Jacob Shively

@jacobshively.bsky.social

Posts

Foreign policy & grand strategy. I also teach tech & nt'l security, religion & int'l politics, int'l law, causes of war. Failure my own, success coincidental.

Posts Replies Media

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

+210 seats gained on a +2% increase in vote share. FPTP Democracy truly a miracle of representation.

Re-upping an earlier post: 21st century digital networking is a step change in information. ...BUT ALSO the future may inherit a spotty record equivalent to early or pre-modern archives. A random collection of print material is preserved and references other stuff that just vanished.

2002: "Careful, kids, the Internet is forever!" 2024: "Oh, hey, all the work you did for a decade of your life was just deleted from the Internet for Business Reasons." latenighter.com/news/paramou...

Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site, 25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gonelatenighter.com One of the richest repositories of late-night videos—including 25 years of clips from 'The Daily Show' and the entire run of 'The Colbert Report'—is no longer.

Academic professional orgs should advocate explicit state legislation on academic freedom. It could easily be nonpartisan. There are legal precedents, but w/o clear & discrete law on 'academic freedom,' it is too easy to dilute norms and fall into competing interpretations.

Many political extremists in the US and abroad mock the idea of "academic freedom." But it's actually been codified in Western institutions for centuries. It's much older than modern declarations of rights, and should hold equal legitimacy. 1/7

Outside consulting firm evaluated departments based on revenue and profits when the literal purpose of a regional state university is expanding affordable access to qualityhigher ed to more people. States didn't design or build them as revenue machines. Incredible category error. (1/3)

AUGH shiiiiit. UNC Asheville's Physics program is on the consultants' radar for reduction/elimination. this freaking timeline mountainx.com/news/14-unca...

14 UNCA academic programs highlighted for potential reductions, eliminationmountainx.com An outside consultant recommended the University of North Carolina Asheville examine 14 of its 35 academic programs for potential course reductions or program eliminations.

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

When studying "the decline" of war, always account for the outliers (data courtesy of the MARS project)

The original metalheads.

Amazing how eras get defined in hindsight when the people who lived through them should know better! Gen X culture was mostly just pop culture. It was all about big block busters, stadiums full of rock fans, and massive stars like Michael Jackson. The median Gen X was socialized to be a conformist.

Saw someone say Gen Xers are more authentic because the “top movies” of 1999 were The Matrix and Fight Club as opposed to Barbie and, my brother in Christ, Fight Club was a flop, the top movie of 1999 was Star Wars

All our campus undergrad research programs are designed on a STEM lab model. I have to give mentees a canned talk about how their research experience will have almost nothing to do with their workshop discussions. On the plus side: no need to report hazardous materials!

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

I think we should give the Congressional Research Service one billion dollars.

Someone should fund an annual Shame List for predictions. It would be weighted by ambition: the greater the gap between prediction and what happened, the worse you do. The end of money? Oops It would track... -Pundits -Tech boosters -Religious leaders -Political leaders -Sports commentators

Yeah, the thing that annoys me most about grifters is how frequently everybody forgets the lies and blown deadlines. it's like apocalyptic Christians who keep predicting Doomsday; no one says shit when it quietly comes and goes. Remember "You'll be able to use your Minecraft pickaxe in CoD!"?

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

Polisky It’s publication day for “Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline” I hope you’ll have a look and join me in considering how the NSF shaped political science and the social sciences more generally.

Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Coredoi.org Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline

Blackthorne: Tell him that states are self-interested but are able to develop cooperation through institutions that preserve long-standing reputations and relationships. Power and coercion are inescapable but may be moderated. Mariko: He says he believes in a utopian international system.

We're worried about mass cheating, but most students think the leading AI chat system is called "ChatGBT" b/c they only ever hear people talking about it.

My grandparents dreamed of owning a successful business, never quite hit that stride, and ended up moving a lot. Grandpa, sagely about life: "The key is to plan, organize, and control." Grandma, a country girl from Appalachian Ohio, cackling: "You don't control NUTHIN."

Tell me something funny about someone important to you who’s passed on. Anecdote, factoid, excellent one-liner—dealer’s choice.

Security and strategic studies folks: I know Sun Tzu quotes are nearly pro forma, but maybe let's be real about how much mileage we're getting.

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

I have currently issued an unsecured, no interest $7500 loan to my employer because I had the audacity to get accepted to two conferences in Europe and reimbursement is the coin of the realm. This model had to die. So predatory and exclusionary.

Our awkward national secret is that that minivans are both more fuel efficient and more useful for hauling than pickups.

Greetings fellow truck owners, who else is thinking about using their truck's manly, rugged trunk for manly, rugged tasks?

Exactly the book I needed eight months ago. I was updating courses on US foreign policy and shifted to a full historical scope. As Copeland says, there isn't much w/IR theory that does that. The econ motivation his develops is especially important since it is usually treated simply as "empire."

IR Book of the Week! "A World Safe for Commerce" by Dale Copeland. States seek power to ensure prosperity, specifically the security of economic and trade interests. This goes a LONG way toward explaining much of US foreign policy over 200 years.

Amazon.com: A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics, 209): 9780691172552: Copeland, Dale C.: Libroswww.amazon.com Amazon.com: A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics, 209): 9780691172552: Copeland, Dale C.: Libros

21st century digital networking is a step change in the human experience with information. ...BUT ALSO the future may end up with a reversion to the equivalent of early modern archives. A random collection of print material is preserved and references other stuff that just vanished.

A good project for a well-meaning billionaire or university: Buying up archives for outlets that get destroyed and deleted. I'm old enough to have used microfiche for research (inc. for my book) and it was invaluable to have *some* way of reading out-of-print material, it didn't need to be online.

Nationalist Internationalism

Serb nationalists are very explicit about comparing themselves to Israel. Bosniak nationalists, for their part, are clearly identifying with Palestinians. balkaninsight.com/2023/11/10/p...

Proxy Wars: Israel-Palestine Conflict is Reinforcing Bosnia’s Divisionsbalkaninsight.com The bloody conflict in the Middle East is being replayed in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an ugly spectator sport – and is fueling a worrying spike in antisemitism.

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

Checking in on the Article II treaty process... Graph shows, for each year, the number of treaties submitted to the Senate and the number ratified. Seems to have stalled out starting in the Obama administration. #polisky

Political scientists appear all the time in media and so forth, but there is still no popular image of the field. Probably need to drop the "science" bit. Too long! What does that mean!? Time to start quoting Politoligists in the field of Politology.

i'm super curious why these polls keep getting framed as polling historians, when they were political scientists - like, explicitly, the leadership of the American Political Science Association www.npr.org/2024/02/19/1...

In historians' Presidents Day survey, Biden vs. Trump is not a close callwww.npr.org A survey of historians and presidential experts ranks President Biden in 14th place all-time, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. Former President Donald Trump came in last.

Good illustration of how Trump represented the first serious attempted break with postwar US grand strategy. I argue that he didn't get there, but a second term changes that calculation. What about GW and Iraq? Preventive war is big, but he didn't reinvent the basic US view of the world.

It's not uncommon for US Presidents to complain about "Free riding NATO allies" But 👇data show that Trump is especially negative when making such comments. For instance: While Obama was more "I'm not mad, just disappointed", Trump would actually express anger.

"Why is it like this??" Americans loudly buzz every four years before, like quadrennial cicadas, burrowing back underground.

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

It would be great if the donors who stop giving to Harvard would instead fund public institutions that are upward engines of economic mobility but they won’t because that is not what matters for them. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/31/ken-griffin-pausing-harvard-donations/

Billionaire Megadonor Ken Griffin Says He Will Stop Donations to Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimsonwww.thecrimson.com Billionaire Megadonor Ken Griffin Says He Will Stop Donations to Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimson

"Grand strategy" spiked in the 1930s. Any thoughts on which publication(s) or other usage driving this? I thought Liddell Hart, JFC Fuller, etc, but I don't yet see obvious pubs from them. CURIOUSLY, "Fiction" is the bulk of the spike. Is something miscoded or was the term in some popular novel??

I'm betting the slow shift toward open access journals will start to cascade at some point in the next decade. For most faculty, there is only benefit: more distribution of their work at exactly the same amount of money they now make from journal articles.

Farewell “Journal of Political Philosophy”, a brilliant institution destroyed by a clueless and rapacious publishing company. Welcome instead “Political Philosophy”, a new *open access* journal with a reassuringly familiar editorial team! politicalphilosophyjournal.org

Reposted by

Jacob Shively

📢Announcing Good Authority Teaching Resources📢 Today @goodauth.bsky.social launches new polisky resources: new Good to Know explainers, Good Playlists, topic guides, & more. We accept proposals for explainers & playlists. Details on new resources page. Bookmark it! goodauthority.org/news/good-au...

Announcing Good Authority teaching resourcesgoodauthority.org American politics, international relations, comparative politics, political science, and more teaching resources from Good Authority!

The real plagiarism scandal is that students apparently no longer learn how to use quotation marks and paraphrases.