Well, Good to Know Charli Carpenter Still Has a Girly Crush on the Donalde

I'm tickled pink, I'll tell you!

Old Charli's back at LGM, "Happy Anniversary, LGM. I Miss You."

And she writes, and mentions moi, surreptitiously:

I have two sets of thoughts which I’ve been developing in the context of recent professional debates about academic blogging.

One is about how different strategies of academic blogging affect the way that scholars blend our academic hats with our other other identities / ways of thinking / emoting / deliberating. We vary in how we do this across venues and time. A common strategy for political scientists – I’ll call this Strategy A – is to blog on politics almost entirely as academics, which is to say we bring academic expertise to bear on political problems – in the way, for example, that SEK brings filmography expertise to bear on my understanding of Game of Thrones. By and large this is what the Monkey Cage does: its authors engage with policy problems and current events by articulating what empirical social science has to say about the causal logics underlying policy problems, proposals or debates rather than primarily expressing political opinions. Of course not all academic expertise is empirical and political theory and philosophy can also be usefully brought to bear on debate, but you get my point.

But academic bloggers do other things as well. We sometimes blog, as academics, on politics directly – that is, we sometimes blog to take partisan positions in political debates affecting national or foreign policy, using our credentials as academics to lend an air of authority to what are essentially personal opinions. This is what a certaine right-winge bloggere who shall not be namede does almost exclusively, for example. Many academic bloggers on the left as well do it at least some of the time; I certainly have. Academics also blog on the politics of academia. A lot of this goes on at the Duck: we generally think of it as a subset of academic blogging but I actually think it is a subset of political blogging because our positions on things tend to be more openly partisan and prescriptive when dealing with our profession than we often allow them to be when dealing as social scientists with the explanatory relationships underpinning national/foreign policy...

Lots more at the link, but for those out of the loop, see Charli's 2010 post, "There Goes My Dreame."

Oh, and I don't much care about lending "an air of authority" to my blogging. Frankly, I'd rather people not know I'm a professor, lest I get too many more attacks like this one here, and this one as well.

And ICYMI, "Dr. Charli Carpenter and the Laws of War."