It takes a really bad politician to actually become a noun, for example with WW2 nearly out of living memory we all still know what a Quisling is and why you don’t want to be one. Apparently Liz Truss was spectacularly crap enough that she’s becoming to gross incompetence and doctrinaire policy what Quisling is to treason and collaboration.

Take it from someone from the one country that developed then abandoned indigenous space launch capability; space infrastructure is insanely expensive.

Black Arrow was actually good though, and Britain was mad to cancel it. Also cheap for its day, the government was spaffing money on far worse at the time.

We’ll just have to sacrifice Luton in a heroic last stand that saves the day from the invading foe. We could do it preemptively in fact, just in case.

Ah I wasn’t aware she’d been decommissioned, Poseidon himself has finally got fed up with the Russian Navy smoking in his house!

Most credible Russian emissions control, it’s not just the Kuznetsov!

While 90 is a decent number of years, it really goes to show how young the field is in the grand scheme of things. How many professions out there have most of their practitioners’ lives overlapping with those of its most important founding figures?

RIP to a titan of the profession, history will recognise her achievements long after all the systems we maintain stop running.

I wonder how it got through the FDA who for better or worse tend to take donkey’s years with this sort of thing?

Using legit clinical computer vision models for this (ie not putting your symptoms into fucking chatgpt) isn’t a horrible idea if it’s been demonstrated safe and effective by clinical trials, but it’s kind of wild there’s no human oversight from clinicians. From what I understand, ance medication can produce some unpleasant side effects. I’d be curious to know how they dealt with those risks.

I only ever see that quote used by people with a ‘some of you may die but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make so my abstract ideology can rule the rubble’ attitude to politics. While I’ve no doubt sometimes revolutionary violence is justified (as in France’s ancien regime), political terrors never are and people who advocate them usually have the immense privilege of never having lived to see one. People who revel in violence are untrustworthy on a basic human level, even when violence is legitimately called for to preserve life and limb the absolute minimum amount that is effective should be used.

I have an extreme distrust of people who see others like Job’s wife and children; fair game to have killed brutally and without further note to serve the main character’s personal arc. They have no idea of the value of human life, and would spend it wantonly given half a chance.

I genuinely hope we don’t live to see your blood-drenched dream become a reality, people like you are exactly how atrocities against innocent civilians happen. For everyone who deserved the guillotine (and don’t get me wrong some were lucky that’s all they got) dozens more were merely the victims of interpersonal disputes or insufficient doctrinal purity. People you’d dismiss as collateral damage to your grand dream have lives worth no less than yours, and you have no moral right to them whatsoever.

Even once your creepy enthusiasm for blood is eventually quenched, you end up with extremely unstable and traumatised polity that gives rise to something worse. People who fetishise death and suffering for its own sake (especially those who quiver with joy at being the one who gets to dish it out) are themselves damaged individuals who have no business being anywhere near the leadership of a political movement.

People who salivate at the thought of another Terror scare me on a human level frankly. Some people are far too keen to play the hangman, unaware of what that does to your humanity.

How do you avoid the problem of leaders with concentrated power in such upheavals historically getting pretty murder-happy or at least very corrupt though? Horizontal organisation isn’t an affectation but a response to a real problem historically speaking.

My ‘favourite’ fact about Soviet-era bioweapons is that they had a facility on an island in the Aral Sea. Said sea vanished from existence after the Kremlin redirected all the rivers which fed it in an effort to grow cotton in the desert, causing it to shrink to some 10% or less of its original volume. As well as destroying the livelihoods of the fishermen of Aralsk in Kazakhstan, it also made the island full of fucking anthrax among other things part of the mainland.

I’ll say this for the Soviets, they didn’t do environmental disasters by halves. Also as a Briton we had our own anthrax island in Scotland from the war that was only decontaminated in the '90s.

Let’s not discount the possibility of creaking Soviet-era equipment that should have been replaced decades ago but the money was non-existent/spent corruptly/not enough to touch the sides of the neglect/delete as appropriate.

We’re talking about the country which operates the poor Kuznetsov which has been begging for death for many years.

Nah I disagree, the state shouldn’t get to disguise the violence it inflicts on people. Executions should not happen full stop, but if they do I condemn any measure whatsoever that spares the executioners from the trauma of what they are doing.

If I were to be executed I’d much rather be hanged, beheaded, or shot and without a hood in any case - hangmen and other supporting officials have no business making it easier for themselves to sleep at night.

The whole notion of lethal injections is the product of a sick and cowardly mentality in my view.

I oppose the death penalty in general, but at least the gallows or the firing squad have the decency not to lie about what they are: the state violently ending someone’s life in cold blood. The lethal injection is a perverse inversion of medicine, it exists solely to protect the moral blushes of the pieces of crap who carry it out. Only a profoundly immoral political culture could invent something so blatantly perverted in my view. I particularly loathe the concept for this reason:

If executions are gruesome enough the people who order them haven’t the stomach to pull the lever on the gallows, the correct response is to abolish the death penalty; not to sanitise it behind a ghastly pseudo-medical ritual which exists solely to allow those people to sleep at night. It is a coward’s way to have the death penalty without being considered cruel and despotic, but it is in reality among the most cruel and despotic forms of execution. If executions are to take place at all (and I think they should not) they should be very public, very swift, and very traditional so people are forced to see what the death penalty actually is.

groups of people who think all of their woes will evaporate as soon as they declare independence.

To be fair this does describe the SNP quite well! I’m a strong believer that a democratic institution is only worthy of the name if you can leave, but the Yes campaign’s whitepaper was very sloppy on its economics for example, it did a lot of wishful thinking around oil prices and Westminster paying for pension entitlements. The SNP is also incredibly crooked as it turns out, I’d be properly miffed if I was a Scot that petty corruption was damaging the credibility of the broader independence movement.

I have a lot more time for Plaid Cymru though, they’re doing the right things on the subject and they’re definitely a lot less shady in my view. Welsh independence is obviously even more challenging economically, but Plaid seem to be pacing themselves sensibly and building trust rather than going full-tilt into an ill-conceived gamble. I can see them delivering independence credibly in the future. Also they’ve done very well to gain enough seats from Labour to overturn their century-long Welsh streak.

Forget merely betraying your country, these people have betrayed their entire species.

Judas and Brutus at least can take comfort, at last we have much worse traitors to make an archetype in their place.

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Russia might be good at general shithousery and political warfare but I feel this just feeds their mythos. America did Trump to itself to a large extent, certainly by voting him in after the man attempted a literal coup.

Now if this isn’t a source of pan-European solidarity I don’t know what is!