Last weekend my wife and son and I went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. It was Old Timers' Day, so the actual game between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians was preceded by a couple of innings featuring a set of retired players who had formerly played for the Yankees. There was a lot of pomp and fanfare as these old-timers were introduced, and it was a great thrill to watch Mel Stottlemeyer, the current Yankees pitching coach, take...

When my wife dragged me to a performance of St. John's Passion at Lincoln Center a few years back, I could feel myself turning gay. A quick exit, however, saved my marriage and kept me on the straight and narrow. Seriously, either these guys are just completely ignorant or it's the start of the secret agenda of the Christian conservative movement: first the Catholics, next the Lutherans....Filed as: stupidity

Leon de Winter in the New York Times (via Marc Schulman):FOR centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.The murder last year of the filmmaker Theo...

I've been reading through R.J. Rummel's blog which, as one of his regular commentators puts it, is kind of a "public seminar" on the virtues of democracy in terms of inter-state and intra-state violence. Rummel's blog is, indeed, not just a really excellent academic advocacy website but a nice "public seminar."Rummel was one of the first contemporary advocates of the Democratic Peace. The basic idea is that if two states are democracies then...

Jonathan J. Monten, a graduate student at Georgetown, has just published a piece called "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy" in International Security. Jon is one of what I hope will be a growing wave of scholars seeking to combine (in a coherent manner) structural realism with arguments about the role of ideology and identity in world politics. This is a research program Stacie Goddard...

I wasn't in my office on Wednesday, and thus didn't post a maxim. Given Dan Drezner's recent post on prospect theory and terrorism, I thought it would be interesting to post Guicciardini's views, in effect, on the rational-choice controversy in International Relations:What I said earlier about princes also applies to people with whom you must deal: always keep an eye not so much on what reason dictates they ought to do, as on what you believe...

I've pulled my post entitled "Tim Burke Wows Me." I want to write a more substantive reflection - and call for discussion - on what, if anything, the online debate about Theory's Empire tells us about "post-prefixed" approaches to IR, and that post will get in the way. Apologies to people with an RSS feed.

Robert Farley doesn't think much of Wretchard's (of the Belmont Club) take on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Here's what Rob has to say:So much is wrong with this; Wolcott does an effective job of demolishing the hyper-masculinity of Wretchard's argument. Let's be frank, if Al Qaeda were given the option of fighting Americans by Marquess of Queensbury rules on an open field in the middle of Afghanistan, they'd leap at it. Winning a war, in spite of...

A number of weblogs have linked to Elliot Cohen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "A Hawk Questions Himself." Cohen defends the basic rationale for the war, but slams the administration for its poor implementation of the Iraq occupation. Key quotation:But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian...

Over the past decade, I've written a couple of book chapters about the use of the internet by transnational political activists. Environment, human rights, and peace organizations, for example, utilize the internet to communicate instantly with thousands of like-minded people around the world. Technology helps overcome resource mobilization costs for social movements.This use of the web generally helps progressive organizations promote their...

As I've discussed before, the current incarnation of "al-Qaeda" appears - at least based upon public documents - to be more of a diverse movement than a single organization. Indeed, "al-Qaeda" is, in some respects, linked together by the claims of particular groups to represent "al-Qaeda" and by the tendency of many western governments, pundits, and ordinary individuals to label any militant Islamicist terrorist attack as an act of "al-Qaeda."...

Writing in Slate, William Saletan argues that Al-Queda's strategy is to "destroy democracy from within."Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down.As Saletan puts it earlier in the article:In April 2004, Bin Laden told Europeans, "Vigilant people do...