We're just a few weeks from the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war -- but the end is now clearly in sight. President Obama, earlier today: Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.Even better, as Obama told U.S. troops:...
My Theories of International Relations course spent this week discussing Rousseau, a theorist whose relevance to international relations is a little unclear at first glance. Hobbes and Locke have...
Just to follow up on Charli's post: if for some reason, you're not one of the millions who have already seen "An Engineer's Guide to Cats," please rectify that now.And the sequel:
I swore I'd never catch the whole "Friday cat blogging" meme, and this won't be a regular thing, but I just have to wish everyone a happy "Leave Your Cat at Home Day." Founded in response to "Bring...
After the Animal Revolution, monkeys will take revenge on us for attempting to domesticate them. Monkeys do not make good pets. There are very sensible arguments for this--Hilzoy makes them most eloquently--and there are the times when it is self-evident that one must be a bit crazy to keep a monkey as a pet:On one occasion, they got in a wrestling match, and Higgins [the baboon] put one of his “steel-like fingernails” through Bob’s scrotum....Bob has been bitten several times by Higgins, who now weighs 50 pounds and has large incisors. Once, when Bob was leading him from an outdoor...
President Obama said a lot of important things tonight, but he also regurgitated a disturbing Bushism or two.* One of these is the term "America does not torture." Stated in this particular way, an indisputible statement of principle is conflated with and therefore masquerades as an empirical "fact," one which is blatantly untrue. This trope was one of the Bush Administration's many brilliant inventions, and was designed as a public relations counter-response to growing acknowledgement that US military and intelligence personnel not only had tortured detainees, but had in fact been ordered...
Abi Southerland on the current popularity of Zombies:I mentioned this puzzle to my better half, who happens to be in the middle of a reread of World War Z. His answer? ... You can have a fascinating story about a single zombie in a world of humans or the last human in a world of zombies. You can do one on one human-zombie interactions, or set entire armies against each other. They work differently as individuals (stupid and clumsy) and in crowds (lucky by means of what sheer numbers can do with probability theory). A group of them is as impersonal as a natural disaster; a single one is as...
One of the panels I attended at ISA was a roundtable on Stephen Brooks' and William Wohlforth's excellent new book, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy. The participants did an outstanding job of discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, but it was a point made both by Charles Glaser (soon to be of George Washington University) and Randall Schweller that got at the crux of a larger problem with the last six years of debate about balance-of-power theory.In essence, the debate looks like this: "France and Germany opposed the invasion...
John Dickerson asks "Is it Obama's Fault the Dow Is Tanking?" and provides "yes" and "no" talking points. Josh Marshall thinks the answer is no:I was just watching Chris Matthews explaining how the Dow is President Obama's "scoreboard" and how people are going to start getting angry at him soon if he's not able to get the Dow to stabilized and start going up soon... There does seem to be a certain lack of comprehension of the fact that there are economic realities, actual losses, underlying the steep stock market decline.I don't watch much any cable news these days, yet I can guess that some...
From the department of shameless self-promotion and linking to one's colleagues: here's a little scholarly op-ed I wrote for the good folks over at e-ir. Nice site they have there, and they read Duck, making them people of taste and discernment besides.The op-ed is titled "What the Philosophy of Science is Not Good For."
To continue the theme of ISA follow-up, I wanted to mix in a few observations about the way the massive technical shift of stuff like Web 2.0 seems to be changing that which we study, how we study it, and how we conceive of what it means to study what we study. Of all, it feels as if our professional norms of what it means to study IR and how we ought to do so are the most lagging.I attended several panels on discourse analysis. One panel focused on the study of images as discourse and featured two innovative graduate student papers investigating the discourse of photographs of Abu Ghraib...
One of the most memorable sets of interactions I had at this year's ISA conference came directly after the close of our impossibly-well-attended graveyard-shift panel on "The Relational Turn in the Study of World Politics." (I say "impossibly-well-attended graveyard-shift" because it was in fact scheduled in the very last session of the entire conference, 4:15pm Wednesday afternoon; I and the other participants, including Dan, expected to outnumber the audience-members and were quite prepared to adjourn the panel to the bar. Instead, there were 64 people in the audience.) The panel was a...