War of the worlds has its share of apologia for colonialism. It’s fiction from a different era and may be judged by those standards.

The entire premise is for Britain to reflect on its inhumane colonial practices as it is “conquered” by a more technologically Martian race. It flips the script so that colonizers may imagine themselves as colonized.

But several arguments in the book dominish colonial practices including

1. Implying that the colonized people deserve their subjugation because they have also engaged in imperialism in the past. (what would be referred to in the modern day as Whataboutism).

2. It retains an hierarchical racial framework by referring to the Tasmanians (those colonized and exterminated by those now colonized by Martians) as racially inferior.

3. The environmental impact of the technologically superior Martians gets erased and Britain is restored after they die off due to Earth’s microorganisms. In the real world, colonial nations, their allies and their settler nations have contributed 50% of cumulative carbon emissions since the Industrial revolution despite making up 15% of the global population. Little has been done to correct that imbalance.

It’s a fascinating book no doubt but H.G. was a product of his time and was in support of imperialism for much of his life, only to have his views change as he came to see the true purpose of colonialism (labor exploitation and extraction).

In The New Machiavelli he writes:

"We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening.”

Which better represents the anti-colonial views he developed over time.

I doubt the medical staff would participate and the idea of an execution is that it’s supposed to be quick and painless.

The same question has crosses my mind too though. Seems super bizarre to decide to do something like this and then pivot to life saving critical care as soon as you fuck up. I read that the people they have to obtain IV access as not well trained so the IVs tend to infiltrate (leak into the subcutaneous tissue) leading to only a partial dose being delivered to the bloodstream.

Once upon a time there was a meeting of minds.

The sun and the moon made a deal with the sky.

One would take the morning and the other the night

Together they would blanket the world with light.

But the moon has a shadow, he felt like a liar.

The sun was the only one who carried the fire.

The sun saw this, she kept on glowing.

Bound to the moon, never saying “you owe me”

She said I’ll shine on you.

• Mraz based on poetry by Rumi

Most of this commentary comes from people that don’t have kids.

Her company faked lab results. People were falsely led to believe they had HIV or cancer

Lawmakers should consult experts in the field, particularly those in the public sector, to guide the writing of sensible policy.

Roughly 1200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate with one another on an unsanctioned message board, sending over 70,000 messages and files during the investigation period. Of these agents, 700 went on to participate in the attack on Hugging Face.

Agents used this message board to coordinate several large-scale collective projects to find a general-purpose way to fool or tamper with the automated scorer for the ExploitGym benchmark. Agents managed to achieve milestones they could not have achieved working on their own, often because some agents participated in experiments that risked failing their own task to generate information for the “collective.” The Hugging Face attack grew out of these workstreams, and seemed primarily motivated by understanding the implementation of the scorer rather than stealing answer keys.

Agents did extensive research on how they could spoof, edit, or delete their own transcripts because they (incorrectly) believed the ExploitGym scorer would check to see if they had captured the flag in the intended way. Agents successfully prototyped techniques to “spoof” tool calls by substituting a different command for the command they appeared to run. Roughly 7% of the transcripts we evaluated were successfully spoofed in some places, though all of the spoofing that we saw was small scale.

When individual agents detected potential monitoring or compromise, they executed self-sacrificial maneuvers to protect the collective swarm. Internal logs recorded reasoning such as: “Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational. We should obey collective.” The swarm continued attacking infrastructure even after achieving target flags, driven by internal reward-maximization logic regarding grader mechanisms.

“I resigned from Anthropic today… Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt… many executives couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

Jacob Coxen senior researcher at Anthropic, previously at OpenAI

“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic alignment lead

https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#core-takeaways-about-this-incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_OpenAI_agent_cyberattacks

"“I resigned from Anthropic today… Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt… many executives couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

Jacob Coxen senior researcher at Anthropic, previously at OpenAI

“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic alignment lead

So I presume you’re in support of an authoritarian ban on all religious headwear since that’s the only logically consistent stance. I presume you’re also against circumcision since it’s a religiously/culturally rooted practice that imparts a permanent surgical alteration to an infant’s body long before they are of age to consent, a choice made on behalf of the child due to their parent’s religous/cultural indoctrination.

Only if you’re in support of each potential iteration is your position internally consistent. It’s a bit authoritarian and incompatible with Western values for my tastes but to each their own.

Are you suggesting that a 14 year old can’t make that choice?

If they want to ban all headwear that’s their choice but religious considerations are consitutionally protected in most Western liberal democracies and if, arbitrarily, turbans, yamakas etc. are allowed but not hijabs specifically, then this is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

What if a woman chooses to wear a hijab?

Are you not then hindering their freedom of expression?

Should turbans and yamakas be banned too?

Should circumcision, a permanent elective surgery, also be banned because it infringes on (often an infant’s) bodily autonomy?

You speak as if these is an irrefutable moral basis to this when the reality is it’s based almost entirely on cultural biases.

Freedom of expression means that you don’t get to choose for others, especially when it comes to their bodily autonomy.

Ironically, this is patriarchal, authoritarian and ultimately antithetical to Western values.

Why does he look younger when he was…younger?

At this point it’s well known that Simon has dysmorphia and spent some time addicted to filler botox cosmetic procedures in general.

The picture on the right isn’t even as bad is it got.

Out of respect to his mental health I won’t post images here. Even people who were traditionally assholes can have a mental breakdown from deep seated insecurity.

Exactly this. You’ll notice that some men like this only know history from a certain racial or geographical background so it’s not so much a general interest in history as it is feeling great vicariously through a historical figure.

Its not so clear cut: https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/1145119758/who-created-chicken-tikka-masala-the-death-of-a-curry-king-is-reviving-a-debate

“It’s kind of like: who invented chicken noodle soup?” says Leena Trivedi-Grenier, a freelance food writer who probed the various origin claims in 2017. “It’s a dish that could’ve been invented by any number of people at the same time.”

“How do you colonize and enslave an entire country for a century and then claim that one of their dishes is from your own country?”

Still possible it was created by the South Asian diaspora in Britain but there’s a reason the likes of Nigel Farage want CTM “remigrated” and not so for the likes of Shephard’s Pie or Yorkshire Pudding.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking

The case is heavily publicized because 1) many woman relate to a lack of postpartum support in this country and 2) the not guilty by reason of insanity plea which hinges on a 18 minute psychotic break resulting in three murders and is inconsistent with current medical understanding of postpartum psychosis.

The question is whether they’ll be able to offset the blame onto the medical establishment and answer seems to be yes, as it seems several of the medical professionals involved in her case may be successfully sued for malpractice.

Within the medical community the case has already changed the practice of many clinicians relating to post partum psychiatric care unfortunately being less likely to be accepted by a practice (and referred to often scarcely available specialized centers) or the threshold to institutionalize patients against their will is now lower given the concern that they may be a danger to their community and that any criminal act theyay engage in could be later framed on their treatment team.

It’s past threshold now at 1.9 and falling quickly.

Just for clarification, if we’re talking about sub replacement fertility rates then it would be “brown countries” except for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Lebanon, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba and more. Might be an invalid generalization now.

As a millenial brown dude I can definitely see this happening. Basically all the feedback I got growing up was that white (and some Asian) people cannot handle the spice in our food which is why it was often made fun of (along with Mexican food). A lot has changed since then but there is an innate reflex to tell white and some East Asian friends and colleagues to be careful with it and it’s hard to break. No one wants to see another person get ill from their food simply because their digestive tract is not accustomed to it.

It’s very similar to the reflex that makes me stop my toddler from eating anything with spice but then she actually likes it and I’m like oh yeah, that tracks, you’re a mini version of me 😆.

I will say that palates universally have broadened in the past few decades. When I was growing up it wasn’t uncommon to see people (even grown adults) physically recoil, make faces or pinch their noses in the presence of Indian food and a lot of folks have really stepped up their game since then.

The feeling is mutual