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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of “infinite monkeys”. An infinite number of monkeys will type the works of shakespeare immediately, because an infinite number of them will start with the very first key they hit and continue until the end. (So it’ll be complete exactly as fast as a monkey can type it, typing as fast as simianly possible, with no mistakes.) You don’t even need the infinite time.

    It only becomes interesting if you look at the finite scenarios.

    And BTW, the lifespan of the universe is finite due to the eventual decay of all matter, including the monkeys and the typewriters. There’s no infinite time.





  • Nixon was simply a bad president, yes, but Nixon’s election campaign popularized the “Southern strategy”. Republicans at the time weren’t particularly popular in the South because–as they’ll happily tell you–Lincoln was a Republican; so they started flirting with racism and courting Southern voters by openly hating black people. It allowed Nixon and others to win elections in the South and became a mainstay of Republicanism. It was the Republican party’s first major foray into fascism which relies on misinformation and manipulation of people through their worst impulses.

    Since that worked, they’ve only gotten worse. The Southern Strategy, which began before I was born, is where I peg the start of the collapse of progressive politics.

    BTW, until that time Democrats were doing it. The parties pretty much traded places on their stances toward race over the course of a couple of decades. So you could also argue that things have gotten neither better nor worse. If so, that doesn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm for our future.














  • Sure he needs to be taxed into dust. But he doesn’t own the WaPo because it’s making him rich. He runs it because it’s a propaganda machine for him.

    He lost 10% of his subscribers, almost immediately, when he tried to use it that way openly. Which says:

    • it’s now a 10% less effective propaganda machine (and that number will keep growing)
    • it’s possible that it was never effective in the first place

    Given those two propositions, he might just unload it, which would be nice for the rest of us.