Last Thursday’s Open Comments was a pre-programmed post speculating that there would not be any catastrophic news about world events, despite the weeks and weeks of build-up in global geopolitical tension.
It turns out that this was a parochial view for those of us in most modern industrial societies, but not so much for the residents of Ukraine or Syria, where the Russians rained missiles, death, and terror from the skies on innocent civilian populations. How is that even possible? How is it that we aren’t putting firmer pressure on Russia’s aggressive war machinery?
My answer to the rhetorical questions is that we should be doing a lot more against our enemies than we appear to be doing, mainly due to our leaders’ penchant for self-deterrence. Because when the Chinese leadership decide to join the fray, we’ll already be so overextended we will barely be capable of defending ourselves.
Maybe doomsday prepping is in order after all.
It's not catastrophic news, but Harvard's president, Claudine Gay announced she was resigning.
It's best she do so: her research is so plagued with concerns for academic integrity that she lost her credibility. I'll only add that most journals didn't move to on-line editions until the 2000s, so what looks like cut and paste had to be more deliberate on her part back then.
I will defend one point of her work. A few of the problem areas were describing variables. Honestly, there's only so many ways of doing so before you are using the same words as someone else. it's in the lit review and hypothesizing where that cannot be used as an excuse. On-line plagiarism detectors flag almost every submission with something; excluding citations, below 2% doesn't concern me as an editor (I'll re-write my own work if anything beyond a heading or title is flagged).
"How is it that we aren’t putting firmer pressure on Russia’s aggressive war machinery?" My fall-back is to assume someone thinks he will profit from our stance, as I am a believer in the notion that people are motivated by hope of reward and/or fear of loss. In this case, I think it is a political calculation with the hoped-for reward being reelection. To be (re)elected, one needs to earn votes from those who may not support you and and not lose votes from those who do. So, a stated position in support of Ukraine, for example will pick up some support but possible cost some. Modern political solution? Support Ukraine but not too strongly. Decry Putin's actions, but not too strongly. This assumes POTUS is not inspired by principle, but by concern for the election outcome and/or his legacy. I believe this has been the case with many past presidents and is our long-run problem with the electoral process. It does not yield principled candidates.
Should we be doing more? Yes. Had we done more much sooner we would not be in this situation today and Ukraine would not be living through a prolonged war of aggression against its sovereignty.