William Bennett -- you remember, the guy who used to be Secretary of Education before he went out and wrote The Book of Extremely Reactionary Virtues -- made an even-more-ridiculous-than-usual comment on his radio show yesterday. To quote a Washington Post article on the incident:"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," said Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues."He went on to call that "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible...

For those of you who where wondering where I have been (yes, all three of you:)), I have been stranded in comprehensive exam hell. Thankfully the process is now over and I passed with flying colors. Now its on to prospectus hell and dissertation hell (why do I get the feeling that grad school is a lot like Dante's Inferno, a series of ever worsening levels of pain--let's leave that discussion for another time....).On to something substantive. Dan's post on Iraq and what the exact relationship is between the Bush Doctrine and the Iraqi conflict raises some interesting questions. Dan outlines...

'Tis the season to be a neurotic mess - if you're late-stage ABD or newly minted PhD.Between, on the one hand, emails from students and friends and, on the other, trolling around anonymous academic blogs, I have reached the inescapable conclusion that it is, indeed, the time of darkness and pain known as "the academic job market."So, in the spirit of Daniel Drezner's advice columns for graduate students, let me share my own words of wisdom hard-learned lessons bs thoughts with those hunting for their first academic job.Before I begin, a few autobiographical points of reference. I have a PhD...

I've been reading the International Security forum on "soft balancing." I'll have more to write about it when I finish my next installment of "Balancing and the balance of power." My initial reaction is that the "soft balancing" arguments, at least as presented by Robert Pape and T.V. Paul, are not very persuasive.But both of the articles raise an orthogonal question, one that has been troubling me for a while. Both Pape and Paul spend a great deal of time on the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States and the "Bush Doctrine" of preventive war against lesser powers developing...

Mansur Mirovalev of the AP reports:TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - A senior State Department official said Tuesday the president of Uzbekistan made it clear that American forces must leave their air base in the Central Asian country, and the U.S. intends to do so "without further discussion."The demand came as relations soured following U.S. criticism of Uzbekistan's crackdown on anti-government protesters in May in the eastern city of Andijan.Regular readers of the Duck will know that I think a US-Uzbekistan break is long overdue. However, the way this played out should please no one. The US didn't...

A while back, Marc Lynch threw down the gauntlet and declared the last decade of international politics a vindication for the constructivist approach to international relations.Warning: what follows is a very long post, one that will be primarily of interest to people who care about academic International Relations (IR)Marc wrote:Back in the 1990s, the International Relations subfield of Political Science was consumed by the so-called "rationalism-constructivism" debate. Constructivism argued that mainstream Realist, Liberal, and formal modeling approaches to IR drastically under-stated the...

Via Robert Farley.The title of my twenty-third post was: "Nineteenth-Century Soft Power."The fifth sentence was part of a quotation from Anders Stephanson:Laggard by comparison, the United States nevertheless had enormous potential for emulation.Directions:1. Go into your archive.2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.Passed onto Mark Safranski , Curzon, and Jesse Bennett.

I'd like to think that the Duck's patron saint Max Weber would have been slightly apoplectic after reading this story in this morning's Washington Post about a new museum outside of Cincinnati dedicated to the promulgation of a "Young Earth Creationist" understanding of life, the universe, and everything: "It holds that the world and the universe are but 6,000 years old and that baby dinosaurs rode in Noah's Ark."This would be laughable -- indeed, it even sounds like a Daily Show skit -- except for two very disturbing pieces of information:1) the article points out that polls from last year...