Happy Day After Halloween, folks. Resist the urge to steal your kid's candy. Once again, the internet is a magical place:
Friday Nerd Blogging: When Life Imitates Art
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Happy Day After Halloween, folks. Resist the urge to steal your kid's candy. Once again, the internet is a magical place:
I still believe that some of Snowden's disclosures, and his actions, have forfeited his whistleblower status. But if he'd been a bit more circumspect about what he'd leaked and how he had done...
Editor's Note: Â This is a guest post from Professor Peter M. Haas of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Finding myself on the grey haired side of the academic divide and having experienced...
Update on the international community's reaction to events in Syria: Russia calls on Assad to cooperate with the weapons inspectors. Says it has evidence the attack was propagated by the opposition....
Change you can believe in. Or is it a trap? So our little geekfest-in-a-teacup has provoked, among other things, some additional contributions by members of The Duck focusing on additional ways that the Empire's command structure and Imperial strategy towards the Rebel Alliance doesn't make a lot of sense. The Imperial troops are feckless, letting the rebels escape on occasions when they should have been able to stop them easily. Opportunities to wipe out the rebels are missed through various kinds of incompetence, tactical or bureaucratic or otherwise. The Empire as a whole is riddled with...
and Failure leads to Fear, Anger and all that Stuff. In the renewed discussion of the Battle of Hoth and other failures of the Galactic Empire, there is a running theme throughout many of the posts: how does a leader get the underlings to do what they are supposed to do. Given the affinity between the dark side of the force and Principal-Agency theory,* it is somewhat surprising that nearly all of these analyses have been atheoretical and have ignored the most applicable framework. As the great Jedi Mace Windu once said, it is principals and agents all the way down. The Emperor is the...
You can’t win a counter-insurgency with a military like this The Duck has gotten into an excellent debate with Ackerman on the Empire’s blown opportunity to stamp out the Space Vietcong Rebellion at Hoth. Westmoreland spent 5 years trying to nail down the VC in set-piece battles where US firepower could be brought decisively to bear and end the war. Here was the Emperor’s similar chance, but Vader and Admiral Ozzel blew it (mostly because the Empire’s officer corps was filled with grandstanding self-promoters, as Ackerman rightly points out). But as the respondents noted, the larger...
With the Oscars fast approaching, one documentary How to Survive a Plague is a likely winner (though may lose out to my second favorite documentary of the year Searching for Sugar Man).  How to Survive a Plague is, as I described in my earlier review, an emotionally redolent account of ACT UP's mobilization to move the U.S. government and the pharmaceuticals industry to bring life-extending AIDS drugs from the labs to market and into bodies. Josh Barro makes the case that the reason why ACT UP succeeded is because they made concrete demands, which echoes the argument Ethan Kapstein and I...
Episode I: Spencer Ackerman over at Danger Room posts this analysis of the Battle of Hoth. Episode II: 90 e-mails and twelve hours later, this symposium goes up on the Danger Room website including a contribution by our own Dan Nexon. Unfortunately, not all of us involved in the furious e-mail thread made the cut or the deadline, so not all of our replies were posted. Which brings us to: Episode III: my piece, sadly not included in the Danger Room symposium. Below the fold. Everybody -- including, I suspect, the official Imperial histories -- acknowledges that Admiral Ozzel's decision to...
I gave a guest lecture for undergraduates on the state of global climate negotiations yesterday for a law school colleague here at the University of Texas. In light of the president's strong but ambiguous comments in the State of the Union last night threatening executive action if the Congress doesn't act, I thought I'd share my notes here and would welcome comments from others about whether I've done justice to the arc of negotiations. My aim was to bring a group of 20 year olds up to speed so that they could understand how we got from the 1992 Framework Convention to last year's...
This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes.  Jarrod is Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2009. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy. He is currently trying to determine what should be on the cover of his forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press while trying to reconcile that with the maxim that books should not be judged by their covers. One of the important areas of debate in securitization theory is...
Japan's "looming singularity." Xavier Marquez has lots of infographics about the "normativeness of democracy." The nuke content in Obama SOTU address. I'm skeptical of both the feasibility and utility of further nuclear arms control with the Russian Federation, but I'm down with cooperative-threat-reduction activity. BLTN: NUKEMAP! Walt argues that US existential security promotes adventurism. And also: Uncertainty about Russian military reforms. Dynamics of Contention and From Mobilization to Revolution but not Politics of Collective Violence? Say it ain't so, Joe. Vote for me for Chair of...