Some more excerpts from G. Loews Dickinson’s writings on international affairs.
The More Things Change…
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Recent Posts
Climate change and the mission of higher education
On October 2, I sat in the audience of the first of six public events in what appears to be MIT’s semester of climate change. Introducing the great and good of climate science, MIT president Rafael...
Want to fix peer review? Standardize appeals
It's happened to all of us. You get that email "Decision on Manuscript...," open it with a bit of trepidation, just to find a (hopefully) politely worded rejection from the editor. Sometimes this is...
A rabbit hole of links on Impeachment
This post will be quick for me to write, but may suck up the rest of your morning. caveat lector. Rachel Navarre—my friend from grad school, who works at Bridgewater State—compiled what was then an...
More Recent Posts
Saturday Linkage
Belated Valentine's from the Duck of Minerva. Brad DeLong wants Cosma Shalzi to figure out what the Chelyabinsk meteorite strike means for policy: "What should this piece of information do, decision-theoretically, to change our view of the situation we find ourselves in?" I'm not a statistics...
Friday Nerd Blogging, Hiatus Ends Appropriately
We have fallen short of our Friday responsibilities, but given the theme of the week, this video seems most appropriate. Of course, this raises all kinds of possibilities and re-definitions of "bad" PR. My guess is that the best episode of this series of six web-isodes will be the next one. The...
About that Gallup LGBT Survey
In a nifty contribution to our understanding of LGBT politics, Gallup has surveyed more than 200,000 Americans to ask if they identify as LGBT or not. This gives us what Gallup claims and I'll accept as the first state-level estimate of this dataset. But Gallup mistakenly interprets their own...
Friday Morning Linkage
If it looks like a Duck -- the Monkey Cage's take on the Hagel filibuster and the politics of the Senate Daniel Serwer thinks the US should be funneling money to Moaz al Khatib and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition forces. Corruption and inefficiency in the...
Thursday evening linkage
Happy Valentine's Day Duckies! Here are a few interesting links on love and gender. First, for those of you feeling completely clueless when it comes to romance, the Huffington Post put up a list of Five Courses about Sex and Love, including "Beyond Hooking Up: Creating Meaningful Relationships"...
It’s a trap. No, really, IT’S A TRAP.
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...
Delegation Leads to Shirking, Shirking Leads to Failure …
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...
5 Biggest Strategic Errors of the Emperor: a Contribution to the ‘Battle of Hoth’ Debate
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...
When does social change happen? Revisiting How to Survive a Plague
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...
The Force is strong with this one
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...
A Short History and Critique of Climate Negotiations: All Climate Politics is Local
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...
The Arab Spring and Securitization Theory
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...