I’ve been getting surprisingly decent feedback on these posts. Some of my colleagues at work (who know more about democracy and elections than I do) have said that they felt that they were not entirely wrong or embarrassing so I’ve decided to stick with it until it’s all over next week – and then get back to blowy-uppy-thingies after 6 May.So what did we see and/or learn in the last leader’s debate on foreign policy last week?My first...
Is this the end of the grand Eurozone experiment? I have to admit that I've had a general feeling for the past couple of months that the Germans would, in the end, cough up a bail-out package for Greece because of a sense that there is no real alternative. But, despite the fact that Angela Merkel finally appears to be asserting herself, now I'm really not sure how it will end. Rumors are swirling that Portugal and Spain will also need bailouts...
I was alerted this morning to the death of Professor Fred Halliday. Halliday, who specialized in the Middle East and was very much a legend around the London School of Economics. I was fortunate enough to be in one of the last classes of MSc students who sat through his IR theory lectures. These classes were a very strange tour de force – mixed with anecdotes of Professor Halliday’s meeting foreign leaders, intellectuals and peppered with...
Sorry I've been out of the loop for a month or so -- I volunteered to lead a search committee for the head of a local organization and I'm just now catching my breath. (Note to self: Volunteering is really hard work and takes a ton of time...)So, I opened the New York Times this morning and notice that Africa's largest country may be on the brink of splitting apart after the country's presidential elections earlier this month. The rivals, Omar...
I finally saw Men Who Stare at Goats this weekend. A significant number of reviews from last year when it came out reference the epigram to the film, "More of this stuff is true than you think." However in my mind, the most important quote in the film is the one above. If you try to read this film through any other lens - pacifism, spy culture, truth v. fiction re. the paranormal - it doesn't work very well. That's why a lot of reviewers either...
Recently, while discussing the war in Afghanistan with a conflict studies program in the mid-west, I had a rather odd debate with a leftist professor who was devil's advocating what he claimed was a "neo-conservative" position (based on some of his recent interaction with naval officers and RAND researchers).His main argument revived the "stabbed in the back" hypothesis from the Vietnam era. The argument essentially posits that...
In every episode of the classic 1960s television series "The Prisoner," Number 6 and Number 2 had this exchange: Number 6: Where am I?Number 2: In the Village.Number 6: What do you want?Number 2: We want information.Number 6: Whose side are you on?Number 2: That would be telling. We want information... information... information.Number 6: You won't get it.The lack of information is a problem widely recognized by international relations...
Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris says NGO Monitor should practice what it preaches when it comes to transparency about donations from government funders. The dialogue in comments on this and older threads is illuminating and raises some interesting questions about the accountability of the NGO sector. Like Heller, I would like to see greater transparency from both Human Rights Watch and NGO Monitor.I think it's a shame that NGO Monitor is so...
I’m planning on writing a larger post on the topic after the Second Election Debate tonight – particularly since it is going to be about UK Foreign policy (and, in theory, more or less related to the topics of this blog...)In the mean time if you haven’t been paying attention, the election has basically exploded into interestingness in the last week. The First (ever) Leader’s Debate basically jump-started the election in a way that I (and I...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]In the latest issue of WIRED, Clive Thompson pens a great piece which echoes a sentiment I've touched on before: in a data-driven world it is critical that all citizens have at least a basic literacy in statistics (really, research methodology broadly, but I'll take what I can get).Now and in the future, we will have unprecedented access to voluminous amounts of data. The analysis of this data and the conclusions...
A bunch of "big thinkers" sat down at Harvard last week to debate this question. You can watch their videos here. Some of the "problems" put forth were simply timely empirical issues with important normative content, like how to close the gender gap in pay equity, or reduce the "skills gap" between Blacks and Whites, or how to understand the relationship between ethnic diversity and civil war. But some were more wide-ranging: What is the...
"I wasn't raped until I was almost ten which is pretty good it seems when I ask around because many have been touched but are afraid to say .... I couldn't tell how many hands he had and people from earth only had two ... You get asked if anything happened and you say well yes he put his hand here and he rubbed me ...and he scared me ...you say the almost-ten-year-old version of f*ck you something happened alright the f*ck he put his hands in...