I wasn't going to post anything about the cyber-intimidation campaign being directed at Erik Loomis, as that seemed like a job for Big Important Liberal Blogs and not for the Duck of Minerva. But now the issue has strayed directly into our territory. In brief, Erik...
The Canard “All the Fake News that is Fit to Print” The Duck of Minerva, considered one of the nation’s top international relations blogs, has recently come under attack from Cat Fancy magazine....
From our infatuation with swing states to the pageantry of the Chinese Communist Catwalk -- great night of TV in China as Xi Jingping steps out first from behind the curtain. I miss the old days...
The Romney foreign-policy memorandum is, for lack of a better term, a bad joke. One example: It twice suggests that the Obama Administration has backed away from European missile defense, in part by using weasel language on the third-site system ("Abandoning A European Missile Defense System"). The memorandum's claims about Iran are inadvertently answered in this short Stephen Metz piece on the vacuousness of current "attack Iran" arguments. Terry Wing explores whether or not the South China Sea dispute will escalate to "war."Taylor Fravel on the "perils of predicting Chinese...
The violence in Syria is spiking. 1,600 killed in the past week and 100,000 new refugees in the past month. After a year-and-a-half of violence, the UN reports that there are now more than 230,000 refugees, 1.2 million internally displaced persons, more than 2.5 million in need of humanitarian aid. Lakhdar Brahimi, the new UN/Arab League envoy called the violence "staggering." Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo yesterday condemned Assad's "crimes against humanity."So what have we learned over the past year-and-a-half? First, despite all the complaints about the era of...
There is KJI in the middle – he was even born in uniform Actually, he was probably born in the USSR during the war. Here are parts one and two of this series. 5. Pyongyang the Potemkin Village? The usual line is that Pyongyang is a potemkin village compared to the rest of the country. I can’t say, but I think so. Unfortunately, we only saw the capital, Nampo, and the Mt. Paektu area. And what we saw was quite controlled of course. We were told at certain points that we were not allowed to photograph out the bus windows. But honestly, I didn’t see any extreme poverty. I certainly didn’t see...
#DNC2012, days 1-2 -- Biography as politics: 1, Arithmetic: 1, Foreign Policy: 0.Jim Baggott explains how the "Higgs mechanism creates mass."The rise of beer culture in Asia.Hayes Brown defends the UN Peacekeeping Mandate. The Chinese satirical critique of the United States that's generating a lot of attention. Ever wondered which countries are eligible to purchase US drones? Now you know. Mali requests (restricted) military assistance. Joshua Landis' Syria Comment provides interesting, well, commentary on what's going on in Syria (via Suzanne LS).George Lewis' mostlymissiledefense blog is...
When I asked for suggestions for interview subjects for the NBinSFF podcast, Alastair Reynolds was high on the list (albeit mostly over email channels). Well, he agreed, and I'm scheduled to interview him tomorrow. The focus is Blue Remembered Earth. If anyone has suggestions for questions or themes, let me know. Also, this seems as good a time as any to ask for more suggestions for interview subjects.A few additional items:Interesting thing I've learned so far: the PR people at Tor? Aggressive. Very aggressive. Many of the other major SF&F publishing houses? Not so much. The "New Books in...
My colleague, Charles King, has a great piece (gated) in Foreign Affairs on what the success of the Scottish National Party says about secesssionist movements everywhere.Opinion polls suggest that the Scots are unlikely to approve independence outright. Instead, they will probably settle for some form of "enhanced devolution," an increase in the considerable policymaking power granted to Scotland over the last decade and a half. But the rise of Salmond's SNP has sent an unexpected shudder through British political life. The outcome of Scotland's vote will also reverberate throughout Europe,...
Cambridge University Press has un-gated the New Orleans issues of Perspectives on Politics until 16 September. From the release.This issue, themed "Post-Katrina New Orleans and Politics of Reconstruction," takes an in-depth look at the various political and cultural issues involved in rebuilding the Big Easy, including social triage, structural violence, and more. For more background on the issue, read Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey C. Isaac's introduction.