What are the catastrophic risks, and how catastrophic are they?

Catastrophe ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Posner
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Healthy Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Natural Catastrophes ◽  
Catastrophic Risks ◽  
Negligible Probability ◽  
Disease Agent ◽  
Flu Virus ◽  
Seriously Ill

The number of extreme catastrophes that have a more than negligible probability of occurring in this century is alarmingly great, and their variety startling. I want to describe them and in doing so make clear the importance of understanding what science is doing and can do and where it is leading us. I begin with the natural catastrophes and move from there to the man-made ones, which I divide into three groups: scientific accidents, other unintended man-made catastrophes, and intentional catastrophes. The 1918–1919 flu pandemic is a reminder that nature may yet do us in. The disease agent was an unexpectedly lethal variant of the commonplace flu virus. Despite its lethality, it spread far and wide because most of its victims did not immediately fall seriously ill and die, so they were not isolated from the healthy population but instead circulated among the healthy, spreading the disease. No one knows why the 1918–1919 pandemic was so lethal, although it may have been due to a combination of certain features of the virus’s structure with the crowding of troops in the trenches and hospitals on the Western Front (where the pandemic appears to have originated near the end of World War I), facilitating the spread of the disease. The possibility cannot be excluded that an even more lethal flu virus than that of the 1918–1919 pandemic will appear someday and kill many more people. There is still no cure for flu, and vaccines may be ineffective against a new mutant strain—and the flu virus is notable for its high rate of mutations. Another great twentieth-century pandemic, AIDS, which has already killed more than 20 million people, illustrates the importance to the spread of a disease of the length of the infectious incubation period. The longer a person is infected and infectious yet either asymptomatic or insufficiently ill to be isolated from the healthy population, the farther the disease will spread before effective measures, such as quarantining, are taken.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

From Flibbertigibbet to Ernest Jones and Ernst Simmel: Nightmares under Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Martin von Koppenfels
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
World War ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Affective Dimension ◽  
Dream Theory ◽  
Ernest Jones

Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams denies itself any reference to the immemorial folklore and demonology of nightmares. This telling omission can be linked to the marginal role assigned to the affective dimension of dreams in Freud's book. It can also be linked to Freud's life-long struggle to determine the place of anxiety dreams in the framework of his dream theory. This conceptual problem became even more urgent when, in the wake of World War I, the anxiety dreams of traumatized soldiers appeared on the psychoanalytic agenda. Among Freud's closest collaborators, Ernest Jones was the first to turn his attention to the mythology of nightmares. Interestingly enough, Jones's study treats the nightmare complex exclusively as a problem of cultural theory instead of dream theory. In this essay I explore the theoretical implications of this half-forgotten chapter of psychoanalytic dream theory focusing on Freud, Jones and Ernst Simmel.

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