From Mother Jones, of all places. Gayle Falkenthal comments.
Friday Nerd Blogging
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From Mother Jones, of all places. Gayle Falkenthal comments.
Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The...
Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP...
 Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help. The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign...
Classes started last week so I'm running a bit behind the news (and way behind in blogging in reaction to any of it) but Rumsfeld's recent (and oft-repeated) henny-penny arguments (thanks, Bill!) equating violent Islamist groups with Nazi Germany and invoking the world's most hackneyed foreign policy analogy -- Munich, Munich, Munich -- to advise staying the course are really starting to get to me. So in the interests of trying to restore a little sanity, I want to take a few minutes to unpack 'Munich' and the course of action to which the commonplace stands opposed ("appeasement") in order...
I took this excerpt about the new Pentagon Iraq report from the LA Times, September 2, but the news was widely circulated. However, you might have missed it because not only did the administration wait until a Friday to release bad news -- it was a Friday before a three day weekend in the midst of an east coast tropical storm!Attacks and civilian deaths in Iraq have risen sharply in recent months, with casualties increasing by 1,000 a month, and sectarian violence has engulfed larger areas of the country, the Pentagon said Friday in a strikingly dismal report to Congress.The quarterly...
It's Saturday afternoon and I have strep throat. I'm not at the APSA convention for the Labor Day weekend, but I can still be a geek: I just watched a large portion of a panel on C-SPAN 2 featuring Peter Beinart of The New Republic, paleo-con Reaganite Lawrence Korb, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, and neocon William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.Towards the very end, Kristol made a point about how Democrats and Republicans see America's foreign policy priorities -- and security threats -- differently. He cited a public opinion poll finding that Republicans focused on the traditional...
In keeping with the Bill and Rodger theme, perhaps a bit more moral clairity on Rumsfeld's recent statements is in order.Courtsey of Tom Toles in today's WP:Moral Clarity is always appreciated in instances like this...Filed as: Rumsfeld
I alerted regular Duck readers to the coming deluge of reputation rhetoric as the Bush administration and the RNC attempt to frame the upcoming midterm elections as a choice between ‘appeasers’ and ‘resolved warriors’. That deluge has officially begun. On Tuesday I discussed Secretary Rumsfeld's latest incoherent drivel speech. This morning’s Washington Post reports on the increase of henny-penny arguments to come:“President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut...
Two recommendations for readers of the Duck:First, a noteworthy article for those interested in analytical studies of strategic interaction as applied to terrorism appears in the recent issue of International Security. Andrew Kydd (a new addition to my department at Penn via Harvard) and Barbara Walter discuss terrorism as costly signaling and further elaborate on the numerous strategic logics of costly signaling at work in terrorist actions:(1) attrition,(2) intimidation,(3) provocation,(4) spoiling, and (5) outbidding. In an attrition strategy, terrorists seek to persuade the enemy that...
This must be a joke, albeit one that requires the audience to provide the punchline. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the American Legion, August 29, 2006: "Any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."Surely Rummy was counting on his audience to remember the backstory. His famous leaked memo from October 2003 was full of potential zingers. Here's a good one: Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and...
Exhibit A: Rep. Tom Lantos"The international community must use all our available means to stiffen Lebanon's spine and to convince the government of Lebanon to have the new UNIFIL troops on the Syrian border in adequate numbers," said Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives' International Relations Committee.Lantos said he was putting a legislative hold on Bush's proposal to provide $230 million in aid for Lebanon in the aftermath of the 34-day war between Israel and Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas."My purpose is not to withhold aid from Lebanon, my purpose ... is...