Random pop-culture notes

13 October 2006, 0215 EDT

• The Crane Wife is, as my friends predicted, growing on me. The prog-rock turn worked much better in The Tain, and I don’t think I’ll ever find the Decemberists‘ fourth LP superior to their prior three, but there’s still a lot to like about their first major-label offering.

• Jonah Goldberg’s the worst kind of sci-fi geek: one who doesn’t know a whole lot about the genre . I actually agree with him about Dean Stockwell’s line in the premiere of Battlestar Galactica, but he’s wrong about everything else. The writers of BSG understand the fragility of goodness in the face of difficult circumstances and that even good people will make immoral choices. It is hard to find a more consistent theme in the show.

Indeed, the notion that one person’s terrorist may be another’s freedom fighter isn’t sophomoric: it is a verifiable fact.

The question is whether we should ever approve of terrorism, a queston BSG poses but, so far, hasn’t answered. Now that’s the mark of good science-fiction: to present us with “inconvenient” circumstances that challenge us to rethink or affirm our preexisting beliefs.

• Why is The New Republic intent on proving that blogs don’t threaten the press, but that they do threaten the pundit class?

That’s all.

Filed as: Decemberists, Battlestar Galactica, and The New Republic

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.