Notices by Nitin Pai (nitin@thinktanki.social), page 10

After reading some pretentious ‘literary’ science fiction, I read an old Robert Goddard novel…and was thoroughly entertained.

I wonder what happened to the proponents of Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

My great grandfather from paternal side was chief priest in a massive temple in Mathura. One great grandfather from maternal side gave up his societal position and proxy-begged for food for leprosy patients who had been outcast from a town (and founded Leprosy Mission of India). Another great grandfather was collector of a large town and drove a Plymouth car, in pre-independence India.

Me? I have cats.

#enshittificaton

An excellent way to bring down a civilized society is to force it to fight a counter-insurgency war.

War brutalizes.
Counter-insurgency brutalizes more.

@cydonian Wah liao! I recall having had it around $5

@carlmalamud Is this on AirBNB? Asking for a friend 😋

It wasn’t that old rascal Winston, but the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban:

>Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternatives/?amp=1

As that great scholar Prof Kader Khan eloquently said: your blood blood, our blood water?

It must be something to do with the Earth’s rotation
Or its magnetic field.
People clearly see some murders as murders
But don’t see others at all.

“Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134780-500-our-human-ancestors-often-ate-each-other-and-for-surprising-reasons/

It was indeed ‘sensitivity’ to China’s concerns that led the Hugo awards committee to drop some nominees. #SciFi #ScienceFiction #China

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/15/authors-excluded-from-hugo-awards-over-china-concerns

Nice, punchy discussion of our study on who gets blamed when a driver hits pedestrian. The neighborhood matters; individual blame is distracting us from the deeper problem - the lack of pedestrian infrastructure

https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2024/02/15/franklin-county-road-pedestrian-safety-crash

@thej Hey!

Back in 1999, many of us laughed at the different electrical voltages and plugs around the world and said “this is what happens when you let governments make standards.” Even the ITU process was seen as cumbersome and bureaucratic.

Whereas we internet and www guys had made everything interconnect with TCP/IP and HTTP URLs seamlessly.

Now in 2024, you can’t sent iMessage to an Android phone.

@mrbrown Hey! Good to see you here. After such a long time. We met circa 2004

Gen Subianto is Gen Suharto’s son-in-law

@brainwane One should never lose the sense of wonder. 😀

“Liberalism is the search for a society in which no one need be afraid.“ - Alan S. Kahan

#Liberalism #Politics #Ideas

@omshivaprakash MHROTD