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Obama ‘how’s that hopey changey stuff working for ya?”
As the Occupy Wall Street New York movement enters its second week of activity and the movement spreads to LA, Boston, Chicago, Denver and other cities across the country, the silence on the part of the Obama administration becomes more and more noticeable (we can't count Biden's weird and incoherent references to the movement in an interview yesterday). Few expected Obama to come out with any statement last week, when the media was still...
Hu’s on First?
James Vreeland imagines the possibilities.
Crowdsourcing for Analogies
Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help. The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign aid might be a way to address the US fiscal crisis.My starting point: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on apertifs.The responses thus far: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an...
Breakout Star Patrick T. Jackson Takes APSA by Storm
The Canard"All the fake news that's fit to print"--Seattle The American Political Science Association is abuzz with talk about a breakout book by an up and coming star in international relations theory, Patrick T. Jackson. While Jackson had previously had strong indie credentials established through gritty work on the strategic construction of the notion of Western civilization by the United States after WWII, The Conduct of Inquiry in...
Piled Higher and Deeper: The Movie
That's right, coming soon to a campus near you. (Or if not, click here to arrange your own screening.)PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
Spoiler Alert! Latest Episode of ‘Dictator Survivor: Africa’
For all you fans of 'Dictator Survivor: Africa,' the forthcoming episode is sure to be the most dramatic one yet. Before this year, fans had gotten tired of some of the story lines and characters (I mean it seems obvious that Mugabe will win, so why bother watching right?), but this last season the international community producers have really intervened to make things more interesting. Forget about Charles Tayor. Sure he was considered at one...
Anwar al-Awlaki and Targeted Killing: A quick, first, and uneasy reaction
*post written with comments from fellow duck Ben O'LoughlinThe world media is reporting that Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in Yemen – although details are very sketchy at this point. It is very clear to me that Awlaki was not a particularly nice person – he advocated some rather terrible things (even before 9/11 supposedly radicalised him). His followers have been certainly linked to terrorism, including the Fort Hood shooting. However, I...
Our new Fall line-up
We're welcoming a couple of new guest bloggers to Duck. Jay Ulfelder, who blogs at Dart Throwing Chimps, is a political scientist who does excellent work forecasting regime survival and change, democratization, and violent conflict. And Erica Chenoweth from Wesleyan University will be posting as Rational Insurgent -- also the name of her blog. She's done some amazing work on terrorism and most recently on civil resistance and non-violent...
Friday Nerd Blogging
How the author coded the characters either for "good" or "lawful" certainly beggars the imagination. That said, as an out and proud political scientist I cannot help but appreciate a handy 3x3 grid wherever I can get one... H/T selfishmeme
“Magic Democracy Words” Don’t Tie Their Speaker’s Hands
In an August 30 piece for BBC News, Shashank Joshi, a graduate student at Harvard University and associate fellow at a major U.K. think tank, argued that strong statements from American officials about Syrian president Assad's loss of legitimacy would help advance the Syrian revolution by committing the U.S. to stronger courses of action. Joshi writes (emphasis added):The Syrian revolution of 2011 could also have been one more of those many...
Terrorism in Democracies
Yesterday the FBI arrested a Massachusetts man, who has been subsequently charged with a number of crimes related to terrorism. [1] This is the latest in a string of plots that the U.S. has successfully thwarted, yet it raises alarms for many Americans who have felt immune from Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism on U.S. soil. Erik Dahl, of the Naval Postgraduate School, has identified dozens of credible plots (as many as 45 by jihadist-inspired groups...