All of Dead Hour Canoe's Comments + Replies

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

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 sp... (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 anyo... (read more)

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 emergenc... (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 populati... (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 Fren