Some good news for a change -- that you can believe in

The greatest contribution FP has made to the field, is to expose how superficial the studies of foreign policy are. How out-of-touch (or never-had-been-in-touch) people advocating policy options, can be. Eurasia group is always wrong, and still they roll in money. Walt is naive. Rothkopf is often close to ridiculous, the other ones have never heard the term Wahabi. They are either in someone's pocket, or too prejudiced...

I think you are confusing the medium for the messenger.

Imagine for a moment what life must have been like for Isaac Asimov. He was a tenured chemistry professor with a responsible job. On the side he wrote science fiction. When he was writing science fiction, he could say anything he wanted and he did, and I'm sure he had fun. He made a little money that way too. But he certainly didn't publish scientific papers using the same skillset he used to write science fiction.

Now imagine Stephen Walt. He's a tenured professor with a responsible job. On the side he runs a blog. He can say what he likes on his blog and it probably won't affect his career at all. since he isn't writing about seducing co-eds or pedophilic pornography etc. He probably is making very little money at it. He gets to write whatever speculation he wants and it doesn't officially count. The blog format goes -- he writes something controversial. Random people reply and a lot of them say stupid mundane things. They argue with each other. Besides the trivial responses he gets some that are off-the-wall like Grand Sen-or and me, people who expand the discussion past what normal foreign policy experts would consider acceptable topics. After the second day or so people are arguing about things that have little to do with his original post, and in a few more days they'll drop it no matter how excited they still are about their argument, because too many newer topics will have come up and everybody else is ignoring the old topic. The other thing that happens is he posts something that no one responds to, or very few. No particular discussion. That happens if he says something people agree with, or something that's too scary to think about, or that has implications too long into the future, etc.

Being a successful blogger means he actually gets people to pay attention. It doesn't mean he checks all his sources and proves his conclusions. The bigger the screaming match his readers get into, the more successful he looks. What would happen if he left a post that explained the statistics backing some conclusion? Probably everybody would just ignore it. If the conclusion was something some people objected to, then they'd object to the statistics by reverse logic. "My conclusion is right. Your conclusion disagrees with it. Therefore the premises you base that conclusion on must be wrong, or else you have a logic mistake. Your statistics are lousy and they've been thoroughly discredited elsewhere. So there."

It's a sham, isn't it. There is no real room for debate of anything, and when a debate starts, it goes no-where.

Where would a debate go? I think we do exceptionally well when we can understand each other's fundamental assumptions. I can imagine you'd like a debate where the other guy sees that you're right and he's wrong and he tells you so. How often does that happen? How often does anybody change his mind about anything he's ready to debate?

I suppose you could have a format where somebody claims to be genuinely undecided about a topic, and he listens to other people argue and he assigns them points according to how convincing he finds them, until eventually he's made up his mind to the point he can't referee any more. I can imagine that being fun. I don't see it happening.

Blogging is more like newspaper editorials, except that anybody can play. When the letter-to-the-editor column is uncensored, it's more fun. But by next week mostly nobody remembers what happened; they're busy with something new.

You want policy experts to put the same care into blog posts that they'd put into academic papers? Why would they do that? What does it get them? The more carefully they write, the harder it is to be controversial and the less attention they get....

If you want a different result, you probably need a different format. This approach where everything scrolls of and is forgotten is not going to get yuo responsible journalism, much less careful scholarship.

AllanGreen participates in an epistemic Zionist intellectual culture that has very little connection to reality: From Epistemic to Bureaucratic Islamophobia.

Zionists are very good at demonizing innocuous terms. See the discussion of Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood in Subjugating American Muslims to Israel.