I often find myself in disagreement with Amitai Etzioni, but he does makes some sense in his recent Politico op-ed on Petraeus' "metrics" for progress in Afghanistan: The newest way General Petraeus plans to measure success in the war in Afghanistan reminded me of what the government did when its campaign to persuade the public to stop smoking did not make much headway. It stopped counting how many people had had their last cigarette - and...
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Another war on terror outrage: asylum denied
Did anyone else know about this additional outrageous consequence of the "war on terror"? You may have to be a subscriber to see this note from The Nation, September 20? Deborah Amos's Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (PublicAffairs; $25.95) is a harrowing account of the pain and anguish suffered by the Iraqi Sunni diaspora in the Middle East. Especially perverse is a legal hurdle faced by exiles seeking...
Marty Peretz, Harvard, and the First Amendment
I attended the Harvard Social Studies concentration’s 50th anniversary celebration on September 25, well aware of the controversy over the University's naming an undergraduate research scholarship in honor of New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. Generating the conflict were Peretz’s long history of contemptuous writings about Muslims and other groups and especially his recent, disgraceful statement: “I wonder whether I need . . ....
Miliband of Brothers (Stolen from Channel 4, but too good not to reuse)
For my first Duck post to be so parochial is a shame, but I can’t resist commenting on the result of Labour’s leadership election, declared a couple of hours ago. For someone such as myself who was once, briefly, one of Ralph Miliband’s students at LSE in the 1960s, the idea that the son of the author of Parliamentary Socialism should now be the leader of the British Labour Party is weird. That he should have obtained that post by beating his...
Revolving Doors, Lobbyist Edition
Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer's lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected...
Bill Clinton and the Russian Israelis
Former President Clinton jumped into the Mideast Peace process earlier this week. According to Josh Rogin's reporting at The Cable, Clinton met with a group of reporters and, when asked to comment about the current negotiations, began by saying:"I wouldn't say too much about this if Hillary weren't Secretary of State and in charge of these negotiations, so I'm darned sure not going to say too much now."Ah, but that's not like Mr. Clinton.And it...
To explain the origin of exchange, you must explain the origin of trust
I've just started reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. So far, it is an excellent, through-provoking read. A key to Ridley's argument is that the innovation of exchange--the trading between two parties of separate items or services that both parties value--that led to mankind's dominance of the planet and the explosion of knowledge and technology.Ridley explains how exchange--or barter--is qualitatively different from reciprocity (an...
Cyber warfare and legal responsibility: drifting further apart?
Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging, a Clausewitzian centre of gravity on a field, but constituted by curious and enthusiastic citizens on the internet. As William Merrin argued at a...
Moral Movements and IR Theory
Joshua Busby has a new book out on transnational campaigns that might be the best new contribution to the advocacy networks literature since Keck and Sikkink's original Activists Beyond Borders. In Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, Busby proposes a theory of the conditions under which such movements succeed at securing commitments from states: Whether states accept commitments made by principled advocacy movements depends primarily on how...
“We should not see moving out of academia as a failure”
Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.Curry was commenting...
Pennsylvania’s Perverted “War on Terror”
How does America's bloated anti-terror bureaucracy spend its time and our money? A story out of Pennsylvania last week throws light on the earth-shakingly important work these saviors of our soil perform, defending us all from the scary monsters who pose such a dire menace to America.Or rather it illustrates, yet again, the myriad ways in which our homeland security hogs work to rationalize their existence and perpetuate their wallow in the...
Predicting flu outbreaks, fashion trends, and political unrest with social networks
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have released a new paper that looks at the potential predictive power of social networks. They claim that current methods of contagion detection are, at best, contemporaneous with the actual epidemic. What is needed is a true early detection method, one that would actually provide an accurate prediction of a coming epidemic.Christakis and Fowler claim that social networks can...