This post comes from Bridging the Gap co-director Bruce W. Jentleson[*], Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. “Not much” and “less and less” is What Americans Think About America First, as documented in the latest Chicago Council on...
This is a guest post by former Duck of Minerva blogger Betcy Jose, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado-Denver and contributor to Al-Jazeera and Foreign Affairs. As the number of posts here...
I don't have an answer for this, as I'm not sure how globally integrated Russia is in to the world economy at this juncture or vulnerable given its fossil fuel resources, but I, along with anyone...
*The following post is written by Ryan Maness and myself. Events are in motion that many thought were past us, part of a bygone era where conventional war still had a prominent place in deciding the...
A standard critical argument in my field looks something like this:1. Phenomenon X involves A assumptions about the world;2. Approach Y contains assumptions inconsistent with A; therefore3. Y cannot be used to understand X.In some instances, and given some specific conditions, this can be a persuasive argument. But it is clearly not a priori true; articulated in the form above, I submit, it is a logical fallacy--one often found alongside, but distinct from, genetic fallacies.Thus, I will call this the "own-termism fallacy" until someone finds a better--or, at least, preexisting--name for...
For the small percentage of our readership that doesn't overlap with that of the Monkey Cage, see its roundup on her passing and a guest post there by Rick Wilson.
I found the above image here. A hat-tip goes to Andrew Sullivan for referencing this debate yet a second time.Here is part one of my response to two recent, heavily-trafficked posts (one, two) on hypothetical retrenchment under Ron Paul. (So yes, that makes 4 total posts, including this one.) I got some flak on how I ranked US allies in order of importance, with the implication that those further down were more likely candidates for a diminished American commitment. Vikash and I are also having a really protracted and wonky comments debate about just how long US borrowing can forestall US...
Slate posted a piece on the academic study of pop culture. It found that academics studied Buffy the Vampire Slayer most. Well, actually, no, it found that more folks studied the Buffy than the Matrix, the Simpsons, Aliens or The Wire.This led to a Facebook discussion of selection bias. We can discuss the merits of these five and ponder why the Simpsons did so poorly (perhaps we need a consistent plot progression?), or why the Wire is under-valued yet again. That the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies sucked so much that they sucked all the air out of the studying the Matrix enterprise? But what...
The Institute for Economics and Peace is making a big splash today with the release of the 2012 edition of its annual Global Peace Index (GPI)---"the world's leading measure of global peacefulness," according to its web site. The launch event for the 2012 edition included several people whose work I respect and admire, and the Institute identifies some of the heaviest hitters in the global fight for peace and human rights---Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama, for crying out loud---as "endorsers" of the GPI.I really want to like this index. I'm a numbers guy, and I've spent most of...
So I recently read Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” series after being pleasantly surprised by the movie. I easily breezed through all three books on plane rides, on which I prefer reading fiction (yes, even teen fiction) rather than my typical literary fare.Collins is no Steinbeck.Nonetheless, I (slightly hesitantly) confess that I was impressed with many of the underlying themes within the series—particularly with how well Collins seems to understand how people build and take power in oppressive systems. Besides the strong “shame on us for our oblivious, exploitative, violent...
Alex Cooley -- whose book on power-political competition in Central Asia is due out soon -- had an interesting op-ed in Friday's New York Times. He argues that the apparent success of the 12th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit masks ongoing Sino-Russian tensions in the region:Since the financial crisis, China has displaced Russia as Central Asia’s leading trading partner, and Beijing would welcome using the S.C.O. framework to further boost regional economic integration and investment. But both Russia and the Central Asian countries fear the political repercussions of Beijing’s...
My GOP gone by, I miss it so.Conservatives are fond of the saying widely, but probably falsely, attributed to Everett Dirksen: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Of course, the saying hasn't kept up to date with inflation or with the growing size of the federal budget--in 1962, a billion dollars was just under 1 percent of the entire budget; these days, it would be well under 1/1000th of a percent of the federal government's outlays.Nevertheless, one party continues to apply the same kind of logic to justify cutting trivially small programs that...