Does Whataboutism work? A new article has answers.
Does Whataboutism work? A new article has answers.
I am preparing to leave for a week to conduct participant-observation research at the The Third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in Oslo. As I prepare my...
This is the second in a series of guest posts by Stuart J. Kaufman of the University of Delaware. Stuart advances a long-running dispute with PTJ about whether "what goes on inside people's heads"...
I am headed out to Coachella this Thursday for three days of music in the desert. Well, two days. I am too old to make it all the way through, and I have to teach on Monday. In any case, I thought I...
The Obama administration's rhetorical escalation on Syria this week seems to have generated quite a bit of skepticism that it will have any effect. Drezner sees it as mostly harmless and won't really do any good. Daniel Serwer thinks for it to be effective, others are going to have to push harder. Andrew Sullivan finds Assad unfazed. True to form, the Neocons see it as too little. On one level these are fair points -- if the sole measure of this rhetorical shift is whether or not it will compel Assad to leave office then obviously this will be a failure. But, no one in the administration...
As James Poulous reminds me, 2010 ain't got nothing on 1968, let alone the long 1960s. Violent rhetoric?Worse.Societal polarization?Worse.Political violence, including assassinations?Much worse.It is something of a testament to how far we've come that what outrages us now is relatively tame compared to the spewings of the far left and the far right less than half a century ago.I still don't have much use for claims that center-left politicians are trying to destroy the United States, or that center-right politicians are fascists. I still think that most of the political elites accusing their...
If you haven't noticed, there's a debate going on about the relationship between rhetoric and violence (meta). I basically agree with Henry Farrell's take:One can say that there is (moderate) evidence supporting the argument that violent rhetoric makes violent action more likely. But this does not and cannot show, in the absence of other evidence, that any particular violent action is the product of a general atmosphere of violent rhetoric.Still, I find myself compelled to comment.First, of course there's &$^!!$@* relationship between rhetoric and violence! It doesn't take a great deal of...
John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals' willingness to engage in actual political violence against government officials. The findings he cites: an experimental study has shown there seems to be no effect on the overall population of exposure to "fighting words" in political ads, but there is an effect on people with aggressive tendencies. Moreover:This conditional relationship -- between seeing violent ads and a predisposition to aggression -- appears stronger among those under the...
Obama's 2010 National Security Strategy according to Wordle:Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy according to Wordle:
One line that caught my attention in Obama's Q/A with the House Republicans last Friday was his rationale for toning down the demonization of one another. He argued, for example, that when Republicans portray him as someone out to destroy the country (i.e., health care reform is a Bolshevik plot), it radicalizes their constituencies and ultimately limits their ability to engage in any bipartisan efforts with him to deal with the country's problems -- lest they be accused of being an accomplice with a socialist.Audience costs don't come as a surprise to many of us in IR. James Fearon's 1994...
Hat tip to President Barack Obama. (The good stuff begins about 10 minutes into the clip.)
Maureen Dowd's op-ed Stung by the Perfect Sting rattled some cages in the blogosphere this week. Laura McKenna calling her a whiner, implying the post was really about her own bad blogger press. Tim Burke claiming she is dissing bloggers by failing to reference our own grand debates over anonymity. Danny being Danny Drezner accusing Dowd of comparing bloggers to muggers. The column seems widely interpreted as a slam against the new media. I was sorry that none of these posts engaged the actual story in the article, which had almost nothing to do with the blogosphere per se. Part of this is...