Why I Live on the Edge of Ottawa

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I hate scraping my car's windows clear of ice and snow.  Ten years of this in Montreal was more than enough.  So, I am loving my two car garage (and also parking garage at work). 

West Point Sucks, Too?

I have long hammered away at the problems of the US Air Force Academy as it apparently has become more of an outpost of evangelicization than a training center for the best and brightest in the US Air Force.  It is only fair then that I blast West Point, the US Army's academy for similar sins.  This piece indicates that it is not just the aspiring pilots and missleers who forget what this nation and its constitution stands for, but also the folks on the ground. 

While there are certainly numerous problems with the developmental program at West Point and all service academies, the tipping point of my decision to resign was the realization that countless officers here and throughout the military are guilty of blatantly violating the oaths they swore to defend the Constitution. These men and women are criminals, complicit in light of day defiance of the Uniform Code of Military Justice through unconstitutional proselytism, discrimination against the non-religious and establishing formal policies to reward, encourage and even at times require sectarian religious participation. These transgressions are nearly always committed in the name of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. The sparse leaders who object to these egregious violations are relegated to the position of silent bystanders, because they understand all too well the potential ramifications of publically expressing their loyalty to the laws of our country.

Pretty brave to give up one's future and potentially be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  It is appalling that the educational branches of the US military have been taken over by those who have a perverted understanding of religion and of the US Constitution.   Maybe this guy will make a difference, leading to a change of the culture of the institution.  Maybe not.  The more stories I hear like this, the more I begin to think that folks like Tom Ricks are right for perhaps the wrong reasons--perhaps it is time to end the academies.  It certainly seems to be the case that these places are fostering ignorance rather than educating the next generations of military officers.

Breaking Up is Hard to .....Show on Sesame Street

Here is a video (thanks, Jezebel) which has Sesame Street talking about divorce:


Wow! Funny that this happens after the ones on HIV/AIDS, death and other stuff. 

Anyhow, how about a little divorce to go with the pre-holiday stress?  And, no, this post has nothing to with my earlier post today.

Movies of the Year?

AFI put out there list of top movies and TV shows.  I have not seen most of them (partly because I cannot see movies that are not released), but not a huge fan of the list.  We did not see as many movies as usual because of the demise of Blockbuster (zip.ca works ok but hard to see recent stuff), netflix Canada's selection sucks); great TV so going out is less attractive (AMC/HBO lead to year around Sunday nights at home); and watching old series and movies on DVD (my daughter keeps insisting I watch Buffy rather than catch up on the stuff we have DVR'ed).

So, anyway, the list AFI has is:


Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
The Dark Knight Rises
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Moonrise Kingdom
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty


I have seen Argo and Dark Knight Rises.  Argo was a very, very good film.  DKR?  Not so much.  The plot was stupid, chock full of holes.  The characters had very little depth or coherence.  The only positive part of the movie (other than being able to make fun of Bane's voice) was Anne Hathaway as Selena Kyle/Catlady.  Otherwise, bleh. 

What would be my top ten movies--ones that I have seen?
Avengers--one of the best comic book movies. Nice blend of humor and action. Best Hulk yet, good Captain America stuff, heaps of material for blogging (here and here)
Ted--Perhaps uneven but caused some of the most intense intenstinal pain for making me laugh really hard.
Wreck It Ralph--Pixar-esque.  Fun, nostalgic, but not as good as the best Pixar stuff.
Argo--Interesting combo of politics, bad clothing and less than optimal haircuts.
21 Jump Street--surprisingly funny.
Looper--a time travel movie that takes serious time travel.  Plus a great Bruce Willis imitation.
The Campaign--fun satire of our political system. 
Cabin in the Woods--Not a perfect movie, but a wonderful take on the old cabin in the woods horror movie.
Goon--in a winter without hockey, this is a very entertaining hockey movie.

Movies that were good but not great:
Hunger Games--entertaining but the book was better.
Brave--not up to Pixar standards but still good.
Chronicle--best of the found footage movies.  Hey, what if we had superpowers and we were teenagers?  We would do stupid things....

Biggest disappointments:
Prometheus--ug.
Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall--not bad, just not good.

Movies I wish I had seen:
Red Tails--might not be great but I wish I had seen it.
Moonrise Kingdom--people say nice things.

Movies that were just as mediocre as I was expecting:
Acts of Valor--awful acting, but interesting action.
American Reunion--the fourth movie of silly series.  For the completion fixation.
Bourne Legacy--Renner was good, but movie was unnecessary.
Rock of Ages (truly an airplane movie)--for those who remember the songs.

Movies that were better than expected but not terrific:
Snow White and the Huntsman (of course, whole new meaning once you realize that Kristen Stewart slept with the director despite his wife playing her mother [I think])
Five Year Engagement--best ice-scraping scene.
Spider-man--heaps of fun with great chemistry between the leads, but entirely unnecessary.

What is a Man To Do?

I usually pooh pooh the complaints of men who are "oppressed" but I am wary of this whole "Mansplaining" thing.  Yes, men can be pompous and condescending, but we need to be clear that not all explanations are pompous and condescending just because they are uttered by a male.  And women can be pompous and condescending as well.

In the Spew household, we take turns--I am pompous about International Relations, Mrs. Spew tends to condescend about all things literary (jeez, I hope she does not read this post), and Teen Spew is pompous whenever her parents comment on pop culture aimed at those under 40 30 20. 

Seriously though, yes, unrequested explanations can be annoying, but as we converse with each other about whatever, must we always be as or more focused on the filter than on the conversation?  Of course, I have said stupid things or presumed about stuff.  But if mansplaining is a sin, I wonder who can cast the first stone?  Certainly not I, but also certainly not most of the women I know either.  I want my friends who are wise and knowledgeable to explain stuff.  I raise lots of questions (deliberately or otherwise) when I chat with folks, and I want them to point out stuff that they know better than I. 

Sure, it can be a bit much when one person dominates the conversation (unless that person is me), so as in everything else, moderate is the key.  Everyone will "mansplain"--they key is not to be rude.  But didn't we already know that?

And if you consider this post to be a heap of mansplaining, um, oops?

Fun in Weapons Procurement

The British are spending more money on new attack subs, but what I find notable are the names.  See if you can pick out the false ones: Ambush, Audacious, Articulate, Astute, Aardvark, Artful, Absinthe, Absent.

To Buy or not to Fly

The F-35 indecision in Canada is getting heaps of press.  See http://milnewsca.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/news-071245utc-dec-12/ for a nice survey of some of the pieces.  I have written a piece for a new outlet (well, new to me), but my basic take on this is:
About time!  Not only have the costs become unsustainable but so have the contradictions in the policy.  Saying the short-ranged, single engine plane is for Arctic Sovereignty when it was designed with multilateral military operations mind has always been a problem for the Harper government.  Why need a stealth aircraft which is designed to penetrate airspace to defend the homeland?  Sure, it might be handy but hardly necessary.  And the reality of stealth is $$$.  I remember all the stories in the 1980's and 1990's about special hangars to protect the skins of the US stealth fighters and bombers.  Note that whenever the US uses the stealth bomber, they fly out of the US and never base abroad.  This has everything to do with the difficult maintenance that these kinds of planes require.*

* No, I am not an expert on military aircraft, so take what I say with a grain of invisible salt.

The Harper government should not be criticized for changing its mind, if it indeed does so.  Learning should not be punished.  However, having a messed up procurement process can and should be criticized.  The problems with the F-35 are not just Canadian ones, of course, as the spiral has been driven by American designs, but how the Canadians have dealt with the F-35 seems not to be that different from other flawed processes.

Of course, if the reports are true and Canada turns away from the F-35, this will have a big impact on the rest of the consortium of F-35 buyers: the costs of buying the plane will go up due to economics of scale in reverse AND the costs of defecting from the program go down as fave US ally Canada opened the door by doing first.

I will have more to say about this in various places over the next few days, so let me know what I am getting wrong.

UPDATE: Check out my post at Atlantic Council 

NATO, Patriots, Missiles, Oh My

I have been engaged in a twitter conversation with Roland Paris about the quick German decision to send Patriot missiles to Turkey to protect from Syrian planes/missiles.  I registered a bit of surprise in all of this and noted that maybe this was Merkl compensating for her overreaction in the other direction over Libya. Roland indicated that since these missiles are for defensive purposes, it was not so problematic. 

But I have a few thoughts that I could not squeeze into tweets:

1. I am curious about the text of the NATO agreement since NATO agreements tend to be fairly loose and let the participant countries impose restraints (such as caveats).  
2. In 2009, when NATO was considering deployments of AWACS planes to Afghanistan to help control the airspace, much of the German debate considered these planes to be defensive, that they would not be assisting Operation Enduring Freedom (the counter-terrorist part of the mission), and so on, but most of these views about what the AWACS would be doing were largely, well, imaginary.  The planes would be coordinating other planes in the airspace including those engaged in more aggressive missions or else the airspace would be uncoordinated and the planes would be relatively irrelevant.  
3. Once the Dutch (more in a second), Germans, and Americans send their Patriot systems to Turkey, one or more of these countries can choose at any time to "re-flag" their contingent so that they operate under national control.  So, if the US decides that it wants its Patriots to engage Syrian planes and missiles that are aimed at Syrian targets, it can choose to do so even if NATO has a restrictive OPLAN (operations plan).  I have had interesting conversations with sailors about ships being under NATO command until it becomes inconvenient, the ships become re-flagged as not under NATO command, do what they have to do, and then re-flag.  Again, I am curious about the OPLAN that NATO has or will be writing, as the devil is a bit more in the details despite what SACEUR may be saying about "defensive" orientations.
4. For me, the interesting thing will be to watch the Dutch, as their past decisions about NATO deployments tend to be entertaining in a car-crash kind of way--that the parties do not necessarily know how they will vote until the day of the vote.  I would guess that they will need an Article 100 letter that specifies how the Dutch contingent will act and so on.  

All of this bears close watching even as most of us now have to do a pile of grading.

Texas Secede? We Wish?

I love a good short video laying out the truths, convenient or otherwise:


The Texans would always tell me they could because they were extra-special.  But no.  Plus the Texas secessionist movement that existed when I lived there had its embassy in a trailer in Texas.  The big mistake is not the trailer but the location--you put the embassy in another country.  Jeez.

Anyhow, this whole Texas secession thing now is just a small minority of sore losers.  Anyone can vote on silly petitions on the White House website.  For a while, there was one insisting that we build a death star... Really.  Now that is a healthy dose of perspective sauce.

Elitism in Hiring!? Shocking!

The latest news is old news: that the top programs in Political Science dominate the hiring process.  Apparently, the top eleven programs are responsible for filling fifty percent of the tenured/tenure track positions at the hundred plus research institutions.*  Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Michigan fill about 20%.  The others in the top 11 in 2009 (the year that was used) are Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, UCSD (where I got my degree), Duke, MIT, UCLA, and Chicago.  Yes, those with significant math skills will note that is actually 12 schools because the last two tied for 11th.

* Note this study only applies to the schools that produce new PhDs, not to liberal arts colleges and not to other universities that do not have PhD programs (not does it include schools outside the US).  So, the folks getting PhDs from schools below the top ten may be getting employment in non-R1s.  Still, to be clear, the academic job market in general sucks bigtime these days with more PhDs being produced than tenure track positions.

I am pretty ambivalent about this hunk of research.  When I went to grad school UCSD was not in the top ten, and so I always eyed reputational stuff with a critical eye but was also suspicious that people were getting the cool jobs because of the brands on their degrees.  

First, reputation: this measurement of top-ness is, dare I say it, endogenous.  The US News ranking is based on surveys of academics about which programs they think are the best ones.  Perhaps these top schools are ranked so high because they have placed their students so well rather than the reverse.  Some of these are also very, very big compared to the rest, so that both their reputation and their placement records are partly a function of size and not quality.  So, on the one hand, this finding should not be at all surprising or even that awful--the big programs that place their students have excellent reputations.  

Second, on the other hand, brand-names or labels tend to gain weight that may not always be deserved.  When I was struggling on the job market as a newbie PhD, I noticed that some folks from the places with the better brands (UCSD was not yet a top ten program at the time or even top tweny?) seemed to get all the interviews, and they seemed to be invited to all the reindeer games (post-docs, edited volumes, etc).  And I saw plenty of bad job talks given by people who had brand names from the best schools.  At the time, it was clear that the best schools had some of the sharpest profs and admitted the smartest students, but varied quite widely in how seriously they trained their students.  Some schools (that would be Harvard) noticeably had extreme variation in how prepared their students were to give job talks, not to mention do research. I have no idea if this is true now because I have not been in departments doing massive amounts of hiring lately (and I was not paying close attention my last few years at McG).  I did notice at McGill a definite trend--Princeton uber alles.  But we hired great people, so that didn't suck too much.  I did try to make sure we didn't go overboard in that dangerously orange direction.

I did notice the people who did get the interviews and who did get the jobs and the post-docs.  And there were and continue to be plenty of folks who received multiple opportunities because they passed through one vetting process (getting into a top school), so the next vetting process (for grants, for post-docs, for jobs) relies on the earlier vetters.  Many of these folks did flame out eventually.  

So is the label everything?  No, as a poker player, I am reminded that when 50% of the folks are from the top 11 school, that also means that 50% are not.  That schools rise and fall a bit (UCSD moved up, other schools have moved down) means that brand-names are not destiny, although it seems like that at times.  Moreover, to be clear, some of this vetting does work quite well.  Over the years, I have bumped into heaps of grad students from the top programs, and most of them have been very smart, very interesting, and very well-trained.  Some klunkers to be sure, but there is a bit of logic to elitism--the places with the most money tend to get the professors with the best reputations (not always earned, not always paid off), that the programs with the most money and best reputations can get the better graduate students, so that many of the best students end up working with many of the best professors, which means they end up doing some of the best work.*

* Yes, this concept of best is tricky, illusive and gives us much to argue over, but unless one buys into a kindergarten view of political science, some work is better than others, that the Incredibles were right--if everything is special, nothing is.

Back to the other 50%: I have bumped to a number of folks over time who were not trained at a top ten school who did really interesting work that makes me think.  Texas Tech, ranked 92nd at the time out of 108, did send its very best student to the University of Georgia where he has thrived over the years.  Why?  Because he had some good ideas, trained with a great scholar, and worked his ass off.

And back to that UCSD story: one of the key things in its rise was hiring some scholars who were underplaced but doing great work.  As my friend who trained the future Georgia faculty member always said, it is about the work, about the work, about the work.  

So, yes, there is elitism in academia.  Some of it is unearned, some of it is earned, and a heap of it is endogenous--that schools that do really well in training their students end up with better rankings.

A Bridge Too Far?

This title was inevitable given which episode of Band of Brothers I watched last night.

Anyway, check out my post at CIC where I put some responsibility on the academic/policy gap on the shoulders of the policy-makers.

NATO Patriots?

I was somewhat surprised that NATO was authorizing the sending of Patriot missiles to Turkey.  Why?  Two reasons: the US could send Patriot missiles to Turkey any time it likes; and NATO has not been that enthused about supporting Turkey.  I also didn't realize that NATO had Patriots as dedicated assets, more or less.  Sure, NATO has AWACS planes that are jointly staffed and funded, but Patriots?  Ok, I guess so.

Anyway, the US and Turkey chose to go the NATO route, when the US could have deployed a US battery in Turkey just as it has in the past in Israel and elsewhere.  Instead, getting a NATO vote to deploy the missiles to Turkey means that European countries have given some kind of consent and commitment that otherwise would not have existed.  That is the value added.  Since the commander of NATO [SACEUR] is an American (always has been)--Admiral Stavridis--this is not a dual key kind of system where Turkey needs to get another vote through the North Atlantic Council.  Stavridis can say yay or nay on his own (with significant guidance from DC--via the US Secretary of Defense). 

The Patriots are meant to defend Turkey from Syrian missiles and planes BUT they can also create bubbles of threat to Syrian planes over Syrian territory.  That is not NATO's intent, but, well, these things have a way of becoming more interesting than designed.

Interesting times ahead.

What I Didn't Know about the Prof Business

In the recent conversations about Policy PhDs and such, one of the frequent assertions was that people  going into PhD programs had no idea what they were getting into.  Why do we assert such things?  All I can say is that I had no clue not just about what was involved in a PhD program, but also what was involved in being a prof.  Let me review some of my beliefs and the realities I have experienced over the past two decades.*

* I will leave aside the job market stuff (like not controlling where I would live).

• Despite warnings from my adviser at Oberlin, I thought profs spent much of their time reading cool books.  Yes, I had the intellectual curiosity that the posts of the past week posit as a requirement for the pursuit of a PhD, but I was not sufficiently curious to do the research ahead of time.  I really spend a very small portion of my time reading cool books about International Relations.  Of the non-grading, non-supervising, non-internet reading I do, most of it is of academic articles and books I need to read for my research and teaching.  While much of that stuff can be quite interesting, a good portion is essentially required reading--what I need to read to get the literature right so that reviewers do not poop all over my stuff. 
• The funny thing is that I did not really think of myself as a writer or that I enjoyed writing while in college.  What was I thinking?  I guess I was thinking I was going to spend most of my time teaching? So much of my non-grading, non-supervising time is spent writing, and, as this blog illustrates, I actually don't mind writing anymore.  Indeed, I like it.  So, I have found multiple media in which to write and write.  
• Of course, I spend a heap of time talking.  That is playing to my strength--not that I am good at it, but I do like to talk.  And always have.  But I didn't expect to be doing media stuff when I went to grad school.  Nor did I do that much of it until I got to McGill and especially when I started doing stuff on Afghanistan.  
• I never expected to spend significant amount of my time either chasing or administering money.  Grant writing can take a heap of time.  I spent most of my fall on a major development grant (which means that the big bucks would be after we prove ourselves and spend much time with a second application).  And a big grant can be like a dog that catches the car it has been chasing--what now?  Well, if I get the grant, I will be spending much time accounting for the spending.  In my ninth and tenth years at McGill, I was still filing annual reports about a grant that built a lab several years earlier.  Oy.
• When one watches a prof depicted in TV or movies, they get two things wrong,* one being that movie/TV profs never do any administrative stuff.  Meetings, committees, reviewing stuff for journals, for presses, etc.  I remember in grad school asking my adviser how I can get in on the article reviewing business.  He wisely said do not rush it.  I have viewed it like shaving--when you are growing up, you want to start shaving as soon as you can (well, for guys, mostly), but then you wish you didn't have to. 

*Yes, the other involves sex with students.  As I discuss elsewhere, the movies/TV get this wrong as well but perhaps more destructively so.

• I didn't realize how social the entire enterprise is.  That while we largely work alone in our offices, not only do we co-author a heap more than I expected, but also that we are constantly reviewing and being reviewed by folks in one's intellectual community.  

To be clear, I love my job and my profession.  I could not imagine doing anything else (which is one of the key reasons why I stayed in grad school--I have a lousy imagination about the alternatives).  I am sure that it is true for most careers that what we expect and what we experience are two different things.

So, what else am I forgetting about expectations vs. realities of the life of the professor?

Thin Benches and Who Thinned Them

Ironic quote of the month (and it is only December 2nd):

“It is ludicrous,” said Eliot Cohen, a historian and senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “The military’s bench was appallingly thin.”+

Cohen wrote one of the most important books on civil-military relations, arguing that civilians occasionally have to intervene pretty deeply into military affairs since war is too important to be left to the generals.  He uses cases of Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion to prove his point.  The irony is this: Cohen served in the Bush Administration which took the lessons of his book way too far.  Rumsfeld's deep and dangerous micromanagement was far more than what was needed and pretty destructive to civil-military relations.  The exodus of key officers as the Iraq war approached might have been exactly those generals who would have been on the bench for key jobs a few years later.

Whether these particular generals would have been terrific or not, having Rummy and his crew for six formative years definitely shaped who got promoted, who got the plum assignments, who did not and who left.  There  are certainly other explanations for a shallow bench so we cannot all blame Rummy and his crew.  But Cohen was very much involved in an administration that had a hand in the shaping of today's military and who was available to run ISAF when McChrystal ran his mouth one too many times.  Petraeus was the right candidate at the time not just because there was a shallow bench but he was seen as both good at the task--counter-insurgency and played well to the domestic audience.  Not too many three star generals around anyway, not too many of them had extensive experience thinking and then doing COIN, and how many of those actually had good reputations in the US so that the switch would be relatively easy at home?

Maybe Petraeus was not the perfect guy to run ISAF, but it is not clear that the US armed forces would have had plenty anyway given the circumstances and given the conventional aversion to COIN.  So, there is something to what Cohen suggests, but we have to keep in mind ... you go to war with the military you have, not the one you want to have.  But we also have to keep in mind who is responsible for the military you have....

Christmas Presents?

I have become a big fan of Brian McFadden and his Sunday NYT cartoons:

The Secession Solution: Congo Edition

In yesterday's NYT, J. Peter Pham argued that we should let the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) fall apart--that separatism would somehow make things better.  While the government has had problems governing the entire country, most of the problems that Pham cites in the piece are not about different ethnic groups with different preferences, but about poor leaders and the challenges of having too much in the way of minerals (the resource curse and all that). 

The militias he refers to as protectors?  Well, these folks are the threat, and it is not clear how allowing several of them to have their own countries will make them any less rapacious.  Yes, DRC is an artificial state, but so are most countries in the world (Japan, the Koreas not so much). 

To be clear, as a scholar of separatism and its international relations, I am not opposed to DRC falling apart due to precedent setting (I tend to believe that precedents do not matter that much).  It is just not clear in this article how secession would solve any of Congo's problems.  Would the smaller hunks be that much easier to govern since they would still be big, landlocked, mineral-rich, and so on?  The Africanists on my twitter feed think this particular "solution" is no solution at all. 

If the piece was about recognizing Somaliland, I would take a different stance as separatism can be a reasonable approach under some circumstances ... like if Texas was willing to pay of its share of the national debt as it left the US ;)

Don't Tell Me the Odds

This morning I got into an extended twitter conversation about lotteries. Why?  Well, because the big powerball lottery led to a NYT oped that asserted that lotteries are bad for the winners, too. The timing was pretty funny since I just saw the author, Joe Nocera, on the 30 for 30 ESPN documentary, Broke,* which focused on athletes blowing their windfalls. 

*  I couldn't sleep last night, not due to the stress my daughter was feeling on the eve of her first SAT exam but because of a backache.  Oy.  So, I watched the doc we had on the DVR.

So, I tweeted a link to the piece thusly:

"Most insidious" these lotteries be. nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opi…
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) December 1, 2012

For the entire conversation, go to this storified account. The main contention that Steven Metz was making was that the very slim hope offered by the lotteries provides psychic benefits that I cannot understand since I have never felt the despair of being so poor and helpless.  True, I have not.  However, I have a relative or two that has been, and I wouldn't want them to be putting money on a con.

Yes, a con.  Steven argued that my labeling lotteries a con was elitist essentially, but what I have read over the years has only convinced me that lotteries are cons.  That they advertise that winning is quite possible and even probably, they play to the innumerate and the desperate, and when people do well, the odds are changed to reduce the probability of winning.  Getting to a jackpot of $500 million is not an accident, but a result of reducing the payoffs of getting some but not all of the numbers. 

I am not a scholar in this area, so I don't know of studies that show how innumerate people are (although the performance of the pollsters inside the GOP and support for the anti-Nate Silvers are suggestive) or how much psychic benefit there is from the very slenderest of hopes.  I did watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (first ep of season three), where the demons suggest that their strange factory (not explained) was close enough to hell since without hope, all there is is despair. 

But my basic take is that governments should not be peddling false hope, but actually real hope by engaging in policies that reach out to those in the worst situations, to provide some ways out of their conditions or at least provide material comfort.  My aforementioned relative or two got some assistance from governments (food stamps, housing assistance, subsidized day-care and the like) which made it possible to endure the challenges.  It did not guarantee a way out, but it provided some hope that they could do well enough to survive and climb out a bit of the desperate straights of their lives.

The only argument that I found at all convincing is that if governments get out of lotteries, then organized crime will get back into the numbers racket. This led to folks chiming in on the differences between government run cons and private but legal cons.  I would rather have legalized gambling, including lotteries, than have government spend money raised by lotteries and by taxes convincing people to engage in bad gambles.

I am not a libertarian, but I am gambler.  My game is poker, and I would rather the governments of the US allow poker than lotteries, because the odds are better.  Sure, skill allows those who are better to prey upon the less skilled, but at least there is a potential to learn and improve one's game.  There is no way to learn and improve one's play in lotteries except not to play.  Yet governments hypocritically argue that online gambling can breed addictive behavior.  Um, yes, it can and does, but lotteries do that as well. 

Others in the conversation distinguished between governments doing something, prohibiting something and staying away from something (legalizing but not running).  I am not a moral theorist, and no one should take me seriously when I make moral claims.  But this is my blog and I can do what I want with it, including arguing that state-run lotteries are pretty abhorrent, that there are better ways for governments to alleviate despair and that gambling (including lotteries) should be legal but not state-run.

When in doubt, Go with the dog

Ok, my mind has been fried by the completion of a very complicated grant application.  So, to celebrate and because I am too addled to post intelligent thoughts about Canada's out-Israel-is-our-pal-ing everyone, here is a seasonal video featuring the First Dog.



Woof, indeed. 

We are a Bad Guild (part seven)

The spat over policy vs. academic PhD-ness continues.  I wrote about it at CIC, arguing that the trends were in the right direction.  One of the protagonists in this conversation suggested that the academics were trying to limit entry into PhD programs because we want keep the value of the PhD high.  The old limit supply, increase value strategy.

If only we academics were so instrumental, but we suck as a guild.  We already let too many folks through our programs, failing fewer than we should at comprehensive exam time, and then letting many go on to complete their PhDs.  As a result, there are heaps of un- and under-employed PhDs who serve as a ready supply of labor as adjuncts, so universities can cut the number of tenure-track positions without worrying about who will teach the classes.  The under-employed supply of PhDs will be there, desperate to get some work. 

No, there are many reasons why we are not thrilled about the idea of the PhD being a merit badge, but protecting the value of our degrees is not one of them.  For me, teaching at all levels is more enjoyable/rewarding (even fun) when the students are engaged in the material because they are interested and not because they are looking to get a certain grade, to get a degree.  While it is understandable and fine for MA students to be focused on getting the degree, it is less fine for Phd students.

Why?  Because the PhD involves not just the analysis of existing work but the creation of knowledge.  Yes, it sounds high falutin and pretentious, but the PhD is a training process mean to produce people who can engage in long-term, original research.  It requires patience, persistence, and much thought.  One get subjected to heaps of criticism along the way.  It is hardly "fun" but the process is endurable if the researcher is interested and engaged in the research.  Same goes for those doing the advising--we want engaged students or else we are reading lengthy documents produced by a machine-like process.  If we wanted to do that, we would have become lawyers. 

The protagonist pushed back, saying with a bit of bite that we should be ok with having some un-fun days.  That work is work, essentially.  Indeed, this is why academics bitch about grading--it is not fun and feels a lot like work.  But advising dissertation students is not just a bit of work over class, but a sustained relationship and repeated readings of the same material.  Most of us got into the professor business because we find this stuff (IR for me) interesting.  We sacrifice much to be able to control what we do, including who we supervise.  Six years in Texas in my first job was one such sacrifice.  Not being able to have control over where I live is a key sacrifice.  That is the price I pay to have a career where the work is mostly interesting.  Why would I want to supervise work that the student considers to be just enough to get by rather than something that interests and animates them? 

It is a fun job with a heap of work involved.  Encouraging people to do PhDs to make them more marketable to policy audiences may make some sense (I am still not sure), but if it encourages people to see PhDs as merit badges rather than something more, then yuck. 

One more thing: in the past few years, many of us have tried to discourage students from pursuing PhDs because we don't want people to waste heaps of time and money.  It is not about protecting our jobs but about guilt about encouraging people to spend years working for us as Research and Teaching Assistants and then struggling to find a tenure track position. 

Sure, we can be self-centered, but strategic?  Hmmm... not so much.

Re-Thinking the War Cap

I posted a while back a rumination: what if the US were restricted from fighting more than two Mideast wars at a time?  This would be like a salary cap in sports.  But the problem with this analogy (ok, there are seventeen problems) is that a salary cap is part of a bargain with the players and among the owners.  With whom would the US negotiate such a cap?  With its allies?  Hey, we all agree we can only fight a couple of these wars in a certain period of time, right?  Or with the public: support the wars we are in and we will not get involved in any more until these are done?

Of course, the problem with a self-imposed cap is that countries in the Mideast may be then encouraged to be forces for instability, knowing the US is at the cap.  The reality, of course, is that the dual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that there is a limit to how many wars the US can fight at one time, which meant that Iran could, for instance, be frisky. 

Perhaps a sports cap is not the best analogy, but a diet?  That is, the US resolves to become involved in less wars in the future?  This would certainly be the healthy choice for the country's economy.  Indeed, when people ask me about the US and NATO using force in Syria, my first thought is not efficacy but budgets--why would any country in this fiscal climate opt for a very expensive new budget item that might go on for years?  Alas, if only the Bush folks had thought about the budget in 2003.

Anyhow, with Iraq over (for the US) and Afghanistan ramping down (for the US and its allies, not so much for Afghans), leaders and pundits may think the US would be under the cap and encourage more interventions. So, perhaps my analogy really sucks.  What do you think?