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Only Two Days Left to Vote
Get your ballots in soon. We are in the home stretch for the voting for the 2015 OAIS Blogging Awards (The Duckies). Voting closes on Friday, Jan. 30 at 5:00pm EST. All ballots must be submitted by...
An Ebola Marshall Plan?: How to Stop Ebola and Salvage the Health System in Sierra Leone
This is a guest post by Dehunge Shiaka, a gender expert in Sierra Leone. This is post #3 of a series he has written on the impacts of Ebola in Sierra Leone (post 1, post 2). How can we ensure that...
Ethnic Security Dilemma Regrets
One of the regrets of my career is that I was developing the ethnic security dilemma concept the same time as Barry Posen, who published his in Survival in 1993. As I prepared for my comprehensive...
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Thursday Morning Linkage
“Of course this is risky,” Mr. Logulov said, “but risk is everywhere in life. A brick could fall on your head in the street, for example. And this is just a small risk.” - on the practice of having Russian children take their pictures with circus animals (WTF!?) Here is your morning linkage with a return to form, conservation concerns and pollution in Asia loom large: Worries about China's resumption of the trade in tiger parts Yao Ming urges Chinese to give up on shark fin soup And good news, big drop in demand for shark fin soup record 4,000 missing in recent India floods Massive flooding...
The State of the Killer Robot Debate
In a new piece up at Foreign Affairs on the killer robot debate, I attempt to distinguish between what we know and what we can only speculate about around the ethics / legality of autonomous weapons. The gist: Both camps have more speculation than facts on their side... [But] the bigger problem isn’t that some claims in this debate are open to question on empirical grounds, rather that so many of them simply cannot be evaluated empirically, since there is no data or precedent with which to weigh discrimination and proportionality against military necessity. So, instead of resting on...
Mocking the Reviewers
As our august leader here at the Duck is putting on his editorial robes, I thought a bit of fresh perspective on the review process is in order. A fun take on the review process!
Monday Morning Linkage
Good morning ducks... Here's your linkage... The Jerusalem Post reviews World War Z. Is this the most pro-Israeli film ever made? ... Probably not - even the trailer shows the wall being breached. A Majinot mentality can't work in a film whose motto is: "movement is life." The terrorist attack on Sunday in Bodh Gaya is a big deal, even if the Western press is slow on the uptake. This isn't just the holiest Buddhist site in India; it is the holiest Buddhist site in the world without a doubt. (I've been there twice in the last twelve months and the security was pretty lax even though...
The “Israel Lobby” and the Nixon Administration
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. When Mearsheimer and Walt wrote the Israel Lobby, I was skeptical. I bought the argument that supporters of Israel influenced US policy, but because I am not a realist, I did not buy the argument that this necessarily deflected the US from pursuing specific policies during the cold war or afterwards. The primary reason for my skepticism was the evidence: because of how recent US support for Israel is, there are few archival documents that have been...
Friday Nerd Linkage
Daniel Bier counters fear-mongering about the world's first genetically engineered babies, another fascinating case study of global normative ferment. But in truly weird science, humans can now transplant whole heads (or rather, bodies). Too bad this important advance comes too late for Ned Stark. -> William Beaty writes about the physics of traffic jams, proposing a simple solution ordinary citizens can use to escape to de-clutter highways. Cyber-war, nano-weapons, and killer robots, oh my! International Review of the Red Cross has finally published a long-awaited special issue on...
Should We Keep Hidden the Way People Behave When their Actions are Hidden?
In his most recent post, PTJ argues that "things like Freakonomics are basically corrosive and should be opposed whenever practicable". While he repeats in that post (and the comments section) a number of dubious claims about what sorts of behavior are possible within a decision-theoretic framework, I think we're past the point in the conversation where it is useful to argue about the possibility of writing down a decision-theoretic model whose actors are capable of moral behavior and belonging to communities.1 In this post, I'd like to discuss the moral argument PTJ makes against...
Global Governance, Big Surveillance, and Intelligence Cooperation
My very quick search suggests that there's insufficient work on this subject. I know that Alexander Cooley has turned up some pretty amazing things on older intelligence cooperation, Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes have done some great work on policing and global governance, and there's a lot of cognate stuff under the rubric of bio-politics (e.g.) and permanent states of exception, but it seems to me that more direct analysis is called for. Because, for example: France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism...