Phil Dickie

Journalist, author, artist and cyclist,

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@TrueFactsStated Dreamed of what?

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

If Elon was the truth advocate he pretends to be, he would retweet this balanced analysis of slavery.

[iOccupyNigeria @iOccupyNigeria]

Elon , you’re retweeting something that, on paper, sounds accurate, but in reality is highly misleading.

Yes, Europeans were enslaved in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. That is historically documented. Estimates often place the number at roughly 1 to 1.25 million over several centuries. That should not be erased.

But context matters.

The transatlantic slave trade involved the forced transport of approximately 12 to 13 million Africans. Of those, roughly 10 to 11 million survived the Middle Passage and arrived in the Americas. Between 1 and 2 million died during the ocean crossing alone. Millions more died during raids, forced marches to the coast, imprisonment in holding forts, and other stages of capture and transit.

So when we discuss “brought” versus “taken,” precision matters. Africans were not immigrants. They were captured, commodified, and transported in a system with catastrophic mortality before and during shipment.

Scale is one distinction.

Permanence is another.

In the Americas, slavery became racialized and hereditary chattel slavery. Enslaved Africans and their descendants were legally defined as property for life. Their status passed automatically to their children. It became a permanent, race-based caste system embedded in law. There was no built-in expectation of ransom, no structural pathway back home, and no generational reset. Once transported across the Atlantic, for nearly all, it was a final and permanent severance.

By contrast, while European captives in North Africa endured brutal conditions, many were ransomed, exchanged, or eventually freed. Their enslavement was not generally codified as a hereditary racial status automatically imposed on their descendants for generations. It was not constructed as a permanent, biologically inherited legal condition.

Slavery in any form is wrong. That is not in dispute.

But collapsing these systems into a numerical comparison without discussing scale, mortality, heredity, and structural permanence distorts history. One was a large-scale, transoceanic, racialized, hereditary labor system foundational to New World economies. The other, while violent and real, operated under different legal and structural conditions.

Accuracy requires more than a headline comparison. It requires context.

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@_lorazepam_ @joni_askola Maybe against censorship imposed by hidden algorithms.

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@Qldaah There might have been a little footslogging involved

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@KosSamaras In Switzerland we have a probably too modest wealth tax which captures unrealized capital gains on an annual basis. The Swiss also get the opportunity to vote on Federal tax rates. The mania for ever reducing taxes on the wealthy is a formula for reduced services and larger debt

[Tarric Brooker aka Avid Commentator 🇦🇺 @AvidCommentator]

This has been happening for decades.

And anti-money laundering legislation that would get us even to a global normal level of enforcement has sat on the shelf for over a decade.

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

Er, may be because the USA didn’t exist when the UK invaded or took over bits of what is now India.

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

Why didn’t the United States go to war with the UK when they invaded India? Why are some territorial aggressions ILLEGAL under INTERNATIONAL LAW?

You need to stick to neocon talk radio, they’ll give you a nice baby bottle to suck on.

[Kristine Ziwica @KZiwica]

Time to burn our activewear and shapewear! I'll just add that Lorna Jane's response to @danziffer threatening "any and all necessary legal action to protect its interests" is one for the ages in what *not* to do in response to today's publication of gender pay gap data.

[ilya @ilyatakesoff]

@knox_fort @WarClandestine Real journalists are jailed or dead in Russia

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@RockAppleWood @DoctorTro Why not both?

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@maria_drutska No

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@journovox9 @PhillipAdams_1 I think we are suffering a shortage of news and an excess of commentary.

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@journovox9 @PhillipAdams_1 Personally I don’t think journalists should be in the pay of any country or interest. We should also continually examine our own beliefs and prejudices.

[CAPTAIN QUOLL @jonkudelka]

Hard bitten journos having a massive sook about a bunch of cartoonists being mean to them is very funny. Sorry but it is.

[jeff @Jeff4theclimate]

@MFWitches @DanielAndrewsMP Including this spread of corporate socialism..

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@ChoateGerry @MarieColemanAO @MColvinMcKenzie @ABCaustralia Ignoring the reality that the consulting industry was at the forefront of the advice that government needed trimming

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@doctorow @linakhanFTC Important to read and to consider.

[Phil Dickie @phildickie]

@IllyBocean @YaThinkN Does this include the armies of pro-Russia bots trying to submerge news from Ukraine?