by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 29 May 2005 | Featured
Because you, the readers, want to know -- or at least because we, the writers, think that you, the readers, want to know. (I'm fascinated by the fact that a name and a personal biography improve the credibility of a piece of writing; there's something very interesting there about the way that we as a society assign responsibility and blame -- but I digress.)I'm an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the School of International...
by Bill Petti | 29 May 2005 |
Dan's post on the recent collapse of the NPT conference raises some interesting points. The recent negotiations, as well as the continuing stand-off between Iran, North Korea, and the US, leads to some very interesting questions regarding motivations, blame, and policy. I have been blogging about this issue as it pertains to Iran and North Korea over the past week, so some of this post will be based on my discussion there. Additionally, I will...
by Bill Petti | 28 May 2005 | Featured
Hello all. As promised, here is my intro post. I will keep it short.I am a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania in the Political Science department. As far as subfields go I am mostly interested in International Relations Theory and Security--however, I find it increasingly difficult (not to mention undesirable) to analyze such phenomena without incorporating concepts from Comparative Politics. Like Dan, I have a webpage but...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 |
"Store Wars", the pro-organic food Star Wars parody, gets 1,268 hits on Technorati. The infinitely superior, but much older, "Troops" receives only 43.1I remember when my wife brought home "Troops" on zip disk from her job at an internet startup. We were living in New York, in a tiny apartment, and I weighed a lot less than I do now. Anyway, we still have the disk lying around somewhere, although internet technology and the lack of a zip drive...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 28 May 2005 |
As a baseball fan, I watch a fair number of games during the regular season, most of them on television (ballpark prices, even for the cheap seats, prohibit more than about one family outing a month to see a game live). A lot of the commentary by the sportscasters is silly, although the anecdotes told by former players and the locker room gossip that reporters have managed to pick up are sometimes interesting. But the analysis of what is going...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 |
The collapse of the most recent NPT conference is already gone from the headlines. The general tenor of the reporting has gone, more or less, like this:When the conference began on May 2, countries had hoped to agree on a plan to plug loopholes in the treaty that enable countries to acquire sensitive atomic technology and to hear from Washington and the four other NPT members with nuclear weapons that they remained committed to disarming.But it...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 |
There were two sets of very interesting comments on my recent post on hegemony. Bill Petti questions whether US hegemony only has another few decades left in its lifespan. At the most basic level, Bill is right. I definitely overstated the case. At the same time, Bill presents far too optimistic a picture of the prospects for medium-term American primacy.Bill argues that hegemonic decline is driven by one of four processes: "imperial...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 | Featured
The Duck of Minerva is now a collaborative endeavor. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, an assistant professor at American University, and William Petti, a doctoral student in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, have agreed to join the staff.They will be introducing themselves shortly.
by Dan Nexon | 26 May 2005 |
The life of an academic is all about balancing the scales. The pay isn't so hot, but the hours are good. Grading is a pain, but they give you money to read stuff. And so on.But one thing that really does unequivocally suck about being an academic, at least in political science, is the constant rejection - or the existential threat of rejection. Russell Arben Fox captures this feature of academic life quite well (although I wish he didn't have...
by Dan Nexon | 26 May 2005 |
How many recent developments in international politics can be attributed to US hegemony as opposed to structural shifts in the international economy, technology, or other factors that might be considered at least partially autonomous from American primacy? The answer to this question matters a great deal, because no one expects US primacy to last much more than a few additional decades.1 Dan Drezner weighs in on the question in his review of a...
by Dan Nexon | 26 May 2005 |
I stumbled across Orson Scott Card's review of Star Wars whilst reading Lawyers, Guns and Money, which itself links to the article via Lance Mannion. There's been some disappointment over the tenor and quality of Card's article, but this is what jumped out at me:As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on...
by Dan Nexon | 25 May 2005 |
In response to Time Burke's "Rampant Geekery: Star Wars Thoughts [SPOILERS]", I made a comment about what I called "nerd hermeneutics": the analysis of the text and media of speculative worlds, such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as if they were complete, self-contained systems. In a followup, Tim expands masterfully on this concept. He talks about it as "ways in which a fiction like Star Wars invites a particular kind of reader to make it into...