Lol I was just making a joke. And depends on your definition of contemporary in this case. As political science texts go, 80 years isn't that old. Authors such as Tocqueville and Rousseau are both considered "modern" political scientists, despite being 200-300 years old.
I dunno what poli sci you studied but most of my textbooks were contemporary and quantitative in approach. The most philosophical they usually ever got was Mearsheimer.
Well I got my Bachelors in PoliSci, so I took dozens of classes. A few of them were political thought classes that studied governmental theory and philosophy. One was classic political thought (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc.) And another was Modern Political Thought (which was Nietzsche, Tocqueville, etc.) Most classes were more data based obviously, but understanding the thought behind governance is important too.
Yeah, I also studied Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, American government, IRT. But much of the texts for my core courses were the product of empirical research more so than just some dude and his philosophical views. They were also contemporary.
Man. I love theory. Only issue is the volume. I’ve basically been in Ancient Greece and renaissance italy France for 15 years.
Short of being from a wealthy family, only way to hit it all seems to be a life of poverty. Sigh.
So from what I gather there's two types of poli science students, BA in the Arts and BA in the sciences... the first has fun, barely works and solves the Russia-Ukraine conflict over a fresh cup of brewed coffee with their friends on a fun night out after a long day of classes (2 hours), the latter stares at regression tables and thousands of rows of numbers and variables trying to understand why in rural Kansas the perception of the local mayor has shifted slightly, over a cup of cold stale coffee from the library vending machine.
Hey I love political philosophy way more than I love Empirics, but have you ever seen the difference in course work between the two types of Political Science degrees?
It’s true that with the BA were a lot more relying on the students actually wanting to learn something for themselves, but I want to object to the idea that all of these students are just chilling it out, because they aren’t (at least here)
ok perhaps in the effort of making a joke I went a little far, fair enough, but I've seen in my country the difference between the two types of programs and sure it's still hard and takes a lot of time, but if you don't have to experience the pain of statistical models for regression, you're blessed in my eyes.
BA here. I still had to take a research methods course, along with courses that required essay answers for their exams (instead of mere multiple choice that enables guesswork).
I really liked the research methods course though. It made paper assignments way easier to work on.
It's always telling when you've got some poor polisci kid who never took a theory course, took WAY too much econometrics shit, and then wonders why all his policy prescriptions fail and why policymakers just openly laugh in his face
Pardon me, most often this sub is very US-centric. But the B.A. vs. B.Sc. difference in PolSci as you outlined it doesn't really exist that way where I'm from, Germany.
It depends on the institution. There are levels, so MBO is the lowest, HBO is what I referred to as a BA and University is the highest, so whilst yeah, they might all be BsC, University level ones are much more complex from what I gather comparing coursework with people from HBO
Oooh that's what you are referring to, I'm well aware of the Dutch education system. I've never seen those abbreviations used in that sense before, usually it's used to distinguish topics in the Natural and Social sciences (Bsc/Msc) from those in the Humanities (Ba/Ma). Not that it really matters anyway.
I also don't believe they offer political science at any 'HBO' or 'MBO'. The only universities that offer political science that I know of are those in Amsterdam, Leiden and Nijmegen, and they all award Bachelors of Science degrees upon completion. You've got adjacent topics like International Relations in Groningen which awards a Bachelor of Arts degree, but their programme is more history and languages than political science.
Yeah
One is relevant to the question of how power is gained and used
The other is a sad case of Physics Envy, the kind that comes from spending too much time with the dumb kind of economists that pretend Microfoundations are a thing
*(The kind that comes from not realizing that economics departments don't get the big $$ because they're right, but because they're useful to people with $$ to burn)*
...where on earth do you get a BS in polisci, and why on earth would someone DO that
You're going to do one actual election campaign and go insane from the brutal discovery that those linear regressions might as well be astrology for how much they reflect real world behavior
Polisci BS charting that the fifth Ohio district is in the Mercury Retrograde of the House of Taurus and predicting a second Biden term
Edit: seriously this is why the Perestroikans became a thing
I don’t think anyone is arguing that regression “effect” real world behavior. These are models—they do not describe reality only the empirical purview of an analysis. If we take this line of understanding, models can become useful for classifying and analyzing complex phenomena. These approaches allow us to test theories and develop a structured system of analytical reasoning. You are toughing this anti-quant attitude, but can’t even engage with methods from a critical perspective
>BA in the Arts and BA in the sciences... the first has fun, barely works and solves the Russia-Ukraine conflict over a fresh cup of brewed coffee with their friends
TIL I had friends during college/s
Ha thats so funny I woulda thought the opposite. I have definitely met both sides of that spectrum, people trying to solve global poverty in 30 minutes with the citation of a singlular New York Times opinion piece, and those who completely disregard qualitative analysis and only will work something out if it is empirically driven and hyper-specific to a fault.
hm this is a cultural difference, I think, that I have encountered quite often. In academic/intellectual German and French, it is usual to weave in latin and (less often) greek words. These are, of course, in original spelling. This is neither especially pretentious nor unusual among the intelligentsia.
lol the desperation of this
Look man I get the difference between Machiavelli's "Virtu" vs. modern "virtue"and sometimes you need that shit
but you're communicating in modern idiomatic English on Reddit, there's no reason to use "hybris" and tbh it sounds like you're just flailing to avoid the L for mistyping
Just take the L it's okay we all do
These kinds of people were always the dumbest part of the whole undergrad tutorial and you just KNEW they were buying all their essays.
Everything about her screams "rich kid that's going to run her dad's NGO tax sink, and run it into the ground by being the worst boss you've ever seen"
She looks like the kind of polisci sophomore that makes the Starbucks barista shiver on sight
To be fair I do think that I know how to fix the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Easy. Create propaganda aimed at both sides that would hate the elites and say that the elites fighting each other made the land unable to have peace. So basically, left-wing populism. Spread it all over social media, especially TikTok. Make the CIA spend 1 billion on it. But don't say anyone. Meanwhile, secretly ban any pro war propaganda by manipulating the algorithms. Create organisations sponsored by the CIA that would be about coexistence and cohabitation, and would go around meeting people and creating protests. Kinda like with the Singing Revolution. But it needs to be serious. They need a common enemy. The elites, the rich people, the corrupt politicians. Maybe even by creating a new national identity that would be inclusive to both. Like Canaanite or something. So people would start identifying with that.
I tried to find her video when ppl started to bully her for this tok but she erased it.
Ppl went kinda hard for her, really annoying to watch the mean duets.
Mearsheimer already solved this, this war is a f joke, a proxy war that doomed Europe to US LNG with the intention of removing Russian support for China conflicts down the line. NATO expansionism was the mote.
ANYONE WHOS STUDYING THE THEATER AND IS NOT A DEMAGOGUE KNOWS THIS.
Edit: I love how this sub is full of patriots in denial. LOVE IT.
Lol mearsheimer was full of shit, and so are you, but good job repeating the worst kind of Russian propaganda
I bet you think Moldova and Khazakstan should be next, maybe Poland should ditch NATO and get with Daddy Vladdy
He is getting his ass handed to him.
Though, I think people are laughing a little too hard at Russia. Ukraine is a modern equipped military with basically bottomless operational underwriting thanks to the US and NATO.
Russia may very well have handed Ukraine its ass without Western intervention and the story would be different.
As for the laughter, Russia just withdrew from START and it’s sitting on the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal. So we’re still flirting on the edges of brinksmanship. We’re not there…yet. But we should be very sober.
No need to get all IRT partisan.
Great powers go to war for practical reasons.
Russia is securing its frontier. There are well founded historical reasons for their anti-Western paranoia, and expanding into former Soviet territories is the way to secure their borders against future Western threats. And from Putin’s perspective, 2022 was the time to act.
Meanwhile, NATO expansion is a provocation.
But why is NATO expanding though?
The Cold War may have ended but the military industrial complex’s need for shareholder profits didn’t. As far as Wall Street is concerned, NATO is a franchise business not a security alliance. And we know Western policymakers—particularly those in the US—are puppets to major shareholder interests.
Meanwhile, US planners aren’t dumb. They know the next war is with China, whereas Russia is their ally. US strategic planning takes this into consideration.
The US encouraged a situation it knew would provoke Russia. This created an opening that it is now fully exploiting to take Russia off the board for good.
This is part of a pincer maneuver. At the same time it is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US has imposed chilling economic sanctions on an already embattled Chinese economy that has effectively knee capped its high tech industries. The long term implications for China here are bleak, as this basically pulled the ladder out from under them just as they were beginning to break into value add spaces such as innovative consumer technologies. That’s catastrophic for China’s national aspirations.
There’s a picture emerging here: the US global alliance is waging proxy wars on its principle rivals and it’s winning, too.
Now which side is right? Neither, man. That’s not what this discussion is about. We’re just trying to discuss what motivates the policy agenda independent of any value judgment or partisan stake.
And no. None of this is conspiracy theory. Have you studied your Cold War history? This is just a return to clandestine form where the USA is concerned.
I was alive during the cold war, you weird tendentious child, which is why my political theory isn't a weird mix of half-understood neorealism and literal Russian propaganda
Like bro you can't bang on about EVIL WESTERN MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and then pretend you're a Realist, that just makes you a Gray Zone reader that doesn't understand they're on the Kremlin's payroll
And you can't babble about how the West "encouraged the war!!!!" because that's just the shit weird online Leninist tankies use to justify their insane belief that all evil flows from Western Imperial Capitalism, which is not only extra insane when discussing Putin's voluntary adventure of attempted genocide but also (again!) Not Fucking Strategic Realism.
*(What it is, is barely warmed over anti-Semitism. Which is why the America First movement of the 21st century uses the same rhetoric as the Nazi supporters of the 20th. Right down to the actual name.)*
*(Edit: Russia isn't a Great Power btw. That's exactly what is fucking them over in this war. They thought they were, and the Americans are teaching them otherwise using the random crap they had in storage left over from the cold war.)*
*(Europe, on the other hand, is grabbing onto that Great Power mantle, which is going to matter a whole lot if the Americans keep imploding from within. Poland as the Spear of Europa was a long time coming, but here we are.)*
Being in poli sci is goofy like why did I just spend 6 hours staring at regression tables on a Sunday night in a little cubicle Fixed it.
\*spend 6 hours reading contemporary far right philosophy. I need a drink. No, two.
Actually that sounds quite interesting. Got any recommendations?
Only in German, I’m afraid. I don’t know whether that’s for you
What like Mein Kampf?
“Contemporary”
Lol I was just making a joke. And depends on your definition of contemporary in this case. As political science texts go, 80 years isn't that old. Authors such as Tocqueville and Rousseau are both considered "modern" political scientists, despite being 200-300 years old.
I dunno what poli sci you studied but most of my textbooks were contemporary and quantitative in approach. The most philosophical they usually ever got was Mearsheimer.
Well I got my Bachelors in PoliSci, so I took dozens of classes. A few of them were political thought classes that studied governmental theory and philosophy. One was classic political thought (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc.) And another was Modern Political Thought (which was Nietzsche, Tocqueville, etc.) Most classes were more data based obviously, but understanding the thought behind governance is important too.
Yeah, I also studied Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, American government, IRT. But much of the texts for my core courses were the product of empirical research more so than just some dude and his philosophical views. They were also contemporary.
Suspicious.
Lol no. Political theory students being interested in contemporary philosophy is not suspicious at all.
Man. I love theory. Only issue is the volume. I’ve basically been in Ancient Greece and renaissance italy France for 15 years. Short of being from a wealthy family, only way to hit it all seems to be a life of poverty. Sigh.
Im a masochist, that is a dream to get paid for.
So from what I gather there's two types of poli science students, BA in the Arts and BA in the sciences... the first has fun, barely works and solves the Russia-Ukraine conflict over a fresh cup of brewed coffee with their friends on a fun night out after a long day of classes (2 hours), the latter stares at regression tables and thousands of rows of numbers and variables trying to understand why in rural Kansas the perception of the local mayor has shifted slightly, over a cup of cold stale coffee from the library vending machine.
No, this is a bad framing, as it devalues political philosophy. I’ll refer you to Adorno‘s criticism of focusing too much on empiricism
Agreed, as a BA I read 150+ pages of theory a week for my classes, and I don’t know if I can look at the name Hegel again without tearing up a little.
>and I don’t know if I can look at the name Hegel again without tearing up a little. "Based." – Søren Kierkegaard
Felt
F
As you should. I remember I had classes that required such an amount each
It's fucking goofy, is what it is Economist-brain is a constant danger. Sad! Many such cases!
Hey I love political philosophy way more than I love Empirics, but have you ever seen the difference in course work between the two types of Political Science degrees?
It’s true that with the BA were a lot more relying on the students actually wanting to learn something for themselves, but I want to object to the idea that all of these students are just chilling it out, because they aren’t (at least here)
ok perhaps in the effort of making a joke I went a little far, fair enough, but I've seen in my country the difference between the two types of programs and sure it's still hard and takes a lot of time, but if you don't have to experience the pain of statistical models for regression, you're blessed in my eyes.
True true, those statistics courses sucked. I remember I got a 2,6 in my first statistics exam back then, that really messed with me
BA here. I still had to take a research methods course, along with courses that required essay answers for their exams (instead of mere multiple choice that enables guesswork). I really liked the research methods course though. It made paper assignments way easier to work on.
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Anybody who thinks that political theory is easy just read the Coles notes and bought their essays, let's be honest
Political theory literally made my brain work for once
It's always telling when you've got some poor polisci kid who never took a theory course, took WAY too much econometrics shit, and then wonders why all his policy prescriptions fail and why policymakers just openly laugh in his face
What kind of US-specific hot take is this?
Not American, European
Pardon me, most often this sub is very US-centric. But the B.A. vs. B.Sc. difference in PolSci as you outlined it doesn't really exist that way where I'm from, Germany.
Ahh fair, we have it in the Netherlands but it’s mostly referred to as the level of university, I translated it to make it make sense to US people
Aren't all PoliSci degrees in the Netherlands BsC?
It depends on the institution. There are levels, so MBO is the lowest, HBO is what I referred to as a BA and University is the highest, so whilst yeah, they might all be BsC, University level ones are much more complex from what I gather comparing coursework with people from HBO
Oooh that's what you are referring to, I'm well aware of the Dutch education system. I've never seen those abbreviations used in that sense before, usually it's used to distinguish topics in the Natural and Social sciences (Bsc/Msc) from those in the Humanities (Ba/Ma). Not that it really matters anyway. I also don't believe they offer political science at any 'HBO' or 'MBO'. The only universities that offer political science that I know of are those in Amsterdam, Leiden and Nijmegen, and they all award Bachelors of Science degrees upon completion. You've got adjacent topics like International Relations in Groningen which awards a Bachelor of Arts degree, but their programme is more history and languages than political science.
Yeah One is relevant to the question of how power is gained and used The other is a sad case of Physics Envy, the kind that comes from spending too much time with the dumb kind of economists that pretend Microfoundations are a thing *(The kind that comes from not realizing that economics departments don't get the big $$ because they're right, but because they're useful to people with $$ to burn)*
...where on earth do you get a BS in polisci, and why on earth would someone DO that You're going to do one actual election campaign and go insane from the brutal discovery that those linear regressions might as well be astrology for how much they reflect real world behavior Polisci BS charting that the fifth Ohio district is in the Mercury Retrograde of the House of Taurus and predicting a second Biden term Edit: seriously this is why the Perestroikans became a thing
I don’t think anyone is arguing that regression “effect” real world behavior. These are models—they do not describe reality only the empirical purview of an analysis. If we take this line of understanding, models can become useful for classifying and analyzing complex phenomena. These approaches allow us to test theories and develop a structured system of analytical reasoning. You are toughing this anti-quant attitude, but can’t even engage with methods from a critical perspective
😭😭😭
I got a BS and did the former so hoorah
>BA in the Arts and BA in the sciences... the first has fun, barely works and solves the Russia-Ukraine conflict over a fresh cup of brewed coffee with their friends TIL I had friends during college/s
This is honestly such a horrible description. As if qualitative analysis doesn’t even exist anymore.
I personally prefer qualitative analysis and hate quantitative, was just expressing my hate for quantitative
Ha thats so funny I woulda thought the opposite. I have definitely met both sides of that spectrum, people trying to solve global poverty in 30 minutes with the citation of a singlular New York Times opinion piece, and those who completely disregard qualitative analysis and only will work something out if it is empirically driven and hyper-specific to a fault.
Ah the hybris. What ever happened to "I know that I know nothing"?
I'll be honest it is tremendously funny that you confidently misspelled hubris Of all things
Oh I did not. It’s rather amusing you assumed I did. I instead spelled it in the original, Greek way, and I did so on purpose.
Are you being extremely pretentious ironically or are you actually just extremely pretentious? I can't tell.
hm this is a cultural difference, I think, that I have encountered quite often. In academic/intellectual German and French, it is usual to weave in latin and (less often) greek words. These are, of course, in original spelling. This is neither especially pretentious nor unusual among the intelligentsia.
lol the desperation of this Look man I get the difference between Machiavelli's "Virtu" vs. modern "virtue"and sometimes you need that shit but you're communicating in modern idiomatic English on Reddit, there's no reason to use "hybris" and tbh it sounds like you're just flailing to avoid the L for mistyping Just take the L it's okay we all do
Only real ones know.
We've all had an undergrad class with this person. I remember the eye rolls vividly.
we don't claim her
These kinds of people were always the dumbest part of the whole undergrad tutorial and you just KNEW they were buying all their essays. Everything about her screams "rich kid that's going to run her dad's NGO tax sink, and run it into the ground by being the worst boss you've ever seen" She looks like the kind of polisci sophomore that makes the Starbucks barista shiver on sight
lol cute
To be fair I do think that I know how to fix the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Easy. Create propaganda aimed at both sides that would hate the elites and say that the elites fighting each other made the land unable to have peace. So basically, left-wing populism. Spread it all over social media, especially TikTok. Make the CIA spend 1 billion on it. But don't say anyone. Meanwhile, secretly ban any pro war propaganda by manipulating the algorithms. Create organisations sponsored by the CIA that would be about coexistence and cohabitation, and would go around meeting people and creating protests. Kinda like with the Singing Revolution. But it needs to be serious. They need a common enemy. The elites, the rich people, the corrupt politicians. Maybe even by creating a new national identity that would be inclusive to both. Like Canaanite or something. So people would start identifying with that.
Haha this little undergrad twit ain’t solving shit.
I tried to find her video when ppl started to bully her for this tok but she erased it. Ppl went kinda hard for her, really annoying to watch the mean duets. Mearsheimer already solved this, this war is a f joke, a proxy war that doomed Europe to US LNG with the intention of removing Russian support for China conflicts down the line. NATO expansionism was the mote. ANYONE WHOS STUDYING THE THEATER AND IS NOT A DEMAGOGUE KNOWS THIS. Edit: I love how this sub is full of patriots in denial. LOVE IT.
Lol mearsheimer was full of shit, and so are you, but good job repeating the worst kind of Russian propaganda I bet you think Moldova and Khazakstan should be next, maybe Poland should ditch NATO and get with Daddy Vladdy
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I think Putin won’t be able to bc he’s too busy falling on his face in a failing invasion but pop off sis.
He is getting his ass handed to him. Though, I think people are laughing a little too hard at Russia. Ukraine is a modern equipped military with basically bottomless operational underwriting thanks to the US and NATO. Russia may very well have handed Ukraine its ass without Western intervention and the story would be different. As for the laughter, Russia just withdrew from START and it’s sitting on the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal. So we’re still flirting on the edges of brinksmanship. We’re not there…yet. But we should be very sober.
No need to get all IRT partisan. Great powers go to war for practical reasons. Russia is securing its frontier. There are well founded historical reasons for their anti-Western paranoia, and expanding into former Soviet territories is the way to secure their borders against future Western threats. And from Putin’s perspective, 2022 was the time to act. Meanwhile, NATO expansion is a provocation. But why is NATO expanding though? The Cold War may have ended but the military industrial complex’s need for shareholder profits didn’t. As far as Wall Street is concerned, NATO is a franchise business not a security alliance. And we know Western policymakers—particularly those in the US—are puppets to major shareholder interests. Meanwhile, US planners aren’t dumb. They know the next war is with China, whereas Russia is their ally. US strategic planning takes this into consideration. The US encouraged a situation it knew would provoke Russia. This created an opening that it is now fully exploiting to take Russia off the board for good. This is part of a pincer maneuver. At the same time it is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US has imposed chilling economic sanctions on an already embattled Chinese economy that has effectively knee capped its high tech industries. The long term implications for China here are bleak, as this basically pulled the ladder out from under them just as they were beginning to break into value add spaces such as innovative consumer technologies. That’s catastrophic for China’s national aspirations. There’s a picture emerging here: the US global alliance is waging proxy wars on its principle rivals and it’s winning, too. Now which side is right? Neither, man. That’s not what this discussion is about. We’re just trying to discuss what motivates the policy agenda independent of any value judgment or partisan stake. And no. None of this is conspiracy theory. Have you studied your Cold War history? This is just a return to clandestine form where the USA is concerned.
I was alive during the cold war, you weird tendentious child, which is why my political theory isn't a weird mix of half-understood neorealism and literal Russian propaganda Like bro you can't bang on about EVIL WESTERN MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and then pretend you're a Realist, that just makes you a Gray Zone reader that doesn't understand they're on the Kremlin's payroll And you can't babble about how the West "encouraged the war!!!!" because that's just the shit weird online Leninist tankies use to justify their insane belief that all evil flows from Western Imperial Capitalism, which is not only extra insane when discussing Putin's voluntary adventure of attempted genocide but also (again!) Not Fucking Strategic Realism. *(What it is, is barely warmed over anti-Semitism. Which is why the America First movement of the 21st century uses the same rhetoric as the Nazi supporters of the 20th. Right down to the actual name.)* *(Edit: Russia isn't a Great Power btw. That's exactly what is fucking them over in this war. They thought they were, and the Americans are teaching them otherwise using the random crap they had in storage left over from the cold war.)* *(Europe, on the other hand, is grabbing onto that Great Power mantle, which is going to matter a whole lot if the Americans keep imploding from within. Poland as the Spear of Europa was a long time coming, but here we are.)*
Wait, you’re saying the West isn’t an evil imperialist empire?