Robert Lieber takes another swing at the declinism debate. Kyrgyzstan moves forward on evicting the US from Manas. US suspends Bangladesh's trade privileges. China shifts policy on the Dali Lama. Also commits combat troops to Mali. David Schorr on nuclear zero. And...
Paypal has just launched PayPal Galactic "to figure out what currency can be used and how commerce should be regulated off Earth" once all the space travel and tourism picks up." More from...
Aside from some abortion rights Texas senate filibuster coverage, this week's morning linkage is all about climate change and President Obama's Tuesday speech at Georgetown University. The announced...
Yesterday was an exciting day in American politics, featuring legislative time-traveling, a Supreme Court turning back the clock on voting rights, and of course the invalidation of DOMA and the...
I was asked by a participating member of the H-Diplo/ISSF network to review The American Culture of War. Here is the original link to my review, but it’s off in some far corner of the internet, so I thought I’d repost it here. In brief, I found the book a pretty disturbing rehearsal of right-wing tropes about the military in a democracy, especially from an academic, and there’s no way I’d ever use it with undergrads as Routledge suggests. The underlying moral driver is the ‘chicken hawk’ principle – that those without military experience are not morally qualified to lead DoD and should...
Hey. Here's your linkage... Data Mining No, I don't care where Snowden is going next... but I am happy to see that Hong Kong used the opportunity to request clarification about US hacking of their computer systems. (h/t E. Webb) Drones Paradoxically, there's something about James Bridle's outline of a reaper drone on the steps of the Corcoran Gallery that makes the idea of drones more tangible and murderous. Of course, the drone pilots actually spend much of their time being bored. Luckily, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University is willing to supply thousands of "Christ-centered aviators" to...
The "debate on missile defense" leaves Robert Farley feeling very, very tired. Sean Kay wants the US to go cold turkey on European troop deployments. Heh. Heh. "Snowden Crash." Heh. "The Strangelove Caucus." Cute. And also: Virtual transitions: The World SF Blog ends, The Smoked-Filled Room celebrates one year of correctly hyphenating a compound-adjective.
Jay Ulfelder and I had a Twitter conversation on this question in the last few days (here and here). But Twitter has such limited space, I thought I would break out our discussion on the blog and ask what others thought. Watching all these riots – driven heavily by youth dissatisfaction, it seems – is making me wonder if this might spread to Asia’s democracies. A lot of the problems these protests are identifying exist in spades in Asia: high-handed, out-of-touch governments; election-proof pseudo-technocracies that act as unaccountable oligarchies; shallow, clique-ish political parties that...
Here are some recent phrases that entered the policy lexicon in the last few years that I absolutely hate – “whole of government” and “game changer.” There is a faddishness to tropes in the policy arena that proliferate, that capture a certain sentiment of the moment that soon become over-used. Earlier, it was “tipping point.” I kind of hated that one too. These words are useful short-hand. Ah yes, a game-changer, that which changes the game, a dramatic development that upends our understanding of what will transpire. Yet, strung together with other stock phrases, you end up with policy...
H/T to Jacob Levy for pointing this out on twitter.
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. There has been a debate on the Duck lately about the meaning of rational choice theory and game theory, and how it’s different from varied alternative approaches (here, here, and here). I wanted to offer a different interpretation than Arena and Jackson. Both give pretty orthodox interpretations, where game theory treats human agents as economic agents interested in maximizing their utility. I wanted to offer a sociologically richer interpretation,...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Michael Martoccio, who is a PhD candidate of Early Modern History with a minor specialization in IR Theory at Northwestern University. His research broadly examines the role of cooperation in shaping political change in Europe, c. 1300-1700. His projects include a study of cooperation-building institutions in Central Italy, the late medieval market for sovereign rights, and a comparative analysis of city-leagues on both sides of the Alps. tl;dr notice: ~1800 words. Tilly’s war-making/state-making thesis has taken a number of knocks recently. The turn...