andrewrgross

This is so exciting. I worked in a lab where we were trying to do this, and so I was very aware what a gold rush we were in. I'm so glad to see that it's actually happening.

This is truly a watershed moment in science. This is going to mark a major turning point in cellular medicine from theory to commonplace care. Eventually, this will end the pharma industry's insulin cash cow.

But it's even bigger than that. Because once we can engineer cells that produce a natural product, the next step is to engineer cells that produce synthetic medicines. Antidepressants, birth control, hormones, weight loss drugs, boner pills... The frontier is huge, lucrative, financially disruptive for pharma companies and life changing for patients. This is a big moment in history, and we all need to be fighting harder than ever to end for-profit healthcare. Otherwise we're going to end up with subscription licenses to our own bodies.

I'm sorry, but this narrative so completely exonerates Biden and Harris for their direct responsibility for risking the election over this.

The notion that Harris is in a bind is an absolute fiction. The overwhelming majority of Americans want an arms embargo with Israel. It has broad bipartisan support, including with an overwhelming majority of Democrats. And in top of that, she chose to not even let a popular Palestinian American lawmaker from Georgia give a vetted speech endorsing her at the DNC.

She is risking this election. That is a personal choice. I hope she wins, but if she loses because she didn't have votes she made clear she doesn't want, that is not on Jill Stein, that's a Harris decision.

The first thing you need to know is that if Trump gets elected, there is no discernible point between whether he "goes dictator" or not. People just use power and whether they're a dictator is a subjective exercise for historians.

Second: if Trump gets elected, everyone should actually be doing the same things they do if Harris gets elected, which are also the same things we should all have been doing under Biden, Trump, Obama, etc: which is building a base of local power to stand up for the most threatened among us and push back against authoritarian state power.

In practice, this means getting to know your neighbors. Knowing who serves as your mayor and city council and county council, and police chief, and local prosecutor. Then you need to organize with your local community to build political power to support democracy and oppose authoritarian power. And if you and the folks in the next town do this, you form a bloc of political will to do the same thing at the state level, and eventually the federal level.

This work still needs done if Harris wins. She is a better person than Trump, but the larger system both would command is a loaded gun. We cannot simply keep trying to keep the gun in the hands of the lesser of two evils, we need to remove the bullets. That means things like public financing of elections and ranked choice voting. It's not as dramatic as shooting politicians you don't like, but unfortunately, in the real world this is how dismantling fascism actually works.

I agree with all of that. Except for the part about possibly appealing to the anti-war voter if it would help them win. There are some -- Biden for instance -- who clearly would rather lose than do that. I don't know Harris well enough to judge.

I think it's sad that people complain when someone says that they won't vote for the lesser of two evils. It's sad because it shows a profound misunderstanding about how democracy is supposed to work, and what they're entitled to demand from their fellow citizens.

The largest voting block in every election is the depressed voter. And the reason is that our system is constructed to favor a broken two-party system even at the expense of civil participation that can solve our problems. Millions of people don't vote because they see no benefit in doing so. The problem to be solved is that the political system has failed these people, not that they aren't showing sufficient enthusiasm to do paperwork to satisfy the demands of people who feel invested in the outcome of elections.

The media falsely claims that each candidate has 47% support when really they each have about 30% support, and a larger number of people have not felt any interest in supporting either candidate. That's a massive failing in reporting and political process.

I honestly disagree.

He's like Trump. There are certainly no shortage of knock-offs who are eager to try and replace him if he falls, but what we saw during the Republican primary is that none so far can quite achieve what he does. They're all lesser copies.

Netanyahu is an extraordinary politician. Not a lot of his peers have what it takes to be as effective, dangerous, and destructive as he is.

I wanna push back on that.

Israel has a population of 5.2 million people, and 2 million of them are Arab Muslims.

The representation of Israel that we see in their media and culture is a reflection of Apartheid. It erases the presence and will of literally millions of people who are the target of the brutality that we're talking about.

A world where Trump gets elected and then assassinated is a world where JD Vance is president of an America that elected Trump and then saw him assassinated. That's how you get Gilead by 2025. That is NOT something to fantasize about. That's a hell scenario. And it's why people who think that there's any solutions to our problem that come out of a gun are -- and I mean this with all due respect -- very, very dumb.

And to put a fine point on this: it's not that this wouldn't be a bad idea if not for JD Vance. It's illustrative of how political violence in real life almost universally makes whatever problem might've motivated the violence suddenly far worse rather than better.

You know what would to be really, REALLY uncomfortable?

If Harris loses, there's a strong chance that it might be over this terrible war. What a stupid, stupid reason to have to live through another Trump presidency.

Is that a real comment or sarcasm?

Netanyahu is. The Israeli public is highly racist, but much less enthusiastic about total war than Bibi. Unfortunately, they don't get a say. This isn't a democracy.

I wonder if this girl considers herself Palestinian. It describes her as a Bedouin, but it's really unclear to me whether Israeli Bedouins see themselves as Palestinians or not.

I think that historically, the Bedouins were a distinct cultural group from the non-Bedouin Palestinians, but it's also really complicated to get any ethnographic information for me as an American, because Israeli media and middle east scholarship has traditionally erased Palestinian identities, instead calling Palestinian Israelis "Arab Israelis". Do people like her family actually see themselves as apart from Palestinians? Or do they recognize themselves within this term, but keep their mouths shut because of how dangerous it is to say such a thing out loud? I do notice that in the article there is a screenshot from a tiktok of people celebrating her suspension, and the screenshot calls her "The Palestinian girl". Is this because she is one? Or is that just them applying it as a slur? I'm very curious.

Either way, as you say, it's wild that "Supporting Palestine" is such hostile accusation to be levied at her. It's just crazy. I feel so terrible for her, and also angry at what Israel has become. I think it's always been bad, but naked hostility and racism is so, so, SO much worse in this generation than it was even 30 years ago.

I don't know why this sticks out to me, but it's kind of nuts that as far as I can tell, the IDF and the Israeli government haven't even given a pretense for what legal authority they're drawing on.

The military referenced a "court order", which appears to be based on the Israeli domestic court system, but officially Ramallah is entirely under the legal jurisdiction of the potempkin government of the Palestinian Authority. But the IDF didn't even bother to go through this puppet government: they seem to have just shrugged and cited the ancient legal ruling of Bigger stick v. Smaller stick and robbed a news office of tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and office space at gun-point in broad daylight.

Everytime they get bolder, that's a very bad sign.