I haven’t read the book - and probably won’t, since Dyer’s not a historian, has no relevant credentials listed on his website, and has never written a book before - but based on the article, it doesn’t sound like he’s saying anything new.

It does sound like it’s being weirdly misrepresented, because Dyer didn’t “reveal” anything and his wealth isn’t any more or less “intimately connected” than any other wealthy person’s at that time. It also sounds like it overstates his wealth. He primarily got his money from being Master of the Mint, which until Newton was a symbolic post intended to give him income in return for his major contributions to science, but in standard Newton fashion he ignored the implied social norm and took it seriously instead. That gave him a comfortable income to essentially have some nice things. We’re not talking billionaire wealth.

As for the connection to the slave trade - based on the title, I’d expect him to have owned the slaves, or led the expedition to enslave people in order to be “intimately connected.” For the time, this was about as connected as any landowner was to slavery. That’s not to say it was fine, just that this is expected for anybody of his station and is absolutely not new or surprising information.

But I guess I’m acting all surprised that the Guardian made a shit article, and that shouldn’t be news to either.

The entire business would be such a trivial government operation, and we wouldn’t have to lose money to corporate greed.

My gut says “that’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean much.” Let me pick it apart.

• LBJ attempted his War on Poverty and Great Society, and while it didn’t go as far as he wanted, he still got some good stuff out the door. Food stamps, medicare, medicaid, minimum wage, just to name a few. No contest compared to everybody that came later.

• Nixon was a Republican, and I’ll skip all of them because by this point in history they would never be as economically progressive as Biden.

• Ford was a Republican.

• Carter ran on being socially liberal and economically conservative. Outside of minor policy like the Community Reinvestment Act, there’s no help there, obviously.

• Reagan was a Republican.

• Clinton ran on the Third Way, which was sort of what Carter did but even more disastrous. Notable policy included gutting welfare and widespread deregulation.

• W was a Republican.

• Obama got ACA passed and used an obviously Keynesian approach to economic recovery with the recession he was given, pulling away from Clinton’s conservative Third Way.

• Trump was a Republican.

• Biden did a similar Keynesian approach to economics.

I would assume your statement hinges largely on the “biggest infrastructure bill” type rhetoric, because he didn’t do anything new, he just continued to fund things that the government needs to fund in order for the country to operate. He sure spent a lot, but whether that’s the metric we should be using for most progressive is up for debate.

Personally, I’d say Obama was more progressive because he actually did something substantial and new with the ACA, but it doesn’t put him in another tier above Biden. Of course, neither comes remotely close to LBJ.

What that statement really shows is how far the government has fallen from even attempting to provide value for people.

Confusingly, British English actually does treat nouns like “data” and “government” as plural where American English does not. Even more confusingly, they’re a little inconsistent with it, so you can find published examples of both.

Heritage Foundation has been running Republican policy for decades. That’s not obvious to anybody who hasn’t read a significant amount about recent history, but there was no doubt about it for people that have.

What a roundabout way to say they’ve just been stealing people’s money with no oversight or consequences.

Have to disagree with you here. I’m not a journalist, but I read easily digestible headlines all day. I had to go back and carefully parse this sentence one word at a time. It’s just a bad headline.

Boy, I’m not a lawyer, but that sure feels like being forced to incriminate yourself.

People say this kind of thing a lot, but I don’t really understand if they don’t have any family or friends, don’t care about their family and friends, or just think it’s reasonable to have to choose between your relationships and living in an affordable house.

It was a really bad year for California props, people just took a hard right turn.

No to: raise the minimum wage, provide housing, abolish slavery

Yes to: harsher sentencing and some weird vendetta a rich guy has against an AIDS nonprofit

Motherfuckers complain about homeless population nonstop and then refuse to pass anything to fix it.

I assume the people freaking out about how dumb python is didn’t bother to read the code and have never coded in python in their life, because the behavior here is totally reasonable. Python doesn’t parse comments normally, which is what you’d expect, but if you tell it to read the raw source code and then parse the raw source code for the comments specifically, of course it does.

You would never, ever accidentally do this.

…you’d also never, ever do it on purpose.

if this given instance is the first instance to which most people will be introduced, being the closest thing to an “official” instance, should they have a duty, or at the very least, an interest, in maximizing the inclusitivity of their community?

I think this goes back to what teawrecks said earlier:

it’s not a for-profit business

It’s a private club with a trivial admission process. It’s not just that they don’t care about maximizing inclusivity, growth, and total users, it’s that they don’t want any of that. They want like-minded people and they’re happy to keep out or ban people that don’t fit that mold.

It feels like you’re saying they should want something else, but I don’t see it as obvious why they would, and I don’t think you’ve explained your reasoning why they would.

You have this perspective that “we can show them” if we just let the Republicans win, but there’s no evidence to support that. Every time the Republicans have won, the Democrats have moved to the right, not the left.

If you want a third party to emerge, you can advocate for that, but a truly leftist third party isn’t possible if we lose all our limbs.

What an absurd headline, so ridiculous they even debunk it themselves immediately. He doesn’t need Venezuela’s cooperation, he’s considering making a deal with them. We know from recent history that the US has no issue deporting people to any country they find convenient, regardless of where they originated. As long as the US has any agreement with any country anywhere, they’ll go ahead and do it.

I went to top schools in wealthy suburbs my entire childhood in blue neighborhoods in blue states, and we were taught American exceptionalism and the strength of our adherence to capitalism was what built the country, as well as what defeated communism. Slavery was a problem but it was gone now and things were fine, especially since the civil rights movement.

It wasn’t all framed quite that simply, but they were the obvious takeaways. I didn’t even realize it until I started devouring history books in my adult life. We learned an accepted view of history, but the arguments for why those things happened and their impacts were wildly disparate from what I (on the basis of what seems to be the historical consensus today) believe is realistic.

Two things I don’t see anybody saying:

1. BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn’t won by having a better product, it’s won by convincing people they should buy your product.
2. Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that’s just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn’t have like a 90% miss rate.

Yeah, how often do the Republicans actually manage to come together to stop Trump?

One major problem here is the lack of community. It was easier to get in-person events organized when the default was to do things in person. #resistance isn’t just more common because people aren’t willing to be in person, but because it’s not as easy to get involved.

As far as actual political groups are concerned, a lot of them have very little online presence, or their information is only available through something like Facebook where you need an account to view it. Those that are more available frequently only hold their meetings online, and many make it difficult to find how to get involved because you have to navigate through all their requests for donations to find there’s very little else available.

But that’s just my experience over the last few years. I imagine it’ll get a lot worse when these groups aren’t legally allowed to exist.

The point is that there’s sanctions, and the sanctions are supposed to prevent those parts from getting into Russia. It’s not surprising to a lot of us that sanctions are ineffective at anything other than hurting the general population, but it’s good to report it and have that data point.

Not who brought it up, but it’s essentially just checking a box if you approve of the candidate, and check as many boxes as you want. Highest number of box checks wins. I’d take it over first past the post, but I prefer RCV still. Proponents of approval voting say it helps weed out extreme candidates, but I find the most extreme candidates in the US have historically been a huge net win, so I’d prefer to give them a better shot at winning.