The last two years saw some major stories in my corner of the blogsphere concerning sexual harassment. Colin McGinn's resignation from the University of Miami saw widespread discussion across the academic interwebs, even if we didn't say much about it. McGinn's case seems not terribly unique in philosophy, as the What's it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy blog has been chronicling for years. Sexual harassment at science-fiction conventions is...
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Where Are All the Republican Realists?
In light of the brouhaha between Chris Christie and Rand Paul over foreign policy, conservative columnist Ross Douthat opined in The New York Times that the Republican Party seems to be missing the sort of realist pragmatists of old that might have mediated between these views. He attributes the realist decline to them being out of step on domestic politics and just not really liked by different factions on foreign policy. He writes: However,...
The (American) Job Market and Interpretive Methods in Political Science
M. David Forrest, a soon-to-be-assistant-professor of American politics, forwarded the following letter to the "interpretation and methods" listserv. He agreed to let me post it at the Duck. Given the methodological heterogeneity of our readership, I thought it would be of interest. It reads: [I am an American Politics scholar who primarily uses interpretive methods and methodologies (IMM) and recently came off the Assistant Professor job...
Resistance is Not Futile.
A claim common among opponents of a treaty ban on autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is that treaties banning weapons don't work - suggesting efforts to arrest the development of AWS are an exercise in futility. Now this claim has been picked up uncritically by the editors at Bloomberg, writing in the derisively titled, "No Really, How Do We Keep Robots From Destroying Humans?": "Bans on specific weapons systems -- such as military airplanes or...
Wednesday Addams Linkage: Special Andragogy Edition
Sorry for the lack of Wednesday linkage posts recently. Bizarrely, on a day when I undertake an intercontinental move, I finally have time to catch up on linking. To commemorate the end of summer teaching and the brief respite between summer school and real school (hey, didn't I join academia so I could have summers off?), here's some links about teaching. Nineteen observations about teaching by Andrew Joseph Pegoda, especially 3, 4, 6, 7, 11,...
Favela Ninjas and Apartheid Samurai
Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" packs a punch for an action sci-fi film even if its punches don't land. So yeah ... Jodie Foster doesn't give her best performance and the other roles for women in the film are completely lame. A beefy Matt Damon, bless his heart, is poorly cast. The core plot line doesn't make much sense. Look, let's face it, there is just no way Blomkamp can match the brilliance of his earlier hit, "District 9." Nevertheless,...
Belated Friday Nerd Blogging: Meta Heroes
I am on vacation so I am a bit late with the FNB. This 2014 film looks like a heap of fun--when superhero impersonators stop impersonating and start hero-ing:
Monday Morning Linkage
Hey, y'all... Here's your linkage... Enjoy. Kapil Patel argues that a growing awareness of India's declining conventional deterrence vis-a-vis China has led it to create a new mountain strike corps of 40,000 men. Alec Metz at Registan reviews this year's Eid message from the sub-literate but charismatic Mullah Muhammad Omar. Ajit Sahi argues that despite the very significant flare-up in Indo-Pak tensions last week along the Line of...
Levee en Masse–but it’s only an operational concept!
Over at the National Interest T.X. Hamnes has a nice critique of AirSea Battle, seemingly the Pentagon's reigning strategy…sorry, operational concept...for dealing with a rising China and the problem of Anti-Access/Area Denial (for the official overview, see here). I expect I’ll be writing a bit on ASB during my time at the Duck, so I won’t try to engage in every debate in the first post. For now I’ll limit myself to one question Hamnes...
Really delayed Thursday Morning Linkage
Apologies for the delay in Thursday linkage but was a bit under the weather. It's the Texas heat, making me crazy and violent, or at least so suggests a recent empirical study in Science though it has its detractors. This week, I link to the back and forth of a major study on climate and conflict that carries out a meta-analysis of 60 studies and finds a 1 standard deviation change in variety of climate indicators leads to a 4% rise in...
APSA Aerobics
It’s almost APSA time and it seems all my friends are busy planning really wonderful sporting engagements for times they aren’t in panels. This always puts me in a bind – I thought we became academics because we were bad at sports! I can’t throw a Frisbee and soccer requires too much coordination. So, I’ve compiled a list of the fun and somewhat aerobic things I plan to do at APSA, none of which require much coordination but all of which...
Beyond Robopocalypticism
In all the media frenzy over “killer robots,” Terminator imagery comes up a lot. So do references to Battlestar Galactica. So does a specific scene from Robocop, soon to be remade to resonate with public fears of domestic drones. These iconic narratives invoke a recurrent theme in American science fiction about lethal robot malfunctions or uprisings against their human creators. So prevalent is this theme in anti-killer-robot media coverage...