troops should be recruited from among specialized workmen : mechanics, electricians, telegraph and radio operators acting under orders of technical engineers who understand the technical working of the State. I’m not sure Musk’s little groyper squad is a crack force in quite this way, but they are definitely attempting to seize the state's nerve centers. It’s almost as if Trump’s movement learned something and took a different approach.
February 6, 2025 at 7:11 PM
litano.bsky.social
Francis Fukuyama vindication arc?
January 30, 2025 at 11:15 PM
litano.bsky.social
This actually happened to Robert Redford!
Director Mike Nichols’s friend, Robert Redford, was very interested in playing the lead role in The Graduate. Nichols tells Vanity Fair he “interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men” for the part and recalls the conversation he had with Redford after he screen-tested for the role: “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
December 23, 2024 at 5:42 AM
litano.bsky.social
I thought he already wrote this how-to guide?
The cover of Ben Shapiro's awful political thriller True Allegiance.
December 6, 2024 at 3:17 PM
litano.bsky.social
There are tMG song titles everywhere once you start looking for them. I'm personally very partial to the Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone, which comes from a buckwild Eric Adams slide deck. I think the phrase sets my brain off just right because it combines elements of Harlem Roulette and Alpha Rats Nest.
Image of a map of NY with Harlem labeled "Harlem Rat Mitigation Zone." Coming out of the text is a cartoon boot, which is kicking a surprised-looking cartoon rat across the river into New Jersey.
November 4, 2024 at 3:48 PM
litano.bsky.social
On 10/7, Ruwa couldn't condemn the actual attack or Hamas by name but she could condemn violence aimed at small business owners in the West Bank. I think her statement is far more sane on this stuff than basically any mainstream Dem's 10/7 takes, but this was never going to fly at the DNC.
August 22, 2024 at 8:31 PM
litano.bsky.social
Just circling back to this now that Jocat has spoken up about the fact that people associated Hesse with the earlier doxxing and package scare-- this is also a non-apology. He may not have MEANT to imply this, but the implication is pretty clear in his website post and people responded as such.
December 20, 2023 at 12:35 AM
litano.bsky.social
We need to go deeper
October 5, 2023 at 4:01 AM