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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Embarrassing to live in a society so puritanical news articles have to dance around this.

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.

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.

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.

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 find it very difficult to justify most historical claims of anticipatory self-defense - it usually looks to me that it’s an aggressor using an excuse to justify their aggression. I haven’t seen nearly enough evidence to suggest Israel wasn’t the aggressor in the Six Day War. While the military mobilization of their neighbors certainly contributed toward Israel’s mobilization, that alone isn’t justification for invasion. Nasser thought Israel was preparing to invade Syria, but he didn’t preemptively invade Israel, he lined up his troops on the Israel-Egypt border and waited. We know now that Israel was not mobilizing troops on Syria’s border, but Nasser’s choice to defend his border was reasonable and nonviolent, even with false information.

But aside from that, I think it’s reasonable to suggest Israel would have attacked even had there been no mobilization of troops from the Arab states. We saw Israel attack Egypt during the Suez Crisis where they forcibly re-opened passage through the Straits of Tiran, their only shipping route to the south other than the also-Egyptian Suez Canal. Just prior to the Six Day War, Egypt cut off Israel from the Straits of Tiran again, something Israel publicly called an act of war. It’s not a coincidence Israel went ahead and took Sinai (immediately adjacent to the Straits of Tiran) during this war and didn’t give it back until the Camp David Accords. (It’s worth noting that had Nasser not gotten the original false information, he wouldn’t have done any of this, and it’s entirely possible the entire thing would have been averted. But he did, and that was a huge blunder on his part. Still, I disagree with Israel that refusing them passage through shipping routes is an act of war.)

I would also suggest that Israel’s behavior after the Six Day War doesn’t seem like the actions of a country that was acting in self-defense. They conquered land during that war and continue to occupy most of it to this day. They’ve invaded other countries since, with stated reasons that are as believable as the United States’ reasons for invading Iraq. They’ve continued to occupy additional land. These actions indicate a country interested in expansionism and power growth, not peaceful co-existence.

I’m actually okay with that not being included as a critical point in Israeli history. My understanding is it was one piece in a long line of antisemitism, and while it was known by the Nazi party, it was known by the leadership to be fictional and wasn’t used seriously as propaganda by them. That’s not to say it didn’t have any effect, just that I’m not convinced it made much difference when it comes to the creation of Israel as a state.

I’m open to alternative viewpoints if you want to provide evidence or just offer some book titles that might change my mind.

I think this might be a semantic argument - it’s not important to me if we use the words “give” or “create.” Happy to use whatever words you prefer for allies having power and control of an area and ensuring that power and control is transferred to their chosen ally.

British Mandatory Palestine was officially ending May 15, 1948. Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948. The United States officially recognized Israel as a state 11 minutes after it declared itself a sovereign state. It’s strange to suggest these are coincidences rather than planned action with their allies, but there’s plenty of evidence in addition to this to make it very clear that Israel wouldn’t have stood a chance without the backing of their superpower friends.

I think there’s a lot of fuzzyness around the idea of “born from that land.” It’s not like they sprouted out of the earth. As with just about any people, there was a lot of rape and murder of warring tribes until some combination of them stopped doing as much rape and as much murder and somewhat arbitrarily called themselves “one people.” If you want to call that “born from that land,” sure, but their ancestry goes back further than that. We’re all just apes.

does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years?

That’s one interpretation, though I’d disagree with it. I have Jewish heritage - enough that a significant portion of my ancestry was wiped out in the Holocaust, though obviously a few of them were lucky and escaped to the US with the help of a sponsor. I don’t practice Judaism as a religion and don’t really relate much to any of my heritage. Is Israel my homeland? Not at all. The United States is my homeland. Before that, Germany would be my homeland. Before that… well, I’m not sure, but history would suggest it’s highly unlikely it was Israel. I have zero attachment to that land, much like I expect you have zero attachment to the land of your ancestors from millennia ago. (I also have zero attachment to the land of my non-Jewish ancestry. I have no idea what it is from thousands of years ago, but I wouldn’t care if I did.)

Would I and other Jewish people be justified in kicking out Germans, because they spent hundreds of years there? What about the Russians? Poles? The Jewish diaspora has gone all over the place and made just about everything their home. Why should they have claim to land that their great great great great great ancestors once conquered and stole from somebody else?

If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?

I would argue Israel wasn’t their home until they moved there over the last hundred or so years. Home isn’t where some of your family lived 3000 years ago. The individuals in question never lived there. Their parents never lived there. Their grandparents never lived there. None of these people had any idea what Israel was even like. Today, there are more Jewish people in the United States than there are in Israel, and they’re happy to call the United States home.

If we’re going to make the argument that people should be allowed to lay claim to land their ancestry owned 3000 years ago, we open up a lot of questions.

First, it’s worth noting that this is also the home of Palestinians. The origins of Palestinians are much less clear than the origins of Jewish people in large part because the Jews have been uniquely good at maintaining their culture, so we have a much better grasp on Jewish people throughout history than we do of Palestinians. But at its core, the fact is Palestinians haven’t ever lived anywhere else. This means they’re also “so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home.”

Second, to be consistent, we’d have to revert a lot of borders to ancient times. Does that mean we should all revert borders to what they were 3000 years ago? Why 3000? Why not 2000? 4000? Regardless, you’re uprooting a lot of people - and you’d have to provide a really good justification for that, and I don’t see it.

Third, even if we agreed the Jews have a right to this land and we should revert to their ancient borders and give them control, that doesn’t mean they have a right to attempt genocide on those living there. The moment they embarked on the Nakba, they should have lost their allies in their mission. Assuming they have a right to the land, they have to humanely displace the people there, ensure they have a new place to live, and give them adequate compensation for the land and the massive inconvenience you’ve caused by uprooting their entire lives. Sort of a “sorry we’re doing this, but we’re trying to make it right.” Instead, they’ve killed millions of people over the decades.