Hasn’t Beal’s list been taken down quite a while ago? I remember making a copy of it before they removed it. It was a great source, but sometimes it needed some context. I think all of Frontiers in ended up on the list for reasons, but their review process was mostly alright, for example. It was this kind of lack of clearly definedrules and explanations that let them to taking the list down. Is it back up?
I’m wondering about coverage. How much was it talked about in the public? How much was it covered by media? What’s your experience from France and other countries that reached the threshold and from countries that remained far from it? People can’t sign something they never heard about.
In a large part, a distraction. Or more generally, a way to stay in power. How do you stay in power when your country is doing very poorly economically while you and your friends keep siphoning public money into their pockets? You create a strong narrative, ideally an external enemy (“NATO wants to destroy our way of life!” “Ukraine is full of fascists killing Russians!”). Support it by propaganda from your state-controlled media and you are a hero saving the country, if not the world. You can do pretty much anything and still retain considerable support.
That’s also why Putin can’t really afford peace, he would lose a strong narrative in his favour. He pretends to agree, but doesn’t actually follow conditions of any agreement while constantly increasing his demands. He might agree with an agreement that would basically be Ukraine’s capitulation, but nothing less.
If you come from elsewhere in the EU, yes, you can always vote in local elections and european parliament elections where you live. If you’re from elsewhere, it depends on local law.
I’m afraid that you don’t quite see all the complexity involved. I’m not saying I see all of it, but I can see there is more to it than you think.
What about bacteria? Not only don’t they don’t often use sexual reproduction, so they don’t need a pair of parents to produce offsprings, but they exchange plasmids and therefore DNA with little regard for species.
Plants are a complete mess of genome duplication, aneuploidy and whatnot. In these aspects, they are sort of scary to me.
Also, what about formation of a new species? Do you think there is a clean-cut time when they stop producing offspring? Also, what exactly do you mean by fertile? Where do you get a partner to test if the offspring is fertile?
These are just a few problems that came to my mind right away. I’m sure there’s loads more. I’m afraid that the notion of well organised, easy to categorise world just doesn’t match the real world. Species are more or less a continuum. Incidentally, so is life. We have no good definition fornlife either. Just use whatever definition is useful at the moment and don’t forget to specify it when necessary.