Michael S. Chase reports on the internal Chinese debate over Beijing's role in international affairs. A new China Security Report from Japan's National Institute of Defense Studies (via Taylor Fravel). Daniel Larison sees Chuck Hagel's potential SecDef appointment as a wakeup call to the GOP about its continued embrace of neo-conservative foreign-policy principles at the expense of realism and what used to be called "establishment...
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Tuesday Late Afternoon Linkage
I'm now in a different time zone, although one rather less glamorous than the one I left yesterday. On the other hand, with temperatures in the mid-50s, it appears that my childhood home has decided to cease being part of the mid-South and instead become part of the tropics. One consequence of my not being in DC at the moment is that this is an unusually U.S.-centric package of links. This is also the consequence of Foreign Policy's apparently...
Firearms-Related Research
If you haven't been over there yet, the folks at The Monkey Cage are providing a slew of stuff on gun-control, gun-violence, and cognate topics.* And, yes, this was mostly an excuse to re-post my armed bear photo from Sun Moon Lake. *I've been critical in the past of The Monkey Cage for over-claiming the definitiveness of social-science research -- and issue that Rob Farley and I discuss in the still-delayed sixteenth Duck of Minerva podcast....
F*&k Freedom.
In the wake of the Connecticut shootings and in light of the hints dropped by Obama at the vigil for the victims, it seems we should be prepared for a debate in the coming weeks and months between those who advocate greater gun control to protect innocent lives and those who make a competing moral claim that such regulations infringe on the more important right to bear arms, which is supposed to be part of a general value of freedom. But that's...
Dispatch from Hong Kong: Asian Values?
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. From 2009 to 2010, he was the ConocoPhillips Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Oklahoma, a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the School of International...
Another Brief Podcast Note
Podcast No. 16 will be available by midweek. I left the power cable for the external hard drive on which all of my podcasting files are stored in my office.... Doh!
Monday Morning Linkage
Good morning... here's your Monday roundup... US & Europe The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that Macedonian officials handed an (innocent) German citizen over to American officials who sodomized and tortured him in the presence of Macedonian officials and on Macedonian soil. Something to ponder as you watch Zero Dark Thirty. Central/South Asia Afghanistan: The AAN Network's S. Reza Kazemi discusses whether threats of a...
Saturday Afternoon Linkage
Via Twitter, Elke Larsen explains that France is "The Other Pacific Power." CSIS report on the Sino-Vietnamese maritime dispute: "Trouble Outside the Gulf of Tonkin" (via Taylor Fravel). Phil Davis provides a guide for gaming google scholar. Perhaps one day the counting citations game will collapse under its own weight? William M. Briggs unpacks what regression equations actually mean, and why so many textbooks get them wrong. Via Chris...
Note on Podcast No. 16
I recorded an interview with Rob Farley yesterday on academic blogging and the academic blogsphere. I had planned to put it up this evening but, like, I suspect, a lot of Americans, I've been a bit distracted for the last few hours. The upshot is that I haven't completed post-production and the podcast will likely not be available until tomorrow. I know it won't be long before we get into some kind of discussion about the Atlantic community's...
Friday Afternoon Linkage
Friday is here. SEMESTER IS OVER. Fresh snow on the Vermont slopes. Three very good things. I'm surprising my wife with this news -- I've already lined up the kids for summer camp. More fodder on Nixon and Kissinger's support for a corrupt Shah. Kind of where we are in Syria. Not good. I guess this is pretty obvious. Pete Muller has his own short take on events in Cairo. Everything we need to know this month about U.S.-South Korean relations....
Models, Maps, and Simplifying Assumptions
I don't want to say too much about the Rathbun-Arena smackdown (smackduck?) taking place but I will say this: We often rely on maps that are not "true." The Mercator projection is "wrong" if our criterion is "showing countries according to their relative size" but "useful" if our criterion is "helping to plot sea voyages." Moreover, we sometimes explicitly distort maps to make them more useful: As Wikipedia notes, the Tube map is considered a...
Brian and Phil Hug it Out
Many of you seem to have read my earlier post knocking the use of assumptions in theory-building, particularly rationalism, and Phil Arena's defense of it. My earlier post was a little over the top and insulting, which led him to take umbrage. I called him a dick; he called me a dick. We were both right, although I guess I started it. When we are thinking about who to ask in as guest contributors, my main criteria was theoretical and...