• 10 Posts
  • 650 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an “urgent” need to see a doctor).

    But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair’s worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.

    When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs ‘met’ the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they’d only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.

    It was very bad back then. It’s much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.

    Not that they’re announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.

    [The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]



  • I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

    One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

    Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

    This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

    The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.



  • The why is a much harder question.

    You’re right about it probably being true, this is not the first study to find something similar, there’s two others reported on here: Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, studies find

    It’s interesting that this study looked at the proportion of women on the surgical team (not the composition of the surgical team for any specific operation):

    Overall, female surgeons performed 47,874 (6.7%) of the operations. Female anaesthesiologists treated patients in 192,144 (27%) of operations.

    Hospitals with teams comprising more than 35% female surgeons and anaesthesiologists had better postoperative outcomes, the study found. Operations in such hospitals were associated with a 3% reduction in the odds of 90-day postoperative major morbidity in patients.

    There’s some speculation in that first link about differences in aggression and risk-taking. But, given the relative rarity of female surgeons, it could just be a competency effect. If women are a small minority for reasons not related to competency, and 93.3% of surgeons are men, it suggests that almost half the men are in the job because a more competent women didn’t get it. Groups with more women do better simply because they didn’t discount half the talent pool quite so heavily.






  • I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.

    But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.

    Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.


  • Because there is no mirror image.

    @pjwestin@lemmy.world has given you a good description of fascist methods. They’re not available to the opponents of fascism because they are not fascists.

    Fascism appeals to the worst parts of our nature. It gives permission to those feeling fear, humiliation or shame to lash out in anger and destroy the people that make them feel that way.

    You can’t deploy the same tactics to make those people want to be on your side instead. If you try to shame them, they will just hate harder.

    You should, of course, expose and ridicule the grifters who lead fascist movements and punching fascists is encouraged. But you need to distinguish between authoritarian leaders and the people they seek to lead.

    You should not pander to the billionaire-funded leaderships (take note NYT), but you must not sneer at the people they are trying to lead (take note centrist Dems).