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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • 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 It’s also outdated to say 74 million fewer people voted for Harris, but at one point, that was in fact the count. But it’s more than outdated - it’s misleading to the point of being factually inaccurate to any observer.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.



  • 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.




  • 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.











  • 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.





  • 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.