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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • In the 1960s black people were much more actively discriminated against on a systemic level, practically prevented from voting in many of the states in the southern United States. The president at the time was the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, and was facing the much more racist Republican challenger Barry Goldwater.

    While the black vote was suppressed in the south, there was a significant voting block in the north of black people and their allies whose main issue was civil rights. Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, met several times with LBJ, who coaxed them to tone down the direct action protests and criticism until after the election, as he claimed to we willing to negotiate with them once the threat to his power was diminished.

    Instead, civil rights protests increased. The leaders, probably correctly, determined that once the election was over, they would have less leverage. Even though losing the election meant having an enemy in the white house, having a ‘friend’ who continued to delay essential concessions did not further their cause. People were actively being murdered by the ‘Jim Crow’ apartheid regime, and delays and half-measures were not sufficient.

    Thanks to the pressure of millions of people engaged in direct action and open criticism of the president, the Civil Rights Act was passed before the 1964 election. LBJ won by a landslide due to the popularity of the legislation, but suffered the severe political consequences Democrats were trying to avoid through their strategy of placation and delay. The 1964 election was the last where Democrats got the majority of the white vote, and electing politicians in the southern states became much more difficult for their party.

    Palestinian Americans and their allies now face a similar situation. Democrats will continue to ignore the genocide in Gaza unless there are real political consequences to their actions. While Donald Trump would be a significantly worse candidate, the logic of a two-party system requires that they be willing to risk a worse political situation if they are to hold any political power at all.

    Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King are regarded as heroes today, but at the time, they were reviled by both Democrats and Republicans as a force of chaos that acted out of ignorance of the political system. If LBJ had lost the election to Goldwater, perhaps their legacy would be considered differently. But it would not change the fact that the cause they were fighting for was just, and they were able to wield political power in a system that was designed to marginalize them.


  • At the last family reunion, my mother and I were in charge of making all the food. We spent 3 days getting all of the groceries, and stacked fruits and vegetables in the family room, filled the bathtub with ice to keep the meat, and stacked the drinks in the garage.

    We fried the meat, boiled the noodles, mixed the salad, and cooked the chili. The entire counter and range were covered in pots and pans. Most of the intermediate cookware had been rinsed and was in the process of going through the dish cycle while we were setting tables out in the yard, when my Mom realized she hadn’t made any red pea soup. Her brother was flying in from the island for the occasion and she knew it was his favorite. The bag of peas had hid under a couch pillow, and we missed it while making the rest of the meal.

    We didn’t have enough time to wait for the cleaning cycle to finish, so I dumped out a shallow stainless steel flower vase and put that over the flame. There was no time to soak the peas, so my mom just mixed them raw with the broth, yams, carrots, milk, and spices, and then transferred them to a clean bowl once the cycle was complete. The soup didn’t look right, though. The peas and broth are supposed to have a full ruddy color, but the result was a much darker red like a beet.

    When uncle arrived he was really pleased to see we’d kept him in mind, but after the event was over and everyone had gone home, we found a pile of wet peas dumped behind some bushes. I learned a very important lesson that day: Those who make peas full-red solution in posse bowl, make violet-red solution inedible.












  • Reddit is notorious to responding to financial incentives. In the past they would ban communities only when they became toxic to advertisers due to overwhelming negative publicity. During those purges, they would often throw in some leftist subs to prevent the user-base political average from shifting leftward, but the purges were never proactive.

    I think we’ve entered a new era where Reddit is no longer as concerned about which subs may scare advertisers, and are more concerned about which subs generate the kind of content that is valuable to LLM training. If I were training the next version of ChatGPT, I would be alarmed if it spontaneously invited me to masturbate with it, or prompts for images of a “battle station” resulted in images of walls full of nude women.