by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 6 Feb 2010 |
A brief non-Platonic dialogue.Dramatis Personae:Friedrich William Shotter-Wittgenstein ("Will"), a mind-world monistRene Roy Searle-Wight ("Roy"), a mind-world dualistRoy: Hey there, Will. Surprised to see you out here shoveling snow.Will: Hey, Roy. Why would you be surprised at that? It snowed a lot last night, and I need to get the sidewalk cleared in front of my house.Roy: Well, can't you mind-world monists just think the snow away? Why...
by Vikash Yadav | 6 Feb 2010 | Featured
In the latest round of the ongoing blood feud between the US military/intelligence agencies and the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP), it appears that the TTP's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed by a Predator drone attack in mid-January. The assassination was apparently in “revenge” for the murder of seven CIA operatives at a forward operating base in Afghanistan by Hakimullah's associate and Jordanian double agent, Humam...
by Vikash Yadav | 6 Feb 2010 | Featured
Hi. I've been invited to guest blog here at Duck of Minerva for a little while. So I thought I'd introduce myself... I'm Vikash Yadav. I teach Political Science and International Relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. My doctoral research (and first book) was an attempt to apply the framework from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality to understand the concept of risk and its effects in international financial markets. I...
by Charli Carpenter | 6 Feb 2010 |
Danny Kaplan at Foreign Policy is pointing out how the US lags behind other top-notch militaries like the IDF in its nascent, grudging willingness to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly. The United States and Turkey are now the only NATO military powers that do not allow gays to serve openly, but Israel and other countries have shown that the participation of gay soldiers in combat units presents no risk for military effectiveness. What's...
by Charli Carpenter | 4 Feb 2010 |
At the Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten has a round-up of some conventional answers and calls attention to a novel explanation just out as a working paper from NYU.[cross-posted at LGM]
by Charli Carpenter | 3 Feb 2010 |
I was intrigued to read my colleagues' latest essay in International Studies Quarterly a couple of weeks ago. Here's the abstract. American scholars routinely characterize the study of international relations as divided between various Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.” Although most international relations scholars have abandoned Kuhn's account of scientific continuity and change, many utilize Lakatosian criteria to...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 2 Feb 2010 |
A new study (summarized here; full text available here if you're lucky enough to be at an institution with a medical school and an institutional subscription to the relevant journal) released yesterday purports to have some implications for sex education policy. By conducting what the authors -- or the publicists at the University of Pennsylvania, at any rate -- refer to as the first randomized controlled study of the effectiveness of various...
by Jon Western | 2 Feb 2010 |
One line that caught my attention in Obama's Q/A with the House Republicans last Friday was his rationale for toning down the demonization of one another. He argued, for example, that when Republicans portray him as someone out to destroy the country (i.e., health care reform is a Bolshevik plot), it radicalizes their constituencies and ultimately limits their ability to engage in any bipartisan efforts with him to deal with the country's...
by Bill Petti | 1 Feb 2010 |
[Cross-posted at bill | petti]Sunday's Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has stopped selling Kindle versions of all Macmillan titles. John Sargent, Macmillian's CEO, recently went to Amazon's headquarters to try and negotiate new terms for the sale of e-books published by his company. In general, the publishing industry has been unhappy with Amazon's insistence that most books be priced at $9.99. Apparently, the discussions resulted in...
by Charli Carpenter | 30 Jan 2010 |
by Charli Carpenter | 28 Jan 2010 |
Dan Drezner is among those who today bemoaned the absence of foreign policy content in President Obama's State of the Union Speech. He's not the only one. Max Boot calls foreign policy "AWOL" from the speech. Eric Ostermeir at Smart Politics has quantified the foreign policy content at only 13.9%. Whether they were very worried or not about Obama's foreign policy message, most commentators agreed it was a weak one relative to the domestic...
by Laura Sjoberg | 28 Jan 2010 |
I am, perhaps, the world's worst guest blogger. I do it rarely, if at all, and in a scattered way. I keep meaning to, but then ... Perhaps I am not suited for this medium of communication. Or maybe I am just distracted. With apologies to my colleagues for my flawed posting habits, however, I am not quite ready to give up on myself-as-blogger, and feel like weighing in on this question of "what to read on gender and foreign policy" might be a...