Trump is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or even a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Trump is a wolf in no clothing. His campaign, transition, and inaugural weekend lay naked the two driving forces of his presidency. The first is an authoritarian disregard for the truth—what...
As Jennifer Grose at Slate reported this morning, a paper by Wendy Stock and John Siegfried at the most recent AEA meetings, had some very disturbing - but not surprising - findings in regarding...
With the year barely begun, we have already seen much over-the-top, endless self-promotion, so I will try to avoid that trap. Instead, we should note that while the Duck is not just about applying...
People may have wondered why spend so much time thinking about what pop culture says about international relations. They have have pondered whether dedicating entire class sessions to Harry Potter...
The Canard"All the fake news that is fit to print"Rochester--Local game theorist Zofran Economakis is afraid of making a credible commitment to his longtime girlfriend, Lisa Johnson, his girlfriend reports. "He tells me that he loves me," Johnson told the Canard, "but how do I know he means it? He has incentives to dissemble. I need a credible signal of his love for me. Like a big fat diamond engagement ring. And he better engrave my name on it, so he can't sell it on E-Bay if we break up."When contacted, Economakis explained that he taken a serious of escalatory steps to demonstrate his...
North Waziristan has witnessed 20 drone strikes in the first four months of this year, which is a relatively lower number than the previous year (in 2010 there were a record setting 104 drone strikes in North Waziristan or 8.67 strikes per month). The relative "silence of the drones" this year is mainly attributed to a lull following the imprisonment of a CIA agent, Raymond Davis, who was accused of murdering two men in Pakistan on 27 January. One day after the US paid diyya (thereby implicitly reinforcing sharia in Pakistan) to have Davis released there was a drone attack which killed 40-50...
John Bolton writes in the LA Times, which unlike the rest of the world I read because where else could I find out who died in my neighborhood recently, that we must stay in Afghanistan forever! Until the job gets done. I have no particularly informed opinion about this, which is kind of sad, but I was amused by the response of a Times columnist, complaining that Bolton had no right to make such a proclamation given his dodging of the draft back in the Vietnam days. Oh, I mean his National Guard service. And he was even unapologetic about it, because, as he was once quoted, the war was...
Steve Walt has a challenge: ...who are the most amusing, entertaining, or witty writers in the field of international relations and foreign policy? I don't mean books or articles that are "funny" because they are wildly off-base; I mean scholars who are a joy to read because their prose is lively, they offer amusing asides, and maybe even manage a laugh-out-loud witticism on occasion. And to narrow the field a bit more, let's exclude journalists (who are rarely all that amusing but usually have livelier writing styles). Since I'm hosting Steve for a talk next week here in the Five Colleges,...
I have the suspicion that my fan base might be the choir, and I want to be sure I play it down the middle. I am sure that Duck readers are the kind of folks who can laugh at themselves.European political scientists like post-positivism, also known as post-structuralism or post-modernism. Or at least non-European political scientists think those things are all the same. No one really knows. No North American political scientist has ever met a post-positivist political scientist. They might be hiding in the anthropology department, where it is safer, coming out to forage for food at night....
India appears to be continuing to shift its West Asia policy away from a once budding partnership with Iran, which aimed among other things to stabilize Afghanistan. It is rumored that in late March, the Indian National Security Adviser, Shiv Shanker Menon, delicately delivered a message to the Islamic Republic that India's PM would not be making a state visit later this year (Telegraph [Kolkata] 3/10/11). If the news reports are correct, the diplomatic maneuver comes only a few months after India abandoned the practice of paying for its crude oil imports from Iran through the Tehran...
The following word cloud from Crystal Smith's The Achilles Effect blog reflects the vocabulary commonly used for toy advertisements directed toward young boys (i.e. those toys in the 6-8 year old boy's section of the Toys 'R Us website were classified as "boys' toys"). While the data visualization was not meant as part of a rigorous study, it is nevertheless interesting anecdotal evidence pointing toward the ways in which gender stereotypes are shaped and/or reinforced, particularly when the word cloud is compared to toys targeted toward girls from the same age group. (Yes, I am aware that a...
Before I begin, I should thank those who have offered encouragement to continue the series and note, to those few who have not, that this is satire. Like all satire, it is an exaggeration of things that nevertheless have a kernel of truth. I myself am guilty of some of these things, like collecting original data. It is not an indictment of the field of political science, only a send-up of its pretensions. OK, here we go.Political scientists like discovering the strategic logic behind all political phenomena, reducing everything to the self-interested calculations of individuals. They...