I highly recommend "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World" if you're interested in learning more about Columbus from a very well documented and sourced non-fiction book.
I haven't read that book, but the title already suggests that it isn't exactly a balanced account of what happened. It's like "Modern Slavery: The First 200 Years of Capitalism".
Sometimes well, things aren’t balanced. The job of historians isn’t to create balance at the expense of facts. A great example would be the actual Holocaust, where a “balanced” history would be completely disingenuous.
But the European discovery of the New World had thousands of aspects besides the genocide of the native population. Omitting those and viewing the entire, incredibly complex and multifaceted, process through a single lens isn't "facts" but propaganda.
On the other hand, historical "science" has always been primarily a vehicle for propaganda, and there is no reason to expect that it would be any different in our times. So I guess this book is simply par for the course.
The book does not take a pro-European perspective of their journeys to the Americas, but I do not think the book takes a single lens through this segment of history. It quotes from the explorers directly from their journeys in most cases.
"Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed."
I haven't really been able to read anything on twitter for a while now as I run noscript by default and haven't deigned to whitelist twitter.
I remain astounded by how much their product has declined (even pre-Musk acquisition) from their glory days of being so light weight that they were used to organize protests when governments would clamp down on internet access.
I try to avoid the site as much as possible but I have a redirection rule to go to a Nitter instance in case I end up clicking on a link. The Nitter UI is nicer too and works fine without JS.
Looks like their redirect service for links was down, not twitter itself. I could go to my profile, but clicking links in my tweets gave me an API error. Ugh, not good.
Nitter doesn't use the official API, which seems to be what's broken, instead it talks directly to the undocumented APIs that Twitters normal web interface is built on.
I assume they do it that way to get around all the rate limiting and threat of having access revoked that the official API comes with.
Thanks - we changed the URL to that from the submitted URL https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/. (Submitted title was "Tweetdeck is now broken for normal users")
Followed swiftly by: "We apologize again for the fault in the service. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked."
That's an excellent question. Having given the matter some serious thought, I think what I'd suggest would be to start by making Twitter better, rather than worse.
I'm not a business genius though so perhaps I'm missing something crucial here.
Honestly I think this point is understated. Twitter (executives at least - but that's how capitalism works in America right now) basically won by offloading a dying platform onto a sucker with more money then sense. If they'd spread the joy around so that everyone who worked there got a golden parachute to glide away on before Musk walked in with a kitchen sink I think I'd be singing praises of them as folk heroes - as it is they're at least assholes that managed to pull one over on a larger asshole.
Where did this meme of them being a cash incinerator come from (other than from Musk, hoping people didn't look into the public statements)? Last time I looked, they had a few profitable quarters on the books. Looking at the last annual statement, I see a 200M loss on 5B revenue, with them sitting on 8B in assets, 2B of which is in cash. That's nothing close to a cash incinerator.
As far as I can tell, tightening up that slightly and reasonably could have turned it profitable again. The only cash incinerator I see in this picture is bull-in-a-china-shop Musk who appears to have made the problem 100x worse.
Everything changed after mister "genius" operated a leveraged buyout of the company, which essentially means that it is now riddled with debt and zero assets that have not been pledged to pay the debt.
They don’t have a quarterly earnings report because they’re a private company now, and their revenue has dropped by 40% according to an email sent from a manager. Ironically, we can only really know their cash position pre acquisition, and the only source for their being a “cash incinerator” is Elon’s word, which to any reasonable person is worth exactly zero at this point.
I only need one example but I have dozens. The only one that matters is he banned journalists from the platform after promising to make it a haven of free speech. It’s objectively one of the more hypocritical things a public figure has done in recent years.
100x was rhetorical. It's not a public company anymore, so we can't know. But if the headlines reporting a 40% drop in revenue are true, that would bring the net loss from 200M a year to 2.2B a year, which would be 10x worse (though I don't even know if you were being that specific in your critique), but that also doesn't take into account whatever he saved from chopping headcount.
> The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. …
> But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
"Treating autism as a ‘disease’, rather than a neurotype that exists as a result of natural biological variation, paves the way for a level of discrimination and stigmatisation that would not be acceptable if it were applied to other minority groups. At worst, it raises serious fears of eugenics. But the traditional understanding of autism as a deficit also plays a huge role in day-to-day discrimination against autistic people..."
> It is a disorder in that our norms of society are not aligned around Neurodiverse brains
Reminder as always that over-simplifying autism to lean into the most high functioning description completely erases the existence of all of the severely autistic people out there who are barely able to function with their disorder.
Given the context of how I understand autism, and my personal experience with it, as a severe inhibitor in a normal life for the people who suffer from it, I find the whole quote you shared as despicable.
Further evidence that the autism you are talking about dismisses and denies the existence of many autistic individuals who are not as privileged to have such a high functioning variant.
Your empathy for autistic people stops at a certain level of capability, because you refuse to even recognize that they exist within your argument. It makes my stomach churn.
You're over-reacting and trying to use your emotion as a bludgeon, in order to stand in for absent logic.
You're also falling into a semantic illusion that everything currently or formerly classified as autism is actually all on the same spectrum. In reality "the spectrum" is a modern theory and literally no other range for any disorder stretches nearly as far. Which is a red flag. See the fact that many people that would have been formerly diagnosed as Asperger's will now not be diagnosed with autism at all, but instead with a social skills disorder.
The existence of Asperger's, or the inclusion or not of formerly Asperger's patients into the general Autism spectrum category does not threaten the identities of other people with Autism.
Neither professionals nor patients should seek to use other people with impairments as their political pawn or psychological security blanket. It is morally wrong to demand the direction of their classification because you or they believe that it helps you. Get a life.
I'm sorry, but I'm not following how I'm leaning into autism with the highest functioning description of it. ASD has multiple stages with varying needs of assistance, I am trying to encourage society to help of all stages.
I truly want to understand more how that quote is despicable. As someone directly responsible for an individual with autism, I very much acknowledge that autistic people exist at several different levels of capabilities.
Your quote precisely claims that it is not "a deficit," which directly denies the reality of people on the lower end of functionality on the spectrum. Period.
There is a vocal minority, of which your source is a part of, who are trying to "normalize" Autism. In order for it to be "natural neuro-divergence" or "a super power" you have to intentionally omit the negative aspects of the medium-functioning, and completely deny the existence of the low-functioning.
Using woke language to try and assuage the insecurities of high functioning autistic people might make people feel like big strong social justice warriors, but I will die on the hill that they are actually doing grave harm to many disabled people. To use the parlance, they are being problematic. And they should be ashamed of themselves for it.
You're approaching this from a scientific perspective. The other approach is political/sociological. Neither of you are wrong.
I get that it can be demoralizing, but I'd suggest it serves your cause better to be able to point to high-functioning cases as success stories to mitigate the stigma, lest the rest of the spectrum be dismissed as retarded beyond redemption (hence, eugenics).
I'm sure we can all agree that there should be different definitions of autism. That low functioning, non-verbal people should not be sharing the same disorder as slightly awkward people.
Since we can agree on that I think we should all work together to change the definitions.
I frankly don’t care if you feel the need to call me/a huge swathe or people disordered and have something medically wrong with them because you lack sufficient creativity to imagine how we could treat people with severe mental health issues if we failed to do this. Severely disabled autistic people don’t give two craps about autistic erasure, I knew some over a period of time, they never talked about ideas how “Asperger’s” was fundamentally problematic or any such hot takes, frankly they couldn’t hold a conversation and mostly wanted people to take care of them and be nice to them and for them to be more independent. This is about you, not them.
All I hear is somebody calling me two insults, “disordered” and “privileged” who feels a sense of moral superiority for doing so. I never chose this label for myself, it was imposed upon me, I can’t choose to shed it, and I reject to being martyred for the sake of the severely disabled. I reject being labelled as having a neurological disorder without anybody looking at my Brain, taking my blood, doing any sort of objective testing, because some psychologist arbitrary deemed how I behave “deficits” through observation, an utterly subjective judgement. it’s some sort of moral obligation to believe I’m mentally disordered otherwise I’m hurting the severely disabled!
You know maybe we could help the severely disabled by volunteering or donating to charity instead of this nonsense??
No, no, never would do this. If, as a company hosting an event, I want them to enjoy themselves and then spread these pictures of their own accord. Blocking access to the pictures to get feedback means you aren't getting accurate feedback with or without blocking.
The United States has definitely had an empire. It intentionally diminished it's role in some of the formerly controlled land and territories, but an empire the US has. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374172145/howtohideanempi... In case you want to read more
"Details regarding Cala dispute resolution process are available in the Cala Terms of Use."
But Cala Terms of Use doesn't link to anything and /terms doesn't load...