by PM | 16 May 2012 |
In fairness, fake dissertations areprobably more fun to read thanthe Little Red Book.Minxin Pei surveys the extent to which China's leaders have faked their credentials.Pei suggests that a number of China's leaders, hailed in the West by presumably credulous journalists, have in fact attained their educational credentials at what amount to diploma mills.The more interesting point Pei makes about this is that many indicators of Chinese...
by Charli Carpenter | 15 May 2012 | Featured
Now that this academic year’s loose ends are wrapped up, it is time to refocus attention on the important topic of norm development around autonomous weapons. Fortunately for my case study there is much developing on this front, in addition to developments in adjacent but (I argue) distinct issue areas like drones.Lawfare Blog has been putting forth considerable new materials related to this debate in recent days, notably a working paper...
by Dan Nexon | 14 May 2012 |
Ted Hopf has an extremely cool talk on how practice-turn theory is being assimilated by the liberal-constructivist borg. Give it a listen.Background on liberalism and constructivism at the Duck, International Studies Review, and via Sammy Barkin.
by PM | 14 May 2012 |
Some critics of academic social science, and political science in particular, have recently asserted that it's difficult to see the benefit of what we do. To be fair, our output is less immediately tangible than the Hubble Space Telescope, treatments for HIV/AIDS, or the decoding of the human genome, to take only three visible and valuable recipients of federal funding for science in my lifetime.To date, however, the defenders of political...
by Dan Nexon | 14 May 2012 |
Scott's recent post (at LGM) on college debt, which links to a depressing New York Times story, focuses primarily on politics. The narrative has gotten pretty familiar. State education cutbacks force tuitions up. Students take out greater debt to pay for a post-secondary degree. Republicans plead budgetary pressure, but do so while gleefully reducing the tax burden on wealthy Americans. It is certainly blood-boiling stuff.At the same time,...
by Dan Nexon | 12 May 2012 |
(Click to Enlarge)But, seriously. What kind of self-respecting despot barely customizes the template used by all imperiled leaders who need help moving their funds out of country? He could have at least replaced "my country" with "Syria." But I guess Assad has lots of other things on his mind, so we can forgive him.
by Charli Carpenter | 11 May 2012 | Featured
by Dan Nexon | 11 May 2012 |
The Monkey Cage is engaged in a full-court press in defense of NSF political-science grants. The cause, of course, is Representative Jeff Flake's (successful) amendment to axe funding for political-science research. Although I never have received, and probably will never receive, an NSF grant, I find Flake's denigration of social-science research troubling. Much worse are attempts to micro-manage the NSF. The whole point of this kind of...
by Robert Kelly | 11 May 2012 | Featured
This genre is growing on the Duck, so here are are a few more thoughts before you take the PhD plunge. Enjoy your last summer to read as you choose, without following a peer reviewer or a syllabus. Such lost bliss… Generally speaking, yes, I like being an academic. I like ideas and reading. I like bloviating at length. The sun is my enemy, and exercise bores me. I would really like to be a good writer/researcher. Including grad school, I’ve...
by Dan Nexon | 11 May 2012 |
On a wall outside of the Intercultural Center auditorium. Make of it what you will.
by Dan Nexon | 10 May 2012 |
Some years ago I finally got around to reading Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology. Reading Goodrick-Clarke's description of various forms of esotericism and mysticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and specifically Blavatsky's Theosophy movement, drove home the degree to which H.P. Lovecraft's writings -- and, by extension, basically all modern horror --...
by Robert Kelly | 9 May 2012 | Featured
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('000902d5-7b3b-4c9c-b77d-2a0f6080ed33'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-xHchAHKaTKA/T6nywRxtfXI/AAAAAAAAALg/2rX2oBbeHk4/video6cf4c2596412%25255B7%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />Greatest Movie Line Ever on Academia: “How the Social Scientists Brought Our World to the Brink of Chaos” Hah!If academia’s...