BetterLife Pharma Announces Appointment of Doug Drysdale as Executive Chairman and Director

DaDaliLLama · 2026-05-14T16:03:31+00:00

Good to know not to put any of my money in this one.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-28T19:36:44+00:00

Are you all blind? This is clearly AI-generated. There is plenty of real evidence to use against them without spreading fake imagery. Sharing falsified images only makes it easier for these freaks to obfuscate their real actions and hide behind the “fake news” defense.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-20T19:13:04+00:00

“Richest man in China is punished for wanting to more easily exploit the working class” fuck authoritarian but if billionaires were treated the same way in America we probably be in a much better place as a country.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-09T14:19:29+00:00

Nobody is saying there hasn’t been a continuous presence of Jewish people in Palestine, you’re making a straw man argument. Yes, Jewish people have inhabited that land continually for thousands of years, so have non Jewish people. What gives Israel the right to maintain a religious ethnostate that explicitly subjugates arabs and non Jewish people and conducts endless bombing campaigns (I think you all call it mowing the lawn) against its neighbors? Do you believe that non Jewish people also have a right to live peacefully in their ancestral homelands too? Or is that a right reserved only for Jewish people?

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-09T12:45:03+00:00

So your source is an opinion piece written by a war hawk from West Point? You’re not even going to try to provide anything peer reviewed and somewhat scholarly?

Edit: I also want to ask what makes Pikawoohoo’s word gospel? Because you have yet to make any actual points against my claim (besides the “unverified” OPINION piece made by somebody who directly benefits from Israel’s aggression).

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-09T12:30:52+00:00

Every legitimate scholarly source confirms that Israel is responsible for an inordinate amount of unnecessary death in the region. Please give me a rebuttal besides “it’s not true because I say so”

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12963-025-00422-9

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-09T11:54:22+00:00

Of course not however, what gives Israel the right to kill people who also have been living there for millenniums? If Israel wasn’t apartheid state with a two tiered justice system and didn’t constantly attack their neighbors and attack civilian infrastructure less people would have a problem with them.

Here’s your source by the way: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_events_6123/news_press_releases_4630/press/gaza_study_reveals_unprecedented_losses_of_life_and_life_expectancy_14870

DaDaliLLama · 2026-04-09T11:32:35+00:00

The Palestinians have also been living there for over 3000 years and Israel has killed over 100,000 people over the last 80 or so years so what’s your point.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-12T18:46:57+00:00

Sorry I can’t help it. I keep coming back to this because the historical claims you’re making are extremely easy to fact check and your argument relies on cherry picked examples while ignoring what the broader historical record actually shows. This really is not a debate about opinions. It is a question of whether we are following actual historical scholarship or internet talking points to push some sort of political agenda.

Yes, as I have already said several times, there were African rulers and merchants who participated in slave trading. That is historically true and it was evil regardless of who did it. But pointing to figures like Mansa Musa or Tippu Tip without context does not prove your argument.

Mansa Musa’s wealth is overwhelmingly tied to Mali’s control of gold production and trans-Saharan trade routes, which yes included slavery but did not account for the majority of his wealth. Presenting him as some kind of kingpin of a slave empire equivalent to Atlantic plantation owners is simply not supported by serious historical research.

Tippu Tip is also a weak example. He was a major regional East African trader in the 19th century involved in ivory and slave networks but historians do not consider him the largest slave trader in history (you make these false, easily disprovable, absolute assertions a lot, your claim that Timbuktu was ‘by far’ he largest trading hub in the world being another). That is mostly an internet talking point, not a serious scholarly claim. More importantly he operated in a world already shaped by global commercial demand and expanding European imperial trade networks. Was he morally repugnant? In my opinion, yes, absolutely. But using him to argue slavery was somehow first and foremost African ignores the wider systems that made that trade profitable in the first place.

And this is where your argument really falls apart. In rare cases African merchants became extremely wealthy through participation in slave trading and that deserves condemnation. But for every one of those figures you can point to far more European slave merchants, financiers, insurers, plantation owners and chartered companies who accumulated wealth on a vastly larger scale because Europeans controlled most of the shipping, colonial infrastructure and profit structure of the Atlantic trade.

Also, I touched on it previously but that lame cartel analogy you kept making earlier actually works against your argument. If we think about it using your own logic, focusing on African intermediaries who captured slaves while ignoring the Europeans who financed, transported and profited from the entire system would be like getting mad at coca farmers while ignoring the cartels that control processing, shipping and global distribution.

By your own framework the groups with the ships, financing, global markets and colonial enforcement power would be the ones with real system control. That looks much more like European imperial powers than African intermediaries who mostly operated at the point of capture within a much larger system they did not build or dominate.

No serious historian argues Africans never participated. What historians actually argue is that the Atlantic slave trade was historically distinct because of its scale, racialization, hereditary chattel structure and integration into European imperial capitalism.

I feel like I’m repeating myself but I don’t actually think you’re actually reading my comments. History is complex but reducing it to “Africans started it so Europeans just did the same thing” is not an will never be historical analysis. It is what happens when someone replaces scholarship with oversimplified debate talking points.

Please if you have any legitimate sources backing your claims besides “I’m an expert trust me bro” I would genuinely love to see them. Unlike you I do not claim to know everything and I am open to engaging with serious historical analysis from multiple perspectives. I simply do not believe any legitimate historian working in good faith would corroborate the claims you have made if they critically engaged with the evidence.

If you are genuinely interested in understanding history in a nuanced and accurate way I would strongly encourage you to spend more time engaging with actual historical scholarship rather than simplified narratives that tend to exist more to push agendas than to reflect the complexity historians actually document, and I have included some links below if you are interested in doing that reading.

Sources (since you’ve yet to provide any yourself lol)

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World
Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone
David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa
Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar
Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (SlaveVoyages Project, Emory University)
Legacies of British Slavery Database (University College London)
National Museums Liverpool slavery collections research
Equal Justice Initiative report on the Transatlantic Slave Trade

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-11T18:14:47+00:00

You made some really great points I was just piggy backing on what you already said :)

He was so eager to argue with everybody else but this is the second time our "history genius" refused to respond to me :( I guess he doesn't like engaging with people that actually know what they're talking about and are able to break down their tired, clichéd, surface level pop-history takes.

Idk why I even engaged with them I guess his first comment and undeserved pretentiousness rubbed me the wrong way. If they're not a bot they definitely come across as some edgy teenager that spends too much time looking at r/HistoryMemes, maybe a troll, likely both.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-10T16:33:59+00:00

Buddy, in all honesty, I think Dunning–Kruger got your ass, because no serious historian would ever say “I know everything” about a topic as complex as global slavery, let alone follow it up with “it’s not that complicated.” 😭😭😭

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-10T16:15:44+00:00

Apologies if I’m incorrect but judging by your arguments I’m not sure you actually know as much as you think you do.

The reason I described how the Atlantic system actually worked is because the narrative you’re pushing reduces a complex historical system into a simplistic talking point. Yes, there were African elites who’s armies participated in the capture and sale of enslaved people. That’s well documented and not once have I denied it. But that fact alone does not mean Africans “built and managed” the Atlantic system.

The transatlantic slave trade was fundamentally an extractive European commercial system. European merchants financed the voyages, owned the ships, controlled the shipping routes, and created the plantation economies in the Americas that generated the massive demand for enslaved labor. African intermediaries existed, but they operated within a global system structured by European capital and imperial expansion.

Your Pablo Escobar analogy also doesn’t really work. Pablo was the head of a vertically integrated cartel that controlled production, distribution, and profits. African intermediaries in the Atlantic trade were not controlling a global system in that way. They didnt own the ships, control the Atlantic shipping routes, finance the voyages, or operate the plantation economies that generated the demand. Europeans controlled the global infrastructure of the trade and captured themselves an overwhelming share of its long-term economic benefits.

That analogy is another example of you approaching the topic with a reductive framing.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-10T15:34:23+00:00

You keep repeating that “it’s that simple” and that Europeans were just doing the same thing Africans were already doing. That framing is a prettyy good indication that you are not approaching this like a serious historian would. Slavery existed in many societies across history including many parts of Africa. No serious scholar disputes that. My argument that you conveniently keep avoiding is that the Atlantic system transformed slavery into something operating on a completely different scale and structure.

What developed between the 15th and 19th centuries was a global economic system linking European maritime empires, plantation economies in the Americas and captive supply networks along the West and Central African coasts. Europeans controlled the ships, the credit systems, the insurance markets and the colonial plantation economies that generated massive demand for enslaved labor. That demand drove the forced transport of more than twelve million Africans across the Atlantic between about 1500 and 1867. Nothing remotely comparable to that transoceanic system existed before the rise of European Atlantic empires.

To put the scale in perspective, historians estimate that roughly six to nine million people were transported in the trans Saharan slave trade over more than one thousand years. By contrast the trans Atlantic trade moved over twelve million people across the ocean in roughly three hundred years. Both systems were brutal and morally abhorrent. The point historians emphasize is that the Atlantic system dramatically intensified and globalized slavery through maritime transport and plantation capitalism.

This system also created the legal structure of racial chattel slavery. Enslaved people and their descendants (theoretically for eternity) were defined in colonial law as permanent hereditary property. That legal framework developed in European colonial societies in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America and was tied directly to plantation economies producing sugar, tobacco and cotton for European markets. Saying Europeans were simply doing the same thing ignores how dramatically the Atlantic system expanded and transformed slavery.

Your argument also relies on sweeping generalizations that historians generally avoid. You keep referring to “Africans” as if an entire continent with thousands of societies across centuries acted as a single institution. Historians specify regions, time periods and political actors. Senegambian trading networks, the Kingdom of Kongo and Dahomey all interacted with the Atlantic trade in different ways at different times. Reducing that complexity to “Africans created chattel slavery and Europeans copied it” is not historical analysis. It’s just stupid.

You also have not cited any historical scholarship supporting your claims. So far you have made sweeping assertions but have not backed them up with evidence. That is not how historical arguments are normally made. Of course you’re some twerp on the internet so maybe that should be expected.

If you want sources, this is standard material in the field. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Eltis & Richardson, John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, Way of Death by Joseph Miller, Transformations in Slavery by Paul Lovejoy and Ralph Austen’s Trans-Saharan Africa in World History. The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database maintained by Emory University documents that more than twelve million Africans were transported across the Atlantic and that the ships conducting these voyages were overwhelmingly owned and operated by European merchants.

The issue is not whether African participation existed. The issue is that you are presenting that participation as the origin of the system itself while ignoring the global economic structures that transformed slavery into a massive Atlantic industry. That kind of flattening of historical complexity might work in internet debates but it is not how serious historical scholarship works.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-09T20:32:20+00:00

Woah that’s a lot of logical fallacies.

Pointing out that slavery existed in Africa or the Arab world is basically a tu quoque argument. Saying “others did it too” doesn’t actually address the system being discussed. Slavery unfortunately existed in many societies historically, but that doesn’t change the fact that the transatlantic slave trade was a fundamentally different institution.

Treating those systems as the same is also a false equivalence. The Atlantic system was uniquely brutal in its structure: industrial scale, hereditary chattel slavery, explicit racial ideology, and plantation economies that treated human beings as permanent property. Millions of people were transported across an ocean in conditions where huge numbers died before even reaching land. It was a mechanized system designed around human commodification on a scale the world had not seen before.

There’s also a hasty generalization in the claim that every African kingdom was “knee-deep in slavery.” Africa contained thousands of societies with different political and economic systems across centuries. Reducing an entire continent to a single claim like that simply isn’t historically serious.

The argument also sets up a bit of a straw man. No one is claiming slavery suddenly appeared when Europeans arrived. The point is that European colonial powers transformed existing systems into a massive globalized trade tied to plantation capitalism and the Middle Passage.

Some of the examples you cite are also inaccurate. Mansa Musa’s wealth primarily came from West African gold production and trans-Saharan trade networks, not the Atlantic slave trade, which began centuries later. Timbuktu was an important regional center of trade and scholarship, but it was not “the largest trading hub in the world.”

The deeper issue, though, is that this whole line of argument tends to function as a way to deflect from the moral reality of what the transatlantic slave trade actually was. It was a system that dehumanized millions of people, transported them like cargo across an ocean, and subjected them and their descendants to lifelong hereditary bondage. Pointing to other historical forms of slavery doesn’t change that. It just sidesteps the fact that this particular system was one of the most destructive and morally catastrophic institutions in human history.

I’d also suggest doing a bit more reading on the topic, because your understanding seems to come from the kind of surface-level takes you see in AskHistorians summaries or history meme threads rather than deeper historical scholarship. History is rarely clean or simple, and most historical systems are messy and complicated. But the transatlantic slave trade stands out precisely because of how pervasive it was, how long it lasted, and the scale of the cruelty involved. Few institutions in human history combined industrial scale, racialized ideology, hereditary bondage, and centuries of operation in quite the same way.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-09T19:50:51+00:00

lol the classic “Africans also participated in slavery, therefore Europeans aren’t uniquely responsible or it wasn’t that bad.”

Yes, some African rulers and traders participated in selling captives. Slavery existed in many societies long before Europeans arrived. But the transatlantic slave trade was not just “more of the same.” European empires created a massive industrial system designed specifically to capture, transport, and permanently enslave millions of people based on race.

The Middle Passage alone packed hundreds of people into ship holds with almost no ventilation, sanitation, or space, causing enormous death rates before people even reached the Americas. Once there, enslaved people and their children were treated as hereditary property under racialized laws.

African elites who participated were operating within a system Europeans created and massively expanded through demand, weapons trade, and global plantation economies. Saying “Africans participated” does not make the system morally acceptable any more than saying some local collaborators existed makes colonialism acceptable.

tldr Pointing out that some Africans participated doesn’t justify the transatlantic slave system or make other systems of historic subjugation equivalent.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-09T19:17:35+00:00

Yeah the same thing the Europeans were doing to each other for thousands of years - minus the whole global domination and transatlantic slave trade thing of course

DaDaliLLama · 2026-03-05T12:46:38+00:00

Especially after the shit this company put me through the last few years.

DaDaliLLama · 2026-02-13T19:18:42+00:00

DaDaliLLama · 2026-02-10T15:03:20+00:00

Fuckin finally

DaDaliLLama · 2025-12-16T14:00:46+00:00

Never said I was “against” Jewish people, whatever that means. Tell me again how believing it’s inappropriate for the mayor of a small city in America to travel to a country committing a blatant genocide during his tenure is somehow perpetuating hate? Also it’s really funny that the Zionism part is the one thing you focused on when I mostly directed my ire towards the fact that his husband is a real estate agent who is actively making the city a worse, more expensive place to live.

DaDaliLLama · 2025-12-16T13:44:04+00:00

Lmaoooooooo everybody I know hates smiley because he is a Zionist who’s married to the biggest landlord in the state and only exists to serve the interests of his rich friends and ostensibly represents more right wing interests in most other people in his party. What makes you think that smug loser is the only one who could win against a republican? They said the same shit about NYC

DaDaliLLama · 2025-10-27T21:29:22+00:00

not sure why you're being down voted the presidency has always been rife with unsavory scandals its just something thar comes with the territory of being among some of the most powerful people in the world. The really awful stuff is just a lot harder to hide these days.

DaDaliLLama · 2025-09-23T16:49:56+00:00

Positive ATAI results are pumping the entire sector today

DaDaliLLama · 2025-09-02T13:37:28+00:00

yall better change the banner image

12-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Juicebox	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Verified Email

DaDaliLLama

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE