by Charli Carpenter | 22 Nov 2008 |
Picked up my copy of International Studies Perspectives yesterday to discover Abigail Ruane and Patrick James' article "The International Relations of Middle Earth: Learning from The Lord of the Rings" leading the "Pedagogy and the Discipline" Section. Just another example of why ISP is my favorite IR journal. I read the article with gusto. The piece "overviews how J.R.R. Tolkien's acclaimed triology is relevant to learing about IR and then...
by Peter | 22 Nov 2008 |
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10cThe Buccaneer Stops HereBarack Obama InterviewJohn McCain InterviewSarah Palin VideoFunny Election VideoWhy is it so hard to deal with the Pirate problem? The Daily Show is onto something here....
by Charli Carpenter | 20 Nov 2008 |
This post began as a response to the comments on Peter's recent post on pirates, but they got to be so long, and required hyperlinks, I decided to start a new thread. In his comment to that post, T. Greer asks what the pirates who hijacked the oiltanker Sirius Star were thinking, since they can't deal with the logistics involved in selling the cargo and were certainly likely to provoke the great powers (further) by targeting such a prize....
by Rodger Payne | 18 Nov 2008 |
Today, Jesse Singal has an excellent post challenging the role of conventional wisdom in making national security policy. All-too-often, he suggests, the terms of political debate and the potential policy options are locked in by a national security elite that infrequently finds its ideas contested, however dubious they might be.For example, what are we to make of the forthcoming increased attention devoted to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- even...
by Dan Nexon | 18 Nov 2008 |
The Chinese Communist Party has sunk all of its legitimacy, understandably, into the continued growth of the Chinese economy and a steady increase in their citizens' standard of living. One of the "nightmare" scenarios for China watchers is that, faced with an inability to generate enough jobs to satisfy domestic needs, the party turns to aggressive nationalism as an alternative means of staying in power. But with thawing relations between...
by Peter | 18 Nov 2008 |
Just when you thought that the Pirates couldn't get any more ambitious than seizing a freighter full of Ukrainian weapons...Somali Pirates seized a Saudi supertanker Tuesday. The tanker, one of the largest ships on the ocean, is the size of a US Aircraft carrier and three times a heavy when full. It has a crew of 25 (by comparison, an air craft carrier has a crew of over 5000). It carries over a quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily crude output.It...
by Dan Nexon | 18 Nov 2008 |
I discuss, at Culture11, Obama's foreign-policy challenges.
by Dan Nexon | 18 Nov 2008 |
Rob Farley points our attention to the latest from Iceland:Foreign diplomats hardly believed what they heard when the Icelandic president said that his country needs “new friends” and that Russia should be invited to take use of the old U.S. airbase of Keflavik.In the lunch which took place in Reykjavik last Friday, Mr. Grimsson accused neighboring countries of failing to support the crisis-ridden Iceland, newspaper Dagbladet reports with...
by Charli Carpenter | 13 Nov 2008 |
Among the insights of New Yorker's analysis of Obama's campaign" is this interesting discussion of "celebrity blowback": "In July... a McCain ad compared Obama to Paris Hilton. What seemed to outsiders like a trivial, even ridiculous attack had an enormous impact inside Obama's headquarters.The campaign kept Obama away from celebrities as much as possible. A Hollywood fund-raiser with Barbra Streisand became a source of deep anxiety and...
by Peter | 13 Nov 2008 |
Toward the end of the Cold War, Georgi Arbatov, the top America analyst in the Soviet Union, told his American interlocutors that the USSR was doing a terrible thing to the US, it was depriving it of its enemy. In a letter to the NY Times in 1987, he wrote:And here we have a ''secret weapon'' that will work almost regardless of the American response - we would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the military...
by Peter | 13 Nov 2008 |
Michael Lewis's account of the collapse of Wall Street is a must read for insight and understand of what was going on that led to the current mess.I know it won't, but it should, end this foolish notion that markets are self-organizing, self-regulating, rational entities where rational actors maximize value and where self-interested firms don't lie, cheat, and steal. Markets are social entities, perhaps best studied as networks governed by...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Nov 2008 |
Alex Tabarrok explains why government employees should be considered unemployed.Some of you will, I expect, object that Tabarrock is actually referring to those employed by receiving money from workfare programs, specifically those, uh, affiliated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the New Deal. Yes he is. But I fail to see why one class of government employees is actually "unemployed" while every other government employee is...