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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Leaves out the one catastrophic demand that the US actually cares about

    (D) taking appropriate steps to return to United States citizens (and entities which are 50 percent or more beneficially owned by United States citizens) property taken by the Cuban Government from such citizens and entities on or after January 1, 1959, or to provide equitable compensation to such citizens and entities for such property;

    “At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports. … The symbol of this shortsighted attitude is now on display in a Havana museum. It is a solid gold telephone presented to Batista by the American-owned Cuban telephone company.” - JFK


  • The second one is more like what the original razed 17th century mosque looked like. Deng was the one who gave orders to open fire in Shadian, he’s not good guy liberal here. Mao’s strategy was to yell at people to be atheist. Deng’s strategy was a religious red light district. Keep it alienated from secular society, make the mosques look like they were air-dropped from Saudi Arabia instead of having been there for 500 years, and give people the choice to be religious or Chinese but not both.

    Starting before Xi China realized that wasn’t working, especially in Xinjiang, so the new strategy was to integrate. That means less of Deng’s “laugh at this weird foreign religion” architecture and more of “respect China’s history of patriots who are Chinese first and Muslim second.”




  • If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

    CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.





  • The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

    “Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.




  • The opposite of woke is random shit boomers happened to grow up with. If your politics are based on some principle you can justify, then if you lose you try again later. If your politics are based on a random collection of historical accidents you can’t justify, and you don’t even like most of them except for a couple, but you think the only way to keep the couple you do like is to defend all of them, then losing is the end. You have to fight to the death, and once you do lose you can’t cope by doing better next time, all you have is revenge.

    Sometimes liberals also want to defend historical accidents that they think fit their idea of liberalism, and then they adopt the same kind of aggressive deterrence strategy, like pro-Israel liberals with college protests or the English with trans people.





  • People say that because outside of modern times in the first world, landlords = the mafia. Without expensive police, landlords have to enforce their own rent. So if you’re socialist or any other political movement bad for landlords, they probably make up the biggest paramilitary force in your country and if you don’t decapitate that chain of command fast you get dumped in a cave with 20,000 other skeletons.

    And even in a first world country, the police manhours dedicated to evictions and the private security industry funded almost entirely by landlords is something anybody who wants to deal with housing prices is going to have to worry about.



  • You don’t usually call the audio engineer a musician though. The fact that you “want a string section” is the important part. Art is communication, if you fuck with the AI until it communicates what you want, that can be art, as long as you’re not trying to pass off that the fake brushstrokes contain any meaning. If you learn all the right prompt words to make it “good” and then Photoshop it to fix all the telltale AI glitches but the only idea being communicated comes from 6 random people on Deviantart smashed together, that’s not art.