Serendipity – again! Drezner’s got a piece, “Where Are Khamenei’s Proxies?“. Responding to Marc Lynch and Ezra Klein on Iran, he writes “I was struck by Ezra Klein’s shrewd point about how truly powerful actors rely on proxies to fight their more vicious battles for them.” Good, good, good…
Even better, I just stumbled over the trailer for the comic-book adaptation of The Surrogates (or is that the movie adaptation of the comic book?). Wired’s Underwire (Ed: gasp! you read a Wired blog OTHER than Danger Room? And why are you copying Drezner’s editorial device? Thief.) has a review up; you can see the trailer here. Scott Thill writes
Building on the foundation of Blade Runner and its replicants, The Surrogates posits a near future where what David Cronenberg called “the old flesh” in Videodrome is replaced with “the new flesh” of mass-produced synthetic doppelgangers. But the process proves to be more complicated than the marketing admits, and trouble brews once the cops, the streets, serial killers and postmodern prophets seize upon surrogate technology to advance their own mysterious agendas.
The real reason this is all so important is because I’m in the final stages of editing the manuscript for my new book, Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates and the Use of Force, under contract with Potomac. Actually, it’s an edited book, I’m the editor, and the line-up is killer: Jeff Bale, John Horgan, Mia Bloom, Bill Rosenau, Peter Chalk, Kevin O’Brien, Brian Glyn Williams, and Antonio Giustozzi.
Now, with these important, edge-of-cool pop culture referents, I can do what everyone else is doing and whore myself for better sales weave it all into my introduction.
MICHAEL A. INNES 