Because Ukraine is turning westwards. NATO is a small part of this, and largely irrelevant; it's not as if Putin's attitude to Ukraine has changed as it has become more likely to join NATO, or as if in the short or medium term it has ever been at all likely that Ukraine will actually do so.
Ukraine sees the healthy democracies and economic growth of other Eastern European countries, and wants to be one of them. This desire has been increased by the failure of the Russian economy over the past ten or so years; since 2013, Russian GDP has decreased by a third (or flatlined at PPP). The GDPs of Eastern European... (read 615 more words →)
George Mikes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mikes) told the story of a friend of his in Hungary who was convinced that war was imminent in 1939. Someone had told his friend that some substance, I think it was red lead, was essential to fighting wars, so even though he had no idea what red lead was he borrowed as much as he could, bought red lead, and became enormously wealthy in a very short space of time. Not sure if there's an equivalent substance for modern armies.
Ah, thank you! I was completely wrong, ignore me
On Monday (21st) Putin stated, in the translation on the Kremlin website, that the setting up of the Union Republics of the USSR in 1922 (which included the three Baltic states) involved transferring the territory and "the population of what was historically Russia" to the new states. He described the principles used as "not just a mistake; they were worse than a mistake", and as "odious and utopian fantasies". He lamented "the collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR". He does go onto discussing Ukraine specifically, but on the basis of that speech he thinks that the Baltic states should still be part of Russia. I understand he has said... (read more)
Think it misses the point a bit to say that the EU and UK don't care enough to deploy their own troops in combat roles against Russia. Whether they care enough to do so isn't relevant; Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons if NATO troops support the Ukrainian army. So deployment of NATO troops was never on the cards. General assumption seems to be that Ukraine will lose the war relatively quickly.
Sanctions will only make a difference if they are significant enough to harm EU/UK/US as well as Russia. Not sure anyone knows how extensive they will be. A lot depends on German public opinion,... (read more)
There hasn’t been nearly enough work put into creating good philosophical thought experiments, and as a result the ones that we have are either flawed or flat-out terrible. It’s easiest to explain the issues by looking at one of the terrible ones. So, in the footbridge or fat man question a trolley is out of control, and will kill its five passengers. You’re standing on a bridge over the tracks, and if you push someone standing next to you off the bridge, your action will kill that person, but stop the trolley, saving the lives of its passengers. Would you do so?
The 2020 PhilPapers Survey recently sent out 100 questions to all... (read 1103 more words →)
This is another field, along with human challenge trials and the vaccination of young children, where the current fixation in medical ethics on not causing harm to an individual might be mistaken. Less clear cut, but still up for discussion. I can think of two areas where slowing viral evolution to greater deadliness might be a policy aim, although in the second alongside the aim of slowing transmission more generally:
1.Should we be using treatments on a small number of the critically ill that are likely to extend their lives, but risk causing the emergence of more deadly variants? I believe there's a real possibility that variants have emerged as a result of... (read more)
I'm not sure deadliness is orthogonal to reproducibility. You're correct that the statement you provide is false, but I think I would defend a similar statement as follows:
1. Causing humans to get sick is very likely to make a virus less transmissible, as the host stops moving around as much, or dies. This generally happens in the short term, but if not then in the long term - for example, if a virus transmits solely through relatives touching the corpses of the dead, it may initially be more transmissible the more lethal it is, but once the human populations that maintain this custom have been replaced by those that don't, then killing... (read more)
One angle to look at invention from is the curious fact that so many things are invented by different people in different countries; and that if you look into it you generally find that most of these multiple inventors have a point (rather than, as in Star Trek, Russians just being adorable idiots).
Just from your list, and from a British perspective/quick wiki'ing, Swan invented an electric light bulb that worked well enough to make him a lot of money before Edison - and Turing built the first computer, as opposed to calculator. And I'm sure there are French/German/etc equivalents that are just as accurate, and just as partial. Though even though I rationally know this, and have no conscious desire to defend my nation's scientific honour, here I am writing this comment.
So invention as an idea (and as it's normally thought of) is suspiciously connected to tribalism and identity. It may not be much use for describing or investigating how discovery works.
I'd be very uneasy about any of the scholarship in a book that from your description (and I think at least one other review that I've read) just ignores reality on the Kandiaronk stuff, and some of the other things it discusses. If you know you can't trust them on things they obviously get wrong, can you trust them on any of it? It seems much more likely that if you got experts to review the bits of the book relevant to their areas of expertise, the conclusion would be that a lot of it was worthless, actively misleading, or not even wrong.
Your description of the book makes me want to read it. It sounds fascinating, and stimulating. I just feel like I might learn more by reading a series of rebuttals of their arguments from people who know what they're talking about.