Your humble blogger went to see Contagion over the weekend for two reasons.  First, Slate movie critic Forrest Wickman concluded his review by calling it, "the most believable zombie movie ever made." He's not the only one to make the zombie connection, and well, now I've got some skin in that game.  Second, the FP editors have asked me to review other disaster scenarios, so I figured I'd just pre-empt their request and join the legions of moviegoers who get their ya-yas seeing Gwyneth Paltrow die on film be entertained. 

So, let me provide the MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT klaxon here and get to the assessment.  How well did Steven Soderbergh and company portray what would happen if a lethal pandemic were to break out? 

OK, good news first:  in terms of both accuracy and suspense, Contagion is a far, far better film than, say, either Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain.  The first reason is that Soderbergh does not bother with the anti-government paranoia that those earlier films possessed in their DNA.  Instead, the treatment of the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Homeland Security, and World Health Organization officials is fair.  They are depicted as flawed but well-meaning bureaucrats, getting some decisions right and some wrong.  They also speak in jargon, a surprising amount of which makes its way into the film.  I fully expect to see the term "R-0" bandied about by news anchors the next time a flu bug breaks out.  A CDC official utters the two most chilling words in the entire movie -- "social distancing" -- to describe the necessary freak-out by citizens to avoid human contact with other humans as a way of slowing the spread of the virus.  That's the perfect dash of bureaucratese. 

The second reason is that Soderbergh almost perfectly nails the first stage of the pandemic.  Unlike, say, most zombie or other apocalyptic films, Soderbergh doesn't get to the breakdown of social order in the first reel.  He takes his time, which helps to amp up the pressure and make it seem all the scarier when things do seem to break down (Matt Damon's character is the perfect vessel here; Damon's best work is in his reaction shots to other people behaving badly).  He also deftly demonstrates in the first ten minutes how globalization would abet the spread of any kind of superbug. 

Despite this slow ratcheting up, I haven't seen a director kill off so many Hollywood starlets since Joss Whedon. 

The third reason is that the movie, intriguingly enough, does not end in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Consistent with the arguments I made in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, humans prove to be just as adaptable as the biological threats to humans. 

That said, here are my beefs: 

1)  Really, the blogger is the Big Bad in the movie?  Really?  The villian of the piece is Jude Law's crudely-named Alan Krumwiede, who detects the spread of the virus early but hawks a homeopathic remedy to enrich himself.  Exactly how he gets rich doing this is not entirely clear -- he has some shady meetings with a hedge fund manager, but it's not entirely clear why, after gaining fame and fortune, he doesn't start acting differently as more attention gets paid to him.  It's also presumed that Krumwiede has the monopoly of blogging on the issue -- I'm pretty sure that as he gained popularity, a few other health bloggers would try to cut him down to size. 

Neither Soderbergh nor his screenwriter Scott Z. Burns like bloggers, like, at all.  At one point the virologist played by Elliott Gould tells Krumwiede, "Blogging is not writing.  It's graffiti with punctuation."  Hah!  That shows what Soderbregh knows -- us bloggers are lucky if we remember to use commas, much less semicolons.  

Look, as a founding member of the International Brotherhood of Policy Bloggers, I can't claim that actors like Krumwiede don't exist.  My skepticism is over whether they'd really wreak as much havoc as Soderbergh thinks.  Myths and rumors can spread on the Internet, but so can the corrections of those myths.  In the end, someone like Krumwiede would affect a very narrow, already paranoid subculture -- the larger effect would be minimal. 

Even if Krumwiede is an absurd villain, I also didn't buy it when the DHS official let him go free once he made bail.  At a minimum, they'd hold this guy for 48 hours without charging.  I'd also wager that they'd try to deport him too. 

One final note:  I'd love to see Lee Siegel hire Sodebergh to direct and Aaron Sorkin to write a movie about the Internet, just to see the final dystopic product. 

2)  Where the hell is the Chinese central government?  The most absurd subplot is when a WHO official gets abducted by her translator as collateral to protect his infected village.  She's held hostage for at least six months -- during which time she goes native -- until the WHO barters some (fake) vaccine for her life. 

Apparently during this entire time, the Chinese central government does not bother to intervene to try to rescue her.  This seems juuuuuuust a bit implausible.  It also leads to the next problem....

3)  Where the hell is the rest of the WHO?  Beyond Marion Cotillard's character, the WHO does not really appear in the film.  It's the CDC's show, and only their show .  They act in Contagion pretty much how they promised they would act if the zombies arrive.  Maybe that's how things would play out, but I suspect other governments and IGOs would still matter more than this film suggests.  Given that the movie virus started in China, and that the head of the WHO is also from China, they might be useful in this kind of situation. 

4)  Few second-order effects.  The virus leads to looting, crime, and other social ills, but I wish they had said something about the total economic devastation that would have occurred.  At one point after a vaccine has been developed, Matt Damon's character walks through a mall to buy his daughter a prom dress -- and 80% of the mall looks to be closed.  Soderbergh suggests a bunch of unions going on strike because they don't want to ge sick.  I'm curious what happens once they find themselves unemployed as well.   

Forget the domestic discord however, there's also...

5)  No international conflict whatsoever.  After the first 15 minutes, almost all of the action takes place in the USA.  Once a vaccine is discovered, there is no discussion of the international wrangling that would take place over scarce supplies.  No diversionary wars happen.  And so forth.  Soderbergh doesn't really address possible problems in world politics.  Because of this, the film implicitly assumes a liberal institutionalis kind of a world.  I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure myself.   

To be fair to Soderbergh and his collaborators, I'm not sure it's possible to get everything right in such a film.  Unless it's a television series I'm not sure it's possible to get all the nuances and complexities right.  Given these limitations, Contagion is a movie worth seeing.  Just bring your own Purell. 

For your weekend amusement, check out my latest Bloggingheads diavlog with Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising and the released-last-month-and-now-a-New-York-Times-bestseller Robopocalypse.  If you're not familiar with Robopocalypse now, you will be when Steven Spielberg turns it into the must-see blockbuster of 2013.  We talk about the challenges of writing a book when you know it will be a movie, the future of self-driving cars, and whether zombies or robots are the perfect 21st-century threat through which to think about international relations (Wilson's answer will surprise Charli Carpenter you!)

Wilson's enthusiasm for the genre is quite infectious, and let me state for the record that a) Robopocalypse is the perfect summer read; and b) despite my strong desire to loathe anyone who stumbles into Spielberg money, Wilson was a great and gracious interview). 

Hey, remember a few months ago, when I wrote that, "the Tea Party's influence on American foreign policy has peaked and will be on the downswing for quite some time."?  How has time treated that statement? 

Well, it's kind of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, as Greg Ip notes over at the Economist's Free Exchange blog, the distrust in government that is the fuel for Tea Party activism has waned considerably: 

My colleague at Democracy in America imputes from Mitt Romney’s surge into the lead among presidential contenders the beginning of the end of the Tea Party’s influence in the GOP. Now, the latest WSJ-NBC opinion poll contains clues that the movement’s broader appeal may also be waning. As my chart shows, after a brief reversal, Americans are once again getting comfortable with more government in their lives....

[T]ime and events have cooled passions. The bail-outs are receding from memory (and turning a profit), Mr Obama has tacked to the centre, and the economy continues to disappoint. Republicans overreached with Paul Ryan’s budget, thinking the population ready for a draconian restructuring of Medicare to deal with a looming debt crisis. Apparently, it isn’t.

I read several lessons into these results. First, political leaders regularly get out over their ski tips when they think the population is shifting rapidly to the left or the right. Ronald Reagan learned that in 1982, Mr Obama did so in 2010, and it may soon be the turn of the Republican far right.

As Ip  also notes, Americans trust in government parallels a disturbing decline in trust in free markets.  Which is kinda consistent with my point on GOP trade policy.

While this suggests that the Tea Party's animating force is waning, it's possible that foreign policy proves to be the remaining policy dimension through which mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney appease the Tea Party wing of the party. 

At a minimum, John McCain ain't pleased: 

US Senator John McCain on Sunday expressed concern about growing isolationism in the Republican party, particularly among those vying for the 2012 presidential nomination.

McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, said he was alarmed to hear various candidates at a campaign forum last Monday express opposition to US military involvement in the NATO military assault on Libya's Moamer Kadhafi.

"There's always been an isolation strain in the Republican party, that Pat Buchanan (a former Republican presidential contender) wing of our party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage, so to speak," he said.

I'm not entirely sure that this is isolationism talking, but the evolution of GOP foreign policy thinking is likely to move in a realpolitik direction.  Which, coincidentally enough, is a cheap way to satiate the Paulite wing of the Tea Partiers. 

Developing....

UPDATE:  Wow, I might have broken my personal typo record in one sentence.  Fixed now. 

Today was a big American foreign policy news day.  Hamas and Fatah seem to have kissed and made up under the aegis of the Egyptian caretaker government; there's a national defense reshuffle as Leon Panetta is moving from CIA to SecDef and David Petraeus is moving from CENTCOM to the CIA; the FEderal Reserve's Ben Bernanke held the Fed's first-ever press conference. 

These are all big stories, and yet the lead of the day is the fact that Barack Obama showed everyone his long-form birth certificate.  There's something really sad about the fact that this needed to be done, but there it is.  

Today's spectacle prompted Slate's David Weigel, who has followed the varieties of birtherism with an eagle eye, to ask honestly when enough is enough: 

Here's the thing. I've spent a lot of time writing about conspiracy theories. I think they're darkly amusing....And if we're being perfectly honest, conspiracy stories do gangbusters traffic. If I were an advertiser, I wouldn't tell a writer to knock off writing about conspiracy theories.

But this is an honest question: How far can people take this stuff? Is there absolutely no downside to using your celebrity to make the wildest accusation you can and watch reporters fight like the monkeys at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the right to cover them first? In the past, rabbit hole chases for stuff that would blow the lid off some conspiracy or another have backfired, wildly. (Google "Dan Rather" and "National Guard documents.") And in the past, things that have caused a lot of amusement for a lot of people have gotten predictable and boring, pointless. This has to happen at some point. Tell me this happens at some point.

I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories too, and I'm afraid I have some bad news for Weigel.  The truly scary thing is that conspiracy theories do even better gangbuster business outside of the United States.  Hear the one about the Mossad being behind the 9/11 attacks?  How the United States caused the earthquake in Haiti?  It's quick, cheap and easy to create a conspiracy, especially when the truth is usually banal and/or mundane. 

As I wrote in The Spectator last year: 

What is clear is that, thanks to the technological and globalising revolutions of the last two decades, modern life has become infinitely more complex. The world has become far less easy to understand in terms of its economic and social organisation. Yet humans remain hard-wired to look for patterns in a chaotic universe. As David Aaronovitch recently observed in Voodoo Histories, conspiracy theories offer the comfort of a narrative, no matter how crazy it sounds....

Will anger and distrust be a permanent fixture in the politics of affluent countries? A global economic rebound should lead to increased trust in both business and political elites. Beyond trying to revive their economies, however, there must be something that governments can do to earn back the trust of some of their people. The most obvious first response would be to offer more information to persuade angry and distrustful people that their worst fears will not be realised. Unfortunately, such a policy might backfire. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler conducted experiments to see whether correct information could erase misperceptions. They discovered that ‘corrections actually strengthened misperceptions among the most strongly committed subjects’. The very attempt to correct erroneous beliefs simply causes the most extreme adherents to put themselves into a cognitive crouch. This might explain why, even though an image of Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate can be accessed on the web, many ‘birthers’ still believe the President was not born in the USA.

This has nothing to do with intelligence, either -- a few weeks ago I wasted spent 15 minutes explaining to a Fletcher student that, in fact, Julian Assange was not a CIA agent.  This sounds laughable, except that at least one head of government said the same thing.   

As long as trafficking in these questions draws eyeballs, the media will continue to act as an amplifier for these kinds of crazed worldviews. 

There is a downside for those who care about their reputation -- ask Pierre Salinger.  For heads of stare and almost everyone else, however, these costs likely seem negligible compared to the political and psychological gain that comes from belief. 

Think of conspiracy theories like internaional institutions -- they don't actually explain much, but they never go away either.  Even global governance structures that have longed outlived their usefulness do not disappear -- they just persist with fewer adherents.  Popular conspiracy theories work the same way, because there will always be a hard core of believers who can sustain their belief regardless of things like "facts" and evidence."  Indeed, scorn from the mainstream just fuels their conviction that they must be onto something. 

I held out as long as I could on the Charlie Sheen fiasco -- but damn Will Winecoff and the IR-relevant horse he rode in on!!

From yesterday's Global Times, Hao Leifeng provides a peculiarly... Chinese take on the whole brouhaha:

Actor Charlie Sheen is a classic example of the difference in Western and Eastern values and norms.

Ignoring public pleas from his father, Sheen has continued a weeklong media blitz, exhibiting obvious signs of mania. With no firm hand to guide them, Western media has deliberately goaded him into making increasingly delusional statements, more concerned about "winning" higher ratings than Sheen's own sense of pride, or the negative example his brash public admissions about his private sex life and unverifiable international conspiracies could be setting for society.

How many young people have been led astray by Sheen's boasts about his substance abuse and freewheeling sex life? And that was when he was in character on national television, as a randy bachelor in Two and a Half Men.

Sheen attracted 1 million Twitter followers in just 24 hours, yet more evidence that microblogs spread the most unhealthy contagions in society like a disease. Chinese family, coworkers, or the authorities would have taken firm steps to make sure someone like Sheen did not make a public spectacle of himself.

It's true:  the Obama administration has been ridiculously slow on getting a handle on the Charlie Sheen issue.  I mean, you know that if Hillary Clinton got Sheen in a room for an hour, this whole problem would go away.  This just reinforces the administration's slowness on handling matters of serious popular culture.   

OK, seriously, as I understand it, Global Times is not the same kind of official mouthpiece as, say, China Daily or People's Daily, so I wouldn't take this as the official Chinese Communist Party position.  Hell, it might be a parody.  Still, a few revealing things from this.  There's the swipe against Twitter, and the emphasis on familial loyalties. 

I see two other interesting reveals, however.  The first is the proposed "Chinese" solution to this problem:

His employers are unhappy that he was distracted with prostitutes and drugs, and didn't show up to work on time. Why not take a tip from the Chinese business community, and make visits to a KTV parlor part of Sheen's workday?

And instead of epic parties at his home with porn stars, why not keep Sheen occupied with business banquets?

Sheen goes on television and boasts that he has two girlfriends, who both sleep in the same bedroom. Is he too poor to set up his wives and mistresses in different houses?

In Chinese society, these problems are dealt with delicately and privately. Sheen is like a typical Westerner throwing fuel on the fire with each interview and tweet. It is almost as if he feels no shame and is loving the attention.

Racism, spousal abuse, addiction, politics, mental illness, boasting about mistresses, - these are all subjects best dealt with behind closed doors.

Er... as near as I can determine, Sheen's bosses have been using this playbook for the entire run of Two and a Half Men.  It's only when Sheen thoroughly rejected all outaside intervention that everything blew up.  In other words, the Chinese solution to this was exactly the same as the American solution to this -- well, minus the massage parlors.  This continued right up until the moment when Sheen decided that the "Charlie Sheen" drug could defeat all comers.  And then he was suspended and subsequently fired.  Perhaps the fact that the government decided not to send him to the countryside and instead just got his children out of his orbit is peculiarly "western." 

Second -- and this is a genuine question to readers -- is Charlie Sheen actually a folk hero to anyone other than substance abusers at this point?  I see the attention he's getting now as in the category of, "Wow, look at that massive 12-car pileup on the other side of the road!!!  It's horrific, but I can't look away!"   Granted, he's now a prime candidate for his own reality show -- but I'm not really sure that's winning the future. 

This is the only time I will ask this about Charlie Sheen:  what do you think? 

UPDATE:  A commenter suggests that this must be a parody, albeit one that the editors of Global Times can't detect.  But the commenter provides an excellent additional takeaway point: 

[I]t's way easier to slip a humour piece disguised as a bizarre anti-US rant past the Chinese censor than it is to get a serious piece that is even vaguely critical of CCP policy published.

LAST UPDATE:  According to the Shanghaiist, the editors at Global Times were  in on the joke -- in which case your humble blogger will join Al Jazeera and admit to being punk'd.

Theories of International Politics and Zombies is now available for order, not pre-order, but order, at Amazon.com.  Right now -- blink and it will change -- TIPZ is in the top 20 ranking among Amazon's international relations books. 

To celebrate, and given the ongoing hullabaloo over the Chinese way of parenting, the subsequent claim that the Wall Street Journal Got It Wrong, and the inevitable response by the Jewish mothering clan, let me offer the following zombie perspective: 

Why Zombie Moms are Superior

(as told to Daniel W. Drezner behind protective glass)

A lot of people wonder how zombie parents raise such stereotypically ravenous kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many biters and gnawers, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover with breathing humans

• have a playdate with humans

• be in a school play, unless the eating of humans was called for

• complain about not being in a school play with humans

• watch TV or play computer games, especially Left 4 Dead

• choose their own extracurricular activities -- zombies have no extracurricular activities

• bite anything less than grade A braaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiinns

• not be the No. 1 student in keeping their teeth razor sharp

• play any instrument.

I'm using the term "zombie mother" loosely. I know some members of the Donner Party, West African, Papua New Guinean, Maori, and vampire parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers, almost always born in Haiti, who are not zombie mothers, by choice of their voodoo master or otherwise. I'm also using the term "human parents" loosely. Human parents come in all varieties and tastes....

Even when human parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being zombies. For example, my human neighbors who consider themselves strict make their children bus their plate to the sink when they've finished dinner. Maybe. For a zombie mother, cleaning the plates is the easy part. It's teaching the children to go forage for live human braaaaaaiiiiiiins, drag them back to the house, and then devour them in full that gets tough.  They never like to finish the frontal lobe....

There are all these new books out there portraying zombie mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many zombies secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than humans, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The zombies just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Human parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the zombies believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see who they're capable of eating, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no breather can ever take away. 

And if none of that works, we will always be prepared to have our limbs shot off to secure a tasty braaaaaaiiiiiiin for our children.  Would human parents to that for their kids?  I didn't think so. 

The scary part of this is how little I had to do to adapt the source material for this post.   

UPDATE:  Chas Homans alerts me to the fact that Chinese mothers might have more incommon with zombie moms than I originally thought:

In [Lac Su's] case, PTSD, which stands for post-traumatic stress disorder, could easily mean "parental trauma stress disorder." His parents, thinking he was "slow," subjected him to hours of supplemental tutoring -- and when he still failed to meet their standards, tried a different kind of intellectual supplement, making him eat an entire cow brain every Saturday until he was eight years old (emphasis added). 

Of course, zombie moms are way more unrelenting than Chinese moms.  That kid would have had to consume brains every day in a zombie household. 

As someone who wrote about celebrity activism a few years ago, I'm always intrigued to see new takes on the issue.  In the Washington Post, a curmudgeonly William Easterly argues that today's celebrity activists -- like Bono -- ain't like the celebrity dissidents of a prior generation -- like John Lennon:

Is there a celebrity activist today who matches Lennon's impact and appeal? The closest counterpart to Lennon now is U2's Bono, another transcendent musical talent championing another cause: the battle against global poverty. But there is a fundamental difference between Lennon's activism and Bono's, and it underscores the sad evolution of celebrity activism in recent years.

Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

Lennon's protests against the war in Vietnam so threatened the U.S. government that he was hounded by the FBI, police and immigration authorities. He was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, supporting specific technical solutions to global poverty. He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders - or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary - than he is to call them out in a meaningful way.

There is something inherently noble about the celebrity dissident, but there is something slightly ridiculous about the celebrity wonk.

Where the essay gets a little strange is where Easterly defines what he means in his dissident vs. wonk divide:

Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age - the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.

But why should we pay attention to Bono's or Jolie's expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?

True dissidents - celebrity or not - play a vital role in democracy. But the celebrity desire to gain political power and social approval breeds intellectual conformity, precisely the opposite of what we need to achieve real changes. Politicians, intellectuals and the public can fall prey to groupthink (We must invade Vietnam to keep the dominoes from falling!) and need dissidents to shake them out of it.

True dissidents claim no expertise; they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They are most effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong. Of course, they need to be noticed to have an impact, hence the historical role of dissidents such as Lennon who can use their celebrity to be heard.

Now, on the one hand, I can kinda sorta see what Easterly is saying.  Sometimes it takes the innocent to say that the emperor has no clothes, and goodness knows celebrities can play that role if they so choose. 

That said, Easterly is also being a bit innocent himself.  As I argued a few years ago, celebrities have strong personal incentives to embrace causes that are seen as having broad appeal.  It's worth remembering that Lennon only starting acting dissident-y after he was more popular than Jesus.  The celebrities that have made their anti-war views loudly known -- like, say, Sean Penn -- haven't exactly shifted the debate all that much. 

This could be because today's celebrities simply can't project the same kind of star power that the Beatles could.  Today's global popular culture is more fragmented, and so individual celebrities might have smaller groupies fan bases than in the past. 

More generally, however, Easterly seems to be arguing that the more celebrities know about the cause that they are embracing, the less effective they will be.  Again, in today's information ecosystem, I'm not sure that's right.  As I wrote before: 

In the current media environment, a symbiotic relationship between celebrities and cause célèbres has developed. Celebrities have a comparative advantage over policy wonks because they have access to a wider array of media outlets, which translates into a wider audience of citizens. Superstars can go on The Today Show or The Late Show to plug their latest movie and their latest global cause. Because of their celebrity cachet, even hard-news programs will cover them-stories about celebrities can goose Nielsen ratings. With a few exceptions, like Barack Obama or John McCain, most politicians cannot make the reverse leap to soft-news outlets. Non-celebrity policy activists are virtually guaranteed to be shut out of these programs.

The growth of soft news gives celebrity activists enormous leverage. The famous and the fabulous are the bread and butter of entertainment programs. Covering celebrity do-gooders provides content that balances out, say, tabloid coverage of Nicole Richie's personal and legal troubles. ESPN can cover both Michael Vick's travails and Dikembe Mutombo's efforts to improve health care in sub-Saharan Africa. MTV will cover Amy Winehouse's on-stage meltdowns, but they will also follow Angelina Jolie in her trips to Africa. They covered Live Earth for both the music and the message....

Indeed, celebrities actually have an advantage over other policy activists and experts because hard-news outlets have an incentive to cover them too. Celebrities mean greater attention, and hard-news outlets are not above stunts designed to attract readers or ratings. Consider this question: If The Washington Post is deciding between running an op-ed by Angelina Jolie and an op-ed by a lesser-known expert on Sudan, which author do you think they are most likely to choose?

On the other hand, it is very easy, in today's world, to mock the uninformed dissident who simply says "war is bad."  Indeed, given the causes that celebrities have latched onto -- like Darfur -- the dissident response might well be to call for greater American intervention as the means to end the status quo in the region.  Ironically, only as celebrities have acquired more information about Sudan have they realized the huge risks of that policy.     

Having read and reviewed Easterly, I suspect he's making these arguments because he knows a great deal about aid (which makes him a wonk in that area) and not so much about war (which makes him more of a dissident) and he'd like celebrities to be following his lead.   More generally, and revealing my own biases, I'm skeptical that the dissident will be more effective than the insider.  Or, to posit the counterfactual, even if Bono, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and George Clooney had railed against the Iraq war from day one, I don't think it would have made a damn bit of difference. 

Of course, if Salma Hayek had gotten involved, then all bets are off. 

I'm willing for the commenters to persuade me otherwise.  Particularly Salma Hayek. 

As the rest of the Foreign Policy gang hobnobs with the foreign policy glitterati tonight, I'm stuck in Boston mulling over the fact that Tom Friedman managed to earn a Bullock.

What is a Bullock? You might recall that earlier this year Sandra Bullock managed to win both an Academy Award for Best Actress (for The Blind Side) and a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress  (for All About Steve) -- the first time that has ever happened. So a Bullock is when one manages to earn both a "best of" and "worst of" in the span of a single year.

Lo and behold, this week Friedman's name appears on both Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers as well as Salon's Hack Thirty -- which is definitely the first time that's ever happened. What can we infer from Friedman earning the Bullock? I suppose this depends on who you ask and which mention you think is the more unjustified. Friedman is the certainly the most prominent international relations columnist working today. Your humble blogger has had his occasional issues with Friedman's columns. That said, even Friedman's harsher critics tend to acknowledge that he makes an interesting point every once in a while. And I've had to write enough 700 word columns in my life to know that it's a much harder task than most people realize.

In a perfect world, foreign affairs columnists would rotate in and out of the op-ed pages after 18 months or so. In the branding world in which we live, I can think of better options than Friedman, but man, I can think of a lot more aspirants who would be worse.

This goes back to my point about the opportunity cost of stupid ideas. Friedman is frequently wrong (as are we all), but he's usually wrong in a way that tends to requires serious engagement rather than a backhanded wrist-slap or easy put-down.

For comparison in terms of stupidity, consider Dan Shaughnessy's latest Boston Globe column in which he suggests that the Boston Red Sox sign Derek Jeter:

Suppose the Red Sox step up and shock the world? There is simply no downside to making Jeter a massive offer. In the worst-case scenario he calls your bluff and you get the Yankees captain.

I don't care if Jeter is way past his prime or if the Sox would have to wildly overpay a player of his diminished skills.

I say offer him the world. Forget about Jayson Werth. Blow Jeter away with dollars and years. At worst this would just mean the Sox would jack up the final price the Yankees must pay. It could be sort of like Mark Teixeira-in-reverse…

What's the harm in offering Jeter $20 million a year over three years? If you can pay J.D. Drew $14 million per year… if you can pay a Japanese team $50 million just for the right to speak with Daisuke Matsuzaka… if you can buy a futbol club for $476 million, why not spend $60 million to bust pinstripe chops for all the ages?

Jeter is closing in on 3,000 hits. Imagine if he gets his 3,000th hit as a Red Sox… at Fenway… against Mariano Rivera?

Since we are pretty certain Adrian Beltre is gone, the Red Sox have a big hole at third base. Jeter could play third. Or you could trade Marco Scutaro and put Jeter at short.

This certainly would make the Sox less boring.

This is bad even when grading on a Shaughnessy curve, which already sets the bar ridiculously low.

First, it's horribly written: in the span of three paragraphs, Shaughnessy manages to give two very different worst-case scenarios. Which is it, exactly?

Second, it's horribly argued. If Jeter is not going to move off of shortstop for the Yankees, why would he do it for the Red Sox? Smart baseball people will tell you that Jeter's recent numbers don't justify anyone paying him $20 million a year -- and no one but the Yankees should even pay him $15 million. If I'm the Red Sox, I would make a play for closer Mariano Rivera -- but why sign an aging shortstop when the Red Sox already have one decent veteran (Marco Scutaro) and two pretty promising younger shortstops (Jed Lowrie and Jose Iglesias)?

Shaughnessy thinks the merit of this option is to force the Yankees payroll up. OK, except that a few paragraphs down, he implies that the Red Sox budget is essentially unlimited. There's no world in which a) the sky is blue; and b) the Yankees have a more constrained budget than the Red Sox. Either there are opportunity costs in paying Jeter a lot of money (in which case the cost for the Sox is greater) or both franchises are so rich that money doesn't matter (in which case there's no point to starting a bidding war in the first place).

I've just wasted untold minutes and several neurons of brainpower to explain why Shaughnessy's column might be the stupidest sports column I've read this year. It's not even stupid in an interesting way -- it's just a brainless rant. Arguing when and why Tom Friedman is wrong doesn't feel like the same waste of time to me.

In other words, he deserves his Bullock.

Question to readers: if not Tom Friedman, who would you want to read on world politics on the New York Times op-ed page?

From Mark Lilla, "The Beck of Revelation," New York Review of Books, December 9, 2010 issue:

[A]fter reading these books and countless articles on the man, I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are. This nonresistance is what distinguishes Beck from his confreres in the conservative media establishment, who have created more sharply etched characters for themselves....

As anyone who witnessed his performance on the Washington Mall can attest, what makes him particularly appealing to his audience is not his positions, it is that he appears to feel and fear and admire and instinctively believe what his listeners do, even when their feelings, fears, esteem, and beliefs are changing or self-contradictory. This is the gift of the true demagogue, to successfully identify his own self, rather than his opinions, with the selves of his followers—and to equate both with the “true” nation.

From Eric Wilson, "Kim Kardashian, Inc.," New York Times, November 18, 2010:

She does not talk about fashion and image as most designers and celebrity designers do, with platitudes about quality and authenticity, but rather as a person who seems wholly content to allow consumers to project upon her whatever image they wish.

“I really do believe I am a brand for my fans,” she said.

She does not talk about design in terms of cut or craft, either, but of Twitter and Facebook, of blogs and text messages. When fans ask her what she is wearing or what lip gloss she uses, she answers them and then creates products in the vein of what they like. When she was deciding on a color for her Kim Kardashian perfume bottle, she asked her followers on Twitter whether they preferred a hot pink or a light pink. (It was light pink, by far.) “Twitter is the most amazing focus group out there,” she said.

These are the connections my brain will make after reading blog posts about Snookiism.

Your humble blogger will not be blogging with great frequency over the next few days, as he'll be drinking power-schmoozing diligently going to panels attending the American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings in Washington.  I have to present at a few panels this year, so blogging will be on the lighter side (though if I have time, I want to revisit this question about millennials and foreign policy attitudes). 

Here's a topic for discussion.  Yesterday I had a disturbing dream involving some hybrid of a normal APSA meeting and The Highlander.  Today I finally went to see The Expendables with an IR colleague, which led us into a deep discussion of how much of a bad-ass Dolph Lundgren is how most movies that have any IR component are essentially idealist in their orientation.  This led my companion to ask me an interesting question:  "Has there ever been a film with an explicitly realist take on world politics?" 

I went back and consulted my list of top IR films and came up empty.  I then consulted Steve Walt's list and came up empty again.  In theory Independence Day has some very crude balancing behavior, but let's face it, that's pretty weak beer.  Both The Americanization of Emily (on my list) and Wag the Dog (on Steve's list) are very cynical movies, but I don't think the logic of realpolitik plays that big a role in either film.  The best example that comes to mind is an old Star Trek episode -- A Private Little War -- but that's not a movie. 

In the end, I can offer two proper film suggestions.  The lesser film would be No Way Out (1987), but I can't explain why this is a realist movie without spoiling the ending. 

The better example -- or, at a minimum, the better film -- would be The Godfather (1972), which is not exactly about international relations, but is about negotiating an anarchic environment.  For more on this selection, see John Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell's The Godfather Doctrine, which started as an article in The National Interest.  As they argue: 

Unlike Tom [Hagen], whose labors as family lawyer have produced an exaggerated devotion to negotiation, and Sonny [Corleone], whose position as untested heir apparent has produced a zeal for utilizing the family arsenal, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family's interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today's foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.

Still, this is a thin list.  Additional suggestions are welcomed in the comments. 

In light of former Fugee member Wyclef Jean's campaign to become the president of Haiti, Stephanie Carvin asks some terrific questions: 

I got to thinking – what other musical super stars could run as leaders to help fix the nations of the world? In what way could Lady Gaga help with nation-building projects? Could Paul McCartney advise the World Bank in any way (other than being able to possibly fund a small third world nation by himself for a year)?

I'll leave it to others to answer the latter two questions -- but the first one is a real doozy.  Carvin offers some intriguing possibilities.  As someone who's researched the link between celebrities and world politics, however, it's worth pondering the question further. 

For me, the musicians I'd want in charge are the ones who demonstrated the ability to persist over time (which disqualifies Lady Gaga for now), the ability to fashion a coherent agenda (which disqualifies Bono), and the ability to avoid a shame spiral that embarrasses the country in question (which disqualifies Britney Spears and many, many others).  

So, which musician would I trust with, say, American hegemony?  Here are my top 5: 

5)  Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers.  This band has stayed vital for close to two decades, and a crucial moment was Flea's decision to re-recruit guitarist John Frusciante when the band's fortunes were flagging.  The result was Californication and the Chili Peppers' return to relevance.  Sounds like someone who could make good staffing decisions.  Downside:  could raise constitutional issues -- Flea was born in Australia. 

4)  Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters.  After 1994, he could have gone through the rest of his life resting on his laurels as the drummer for the greatest American punk band in history. Instead, he became a frontman and formed the Foo Fighters.  And here just has to be a negotiating advantage from listening to this song before going into serious international negotiations.  Downside:  Grohl would need to get a serious grip on his coffee addiction. 

3)  Justin Timberlake.  The only member of 'N Sync to thrive after the death of boy bands.  The only ex of Britney Spears to be known for something other than dating Britney Spears.  The only person I know who can be consistently funny on Saturday Night Live.  Clearly, he's a survivor.  Downside:  Hmmm... sure, Timberlake is a survivor, but is he responsible for the demise of Britney and boy bands? 

2)  Snoop Dogg.  Anyone who needs his own translator is bound to confuse and obfuscate his adversaries.  Also, the man never seems rattled by anything -- exactly the kind of cool head we need in the White House.  Downside:  there could be reasons beyond temperment that he's so mellow. 

1) Madonna.  She's been in vogue for decades now.  She's been a true blue survivor, a ray of light to other female singers looking to break into the music industry.  If there's anyone who knows how to properly game a situation, it's her.  Downside:  There's this. And this. This too.  Oh, don't forget this.  Also, I'm not sure she thinks she's an American anymore. 

Readers are warmly invited to proffer their own suggestions for musico-political royalty. 

Analysts are trying to decipher the content and implications of the Senate's financial regulation bill. Noam Scheiber and James Pethokoukis have surprisingly similar takes, in that the bill doesn't directly address the "too big to fail" problem, though Scheiber thinks it does address the problem indirectly. 

Both takes are worth reading. Touching on a point I have made previously, however, I was struck by this Pethokoukis point: 

Wall Street has an enduring PR problem. Yes, big banks are unpopular. But it has gotten so bad that they may not be able to so easily counter their image issues with campaign cash. Getting Wall Street money now has a stigma attached to it like oil and tobacco money. Candidates like Meg Whitman in California and John Kasich are getting hammered for their Wall Street ties. The industry’s continued unpopularity will no doubt spawn further attempts to tax, regulate and restrict the sector.

If the public stays this outraged for this lomg, then Pethokoukis is right. The political problems of finance are becoming so great that we could be talking about a shift in social norms with regard to what is considered "honorable" work.  

Of course, paradoxically, this could serve to increase the salaraies of those still willing to go into finance. As Adam Smith pointed out in Wealth of Nations: 

[T]he wages of labour vary with... the honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment.... Honour makes a great part of the reward of all honourable professions. In point of pecuniary gain, all things considered, they are generally under-recompensed, as I shall endeavour to show by and by. Disgrace has the contrary effect. The trade of a butcher is a brutal and an odious business; but it is in most places more profitable than the greater part of common trades. The most detestable of all employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better paid than any common trade whatever.

Question to readers: Will the social stigma against Big Finance persist or fade as the economy bounces back? 

One of the purposes of this blog is to profess my deep, profound admiration for Salma Hayek take somewhat arcane concepts from the world of social science and make them more accessible to the general interest reader.  For example, there's been a lot of talk in recent years about the end of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.  I keep saying it's not going to happen.  To undertstand why, let me put it this way:  the U.S. dollar is the Facebook of hard currencies. 

Social networking technologies, like reserve currencies, have  a peculiar quality -- they are more useful when more people use them.  A social networking site is only worth something if everyone's friends and contacts are on the site.  It doesn't matter if there's another site that's superior, unless everyone is willing to simultaneously switch over. 

This gives the owner of the dominant social networking site an exorbitant privilege.  It can change the rules of the game in its favor with minimal risk of mass defections.  Indeed, it looks like Facebook is doing exactly that in an effort to increase its profit sources. 

Not surprisingly, this has alienated some Facebook users.  As Charli Carpenter points out, however, alienation does not necessarily lead to defection:

A lot of us can’t just decide to “leave” without having somewhere to go. That’s because Facebook has become not just an extension of our offline networks, but to some extent, a space in which our virtual identities live – our most important semi-imagined community. The decision to leave such sites is usually agonizing and isolating, because we are deeply committed to what Facebook has to offer, even as many of us abhor on principle what Facebook is becoming....

Plenty of us would choose such an exile from the dictatorship of Facebook were there a welcoming neighbor nearby to which we could escape with our friends and families. The latter is crucial: since the “space” of social networking sites is constituted both by the platform and by one’s social network, we need a way to convince people in our Facebook networks to join us in exodus. That requires a social networking utility as cool and functional as Facebook, with none of its privacy-violating nonsense. Not just any country, but a country where we and our friends would actually want to go.

There's an additional requirement -- everyone would need to agree that the new country is clearly cooler than Facebookland.  These are pretty imposing barriers to exit. 

Now, lest one despair too much, Facebook, like the U.S. Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve, does not have unlimited power -- there is a limit pricing effect.  Too much abuse of the privilege will lead to increased search for alternatives, and give competitors an enhanced incentive to encroach on Facebook's turf.  Indeed, in this way, Facebook's status is more fragile than the dollar -- because while there are viable alternatives to Facebook, the only plausible rival to the dollar right now is doing a lovely job of imploding right now. 

There is one warning, however -- Facebook's hegemony will seem impregnable right up to the moment it collapses.  Because the attraciveness of these sites depends on the number of other users, there's always the possibility that an inflection point is reached in which everyone migrates from Facebook to Orkut or something else.  And when that does happen, the fall of Facebook will be fast and hard. 

And yes, this applies to the dollar as well. 

As always, your humble blogger will be watching the Academy Awards show -- especially since the Powers That Be took 50% of your humble blogger's advice with regard to hosting duties this year. 

That said, this evening's festivities are a bit odd, in that there are so many mortal locks in the major categories.  Christoph Waltz is gonna win for Best Supporting Actor, Mo'Nique is gonna win for Best Supporting Actor, Jeff Bridges is gonna win for Best Actor, and so forth. 

For reasons that passeth all understanding, Salma Hayek did not appear in a Major Prestige Picture.  This leaves the Best Actress category is a bit more muddled.  Unfortunately, I fear that Sandra Bullock will win in a year when Gabourey Sidibe, Carey Mulligan and especially Meryl Streep gave better performances. 

The real uncertainty is over who wins Best Picture.  With the voting rules having changed, the conventional wisdom has The Hurt Locker edging out Avatar and Inglourious Basterds for Best Flick.

It's interesting that these are the three films being talked about, since they're all war pictures, even though they're operating in very different keys.  Long-time readers know how I feel about Avatar, so I won't regurgitate it here.  I finally saw The Hurt Locker last night.  It's much better than Avatar -- there are nuances to the characters and everything -- its massive adrenaline rush began to wear off about two-thirds of the way into the picture (though the final 10 minutes are better than entire hours of Avatar).  And as that rush worse off, so did the willing suspension of disbelief. 

Then there's Charli Carpenter, who's rooting for the Basterds:

Tarantino has done what he always does best, though not always in the same way - something unexpected that makes us uncomfortable. Partly because so many of the uncomfortable conversations the film would have sparked are about one of the most important moral issues of our day: the limits of just war theory. And partly because Basterds does something most films don't do: make us think about film itself as it ties into power politics. 

In what is likely a sign of advanced aging, the film I'll be pulling for is Up -- because the directors of this movie had the audacity and skill to put this effortlessly heartbreaking sequence into a children's movie.   Oh, and because of Dug. 

I'll live-tweet the show itself, with a wrap-up post sometime in the morrow.