[Spoiler Alert: Obviously, you shouldn't read this post if you want to see the movie unfiltered.]Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" (2012) is a film about creation, abortion, and redemptive self-sacrifice. Although elements of the plot do not have as much art or integrity as one might like, the film has moments of complex and sedimented allegory. The film obviously operates at the granular level of biopolitics as well as posing the fundamental...
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Is Rio + 20 Going to be a Waste of Time?
This was the tone of an op-ed I pitched regarding the Rio+20 environmental summit. Below the fold, I offer a slightly more nuanced argument ...Rio+20, the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, kicks off the formal part of the negotiations tomorrow as leaders of 130 countries arrive to take part. It strikes me as a misguided nostalgia tour and will probably achieve even less than the tenth anniversary that took place in South Africa....
Let’s (Keep) Talking About Sex
Foreign Policy just published its latest issue online. The letters section includes a response that expands on my earlier blog post calling the recent "Sex" issue a Teen Magazine. For those interested in reading further, my letter points FP editors to a wider range of scholarship and contributors they might have considered and challenges them to reconsider gender as only a 'special issue:'"Women are half the population (are we still having this...
Gender, Violence and Digital Emergence
One of the most unsettling findings of our media and radicalisation research was the way in which the suffering of certain individual women is turned into a cause by radical Islamic groups that leads to violence by men in those women’s names. The availability of digital media, combined with a certain doctrinal entrepreneurialism by those using religion to justify political violence, has resulted in the widespread dissemination of amateur video...
More on Abusing America’s ‘Exorbitant Privilege’: Will the Bond Market Turn on the US at a 100% Debt-to-GDP ratio?
As part of a now lengthy chain (one, two, three, four) on US allies and the likelihood of US retrenchment, I argued that American hegemony, despite America’s huge debt and deficit, is more financially stable than almost anyone expected. Because foreigners’ appetite for dollars seems unquenchable and because we print the global reserve currency, borrow in it, and face no serious reserve challengers (the euro and RMB maybe, see below), US can...
Baseball and American Foreign Policy
Not long ago, Robert Elias, a Professor of Politics at University of San Francisco (and editor of Peace Review), published The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy & Promoted the American Way Abroad (The New Press, 2010). Unfortunately, I have not yet had a chance to obtain a copy of the book -- or read it. However, thanks to my SABR membership, I learned this week of his related article "Baseball and American Foreign...
The collective production of individual genius
Can China create the next Steve Jobs? The New Yorker discusses a quasi-official Chinese attempt to find the next Steve Jobs--a sort of Apprentice with less Donald Trump and more pseudo-Confucian standards. As the New Yorker reporter Jiayang Fan writes, there is something bizarre in the contest. But there is also something revealing about how countries partake of international relations in a world once presumed to be post-nationalist.The first...
Kahl et al. on Iran and US Options
Colin Kahl sent me a list of recent work he's done on the US-Iran standoff. The first is a CNAS report, Risk and Rivalry: Iran, Israel, and the Bomb (PDF). The abstract:As Iran's nuclear progress continues and negotiations fail to reach a breakthrough, the threat of an Israeli preventive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities grows. In Risk and Rivalry: Israel, Iran and the Bomb, authors Dr. Colin H. Kahl, Melissa G. Dalton and Matthew Irvine...
Head of State
As if controversies over graphic sex, gratuitous nudity and rat torture weren't enough, now this. Yep, that's George W. Bush's head on a spike, in the Game of Thrones Season 1 scene where Joffrey torments his fiance Sansa by forcing her to view various decapitated heads.Fans didn't actually catch this, until producers pointed it out on the DVD commentary. The news was popularized on a Reddit thread, picked up by IO9 and quickly caused a stir....
Bombs into Knives
I've been meaning to write substantive posts about my recent trip to Taiwan, but between the time change, conference prep, and getting sick, I haven't had the time. In the interim, I found a video of the knife-making process at Maester Wu knives on Kinmen. Kinmen (aka Jinmen aka Quemoy) was repeatedly, and intensively, shelled by the People's Republic of China in 1958. Maester Wu Bombshell Steel Knives took advantage of the cheap source of...
The Fallacy of Own-Termism
A standard critical argument in my field looks something like this:1. Phenomenon X involves A assumptions about the world;2. Approach Y contains assumptions inconsistent with A; therefore3. Y cannot be used to understand X.In some instances, and given some specific conditions, this can be a persuasive argument. But it is clearly not a priori true; articulated in the form above, I submit, it is a logical fallacy--one often found alongside, but...
Elinor Ostrom
For the small percentage of our readership that doesn't overlap with that of the Monkey Cage, see its roundup on her passing and a guest post there by Rick Wilson.