Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

'would need to' lol.

What about pragmatic discussions in domains where clear data isn't accessible?

Deriving high probability conclusions from high probability premises?

>A greater number of people took psychedelics because they're more accessible due to anonymous, location independent markets

Likelihood of this not being true approaches zero IMO.

> Psychedelics change people's lives meaningfully

Sufficient research exists to back this up. Michael Pollan's book cites many.

> the kind of people who buy drugs on the internet are the kind that are demographically likely to experience positive life changes from psychedelics.

You may want to note: most would agree by volume, those buying psychs online are also distribute them with their social sphere. The dark net facilitates local area networks of psych access. There's no a 1st order relationship here.

You're the only one bringing up a "founding principle", which shifts the discussion from reality on the ground towards legislative philosophy.

Everything you've said here and in the sibling comment makes the case for the irrelevance of those declared policies. If they were important you'd expect the US to have abolished slavery relatively early, or for it not to have been such an important issue as to have precipitated a civil war within its borders.

To say that a country is "founded on" something speaks to its early development. For instance the modern Icelandic state is arguably founded on its fisheries, and the US can be said to have been founded on sustenance agriculture, the economic surplus of slavery etc.

Its impact on global warming includes not only the carbon footprint of all the electricity it wastes, but also all the hot air and fermenting bullshit generated by people yapping and shilling about it.

> You're the only one bringing up a "founding principle", which shifts the discussion from reality on the ground towards legislative philosophy.

The reality on the ground is that most of the US was the first country in the Americas to take steps towards abolition, most of the country by population had banned slavery within a few decades, and it was banned nation wide within a century. I had assumed people were talking about "founded" in terms of founding principles, because trying to justify the claim that the US was founded on slavery based on "reality on the ground" is even harder to defend.

> If they were important you'd expect the US to have abolished slavery relatively early, or for it not to have been such an important issue as to have precipitated a civil war within its borders.

It was. The first state to ban slavery was Vermont in 1777 literally one year after the country's founding. Massachusetts, then one of the most populous colonies (I think 2nd or 3rd highest population) banned in in 1780. The majority of the country by population had banned slavery well within one lifetime after it's founding.

The fact that the country was willing to go to wage a Civil War to bring about the end of slavery is testament to the fact that that the country was not founded on slavery, I cannot fathom how one can convince oneself that this indicates the opposite.

> To say that a country is "founded on" something speaks to its early development. For instance the modern Icelandic state is arguably founded on its fisheries, and the US can be said to have been founded on sustenance agriculture, the economic surplus of slavery etc.

By this logic, the US was founded on subsistence farming, logging, fur trapping, manufacturing, shipbuilding, whaling, and countless other industries. Furthermore, using this logic one can claim that the entirety of the Americas, Africa, much if not all of the Middle East, and many European countries are "founded on slavery". The fact that the only way to defend the claim that the US was founded on slavery is take such an expansive view of what it means to be "founded on slavery" that it becomes almost universal demonstrates that there isn't much justification for this claim.

> I cannot fathom how one can convince oneself that this indicates the opposite.

Honestly I can't fathom how saying the US was founded on slavery is a controversial point.

The context of this thread is a discussion of the design of the British pound, and whether Obama being on the dollar would be seen as being notable by future generations because he's black given the deep history of slavery in the US.

I think you're trying to defend a strawman when purely discussing the US's slavery practice in the context of the Americas. If we're only doing that we'd focus on countries like Haiti and Brazil instead, but we're not. Furthermore it's a given that it's not notable that a black person's on Haiti's money given their demographics.

To say that a country is founded on something is to describe its overall character at the time. Almost a 100 years after the country's founding almost 1/5th of the population was enslaved[1]. More than half of the US's export earnings were from the products of slavery, dwarfing any other sector.

Comparing this to whaling would be comical if the subject matter wasn't so sad, and so is cherry-picking the early abolishment of slavery in a few northern states who didn't have a notable population of slaves to begin with. It would be like Nebraska having outlawed whaling while most of the US's population & economic output was supported by whaling.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_Census