by Cliff Bob | 24 Mar 2012 |
A few sensitive souls expressed dismay this week when a Romney official declared that the campaign would “reset” itself for the general election after the primaries. Virtually all of the shock was insincere and hypocritical. The “Etch-a Sketch” approach is hardly news for anyone who understands election politics in the U.S. or just about anywhere. In fact, the only newsworthy aspect of the statement was its refreshing openness--but of course...
by PM | 23 Mar 2012 | Featured
This is the nerd equivalent of a dad joke. A pair of posts today from political scientists I admire prompts me to postpone my musings on the Hunger Games and to talk about how to get to graduate school in political science again instead. In an effort to convince you to read on, I'll name the authors of the two posts: Dan Drezner and Chris Blattman. Dan Drezner writes about how a post-graduate (non-Ph.D.) degree can help you to get into the...
by Josh Busby | 22 Mar 2012 |
This is re-posted from e-IR. I hesitated to write anything about climate and security until I had read all (or damn near all 17 articles) of the recent special issue of the Journal of Peace Research.My initial mandate for this post was to talk about the significance of climate and security for militaries, and as part of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, I obviously should have something to say about that. My reaction, however,...
by Dan Nexon | 22 Mar 2012 |
[UPDATED] Yglesias asks if "any real country could have an economy like Panem's?" His answer comes via a synopsis of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail:The places that are rich today were poor then, while those that are poor today were generally rich in the past. This, they argue, is no coincidence. When Spanish conquistadors showed up in the prosperous areas of Latin America, they stole all the gold they could get their hands...
by Robert Kelly | 22 Mar 2012 | Featured
This week is the big nuclear security summit in Seoul, with something like 60 attending countries and over 40 heads of state or government. A friend from a Korean expat magazine here in town asked me for a brief write-up. Here are the issues as I see them from Korean IR and the local media. For full-blown think-tankery on the summit, try here. 1. Obama’s personal commitment to de-nuclearization: I can’t think of any president since Reagan who...
by PM | 22 Mar 2012 |
This is not an iPad. It is also not anethical statement.Globalization is no longer the Western world's ethical quandary.The biggest story in globalization this week has been the saga of Mike Daisey, the storyteller who posed as a journalist in a theatrical monologue about working conditions in Apple's factories in the People's Republic of China. Daisey, who has now been outed as a fabulist, lied about his visits to China and what he saw there,...
by Dan Nexon | 21 Mar 2012 |
As regular readers know, I assigned The Hunger Games in the last iteration of my SciFi class. Ever since then, I've been thinking about doing a short book with, one hopes, a less boring title than "The Politics of the Hunger Games." Indeed, I just finished talking to an editor about it. Unlike the Harry Potter and International Relations volume that I co-edited, or the Battlestar Galactica volume that I co-wrote the conclusion for, this would...
by Charli Carpenter | 21 Mar 2012 |
As I gathered content today for my upcoming ISA presentation on social media, I was delighted to discover that my "Blog Wars" video from few years back (a response to a theory-policy debate stirred up by Joseph Nye and Dan Drezner) is cited in an academic paper as an actual contribution to the debate! The paper itself is quite good: Bradley Parks and Alena Stern conduct one of the few empirical studies I'm aware of how scholars actually...
by Steve Saideman | 20 Mar 2012 |
A twitter discussion got me thinking about this. We end up reading tons of CVs, developing opinions and pondering what people are thinking. First, there are no real rules for writing a CV except these:Read other people's cv's to get a sense of what looks normal (don't be strange).Take care so that it is not messy, has no typos (twitterfightclub pressure has killed my typing skills), and so on.Unless your audience is just a bunch of dim-witted...
by Megan MacKenzie | 19 Mar 2012 | Featured
Over the last few weeks it has been hard not to get overwhelmed by all the headlines related to the Republican primaries and women. There has been theRush Limbaugh fiasco, with Rush outdoing his usual dink-guisting self by calling law student Sarah Fluke a slut. This has been followed by outrageous comments from almost all the Republican candidates: Romney just declared that he would get rid of planned parenthood, Newt has had a consistent...
by Robert Kelly | 18 Mar 2012 | Featured
With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is different. Not even Chinese elites play the sorts of merry-go-round games at the top that Putin has engineered in the last 6 months. To their great credit,...
by PM | 18 Mar 2012 |
A monologue from Julian Comstock, Robert Charles Wilson's fascinating novel of post-scarcity America:You might want to consider your tone of voice, Private Commongold. May I offer you a lesson in Civics? There are three centers of power in the modern Union, and only three. One is the Executive Branch, with its supporting host of Owners and Senators. One is the Military. And the last is the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. They're like the...