- The difference between pets in Diablo III and Torchlight II.
- Blah blah blah Game of Thrones blah blah credible commitments blah blah blah prisoners’ dilemma.
- Taylor Fravel says that China hasn’t abandoned no-first use.
- Pavel Podvig demolishes “SDI ended the Cold War” claptrap. Key graf: “The evolution of the Soviet attitudes toward SDI suggests that the main factor that contributed to the ending the confrontation of the Cold War was the willingness of the United States and the Soviet Union to engage in a dialogue on reduction of their nuclear forces. The only result that the SDI program was able to achieve in the context of confrontation was to embolden those in the Soviet Union who defined security in confrontational terms and benefited from this kind of understanding.”
And also:
- David Rhode argues that the UN is a mess.
- Justin Gengler links to an interview that he did on sectarianism and the Gulf States.
- More on the colonization of the academy by late-capitalist scripts. Meanwhile, California Governor Brown wants to solve the perverse incentives of allocating funding by number of students by creating new perverse incentives. #protip: bad metrics are worse than no metrics.
- Study finds increasing women’s employment opportunities would boost economic growth.
- Xavier Marquez on interaction ritual chains.
- “The Real Marx.”
Re your last link, Gray’s piece on Marx: Gray’s statement that were it not for a few historical accidents Marx’s name would be “one which educated people struggle to remember” is absurd. Marx had some profound insights, as Gray himself acknowledges, and Marx was also, at times, a gifted writer. He would be read today even if WW1 and the Russian Revolution had not happened.
As for Sperber’s point that “all that is solid melts into air” is a bad translation from the German, that horse left the barn a long time ago. Generations of students who read Marx in translation remember that passage from the Manifesto, and another book on Marx, whatever its merits, is not going to change their recollection. And as Gray points out, Sperber’s ‘more accurate’ translation of that passage basically means the same thing as the familiar version.
By definition, everything at the Duck is nerd-inflected… Just sayin’