Musical Politics and Political Science: I'm currently downloading the free EP by Hey Anna, a well-reviewed band involving Mike Tierney's nieces. Hume's Bastard discusses PSY's profanity-laden anti-Iraq War stylings. More from Juan Cole. Apparently this is a big...
The initial reaction from Facebook and from my Realist friends reveals a certain amount of scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement this morning. The EU today is an easy parody and I guess the...
As I've mentioned before, one of the projects that I'm working on now is a book provisionally entitled "The Politics of the Hunger Games." PM and I are overdue in submitting a full proposal to the...
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So...
This genre is growing on the Duck, so here are are a few more thoughts before you take the PhD plunge. Enjoy your last summer to read as you choose, without following a peer reviewer or a syllabus. Such lost bliss… Generally speaking, yes, I like being an academic. I like ideas and reading. I like bloviating at length. The sun is my enemy, and exercise bores me. I would really like to be a good writer/researcher. Including grad school, I’ve been doing this now for 15 years, so clearly I could have switched. I am committed. But there are at least 7 things I didn’t see back in my 20s when I...
On a wall outside of the Intercultural Center auditorium. Make of it what you will.
Some years ago I finally got around to reading Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology. Reading Goodrick-Clarke's description of various forms of esotericism and mysticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and specifically Blavatsky's Theosophy movement, drove home the degree to which H.P. Lovecraft's writings -- and, by extension, basically all modern horror -- are a product of that milieu. Indeed, it isn't much of a surprise that horror, fantasy, and science-fiction writers (and not a few conspiracy...
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('000902d5-7b3b-4c9c-b77d-2a0f6080ed33'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-xHchAHKaTKA/T6nywRxtfXI/AAAAAAAAALg/2rX2oBbeHk4/video6cf4c2596412%25255B7%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />Greatest Movie Line Ever on Academia: “How the Social Scientists Brought Our World to the Brink of Chaos” Hah!If academia’s taught me anything taught me, it’s that the real world is flawed, not theory, and that facts should change for me, not the other way around. As...
Despite Adam Elkus's prodding, I avoided participating in the first-round beat down of Paul J. Saunders supremely stupid essay, "Giving Realists a Bad Name." That's okay, because Daniel Larison, Dan Drezner, and others piled on.Saunders's subsequent response to Drezner does make a very good point: just because you are a realist doesn't mean you don't have to care about "values." Realism writ large is not logically equivalent to Meineke's "Machiavellianism." Unfortunately, Saunders's justification is more Joseph Nye than E.H. Carr:Realists understand well that perceptions are important in...
I am concluding a semester-long experiment in incorporating a theory/policy writing simulation of sorts into my doctoral level "Human Security" seminar. This struck me as important both because my own doctoral training left me unprepared for writing for practitioners, and because the divergent socialization of academic professionals into scholarly versus non-scholarly writing has been cited as a key impediment to successful communication with those to whom our ideas and knowledge could conceivably matter.In fact since "human security" is both an academic field and a policy domain this...
I guess I should not be surprised at this news that the Pentagon did not cooperate with Marvel Studios to make The Avengers movie (h/t to Jacob Levy for pointing this piece out to me). After all, immediately after seeing the movie, I enumerated the many principal-agent problems illustrated in the movie, and the military abhors P-A problems. It turns out that the Pentagon found unrealistic not the part about the Norse Gods, the large green rage-machine (best depiction yet by Ruffalo and Whedon), nor the un-icing of a Super-soldier. Nope, the unrealistic part was:“We couldn’t reconcile the...
Another Sunday, another military puff-piece from the NY Times. Yesterday's issue promoted the idea that America is threatened by a drug trafficker-terrorist network emanating from Central America. The source of this idea is--no surprise--the U.S. military, our fearmongers in chief. But the Times unquestioningly reported their statements as front page news, as part of a longer article about the new Central American wars such propaganda is justifying. According to Col. Ross A. Brown, commander of the military’s Central America operations, his mission is “disrupting and deterring the potential...