A community for discussing events around the World
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
Did anyone bother to read this article?
If anything, all I can really imagine that's necessary is to not worship him. Kind of like when you get out of grade school and find out that the US founding fathers were not in fact gods, but disgusting men that were products of their time.
It's amazing how
He was a part of his time
And
He was apart of his time
Sound like total opposites. The latter makes no sense though
I thought you were starting a haiku
I hate the way that now you can
Write a poem that doesn't scan
If it doesn't even line up right
It's just someone talking shite
Especially if it doesn't rhyme
It's definitely the fault of the people who invented haiku
Cunts
It's interesting that our first instinct is to think of cancelling. Cancelling is a way for us to assert that we are not "that", to affirm our disgust for those people. It's flushing the shit away, if you will.
Until you realize that it's all shit, all the way down (cue in Ohio meme). The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Arabs, the Malians, the Turks, the Babylonians, the Indians, the Europeans, ...every civilization until, what, 200 years ago, was a slave owning society.
You can't cancel all of human history, you can't flush away the entire earth, even if ultimately, all soil is shit and rotting crap mixed with rocks.
We have to go beyond cancelling. Instead, we have to recon with the fact that we are somewhat woke on the shoulders of giant douchebags. We can't cancel our history away, we have to sit with the shit and see what it means for us today. Instead of absolving the past, cancel it out of sight and think we're done with it, we have to wrestle with its legacy.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
America still has slaves, the constitution makes an exception for prisoners, which is just Roman style slavery again.
This is great news! Calculus is cancelled!
Schoools Out For Summer!
"man in charge of money in 17th century found to be LINKED to how money was used in 17th century..."
my god
Yeah, this seems like a strange connection to make. "He was in charge of the mint, and the mint used gold, and a lot of gold at that time came from Brazil, which used SLAVERY to mine it!"
Like, yes, this is true, but it's a connection to slavery only insofar as every major economic actor at the time was connected to slavery in some way.
Slavery was commonplace and normal several hundred years ago.
It's actually more surprising that Newton is only "connected" to slavery instead of owning a few slaves personally.
By our standards he may have been a peice of crap.
At the time he was born in the society he lived in his wealth gained in a largley accepted manner.
I see no need to go back over history constantly bringing this shit up.
Nah, by their standards, he was a colossal piece of crap too. He was very much disliked. He was known to be humorless and just kind of a jerk overall. He was also pretty useless a lot of the time. He was elected to parliament and only spoke one time during his tenure there. He said, "the window needs closing." Really.
And then when he took over the mint, he was just ruthless in prosecuting anyone he could for any reason he could find. He had a witch hunt for counterfeiters after there was a change in coinage. It was pretty nuts. So yeah, he was always a piece of shit. This just makes him a bigger piece of shit.
Damn, and I thought he was just a piece of shit for inventing calculus
Ok, but I think the point is to judge him by the standards of the time. That might still label him a jerk, and so be it.
Maybe he was a neuro-diverse individual who saw little value in "people problems" and was only interested in maths and science. Today, we'd show more understanding to that, but we don't know. All we can say was he was a jerk in the eyes of those around him.
That is not an excuse for his witch hunt. And it was a witch hunt by the standards of the time, although they wouldn't have called it that obviously. He ruined people's lives. He literally got people executed. One was certainly guilty of counterfeiting, but he also just made a list of suspects when he was put in charge of the mint and went after them McCarthy style. You cannot argue that drawing up lists of people and having them rounded up on spurious charges based on a list of people you suspected might have been guilty was the norm then because it really wasn't.
Also, why should we judge him by the standards of the time? It was essentially "standard" for nobles to rape children who were put into arranged marriages with them because those children were considered property and brood mares all over the place and not just in the Western world. I sure as fuck judge Muhammad for marrying a six-year-old and raping her when she was nine. I don't care if that was the standard at the time. It's fucking disgusting.
It sounds like your point is that we should be context-aware. By being context-aware, we could avoid judging someone unfairly, such as someone who was neuro-diverse. It sounds like you really value accuracy in assessments. It also sounds like you're saying that judging someone from one's time with the standards of one's time is more accurate than judging someone from the past with the standards of one's time. If so, would you say people from our time accurately judge Donald Trump? Would you say there is consensus about how to judge Donald Trump? In other words, is there consensus in the standards of our time? Zooming out a little bit, if we are truly context-aware, would we not have to judge context-awareness itself as a reflection of who we are?
Newtons part in the slave trade is no less a part of the life and history of Newton then his contributions to science, why would we omit it? Calling him a piece of shit and saying he contributed to an awful system does not alter the fact that modern math and physics are where they are currently due to his contributions. Conversely, his contributions to science doesn't alter the fact he contributed to one of the worst systems in human history.
I'm not denying it I'm simply tired of the inevitable outcome that this brings
It's a long fucking list and the guys been dead for a couple hundred years.
Watson and Crick are/were giant pieces of shit. We still teach about them. Many biology teachers will openly state that Watson is a terrible person
Curious for your take on Confederate statues in the US
Not excusing the past, OR the present, but people a few centuries from now will call us monsters.
He was a rich dude in the 16 to 1700s, his wealth could only come from the suffering of others. While an interesting tidbit about his life, what does it have to do with his math? Not like we can stop using it due to his moral incompatibility with the present day...
He was a rich dude in the 16 to 1700s, his wealth could only come from the suffering of others.
Nobody gains massive wealth without the suffering and exploitation of others, not the 1700s, not in 800BC and not today.
Hundo p!
Extreme wealth is built on the back of extreme poverty.
Heads or tails. Billionaires or slaves. And don't kid yourself; literal slavery still exists.
The summary in the body says his scientific legacy remains untarnished, so it has nothing to do with his math.
However, much like America's Founding Fathers, it is important to account for the amount that important European and European-descended people in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (really even the 20th) benefited from the transatlantic slave trade. An accounting of history's wrongs is necessary.
I really do believe that people remember historical figures moreso for their achievements and impact on the world and society. Than ever the characteristics of their human personality.
Because let's be honest, a lot of historical figures - might surprise you - aren't exactly great people at the whole humanitarian department.
I think it might have more to do with the fact that our perception of morality changes with societal norms. People in the 19th century probably looked at Roman gay sex as something bad and vulgar because gays were bad. Now we view Roman gay sex in a positive light.
Were the 19th century people bad people because they viewed homosexuality as something bad? Or do we consider them bad just because we no longer see homosexuality as something bad? What if 200 years from now homosexuality is considered bad again, do the 19th century people become good?
Maybe we shouldn't apply our current moral values to people who lived at a different time with different moral values?
Isn't that contingent on a person's parameters for what they consider humane? Good and evil are subjective concepts that will never be objective. Wouldn't you agree the definition for what you are calling humanitarian department is constantly evolving? For example, it was considered humane to designate women as the caretaker and men as the provider but now the idea of taking away a man or women's option for how they want to build their family's framework is inhumane as fuck. Also I'm not implying anything about a family being between a man and women or any gender related shit. I simply mean to include the full range of our species' sexes.
Edit for further context: what i mean is that the fault doesn't always point to historic records omitting truths to fit a narrative. There are plenty of examples of the records being accurate, but societal parameters for what is considered humane or inhumane is what evolved.
People in the past were huge pieces of shit. News at 11
People in the past were products of their time, news at 11
News at 11: if you'd been born and raised in the 17th century there's a chance you'd have felt the same
Now the weather
Have you heard of Elon Musk? ..he isn't nearly as smart, though 😢
Dude was smart as hell. He wasn't nice.
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.