by Peter | 27 Apr 2008 |
Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I've been sick all week and finally feel like myself again this afternoon, so I'm going to try to catch up on a few things that I had meant to mention but....First off: A must read from last Sunday's NYT (I had actually started the post earlier, but only typed 2 lines before I started coughing).So, to all those who thought that the US needed to do a better job in winning the “war of ideas,” it turns out...
by Charli Carpenter | 25 Apr 2008 |
Earlier this year, Hillary was leading Barack by 25 points in Pennsylvania; by April 22, Obama closed the gap to 9.2. Interestingly, this result has been largely interpreted as a loss for Obama, even by supporters. (Partly this effect was psychological - hopes were raised early in the evening last Tuesday when the networks claimed it was "too close to call," making a single-digit victory loss, which had always been more or less what supporters...
by Rodger Payne | 23 Apr 2008 |
Pundits have frequently compared the 2008 election to 1980. In both elections, the opposition party fielded strong candidates in the face of an unpopular president brought down by economic insecurity and foreign policy disaster. For his part, Senator Barack Obama has openly compared himself to Ronald Reagan -- not in substance, of course, but in transformational style.Reagan won the 1980 Republican nomination for President, but his main...
by Charli Carpenter | 21 Apr 2008 |
Peter recently urged me to report from the Pittsburgh grassroots on the Pennsylvania primary. Well, word from Frick International Studies Academy in Pittsburgh is that middle-schoolers are split on who they hope will win tomorrow, and the divisions cut across grade-level. According to my twelve-year old daughter, lunchroom polls at Frick last week reported a majority of 6th-graders support Obama; a majority of 7th-graders support Clinton. The...
by Rodger Payne | 21 Apr 2008 |
Last week, in the much-maligned Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, Senator Hillary Clinton said that she would greatly expand the US nuclear umbrella in the Middle East: Well, in fact, George [Stephanopoulos], I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United...
by Charli Carpenter | 20 Apr 2008 |
This weekend I discovered Facebook’s “Which Dictator Are You?” application. This is a seven-question quiz that spits out a result with some basic historical information on a dictator and some cheeky comments about how the application inferred a match from your answers.I have some unanswered questions about how the quiz works and some preliminary thoughts on how history is being communicated through such a device.1) First item of note is the...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Apr 2008 |
A while ago there was some discussion on this blog about the definition of "celebrity" activism for the purposes of empirically studying the entertainment industry's role in advocacy campaigns. A question was raised about what constitutes celebrity status, what constitutes activism, how much the two co-constitute one another in these cases.Jeff Skoll weighed in on this last week in his comments at the Global Philanthropy Forum 2008 Annual...
by Dan Nexon | 17 Apr 2008 |
Charles Tilly has won the 2008 Albert O. Hirschman Prize.From the announcement:“Charles Tilly is one of the most distinguished of all contemporary social scientists,” said Craig Calhoun, president of the SSRC. “He is the most influential analyst of social movements and contentious politics, a pathbreaker in the historical sociology of the state, a pivotal theorist of social inequality. Among the most eminent of sociologists, he is also a...
by Charli Carpenter | 17 Apr 2008 |
An unusually empirical op-ed in the New York Times today tests Obama's hypothesis that "wedge issues take prominence" when voters are frustrated by "difficult times." Larry Bartels uses polling data to demonstrate that in fact, more small-town working class voters believe the government can be trusted than urban voters making more that $60,000 a year, and the small town working class is also least likely to vote on social issues. David Park...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Apr 2008 |
Some commenters on my recent post about emotions in IR are a little flustered over the difference between Klingons and Vulcans in Star Trek. Representative David Wu of Oregon offers a clarification from the floor of Congress:
by Rodger Payne | 11 Apr 2008 |
Recently, my graduate IR seminar addressed critical theory -- and we naturally contrasted critical theory to "problem-solving theory," as Robert Cox would have it.In a volume about Cox's contributions to IR, Timothy Sinclair draws the distinction (pp. 5-6): It is the action, not the limits of the system, that is the analytic focus of of problem solving. Critical theory steps outside the confines of the existing set of relationships to identify...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Apr 2008 |
Daniel Little has a wonderful project instantiated in his website "UnderstandingSociety ChangingSociety" aimed at providing resources for those interested in social processes and social change. He's collected a number of interviews with prominent figures. I've watched the one with Charles Tilly, which is really a remarkable interview with a remarkable scholar and intellectual. I highly recommend that readers of the Duck take a look,...