15 million of them. That is a staggering number.
It’s also not an accurate number. The official count for Biden in 2020 was about 81.3 million (found many places online, but the official one is a good choice) and the unofficial count for Harris by AP so far is about 74.3 million. That’s about 7 million, which is less than half of what you claimed.
People have got to stop just posting straight up false information. If you don’t know, don’t post.
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.
Does this just means countries that have historically been associated with the communist bloc, which is to say opposed to the US? Because I’d find it hard to make the argument that any communist or socialist country really exists today, even kind of. They’re all operating under the same fundamental worker-owner principles.
My household is in the top few percentile, we’re fine. I just think everybody else should also have the luxury of not having to choose between relationships and shelter.
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.
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.
Two things I don’t see anybody saying:
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.
Too true. Listening to Sanders from the 80s is the same as listening to him today. It’s shocking how little his views and rhetoric have changed while being absolutely correct from the beginning.
Not a bad idea, though I’d tweak it to say election officials can’t release information, since that preserves freedom of press.
Either way, it’s highly unlikely it’s ever affected the outcome of an election.
And I very much recall at least two instances where he said this is the last election you’ll have to vote in. Is he going to find/create a way to suspend the 2028 election and stay in power? Who’s going to stop him?
That’s why I said it’s possible, I just don’t think it’s probable. People are loyal to Trump until they’re not. Nobody’s loyal to him because they like him or they think he’s a good guy, or because they think he’ll bring the country prosperity. They’re loyal because they think they can get something out of it. Most people aren’t in a position where they’re willing to give up literally everything to help this particular asshole become a dictator. Those that are are typically incompetent - see anything and everything related to stealing the 2020 election. They tried a LOT of things, but nothing came even close to working.
So they’ll try again, and I don’t think anybody’s doubting that. And I don’t think our institutions are particularly strong, but they’re probably strong enough to stop that kind of incompetence from leading to a dictatorship.
Let me be clear here. If we have a global nuclear war, that’s not recoverable, because every human on earth will be dead. If we enter a fascist dictatorship with today’s technology, that may not be recoverable, because we may see the permanent end of anything resembling a democracy.
I’m not saying there weren’t horrific atrocities committed during Trump’s reign. What I’m saying is that so far, there’s a chance future generations can live better lives.
Not unusual, and not a bad thing. They called a number of races with less than that. If you’re taking your expected percentages with the voting samples you’ve got and your statistics and calculations say there’s less than a 1% chance the race will flip, you might as well call it. They’re pretty much never wrong when they make a call that early.
It also doesn’t actually matter because the AP isn’t who decides the winner.
The truth is it’s unlikely anything historically big is going to happen in the US. We saw what Trump did last time he was in office, and it was really bad, but it was recoverable. The fear isn’t that it’s likely, but that it’s far from a non-zero chance, and there’s very little we can do about it. That uncertainty is scary when we’ve had a relatively good time in recent decades.
Will we see a sudden shift toward a state where you can get jailed or murdered for being a dissident? Maybe, but probably not.
Will we see an escalation of the wars involving Israel, such that we see a WWIII and/or the first nuclear strike since WWII? Maybe, but probably not.
Will we see economic collapse causing widespread hunger and homelessness that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression? Maybe, but probably not.
The only thing that’s really a guarantee is that we’re another four years away from dealing with climate change, and while that’s massive for humanity down the line, individuals currently living in the US are probably going to be mostly fine. Not to say nobody will be affected - hurricanes, floods, fires, and so on - but it won’t cause catastrophic failure of society in the near future.
Very true! It’s hard to imagine Israel would be the same today without the particular cultural choices those first immigrants made. Thanks for the addition.
I think Al Jazeera is good for news related to the middle east - Al Jazeera has an Arab bias, the same way US news has a US/Israel bias. When there’s a conflict between US/Israel and the Arabs, I tend to be more sympathetic to the Arabs, so I prefer their news. Somebody with politics different from mine would disagree.
Plus they sometimes put out absolute fire like this: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/11/debate-in-nuclear-armed-former-colony-fails-to-reassure-global-community
True! That’s a good one to point out. It’s hard to overstate how significantly and suddenly the Arabs turned against the Jews. Plenty were understandably going to emigrate from Europe, but Israel made them very unwelcome in the Arab world, too. It’s also another good example of how Israel couldn’t have been established without their allies, since the US/UK were the primary providers of air travel for Jews seeking refuge from Arab states to Israel.
We both know the reasonable way to interpret your post, and the way nearly everybody would interpret it, is that that’s the current or final count. It’s also outdated to say 74 million fewer people voted for Harris, but at one point, that was in fact the count. But it’s more than outdated - it’s misleading to the point of being factually inaccurate to any observer.
I can’t believe instead of being like “oh shit, I made a mistake, my bad, I better think for a second about this in the future” you’re going to try to justify it. Whatever, that’s social media at this point I guess. Surely I’m not the problem, says everybody feeding misinformation in a giant circle. I thought Lemmy might be better, but it’s just not. Thank you for convincing me to finally give all social media up.