{"id":76030,"date":"2022-12-07T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2022-12-07T06:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=76030"},"modified":"2022-12-06T09:56:30","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T14:56:30","slug":"qotd-career-path-from-recent-b-a-to-being-an-expert-on-national-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/12\/07\/qotd-career-path-from-recent-b-a-to-being-an-expert-on-national-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Career path from recent B.A. to being &#8220;an expert&#8221; on national TV"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>The Z Man has had lots of fun bagging on &#8220;The Institute for the Study of War&#8221;. These are the guys peddling the truly bizarre Ukraine fantasies. Take a look at their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.understandingwar.org\/who-we-are\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">masthead<\/a> (with the awesome domain name &#8220;understandingwar.org&#8221;) and you&#8217;ll see a whole bunch of people who have never fired a shot in anger, but are either big league Media goons (Bill Kristol), disgraced politicians (Joe Liberman!), woke capital grifters, and of course at least one fucking Kagan, warming up in the bullpen until the next &#8220;change&#8221; of &#8220;administration&#8221;, when she&#8217;ll rotate into her patrimony at the State Department.<\/p>\n<p>Just for giggles, I clicked on the bio of the cutest contributor \u2014 called, hilariously, &#8220;analysts and associates&#8221; \u2014 a <del datetime=\"2022-08-29T21:14:28+00:00\">woman<\/del> <del datetime=\"2022-08-29T21:14:28+00:00\">girl<\/del> persyn named Karolina Hird. Here&#8217;s her official bio, in full:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Karolina is a Russia Researcher on the Russia\/Ukraine portfolio at ISW. She graduated from George Washington University in December of 2021 with a B.A. in International Affairs and a concentration in Security Studies. Karolina&#8217;s undergraduate research examined aspects of international law and Eastern European security with a special focus on the rise of Polish populism. She has also conducted research pertaining to Russian objectives and geopolitical strategies on NATO&#8217;s Southern periphery. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Did everyone catch that? A Bachelor&#8217;s Degree. In December 2021. This gal is all of nine months out of college.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve read my share of undergraduate research. Some of it is decent. There are some undergrads I&#8217;d trust to hit the archives for limited purposes. But there are no 21 year old kids on this earth whose judgments I&#8217;d trust, because I&#8217;ve taught a LOT of college kids, and y&#8217;all &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But of course she&#8217;s not doing anything policy-related. You know how this kid&#8217;s career trajectory will go: A few years at ISW, in which she&#8217;ll start appearing as a guest on the &#8220;news&#8221; as a &#8220;Ukrainian affairs expert&#8221; \u2014 and you can tell she&#8217;s an expert, because she&#8217;s an &#8220;analyst&#8221; at the &#8220;Institute for the Study of War&#8221;. Once her looks start going, she&#8217;ll move over to a staff job for some politician, then off to a think tank, then maybe a run for office in her own right, then back to the Media as a &#8220;senior analyst&#8221;. I&#8217;d wager many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that this lady couldn&#8217;t tell the difference between a MiG-31 and a Mazda Miata, but we&#8217;re a year or two away from putting her on national TV as an &#8220;expert&#8221; on war and peace.<\/p>\n<p>How do you stop that kind of thing? How would you even start?<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <a href=\"https:\/\/foundingquestions.wordpress.com\/2022\/08\/27\/slipping-the-leash\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Slipping the Leash&#8221;, <em>Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-08-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Z Man has had lots of fun bagging on &#8220;The Institute for the Study of War&#8221;. These are the guys peddling the truly bizarre Ukraine fantasies. Take a look at their masthead (with the awesome domain name &#8220;understandingwar.org&#8221;) and you&#8217;ll see a whole bunch of people who have never fired a shot in anger, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,28,53,41,13],"tags":[1462,101,764],"class_list":["post-76030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-severian","tag-tv","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jMi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76030"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78450,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76030\/revisions\/78450"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}