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Podcast No. 4 – the End of IR Theory?
Dan and PTJ discuss “the End of IR Theory.”
Plagiarism 2.0
The internet has exploded this afternoon with the revelation that Fareed Zakaria (a Harvard Government PhD 1993) apparently plagiarized significant elements of his Time magazine op-ed this week. As many in the media have noted, including Politico, several paragraphs in his piece about gun control are "remarkably similar" to paragraphs originally published by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker on April 22, 2012. Zakaria almost immediately owned up to...
Friday Nerd Blogging Challenge Met!
I am pretty sure this answers the mail, Charli: Shakespeare, Zombies, John Amos, Shelley Long, June Lockhart, and the dude from Clerks. Yeah, the the skinny one. Plus a Weekend at Bernie's reference. What more could you want on a Friday?Oh, and Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Talk about nerd-overload.
Friday Punctual Nerd Blogging/Blegging
Last week, I embedded with smart people thinking hard about ethics, armed conflict and emerging technologies. I learned that it's an open questions whether governments can or should move toward fully autonomous systems; I learned philosophers, technicians and lawyers approach these questions so differently that it's probably wrong to think of a expert network like CETMONS-AWTG as an epistemic community. I also learned that being a world-famous...
Friday Morning Linkage
From Her Majesty's Explorer.The Battle of Aleppo continues, but things are looking worse for the rebels. Matt Fay at Hegemonic Obsessions ruminates on what we debaters used to call the "Japan Prolif" scenario. Jay says that the CCP is right to be worried about protests. I agree. But he's got a model and stuff. Robert Farley and Taylor Fravel discuss China on Rob's bloggingheads subchannel, Foreign Entanglements. Yeah, well, has Rob ever crushed...
Lands of the Rising Sun
Hawai'i isn't the only colonial possessionto get the inset treatment. Although the authors of the Duck of Minerva do not condone, endorse, or even take seriously this proposal, we do want to bring to our readers' attention a petition urging President Obama to return Taiwan to the Emperor of Japan.This is not entirely crazy, just 99.98 percent insane. Taiwan, of course, was a part of the Japanese Empire after the cession of Formosa in the Treaty...
Thursday Morning Linakge
Daniel Drezner unloads on Jennifer Rubin. Bottom line: better hacks, please!Thomas Rid argues against much of our current discourse on cyberwar. Lincoln Mitchell writes that: "Georgia's government has lost its identity as one led by bright-eyed democrats seeking to build a European style democracy deep in the heart of what used to be the Soviet Union. Instead, the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili has become another semi-authoritarian...
The Olympics Make You Care Less About Milwaukee
When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of moviegoers, including the observation that the timing of the Milwaukee shootings so soon after the Batman massacre have left many pundits unwilling to talk further about gun control for fear of sounding redundant. Appel also hypothesizes that low...
Emerging Technologies, Material and Social
Recording Casualties and the Protection of Civilians from Oxford Research Group (ORG) on Vimeo. As the lone social scientist in a room of lawyers, philosophers and technicians last week, I was struck by a couple of things. One was the disconnect between descriptive and normative ethics, or rather questions of is versus ought. Everyone was speaking about either norms and rules, but whereas the lawyers treated existing norms and rules as social...
Wednesday Afternoon Video
Do Battle Droids Dream of Electric Medals?
One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the human presence from battle-spaces altogether. The general consensus is that this is unlikely, with which I am not claiming to disagree. But what fascinated me was a particular...