The Canard “All the fake news that’s fit to print” --Los Angeles Part-time political scientist and blogging provocateur Brian Rathbun yesterday checked himself into a rehabilitation center for addiction to science fiction. Although Rathbun’s public face was as an anti-nerd, he secretly had succumbed to the vice of Battlestar Galactica, which he watched in its entirety over the last few weeks. Reached for comment, Rathbun simply said, “I haven’t...
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Some Political Science Thoughts on the GOP Debate Marathon
<img src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-kdQcW4Vl7-k/T1A4B7ds90I/AAAAAAAAAGc/qah90Do3fTk/videoc8c44ca00ba6%25255B13%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('1f164c0c-2f86-4021-9047-76be574cf4fc'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Here’s the last one if you haven’t seen it yet So it looks like the GOP debating season...
Syria: The Exile or Justice Ultimatum
ReutersMarc Lynch's policy brief for the Center for a New American Security, titled "Pressure Not War:" A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria" raises a provocative possibility for ICC judicial intervention. Lynch argues that pressure should be put on Assad and his officials to either go into exile to allow for a political transition or risk facing war crimes charges at the ICC. In his own words:"To date, Syrian officials have not been...
Feminist Rick Santorum
via. H/T Catia Cecilia Confortini. With apologies to Ryan Gosling and Danielle Henderson.
Cyber Nerd Blogging: Neuroscience, Conflict and Security
Antoine Bousquet has a fascinating post at Disorder of Things on developments in neuroscience and how they are being used by militaries to 1) enhance their own soldiers and 2) degrade the abilities of their opponents. The post is in response to a report by The Royal Society on Neuroscience, Conflict and Security which outlines these developments, speculates on the future and the ethical implications of these developments.As Bousquet notes, it’s...
A Farewell to Norms
Here's something funny: I've been so mired in studying how international norms emerge for the past few years that I haven't given much thought at the theoretical level to how they fall apart. To be fair, constructivists have paid much less attention in general to norm death than they have to norm creation. Finnemore and Sikkink's "norm life cycle" stops at norm internalization. And even though scholars like Patrick Cottrell have pointed out...
In Social Science, You’re always Under-read, so How do you Choose ? (2)
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found...
Global Implications of the Contraception Kerfuffle
Our readers are surely aware of the contraception kerfuffle, the outpouring of criticism and controversy engendered by the Obama's administration's efforts to ensure that more American women have access to contraception as part of their health plans. With the insurance schemes of religious-affiliated universities and hospitals often not covering contraception services for women, the Obama administration sought to use the new health care law to...
In Social Science, You’re always Under-read, so How do You Choose ? (1)
If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc....
Friday Nerd Blogging
"hunger" "rebellion""mutations""killer kids""torture and execution""weapons""medicine""tributes""weird science"This President's Day week, tickets went on sale for The Hunger Games movie. While you re-read the books and prepare yourself to be generally underwhelmed by the film (seriously? casting kindly-wise-old-Father-of-Elizabeth-Bennett as a bloodthirsty dictator?), let me encourage you to purchase The Hunger Games Companion. The Companion is...
Learning to Fish Through Human Rights Data
I often encourage my students to distill complex analytical concepts into terse, plain English. But some things can't be boiled down to a tweet, as I discovered this week when attempting to explain Cingranelli-Richards data coding in response to Joshua Foust's queries on my abusers' peace post.What I didn't think to tell him in response to his original question was: here is how you can look it up for yourself. So this post contains (I hope) a...
War Crimes and the Arab Spring. Again.
The direct targeting of actors protected under the laws of war has been one of the most disturbing trends arising out of the Arab Spring. For example, the targeting of medical workers and ambulance drivers was well documented and reported on last year. Additionally, here at the Duck we've been following the issue. In recent months Dan Nexon wrote about the targeting of doctors who treated protesters in Bahrain and I've bloged about the growing...