Morning Linkage

2 August 2012, 1230 EDT

  • That aircraft carrier base in Perth? Not so much.
  • Against self-epublishing (“self-epublishing”? Gah!).
  • Artillery as “The Last Argument of Tyrants.”
  • Gerard N. Magliocca asks if Washington, DC is unconstitutional. The correct question, though, is if it is the greatest place to be?
  • Jamie at Blood and Treasure on the flap over the Churchill bust: “People close to the seat of power in the United States, at least in the geographical sense, are arguing over the positioning of a minor hearth God relative to the household altar.”
  • Jay Ulfelder at his home blog: “I think that political science deserves the second half of its name, and I therefore consider myself to be a working scientist. The longer I’ve worked at it, though, the more I wonder if that status isn’t as much a curse as a blessing. After more than 20 years of wrestling with a few big questions, I’m starting to believe that the answers to those questions are fundamentally unknowable, and permanent ignorance is a frustrating basis for a career.” 
  • Robert Murray makes the important point that IR students need to “read more history” and that this applies to scholars as well. That way we might, among other things, stop making wrongheaded claims about the Peace of Westphalia and all that. Unfortunately, his discussion of Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn suggests that IR students and scholars also need to read more philosophy of science. 
  • LFC writes something depressing, but too common, about his graduate-school experience. 
  • Robert Farley wants to know why Star Trek is so, well, non-Asian. At least it is better than Firefly.
  • Daniel Little on Daniel Elder-Vass’s The Reality of Social Construction. And yes, I recognize that this basically amounts to trolling for a Colin Wight-PTJ comment war.
  • Matt Scroggs at The Smoke-Filled Room riffs on Kenneth Waltz’s Nukes-for-Iran! article. The punchline: nuclear weapons may not enhance stability, but a nuclear Iran can be deterred.