My Blog Wins 3rd Prize

Charm Quark3 Quarks Daily, one of the classiest outfits on the internet, has awarded me 3rd Prize  in its annual competition for “the best blog writing in politics & social science.” Harvard professor Stephen Walt, a formidable blogger in his own right and a model to younger academics like myself, was the judge. This is the post that won me 3rd Prize, which is officially called “Charm Quark.”  And this is what Walt had to say about it:

Why are today’s so-called “conservatives” so enamored of far-reaching social and political transformations, not to mention costly and ill-fated efforts to export “liberty” at the barrel of a gun?  Far from being traitors to true conservatism, Robin argues that today’s conservative radicals are drawing upon a tradition of discourse dating back to Edmund Burke’s fear that established orders cannot generate the passion and commitment needed to vanquish revolutionary movements.  To defeat Jacobinism and its various revolutionary successors, in short, die-hard “conservatives” have to fight fire with fire.  And from these deep roots arises a “conservatism” that takes no prisoners and leaves few traditions unscathed.  It is the “conservatism” of NSC-68 (which told Cold Warriors not to shrink “from any means, overt or covert, that could frustrate the Kremlin’s design”), of the Patriot Act, and of today’s drone wars and targeted killings. It takes real imagination to help us see Burke afresh, and Robin provides it here.

Having only begun to blog in June of this year—here’s my first post—I can’t tell you how thrilled and honored I am by this award.

My warmest congratulations to Kenan Malik and David Graeber, who won 1st (“Top Quark”) and 2nd (“Strange Quark”) Prize, respectively. I’m very pleased to be in such company.

9 Comments

  1. Erstwhile Anthropologist December 19, 2011 at 3:24 pm | #

    Congratulations on the award, in checking out your co-winners I checked out the David Graeber article Stephen Walt links to on the Naked Capitalism blog. I think there is an interesting, even if orthogonal, link between Graeber’s comments on “monomaniacal sociopathy” and your critique of Christopher Hitchens’s “sociopathic indifference” and the response your critique generated from some commenters to this blog. I also think there is a link between both these posts on sociopathy, and the post for which you won Walt’s Charm Quark prize: especially given your discussion of the Bush administration official who differentiated between those who operate in the “reality-based community” and those who don’t. In my previous comments I wrote about historical-political projects that whitewash unpleasant historical facts, empirical realities, and it seems to me that the three posts I have just mentioned are all writing against such sanitized, imagined histories. When Graeber takes economists to task for ignoring the actual empirical/anthropological record on pre-/non-monetary societies, he is planting himself firmly in the ‘reality-based community’ and eschewing an imagined history that makes most economic theorizing–and especially conservative economic theorizing–possible. Likewise with your refusal to sanitize and deify Christopher Hitchens.

  2. Joe December 19, 2011 at 6:48 pm | #

    Kudos and congrats for you’er splendid award from 3 Quarks Daily.

  3. Brahmsky December 19, 2011 at 10:07 pm | #

    Congrats! Richly deserved. Most interesting political site one the web.

  4. richsw December 20, 2011 at 4:43 am | #

    Well done, Corey. I only learned about your blog’s existence last week, so I’m just mousing in the archives thus far. Enjoying, and learning from, your clearly-written articles.

  5. bcpolscima December 29, 2011 at 3:43 pm | #

    Bravo!

  6. Leslee March 20, 2014 at 10:53 am | #

    Hmm it seems like your blog ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I
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    I as well am an aspiring blog blogger but I’m still new
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