The Scholar's Stage

Notes From All Over (9/10/18): Constitutional Cycles, Cognitive Gadgets, and the Uses of Repression

09 October, 2018Bharat, By The People, Cognition, Culture, Military Affairs, Narrative, Notes From All Over, The Middle Kingdom

TOP BILLING “The Recent Unpleasantness: Understanding the Cycles of Constitutional Time”Jack M. Balkin, Public Law Research Paper No. 648. 8 August 2018. (Indiana Law Journal, 2018 Forthcoming). Our present condition is a little like an eclipse, although much less enjoyable. To understand what is going on today in America, we have to think in terms […]

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Travels and Other Announcements

06 October, 2018Site Announcements, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

Folks, I am going to be in the Washington DC area for most of next week. After that I will be in Northern Utah for at least a month or so. If you are a reader of the blog and would like to meet in person in either of these two locations, send an e-mail […]

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Taiwan Can Win a War With China

25 September, 2018Dogs of War, Futuristics, The Middle Kingdom

Image Source Danger is part of the friction of war. Without an accurate conception of danger we cannot understand war. —Clausewitz, On War (c. 1825) Over the last month or so we have had a few raucous discussions about Taiwan and its future here at the Scholar’s Stage. In these comment threads I have expressed […]

8 Comments

Psychology Makes the Strategist

20 September, 2018Books and Literature, Cognition, Dogs of War, Political Theory

Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated. —Carl von Clausewitz, On War I have a new double-book review up at Strategy Bridge. This time both books were written by the same person: King’s College […]

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A Small Note on the Terror of Uncertainty

13 September, 2018The Middle Kingdom, Tyranny

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where that rule prescribes not: and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary […]

4 Comments

Things That Will Get You Thrown in a Chinese Political Education Camp

11 September, 2018The Middle Kingdom, Tyranny

“People have to tell the crowd what their families did, just like during the Cultural Revolution.” —”Ainagul,” 52, who left Xinjiang in 2017 and whose son is in a political education camp (interviewed May 18, 2018). “A wife denounces her husband, an imam who was imprisoned for extremism, … saying something about him propagating Wahhabism; and […]

22 Comments

So Why Did They Publish Them? – A Few Notes on the Latest Batch of Fail-to-Replicates

02 September, 2018Cognition, Culture

The big news this week is a fresh study in Nature that reports the results of a team that sought to replicate 21 high profile experiments in social psychology, all originally published by the journals Nature or Science between the years 2010 and 2015. The study has garnered a lot of headlines. You can read […]

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Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

27 August, 2018Culture, Ecology, Small and Simple Things

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. […]

30 Comments

Taiwan Will Be Defended by the Bullet, or Not at All

18 August, 2018By The People, Dogs of War, Military Affairs, The Middle Kingdom

Image Source “The ultimate determinant in war is a man on the scene with a gun.” —J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control Some excellent comments were written in response to last week’s post “Taiwan’s Past Matters Less Than Taiwan’s Present.” Two of these comments were particularly excellent, and I am saddened to […]

21 Comments

Taiwan’s Past Matters Less Than Taiwan’s Present

10 August, 2018By The People, Entangling Alliances, History, The Middle Kingdom

Image Source The time was, sir, when we loved the King and the people of Great Britain with an affection truly filial. We felt ourselves interested in their glory. We shared in their joys and sorrows. We cheerfully poured the fruits of all our labour into the lap of our mother country, and without reluctance […]

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