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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Puberty blockers are reversible - that’s not a lifelong decision. That information should have been in the article, and if we didn’t live in a dumbshit rightwing dystopia where press is owned by the conservatives and also fears retribution from the conservatives, that information would’ve been in there.

Surgery? Sure, let’s have that conversation - though I would certainly argue it’s not the state’s business what happens between a child, their parents, and their doctors, any more than it would be any other lifelong medical procedure. But it’s at least a little murky. But this decision isn’t surgery, it’s puberty blockers. Not murky. Just evil.

People with that kind of money don’t work, they own. They’ll hire somebody to do those 80 hours while they rape underage trafficked girls.

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.

God, this article is awful.

There’s stuff like this:

A majority of voters nationally said Trump was a strong leader; slightly fewer than half said the same about Harris.

…which implies there’s some significant difference here without giving you the specific numbers. Is this 51% to 49%? They go into the Latino specifics, but only for Trump, but even break it down further to say what percent of Latinos think Trump is strong versus the percentage of Latinas that think Trump is strong.

The AP is always held up as this infallibly unbiased source, but even if we agree that being unabashedly both-sides centrist is unbiased, that’s not even close to what’s happening here. To even remotely both-sides this you’d have to show all the people that think asking the question of Trump’s strength is an absolute joke and it’s bizarre we’re even discussing it because the only people that believe in strongman leadership are literal fascists.

With respect to the actual headline and meat of the article, it also doesn’t challenge the assumption that Trump would be better for the economy. If you’re going to include people who were brainwashed into believing that, you have to juxtapose them with the endless historical precedents and current studies that show his policies will absolutely be detrimental to the economy. Even corporations are going to tank in the long term, because you can’t steal from the working class forever.

By continuing Trump’s campaign propaganda without serious challenge, this is a right-wing article in support of his administration. A more centrist article would say something closer to “Trump tricks public into believing he’ll be better for the economy” because that’s the reality of what happened.

Mules are maybe the most useful freak of nature (sorta) for humans. They’re still used surprisingly widely - even the US military still keeps them on hand, for similar cases to this one: the terrain is so fucked that ground vehicles are going to have a hard time getting to certain areas.