the party standing for freedom

That died with the Hayes Administration.

it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity

You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.

That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.

Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.

And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.

Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.

They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.

Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.

That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.

Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.

• Pseudocode

• Daemon Thread

• Ruby on Rails

• Onion Router

• Python Commands

All leap to mind.

More artists are coming up through tik tok now than the radio.

The radio isn’t a thousand independent stations looking to fill air time with local talent, it’s a handful of mega-monoliths looking to maximize advertising revenue with the Most Popular Thing (that fits the corporate agenda).

This relationship shows that being attractive will improve a persons odds of being successful in music.

Blandly conventionally attractive, to boot. Could we even do Amy Winehouse in the modern moment? Could we see Eminem or Maryl Manson or Buddy Holly or Ray Charles or Billie Holiday topping the charts? Idfk anymore. Seems like it’s easier than ever to blacklist anyone who is even remotely controversial. Plenty of attractive people who will do the Brittany Spears thing for fear of being the next Dixie Chicks.

Maybe if personality can shine through in those videos it can overtake appearance.

Unfortunately, the personality that shines brightest seems to be the kind that singles you’re an asshole.

Just ask P Diddy and Kanye.

Oh yeah, I love people who stick SQL lookups in a For Loop. Even better, the coder who puts conditional if (but no then/else) clauses around a dozen raw text execution commands that fire in sequence. So you’re making six distinct lookups per iteration rather than answering your question in a single query and referencing the results from memory.

Internal screaming

Well, you don’t want to waste space by adding the same file path twice

Do you think music nowadays puts more emphasis on the appearance of the artist than before?

I think the question is backwards. What we have isn’t a prioritization of appearance but a reduction of advertised talent combined with a professionalization of cosmetics. When you’ve consecrated your industry around a bare handful of performers, you can pick out the fist full of people that check every box.

Beyonce, Swift, Usher, and Bieber cover all the bases.

But once you get outside that rarified niche of promoted talent? Do you really think Post Malone is famous for his good looks? Is Kishi Bashi just coasting on his pretty face?

I don’t really think so.

Young Mic Jagger was a snacc.

Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…

Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.

Facebook Ads are on par with most of what Trump sells, and they’ve got a market cap of $1.4T

The thing with cats is they assume they’re the patron.

warlocks have more fun than any other class

Love to be dragged into a plane of eternal torment and subjected to the most nightmarish cruelty my patron can devise, because I failed to fulfill condition XXVI.a.243-0.1 in the infernal contract.

Love to have a creature of mad whimsy show up to cause sheer bedlam at the worst possible moment, because I stumbled in a grove half-starved and ate fruit from the wrong Fae Lord’s magical bush a lifetime ago.

Love to be forever trapped under the unblinking eye of the Divine Surveillance State with an angel’s merciless glare boring holes into the back of my neck because my great-great-great-grandfather pledged himself to the seventh generation as part of the Glorious Crusade of the Most Righteous High One.

Warlocks having so much fun right now… weee… :-(

Jews did live in Palestine/ Middle East

Look up the history of the Beta Israelis / Ethiopian Jews and their treatment in the reconstituted state of Israel.

Compare that to the treatment of Afrikaner Israeli converts emigrating from South Africa and Russian/Ukrainian Jews fleeing violence in the current Russo-Ukraine War.

You’ll notice one of the groups was targeted for mandatory sterilization and it wasn’t the white folks.

What if you were more of an R.E.M. guy than a Nirvana guy?

Someone is going to feel so edgy when they use it as originally conceived unwittingly.

Know more than a few people who lived together for years before tying the knot primarily for the economic benefit (plus throwing a big party is fun). By the time you’re really vibing with someone, marriage is almost an afterthought.

This entirely unironically. Life is better when you can share it with other people.

I think that those animals would absolutely do the same thing if they had the physical and mental capabilities

Definitely depends on the animal. Bonobos and Chimpanzees - our two nearest relatives - have dramatically different dispositions and cultural patterns. Go further back in history and you’ll find six or seven other close ancestors to homo sapiens spread across the globe, each of which developed their own distinct behaviors.

Even to say “they’d behave like humans” requires a very broad brush, because human behavioral patterns are also extremely variable. The Columbian explores had a dramatically different social pattern than the West Indies neighbors they initially encountered.

Since there are finite resources, if they’re too successful they start to become victims of their own success.

This goes back to the infinite growth engine of solar energy. If you can capture more sun - either directly or by proxy - you can grow with fewer bounds. Organisms best suited to this task fruitfully multiple. But there are still evolutionary dead-ends - patterns that seem fruitful in the moment but only because of a temporary state of affairs.

The engine of evolutionary development is an erratic oscillation between environmental compromise and conflict, exploration and exploitation, production and consumption. Because the rules are always changing, there’s no permanent winning strategy.