The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Foreign Policy Magazine (FP), a subsidiary of the Washington
Post Company, is out with its list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. The list is an
annual event at FP. Like all such lists it is easy to ridicule. Here is how FP
introduces its 2012 list:

The list
gets off to a good start, pairing Burma’s Aung
San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein, the once-jailed dissident and the longtime general
who runs the country, at #1, because they worked together to open up Burma to
limited transparency and freedom for most of its people. Overall, their top 15 Global
Thinkers list equals 23 people. But what qualifies someone as a “Global Thinker”?
What is the difference between a global thinker and a “Thought Leader”?

FP thinks
that America’s Republicans are vendors in the global marketplace of ideas. Rep.
Paul Ryan, R-WI (8th) joins Liz and Dick Cheney (tied for 38th)
and Rand Paul (71st) on the list.

FP
helpfully points out their reasoning for everyone on the list, including these
4, and the reasons are laugh out loud funny

• Rand Paul: “For telling America
  to come home.”
• Liz and Dick Cheney:”For keeping
  the neocon flame alive.”
• Paul Ryan: “For doubling down on
  the debt crisis.”

Whatever.

David
Rothkofp, CEO and Editor-at-Large of FP, wrote the following about the Thinkers
List for FP’s December issue:

So we have
the FP’s CEO dissing his own list. Maybe this is why as Esquire Magazine’s Charles Pierce says: “the basic problem with the
list, of course, is the basic problem with all of elite journalism, the search
for a spurious ‘balance’ instead of truth.”

It explains why Aung
San Suu Kyi (1st) can appear on the same list with Benjamin
Netanyahu and Ehud Barak (tied for 13th). Or how a writer like
Salman Rushdie (33rd) is equated with a charlatan like Charles
Murray (43rd).

There are some redeeming
placements on the list. Russia’s Pussy Riot is ranked 16th on the
list: “For shattering their glass cage with a love letter to freedom.”  That, like much of FP’s reasoning, sounds
craptastic, but read a little of this speech by Nadezhda Tolokonnikova at Pussy Riot’s trial:

They took on Vladimir
Putin and the Russian Federation in public and won the PR and thought
leadership battle, creating a global response. 
And Ai Wei Wei (26th), an artist and thought leader, beats
out Christine Lagarde (27th), who is an operative, not a thinker.

When you care more
about superstar politicians than thought leadership, you get committee-created crap like FP’s “Thinkers” list. No one considers
Paul Ryan and Rand Paul either global or thinkers; The Onion could do better.
If, for the sake of argument,
we accept Paul Ryan as a “thinker”, it boggles the mind to figure out
how he could be lauded as a “global” thinker. His entire intellectual
effort has been about establishing a Randian oligarchy in the US, while showing
virtually no interest in global affairs.

FP includes the
economist Nouriel Roubini (35th)
who called the housing bubble in 2005: To equate Roubini and Paul Ryan as “Thinkers,”
when Roubini has been right about almost everything about which Ryan has been
wrong, shows the inherent artlessness of the thinkers at FP Magazine.

Sad to think that a
respected journal like FP can sink their credibility with this kind of
star-chasing trash.

We desperately need
thought leaders, not self-promoting operatives. A few really strong intellects
with the ability to lead us to a better place could do the job.

Will the real “Global
Thinkers” please stand up?