If there's a benefit to religious charity, it lies not in the "inclination to judge" but in maintaining a multiplicity of authorities. Combining everything under the government umbrella gives you a totalitarian society; a liberal democracy restrains the power of government while allowing for competing authorities in other spheres, like medicine, religion, academia, and the press. Giving the government the power to mandate or withhold medical treatment for political opponents (think Soviet "sluggish schizophrenia" as a diagnosis for removing dissidents from public life) seems more worrying than strippers getting free healthcare.

Some of that table is already mitigated: we test blood for HIV, so transmission by blood transfusion is unlikely. Transmission by pregnancy is less likely simply because few women have HIV: 80% of new cases in the US are male, 20% female.

The real question is whether "having a conversation about prep with your doctor" is going to lead to someone caring enough to pursue a prophylactic course of medication when that same person doesn't care enough about his own health or others' to avoid risky sexual encounters. Is someone irresponsible enough to pursue causal, unprotected sex with random partners also likely to be responsible enough to visit a doctor proactively and comply with a prep regimen? Sure, it's a "really good idea," but a simpler and better idea is not to have random sex in the first place. A "really good idea" depends on a level of self-control that some people obviously lack.

The idea that a double-hyphen is "old school" is on par with the false notion that double-spacing between sentences is a product of the typewriter; one need only look at a typeset book from before the twentieth century to see the truth, or look at a decent image of the Declaration of Independence or other hand-written document from prior centuries to see the extra space left between sentences.

Many of the changes we see in written English style are the product of ignorance of the past beyond two generations or so. Avoiding em-dashes to keep up with the latest anti-AI fad is just reacting mindlessly to the stimulus of popular ignorance instead of deliberately situating one's style in the history of writing conventions.

https://liveandletsfly.com/united-airlines-air-traffic-contr...

In the face of what is advertised as an existential global threat, the argument that the Chinese should be excused for failing to curb their emissions, on the grounds that others in the past also emitted, contradicts the idea that emissions pose an existential global threat.

The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.