My partner used to refer to Worf as the Klingon equivalent of a Kantian. The Klingon-centric episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: DS9 make clear that Worf is committed to a deontological interpretation of Klingon ethics. If you're still reading...
Despite the geekiness of my previous post today, I had to double dip with this: H/T Jeff Emanuel
Twitter went nuts when President Obama said he could not get the Republicans to do what is right because of his finite powers, that he could not do some sort of Jedi mind-meld! He mixed his space...
Because "53 reasons" is just plain stupid, and increments of five are basically listicles, I provide three. 1. We are heading straight for maximum Star Wars saturation. Despite its...
Slate posted a piece on the academic study of pop culture. It found that academics studied Buffy the Vampire Slayer most. Well, actually, no, it found that more folks studied the Buffy than the Matrix, the Simpsons, Aliens or The Wire.This led to a Facebook discussion of selection bias. We can discuss the merits of these five and ponder why the Simpsons did so poorly (perhaps we need a consistent plot progression?), or why the Wire is under-valued yet again. That the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies sucked so much that they sucked all the air out of the studying the Matrix enterprise? But what...
Today at the LSE there are two fabulous (read: fabulously nerdy) events on Science Fiction and IR. Even better, it's full of ducks! The event was organized by Chris Brown and features Dan Nexon and Prof PTJ. The first event, chaired by Chris Brown, features three prominent Science Fiction authors: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Paul McAuley, Ken McLeod. The second event features several prominent academics who will be discussing the implications for IR. Chaired by Barry Buzan, it features our two ducks and Iver Neumann.My only regret is a lack of female voices. So, in an attempt to rectify this, I...
Claims of "genocide" abound in policy discourse. So do misunderstandings about the concept. Some recent examples. In the last two years, Russia claimed that Georgia's attack on Tshkinvali was "genocide;" US House of Representatives accused Iran of inciting genocide in response to Ahmadinejad's inflammatory comments about wiping Israel (as it is currently politically constituted) off the map; and Gideon Polya apparently discovered a correlation between countries experiencing "war, genocide and occupation" and the failure of those countries to win Olympic medals.These examples demonstrate both...
It's not going to get on anyone's list of top ten IR movies, that's for sure. But that doesn't mean I'm disappointed, exactly... more like a little shell-shocked.Lawyers, Guns and Money doesn't have a peekaboo function, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone else, so my reactions from seeing the film only once so far are hidden safely below the fold. Foreign policy subtext - decidedly post-Global War on Terror. The original Federation always was presented as a metaphor for liberal internationalism ala Western Hemispheric U.S. hegemony; during the Cold War this meant as opposed to a...