Daniel 🦁

Alberta Bill 11 opens door to two-tier health care The moment doctors can bill both the public and private systems, the public one starts to lose

'It’s clear from the public record that the private health insurance lobby has been intimately involved in discussions on the bill and presumably seeks to financially profit from the introduction of Bill 11.' troymedia.com/health/alber...
@alonghurst.bsky.social @policyalternatives.ca

YES. THIS.
What the state "giveth", the state can take away. Or create barriers to access. Or use to punish.

I hate that the sparkle icon is shorthand for AI. They want us to think it’s magic. Fuck you!!! Magic is when you lose a glob of mustard from your sandwich but it doesn’t land on you. When you win at 20 questions. Sparkles belong to Liberace. A baby’s smiling eyes. I will put you in the ground!!!!!!

The Iran War is costing $11,000 per SECOND but tell me again how we can't afford healthcare.

We're literally spending a billion dollars per day on murdering children but I'm supposed to believe we can't fix homelessness.

Alberta Won’t Budge on Charging Indigenous People for COVID Vaccines Though health advocates argue the province's $100 fee amounts to a treaty violation, the federal government rebuffed a request to step in, pointing out it's still free on reserves

Lots of Alberta health news these days; here's one from me:

First Nations leaders and advocates have been telling feds and provincial govts that Alberta UCP's $100 COVID vaccine fee is a treaty violation.

Neither will step in to remove this access barrier.

pressprogress.ca/alberta-char...

So instead of going through the hassle of changing my name on my ID (and then banking, etc, etc), I have simply decided that I have a "government name" which I use to deal with the government and a real name which I use for a sense of identity, and they are distinct.

CW: child abuse

The specific reason I think about this is that my parent's parent is a child abuser, and so my family name (on my ID) comes from a child abuser. I would like to change it, but I have to ask permission from the government, pay a fee, and deal with bureaucratic nonsense.

I think it's strange that we have to register children's names (and genders) with the government when they're born, and that people have to ask permission from the government to change their names.

Why should we accept government owning and controlling people's identities in this way?

"We have to sacrifice trans people for the economy" is an interesting take.

I feel like knowing anything about Jewish history, I would simply not publish an article unabashedly praising German romantic nationalists constructing the imagined heritage of the Volksgeist, but then, I do not write for Tablet.

When the Democrats are making decisions, they're the "adults in the room", and when we're criticizing them, "you're beating children".

It's making me want to ask how the poster's own parents treated them as a child because I'm getting some "children are property" vibes.

And I got the distinct impression that the article author thought "we obviously can't expect the Canadian government to care about people's need for housing, so it must fall on this First Nation to provide it for them."

Why can't we expect the Canadian government to care about housing? Why?

Writing a "news" article in 2026 asking why an Indigenous nation doesn't give up their unceeded (not even treaty) territory to Canadian settlers, and not reading that back and considering the foundational assumptions is wild.

How is "we don't care if you have somewhere safe to sleep" the basis for any sort of healthy society? And yet, that's the basis for all the Western "democracies". You can't tell me we care about each other in the slightest if we don't care that we each need somewhere safe to sleep.

I'm still quite annoyed about a "news" article I read the other day whose premise is "why doesn't this Indigenous nation guarantee housing security to these settlers?"

Firstly, do you hear yourselves? Secondly, why doesn't the Canadian government guarantee housing security to its own citizens?

"People were not invented in the 1800s. What did emerge at that moment, and what dramatically influenced the creation of countries, was the conceptual framework of “peoples” or “peoplehoods.” This idea derived from 19th-century German Romantic philosophy and in particular the work of Johann Gottfried Herder. In tracing the development of human civilization, Herder noted that shared language, literature, traditions, and history forge a unique spirit, or Volksgeist, that he argued should serve as the basis for nation-states. When Herder went looking for an example of a group of people whose attributes—common language, history, religion—he could use as a foundation for this theory, he chose the ancient Jews, who, he argued, were the supreme example of the authentic folk expression of a people. If modern Jews had a problem, Herder continued, it was that they had been flung from their land, turning them into a “nation within a nation.” Still, that only added to their mystique: Their specific set of characteristics enabled them to maintain a unique culture—fitting in while keeping apart—and successfully adapt to successive waves of modernity, from the Roman Empire to the great religious empires of the Catholic Church and various Islamic caliphates, to the multiethnic empires of the Habsburgs and Ottomans, to the Westphalian state order born in 17th-century Europe."

There's something remarkably telling about the fact that, in their case for Zionism, Tablet is approvingly citing the same German nationalists that directly influenced German fascism. (www.tabletmag.com/feature/zion...)

The Mirror article linking Savile to the Maxwell/Epstein files is the tip of the iceberg.

At that exact time, Savile wasn't just a TV star; he was a “key advisor” to the then Prince of Wales.

Charles was writing to him for PR advice and even asked him to mentor Sarah Ferguson.

I assume the social media person posted that with full support from the rest of the people in the organization.

any analysis of Israel and Lebanon that does not include the stated desire by multiple Israeli politicians - over many years - to destroy Lebanon itself is either not paying attention, in denial or actively deceiving people

I figure you catapult a few politicians, the rest fall right in line

white text on black background snippet overlaid an image of various coloured hardcover books resting like tilted dominoes against an orange gradient background. Text reads: catieosaurus (verified check) > burnout 6 d One of the funniest things about burnout is that scientifically, burnout affects your ability to interpret your body's signals, your reward prediction (what will feel good/what you want/need), and how much energy things will take, alongside increased executive disfunction, emotional flattening, brain fog, and reduced self-trust & connection to self, but all of the advice about burnout is "just listen to your body, relax, do something restorative that you enjoy.["] HOW, BRENDA? LITERALLY HOW.

Feeling this one today.

Liberals love to do “what if these monsters were gay? ha ha ha” satire. It’s gross every time.

Might be time for my mutuals who follow them to unfollow.

No way they are talking about RACIAL JUSTICE and they are endorsing a dude with a Nazi tattoo.

I have no idea what SURJ is, but if you like Nazi Tattoo Guy and think he's anti-war (LOL), then I would like to never hear from you again.

“Why is it that these apparently liberal democracies in the West are such incredibly violent warmongers?”

And I contend further that self-reported sentiments—even if they could be verified by behaviour—would be worthless because people don't act based on sentiments.

People act based on social pressure. Anyone who tried to stop it would have been attacked. Fear and peer pressure are motivators.

And I contend further that self-reported sentiment of non-Jewish Germans would be worthless, because how can we even know if their self-reported sentiments had any correlation with their actual behaviour? Maybe they self-reported contrary to their behaviour to make themselves feel better.

If we had opinion polling of the sentiment of non-Jewish Germans during the Holocaust, would it have any bearing upon the "legitimacy" of the Holocaust?

Of course not! The very idea is horrifying. Opinion polls can never justify (or explain) genocide.

What opinion polls are really doing is asking me to change my position on the basis that (supposedly) many other people hold a different position. Or, providing reassurance that if I hold an immoral position, at least other do too, so it's fine.

I'm not interested in moral relativism.

How do we know if weapons from Canada's private arms dealers are being used in the genocide in Gaza or the bombing of girl's schools in Iran? We don't, but we do know that private arms dealers profit. They're arms dealers, they already rationalized that someone would be killed.