Dan Drezner and Bill have both flagged Randy Schweller’s new piece in National Interest. I’ve just finished reading the piece and I agree with them – it’s really a depressing read. But, it’s the type of piece that we see periodically – it tries to take stock of the...
A few weeks ago Facebook unleashed its new Terms of Use on the unsuspecting user community. As anyone with a FB site knows, though the changes were touted as enabling greater user control over...
I just re-read Susan Strange's article, "The Westfailure System" in the Review of International Studies 25, 3 (July 1999). In either early 1999 or late 1998 (depending on the editorial schedule of...
I've been traveling in the southwest and reading different newspapers than I usually do. As a result, I learned that Phoenix is America's "kidnapping capital." The LA Times published the AP story I...
Wow. If the use of non-binary-gender-codes on census forms is an indicator of progressive human rights law, Pakistan has now left the US in the dust: Late on Wednesday, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered that the government officially recognize a separate gender for Pakistan's hijra community, which includes transgendered people, transvestites, and eunuchs. The court told the federal government to begin allowing people to identify as hijras when registering for a national identity card. Such cards are necessary for everything from voting to more informal situations; patrons must present...
For my first blog post here at Duck of Minerva, I thought I should stick to one of my areas of experience (if not expertise): Alcohol.The Canadian Press has picked up on the fact that although there are many Canadian wines available at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, there are only three Canadian beers (– and hardly the finest that the landmass north of the 49th has to offer: Molson Canadian, Alexander Keith's Ale or Blue Light.) Considering that Canada is the nation of Bob and Doug, this hardly seems fitting. I’ve been at two soirees at the Washington Embassy this year – and many at the...
I have now seen Avatar twice, (one in each 'D'), and I can say without spoiling anything that critics like Armand White and Annalee Newitz* are way off base in describing the film as "the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt." Corny, maybe a little. OK, maybe a lot. But imperialist?According to White:Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes Cameron’s technology-infatuated audience; they’ve never read Joseph Conrad on colonialism or feel any compunction about balancing politics and fantasy....
From ICanHasCheezburger.com.
I first posted this two years ago; since it's that time of year again, and since I still stand by what I wrote then, I am re-posting. 'Tis the season, and all.Ever since the invention of the InterNet, not a December goes by without some version of this making the rounds of listservs and e-mail chains and the like. I must have received it a dozen times from various sources. It's cute and funny and all, but I must say that I've never been entirely happy with its conclusions. So in the spirit of the season, I present the first known social constructionist investigation in the the existence of...
The opening of Randall Schweller's latest article for The National Interest:CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence,...
Uruguayan producer Fede Alveraz uploads a short 4-and-a-half minute film of giant robots destroying Montevideo to YouTube and now has a $30million dollar contract to develop a feature length film of it. Alveraz says it cost him $300 to produce -- call me a skeptic on that point -- but it is cool how quickly information technologies open space for new voices....
Aaron Shaw had an interesting post at the Dolores Labs blog last week that examined how using different question scales in surveys can elicit very different responses:You can ask “the crowd” all kinds of questions, but if you don’t stop to think about the best way to ask your question, you’re likely to get unexpected and unreliable results. You might call it the GIGO theory of research design.To demonstrate the point, I decided to recreate some classic survey design experiments and distribute them to the workers in Crowdflower’s labor pools. For the experiments, every worker saw only one...