Matt Taibbi, a few years ago, discussing Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat:
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.
And the opening paragraphs of Friedman’s column today:
I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.
It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Taibbi 1, Friedman 0.
Discuss.
liberal
Best spoof of TF evah:
"The Datsun and the Shoe Tree"
Comrade Jake
I’m not sure there’s another pundit/writer who’s been so popular for so long, who’s also been such a tool.
liberal
@Comrade Jake:
It’s not just that he’s a tool—how can a person with so many crappy cliches get that popular?
LarryM
I’m torn between saying that he is such an easy target that this kind of stuff just makes me yawn … and realizing that, despite the fact that he is almost universally regarded as an idiot in the blog world, in the "real" world he still has a frightening level of undeserved credibility.
Homer Simpson
Larry – it is because he "makes sense" of the world in layman’s terms. Not many people were writing like that prior to 1995. Good work if you can get it.
Laura W
@liberal: Absolutely Fabulous.
nitpicker
Friedman’s just pissed because his rich-as-Croesus heiress wife is losing money and they might have to move out of their 11,400 sq. ft. mansion.
smedley
The one thought I take from this opening para. is that it’s in China and not in the US. Our communication and transport infrastructure sucks in comparison to many developed nations; especially in Asia. Getting from mid-town to most airports here is a challenge. Cellphone services, bandwidth,
and cost are absurd in contrast with Korea, Japan, Finland etc.
U.S. Providers are slow to adopt new capabilities probably because there is no incentive in their oligopoly. The national reluctance to invest in infrastructure is much discussed of late but with little result.
DougJ
That was among Taibbi’s best work. The line about the shark spouting is brilliant.
Xenos
It is not so much that Friedman is wrong, but that he builds this towering structure of accurate, if banal, observations, and then reaches a gob-smackingly stupid conclusion. Every time I read him I feel he has made me less smart and less informed as a result.
Like this article, where he notes how crappy the infrastructure in the US is, and then concludes thus:
Pork spending is usually done on infrastructure. I bet the citizens of Minneapolis and wherever it was in Maryland that the 66” water main broke wish there had been a lot more ‘pork’ in the federal budgets over the last few years.
And the most immediate infrastructural problem we have is our tax structure. We fail to tax anyone enough so that a tax incentive could have any effect. But Friedman is the same neoliberal fool in neo-liberal clothing he has always been.
Loneoak
As much as Taibbi is right about Friedman’s profound wankertude, Friedman was right in that column about the shite state of our infrastructure. Do you know what I would give for a high speed train with reliable intertoobz? A toe.
Of course Friedman cannot see that his handjobs to the free marketers and corporate-jet types is part of what prevents good infrastructure investment, but he’s still sort of right.
John Cole
Yeah- you know what China hasn’t done over the last 40 years? Spent 20 trillion dollars invading every fucking thing tom Friedman wants invaded. We could have built some solid infrastructure with the money we spent in Iraq alone.
Suck on that, Friedman. WTF was I thinking?
Not to mention, they are already clamoring for more defense spending as the “stimulus package.”
p.a.
JC in post 12 beat me to it, and said it better than I would have. Damn you sir!
Oh, and at least the Chinese had the sense to quit early on after the Vietnamese kicked their ass in their little ‘border skirmish’.
kay
@Xenos:
Congress passed a water delivery infrastructure upgrade bill in ’07. It was one of the few sensible things done.
They haven’t shoveled out the money yet.
Comrade Stuck
Friedman’s next book "How I Surfed My Laptop All the Way To Xanadu"
Karen S.
I used to work at a small, community weekly newspaper in suburban Chicago. One of the things I had to do as part of my beat was cover chamber of commerce breakfasts and lunches from time to time to keep in touch with the local business community, my editor said. Anyway, ever since Friedman’s The World is Flat book came out, the chamber of commerce types were embracing it as a sort of global economic bible, many of them proudly brandishing copies of it in public even. The ones who hadn’t read it felt left out and entered into their Blackberries reminders to get it and read it ASAP. I tried reading it, the same as I try reading Friedman’s NYT columns, and I couldn’t make it through the whole thing, mainly because I don’t think it’s well written.
I agree that Friedman is a tool.
(This is my first post here. I’ve been lurking for a couple of months. This a fun blog.)
TenguPhule
If we took out everything Friedman ever wanked, he’d be right. But then it would also be a blank space.
TenguPhule
Right, America had to put up with another day of Friedman sucking on the liberal media’s tits.
Zifnab
I swear to god it’s just gray hair and a mustache. You put a guy on TV with gray hair and a mustache and people will believe whatever it is he says just because he looks scholarly and academic.
This is what pisses me off about American politics. The right wing listens to Friedman spout this horseshit, label him an "Ivory Tower Elitist" and then go on a crusade to hate all colleges to death. Then, when the left wing responds by releasing reams of intelligent retort, Friedman piles on with more of his inane bullshit which gets sifted out and pillared yet again as the "academic" opinion wingnuts all love to hate.
It’s a vicious cycle of stupid in which the idiots feed on each other in a search for self-validation. If you want validation so bad, go play a fucking video game. *sigh*
El Tiburon
Would someone tell me who is the bigger wanker: Kristol of Friedmann.
I realize Kristol is just a stupid person and Friedmann so unaware.
I’m really having a hard time, could anyone settle it once and for all?
schrodinger's cat
I usually lurk here, but this post prompted me to post.
Friedman’s pomposity quotient tends to infinity. I have always
wondered why he is so popular. Its good to know that I am not
the only one who finds him insufferable.
The Other Steve
While sitting at my desk upon which sits a relatively new Dell Optiplex DX620, I was reading Tom Friedman’s remarkable column. Just then I received an email from my wife highlighting an article she had just seen in USA Today, the bastion of all that is news worthy in America. The title of this article was "Seattle, Minneapolis most literate of big cities."
And then it struck me, here is this man Tom Friedman who grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, one of the most literate cities in America, who is now writing for the New York Times, that most worthy of all grey lady papers. At that point however my Blackberry Pearl 8120 rang, and it was the service manager at the BMW dealership asking whether or not I would need shuttle service for my scheduled apointment last week. Did I mention how I scheduled my service appointment using the web site of the dealership? This is an example of the convergence of real life effectivity and the internet, such that not only is the world flat but so is our day to day life.
But going back to that Friedman column, it just dawned on me that it is nearly lunch time and I must think about where I shall eat my next meal. For there are so many choices now available in this country. Do I go to McDonalds which is close, or look for a more intriguing asian-texmex fusion restaurant upon which I can tempt my tastebuds?
And then it dawned upon me, that I really have little desire to finish reading the column by my dear friend Tom Friedman for I am already living his life.
Brian J
I don’t really follow Friedman. In fact, the only columnist from The Times I follow regularly is Krugman. I don’t have any particular opinion about him, but I do remember reading a few months–maybe a year or so ago–that he didn’t even bother to learn about what was in a bill and that if if was associated with the words "free trade," he was for it. I certainly don’t read any legislation out of congress, and I certainly don’t examine every issue as much as I would like, but even I was appalled by that intellectual laziness.
I say this, by the way, as someone who (thinks he) understands the logic behind trade pretty well and would probably go against a decent number of Democrats on this issue regularly.
AhabTRuler
@Xenos: Don’t let anyone fool you, the area where the break occurred in one of the most monied and well-taxed parts of Maryland. The aging infrastructure is unavoidable, but we spend plenty of state and local $ on infrastructure.
see Montgomery County, Potomac, Bethesda, &c.
The Other Steve
Welcome aboard Karen S!
Feel free to mock Friedman, in six more months we shall mock him again.
Zifnab
Except under Bush the contracts would all have been no-bids to Halliburton and the assorted corporate donors. Remember the "Big Dig" in Mass under Romney? Imagine that across the entire US.
I’m not saying we don’t need better infrastructure spending. I’m just saying we desperately need better management.
The Other Steve
Ok, in fairness to Friedman. The reality is most Americans don’t know anything. To someone who knows nothing, Friedman sounds intelligent.
It’s the same as blogging luminaries. Most of them also don’t know much, but they are good at writing. There’s nothing wrong with that. We need people to dig ditches, take out the garbage, and write down the thoughts of great people so that those thoughts may be shared with not so great people.
So think of Friedman as the equivalent of a janitor. He’s just shoveling thoughts around instead of trash.
DougJ
I agree. I’m a pro-free trade liberal who agrees with Friedman about the need for the US to become more scientifically educated and so on. In fact, I agree with Friedman’s positions on most issues other than the Iraq war. But he’s just a simple-minded dipshit about free trade and globalization. Sometimes by the end of his columns, I find myself so unconvinced that I think the "NAFTA killed our industrial sector" nuts may be on to something.
DougJ
I’m not sure I buy that. He doesn’t write well either. At least Brooks and Dowd are skilled writers.
I think that Friedman is so clumsy with language that people are fooled into thinking that there must be something profound underneath it. Sort of like with the dialog from the matrix and Moody Blues lyrics.
liberal
@Xenos:
It was here in Montgomery County.
I’d just used the, ah, facilities in my office at a federal institute, and couldn’t get it to flush much. Called maintenance to report low water pressure; they told me the news.
At least this time the water commission says the water is safe; last time a big water main broke (a few month ago, maybe?), they said that due to low pressure the system was compromised and that for a few days any water had to be boiled.
The Other Steve
Do you realize how desperately boring financial engineering is?
Frankly I’d rather work on rocket engines. But rocket engine making doesn’t pay very well.
liberal
@Zifnab:
Was it really all under Romney? I would have thought that that massive a project would have started well before King Flip-Flopper took office.
liberal
@AhabTRuler:
Montgomery County as a whole is very wealthy, but the WSSC (in charge of water) serves both MC and Prince Georges.
Juan del Llano
@ Other Steve
So, you’re not doing what you want to do?!?
That’s not a silly question. To me, it points to the ultimate human responsibility. 63 years and I’m still trying to get it right. :-( Don’t waste another SECOND doing something boring! Trust me on this…
Chinn Romney
As a matter fact I do, but you clearly do not. Here’s a refresher for you:
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig_(Boston,_Massachusetts)"
To summarize, the Big Dig started in 1982 my friend. Ground was broken in 1991. Completed, sort of, in 2007.
Uncle Mittens was Governor from 2003-2007. And one of his few accomplishments in fact was canning the incompetent Matt Amorello. He was mostly powerless to change anything at this late point in the game.
Your comparisons to Cheney, Halliburton, and Iraq don’t work here friend. Try again.
liberal
@John Cole:
You might have done us the common courtesy of warning us that that was authored by Martin "Clinton’s tax hikes are going to throw the economy into recession!" Feldstein. I could’ve avoided puking on my keyboard.
I especially like this part:
Funny that he thinks that, since we’re going to flush money down the military rathole eventually, we might as well do it now and get some stimulus to boot.
Zifnab
Ok, that’s a little unfair. The project broke ground in ’91. But I’ll be damned if I miss a chance to piss on Mitt Romney.
Still, the point is that simply throwing money at "Infrastructure" doesn’t actually give us a return on our investments if the project and the money goes to the wolves.
liberal
@DougJ:
I hate the way the guy bullshits about technology. I’ll bet he’s never written a line of code in his life.
Nylund
His wife’s family business pretty much invents the shopping mall. They do everything they can to turn Americans into mindless shoppers, and they make billions of dollars in the process. Then he goes to write in his billionaire home about what a shame it is that America has turned into the land of perpetual shopping and no longer does anything productive. Finally, as the family millions (billions?), sit in the coffers, he lectures the world about how the rich and the powerful should really get off their buts to help make the country better for all of us.
The only person who needs to pay close attention to Tom Friedman columns is Tom Friedman. Its a classic case of projection of his own guilt for being an undeserving multi-millionaire who got rich by marrying into a family that helped baptize millions into the Church of Shopping.
liberal
@Zifnab:
Yeah, your overall point is still valid.
Kinda like how one locality used homeland security money to buy new leather jackets for firemen or something.
Dw Gregory
I’ve been reading this blog for many months, but will admit I must be lacking context for this issue with Tom Friedman. Then I read the column … and I find I agree with him that our infrastructure and educational institutions are in desperate need of revitalization, that a low-tax mentality has contributed to this situation, and that our national immigration policy is foolish.
Then I get to the end and scratch my head over his conclusion … about pork barrel spending … it seems he’s completely contradicted himself, making a case for how we must spend more and spend it wisely … and then insisting that we shouldn’t be spending it, or if we do spend it, spend as little as we can get away with.
What bothers me about his work when I do read it is that he always seems to be bragging about what globe-trotter he is. I don’t see any evidence of actual research in this column. It strikes me as the work of a lazy writer who can’t be bothered to find out what we actually are spending on infrastructure and whether there might be some other, possibly more complex, explanation for the disparities he observes between Hong Kong and New York.
In short, he states the obvious, then offers little insight and a nonsensical conclusion.
I think I am beginning to see your point about his work.
Merry Happy Seasons Holidays Greetings.
Comrade Darkness
I tried to read the World is Flat. This was before I knew who Friedman was, so I claim no bias. It was so awful, the most mindnumbingly drooling pedantic crap from your most boring middle school teacher that I choose to stare blankly at the back of an airline seat for nine hours rather than read further. I thought, who is this guy’s audience? Shut ins with a vocabulary of 5th grader and an IQ below 70? At the time I had just also suffered through the Davinci code, and I kept thinking Dan Brown and Friedman were either duel simpering twins of bad prose, or the perfect co-authors for a treatise on the joys of extended lawn observation.
Comrade Stuck
The World is Flat and all the jobs went over the edge. Friedman predicts a turn around in 6 months.
Will
I remember this column–this was back when Taibbi wrote New York Press, before he got pushed out by management. This is perhaps my favorite book review ever.
liberal
FWIW, Daniel Davies has a link to a video of the Moustache of Understanding getting pied.
demimondian
@DougJ: Ironically, the truth is that transport costs killed our industrial sector, and automation bosses — that’d be people like me — killed our unions.
Polish the Guillotines
Thomas Freidman is Dr. Phil to Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Abraham Maslow.
TenguPhule
Few of us ever do.
Though if the position for official executioner of GOP prisoners ever opens up, I will be first in line for the job.
Comrade Stuck
@TenguPhule:
We knew that already.
StringonaStick
I hear the words "Tom Friedman" and my brain immediately adds the words "that rich wanker" and "the Moustasche of Understanding". Once I found out how amazingly wealthy he is thanks to marrying well, I decided his so-called common man observations were indeed the BS I suspected they were. Taibbi said it all, and said it best.
TenguPhule
That is like asking for a taste comparison between cyanide and arsenic.
Comrade Darkness
I resisted adding, but now can’t resist: Of course it was static-free, it’s a fucking digital network. He really has not even a fractional ounce of underlying clue, does he? If he really were so slick, he’d have ordered a sim chip before he arrived and wouldn’t have needed to suck on someone else’s minutes.
And Steve WiththeBeemer for the win. You actually made me cringe away from my screen.
TheHatOnMyCat
It took me a long time (more than a Friedman unit) to figure out what was up with Tom back in the days when we were first discovering the Friedman unit.
There he would be, all bright eyed and bushy tailed on some tv blatherfest or another, and after listening for a long time I finally figured out how to decode his messages.
This is what he was really saying:
"I have no fucking idea on earth what is going on, or what will happen, but if you will give me six months, I will come up with something. So, six months. And boy, this is something, isn’t it?"
Once you understand what he is really saying, he makes a lot of sense.
Punchy
Who the fuck is Tom Friedman and why should I care?
Cassidy the Racist White Man
OT but good song.
bago
The same Brooks-Tard you’d run into at the salad bar at applebees?
I’m sorry, but "Prole X said this" is just completely fucking lazy, no better than your local man on the street interviews.
Craig
John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon.
JFK – first man to crane his neck upwards.
bago
Hell, I bet the Friedman Unit probably bought gold tipped monster cables for his HDMI connections. What a tool.
TheHatOnMyCat
(loud breathing noises)
Luke, he is your father.
(loud breathing noises)
DougJ
This is a good Tom Friedman parody too.
Shawn in ShowMe
I heard that the original title for Friedman’s book was "My World is Flat and You Can Too!"
The Moar You Know
FIXED.
What the fuck happened to the buttons? And preview?
Comrade Jake
They are equally troubling. Everytime I see one of these asshats on the teevee, I wonder why in ungodly hell anyone thinks what they have to say is valuable.
Friedman is more widely subscribed, occasionally making an appearance on such mainstream programs as Good Morning America. Kristol tends to say fairly mind-numbingly stupid things, but the damage is limited to Fox News, and I’m not sure anyone takes him seriously.
They both write for the NYT, I assume because the editors have determined that pissing people off is a good way to generate page hits.
TheHatOnMyCat
No! Say it ain’t so!
They’ve invented trolling!
demimondian
@Comrade Jake:
For some reason, when saw this, I thought it said "The Editors", and my response was "How come it took you so long to catch onto Sadly, No!’s schtick? What kind of a troll are you, anyway." Then I realized that you were talking about the NYT.
And wondered the same thing.
The Other Steve
They’ve finally learned how blogs work?
This is my entire marketing strategy for my new website(whenever I get it built)…. I’m going to post articles about how much Mac’s suck. This serves two fold… to drive traffic, and test website performance. :-)
mapaghimagsik
The fact that we haven’t outsourced our pundit class says a lot about their observations on the state of things.
Tom Friedman would make a lot more sense spoken in Hindi.
Comrade Darkness
Yes, they suck. Stay away from them.
–Comrade Ever-Attempting-To-Keep-Installed-Base-Below-Malware-Writers-Radar Darkness
Comrade Jake
@demimondian:
Oh, I agree it’s an obvious strategy. What’s amazing is the number of people who think Kristol will be shown the door because he writes incredibly stupid things, or can’t write period, or has to frequently issue corrections.
The notion that the op-ed slots are merit-based directly contradicting Kristol’s job offer in the first place doesn’t seem to have penetrated the consciousness of many folks. The guy wasn’t given the job because the editors were reading his Weekly Standard pieces and were blown away by his penetrating analysis.
TenguPhule
That’s not why Macs suck.
Macs suck because they’re pains in the asses when they break compared to PCs.
LCS Screen dies? Sorry, might as well buy a new Mac.
Oh, that power supply wasn’t quite up to spec? Sorry, we need to dismantle your entire computer and oops we lost all the data on your harddrive during the repair, our bad!
Dvd drive on the fritz? Sorry, you can’t swap the part out!
Our OS never crashes…until it does! Repeatedly, during a simple basic program.
Comrade Jake
@TenguPhule:
My experience with Mac support has been just the opposite. Nothing but reliable support, no hassles, from day one. My current laptop has not crashed once in the three years I’ve owned it.
blogenfreude
@liberal: David Broder – the Dean of Tools.
gnomedad
The Big Dig continues to astonish me. It was already old news when I was last in Boston in 1993 and ever since I’ve wondered when I was going to stop hearing about it. I’m trying to imagine how anything that took half that long to complete would not be obsolete when it was finished.
terry chay
It’s nice to see people wising up to Friedman’s game.
Fledermaus
Friedman is really whistling past the graveyard here. His long oddosey amogst the rich and powerful in lands decimated by systemic poverty and he says everything is great because they can buy a starbucks latte for a month’s pay.
Even his view of american employment isn’t matched in reality. Manufacturing jobs going overseas? Never mind because smart economic folk tell me that there will be BETTER JOBS that PAY MORE doing [handwaiving] something. No doubt something Innovative! and Dynamic! and 21st Century!
Really all they’ve been doing is paying a bunch of Americans to push around paper and paying them just enough to keep consumption rolling supplemented by massive consumer debt. Sorry Tommy, you can have all the ‘6 months more’ in the world – nothing is ever going to be the same. The Clinton years ain’t coming back – they can’t. Not now. Now 4 years from now. Not ever.
suck.on.that.
TenguPhule
Speaking of Compare and Contrast…see how media treats Afghanistan vs Iraq
Josh Hueco
@Comrade Jake:
Agreed. I’ve had my base-model MacBook for nearly 18 months (recent upgrade to Leopard) and have never had problems with it crashing or anything. My gf’s 6 month-old Gateway laptop that runs Vista, on the other hand? Well, if you don’t mind a RAM-hog OS that makes everything run slow and having to spend a couple hours every week downloading 375 GB of updates and security patches that make the laptop run even slower, then it’s perfect. And it also comes in red. :)
andrea
Re John’s link to the WSJ article, my Bad Thought is defense spending is one of the areas where we haven’t offshored our manufacturing base.
Reading Friedman now, I wonder what happened to the guy who won a Pulitzer for his Middle East reporting and wrote "From Beirut to Jerusalem". Sad.
Ram111
Uhh… Is this the Feats of Strength post?
Zifnab
Dude. It’s a "Big" "Dig". There’s not much in that concept that can go out of style.
One could certainly argue that the concept of individual automotive transportation is defunct, but then you’re just ripping on the entire Eisenhower era US Highway system.
TenguPhule
You are either very lucky or Macs just hate me.
I’m on my third Mac, first two died from screen failure and power supply respectively. Support was an expensive joke. Had to cannibalize a third unused one for use.
The Moar You Know
@andrea: Same guy. And he was just as wrong then as he is now.
jake 4 that 1
Fxd.
Gah. And thanks for the reminder that he lives in Maryland.
Brian J
Two things. First, I love reading Dean Baker because he makes me realize there’s a way to attack free trade from a progressive standpoint while not being economically misguided and because he shows that this issue isn’t as clear cut as some people want to believe it is. Second, the person above who said that the real problem seems to be the conclusions Friedman reaches seems to be on to something. It’s not that he’s completely nuts or incredibly stupid, just that he seems to oversimplify everything to the point of absurdity, making him look vapid.
The Other Steve
I AM A FREAKING GENIUS!
All I had to post was my idea, and we got 6 posts arguing how much Mac’s suck!
Call me John C. Dvorak!
Comrade Darkness
That was my previous office’s experience with Dell laptops. We bought two, they had consecutive serial numbers but the same boot scripts would not work on both of them because they were grey market cheapest crap chips that fell off a truck machines. Within two months of light use, both were toast and a local geek chop shop made one mostly working one out of the two of them that lasted another 18 months while being treated like the case were spun glass. They were not any cheaper than our macs, that’s for sure. Just clunkier, annoying to configure, and short lived. So, needless to say, we didn’t change vendors.
Contrastingly, I’m typing this on a 2002 vintage, fully upgraded powerbook. I prefer that when I upgrade to a new version of a vendor OS, my hardware runs faster. Having the opposite happen would drive me to drink (even more), I think.
"You are either very lucky or Macs just hate me."
I can identify. My mere presence within 10 feet of a PC causes registry damage. Really, I swear this is repeatable.
Jonquil
Do you realize how desperately boring financial engineering is?
I work at a software company that vacuums up genuinely brilliant people. [Not me; I just got lucky.] One of our recent hires told me this summer that he’d been courted by a friend at a financial institution, who’d told him (paraphrase) "this is all a total charade; stay two years, get your money, then get out and retire." The recent hire chose the lower money at my company, because he liked what we were doing. Then this fall came and suddenly he’d made the wise financial choice as well…
blogenfreude
@Josh Hueco: I have a 3 year old 1st gen G5 – just added another gig of RAM and it performs flawlessly. I’ll get two more years out of it.
BethanyAnne
I have a friend who is a Mac tech. Can fix most anything about anyone else’s Mac. But almost all of his electronics, not just his Macs, fuck up constantly. I’ve watched him – it’s nothing that he does to them. I’m beginning to believe that his existence just pisses them off.
My favorite was when his phone started calling mine. We were at dinner together. Eventually, we put our phones on the table and just watched as his phone kept calling mine. Rebooting didn’t help, and we weren’t touching either phone. He now works in QA at Apple, and I think it’s a prime example of "functionality is making your problems work for you, instead of you working for them".
TenguPhule
This makes Friedman both crazy & stupid.
Incertus
@TenguPhule: Macs hate you, then, and I feel for you, because they’ve been the best computers I’ve ever owned. I currently have two, my g/f has one, and we have the iPhone and iTouch as well. I bought more gifts at the Apple Store this Christmas than everywhere else combined.
Laura W
@BethanyAnne:
So maybe it’s not that he won’t answer your phone calls, but that he can’t. Huh? Huh?
(I know, maybe different guy, but I had to say it anyway.)
Laura W
@Incertus: Do your in-laws know you have a g/f?
Brian J
I think what I meant was clear. It’s not that people are claiming he’s some weird hybrid of Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin from the left. It’s…
Actually, think of it this way. I’m sure we’ve all encountered the simple-minded libertarian who talks about this and that as if it were the end of the world. To take just one example, one guy I work with was talking about Obama’s tax plan was socialism. I wonder if he realizes that Milton Friedman was a proponent of the negative income tax (with some conditions, of course), which is what the EITC and other programs are based on. My guess is, he doesn’t.
Friedman’s a lot like that, or so many people think.
Chuck Butcher
Friedman:
1) State the obvious
2) State the obvious
3) State the obvious
4) Make a connection between them that has nothing to do with anything other than his a priori decision
5)State what he wanted to state before wasting your time with the obvious and state it badly.
6) Marry well and get paid to write stuff that could depopulate a successful blog in a week.
I’m a big fan.
Funny thing, I like what I do for a living, I like running job sites and I like doing construction work…I’d like to have some work to do…my mortgage co, insurance co, bank, etc would like me to have money to give them. Really like me to. I should have married better or gotten one of them smart 21st Century jobs…
Chuck Butcher
ooops, doubled
Incertus
@Laura W: That’s the problem with being in a long-term relationship–what do you call each other? My g/f and I have been together for eight years, and have no plans to get married, even though her parents consider us the most married couple they know.
Incertus
By the way, Friedman’s not the only one full of dumb economic musings on the NY Times today. Levitt on the Freakonomics blog is trying to figure out why SUVs are still unpopular even though gas prices have fallen, and he seems genuinely confused.
Laura W
@Incertus: Yeah, I know. S/O and Life Partner just don’t have the same sweet ring, do they?
I was just joshing you. The mere calling them "in-laws" demonstrates your commitment to each other.
rcman
I live in MA.
The total bill for the big dig was less than two months in Iraq. I’m not defending the inefficiencies but at least we got something when it was done. It has made a real improvement in the traffic for the airport and the Rose Kennedy parkway is quite lovely and a vast improvement over the grim, hulking highway that used to be there.
.
Also, don’t discount the tremendous impact it had on employment.
.
It will always be difficult to make these large projects efficient and remove graft, but at least spending on infrastructure has a chance to make things better.
The goal should be to make the management of large infrastructure projects better not avoid them.
[delurk]...[/delurk]
@Xenos:
Yeah, I’m really getting tired of the term "pork barrel spending." Everything that gets done is done somewhere. And if the Representatives from Somewhere aren’t advocating for their constituents, it’s time for the Somewherians to vote them out and elect someone who will.
@Nylund:
I have to comment on the theory that Friedman’s wife’s family invented the shopping mall. Northgate, here in Seattle, was the first (1950) suburban shopping mall. Everybody said: "There’s nobody out in the boonie weeds to shop there." They said: "There will be." And they were right.
liberal
@Brian J:
I’ve been following DB since before the Tech Crash.
Got most out of the stock market largely on the strength of Dean’s analysis.
Then I was reading him when he saw the housing bubble long before almost anyone else.
Some idiot commenters at Josh Marshall’s Talking Point Memo derided Dean’s call of the housing bubble, saying he called it before it ever happened. They’re too ignorant of financial matters to know that it’s almost impossible to call the actual top of a bubble.
Rosali
Remember when we used to sit around and talk about the peace dividend? We were so cute back then. Now, we’re jaded and down strong martinis as we discuss the war and more war deficits.
TenguPhule
What do you mean, seems?
phobos
If this was front page on Wired News–written by anyone else besides Friedman–a great number of traveled geeks would be nodding in agreement.
Just saying.
Comrade Darkness
I bet you dimes to dollars he’s like someone else I won’t name the name of (butIsSittingAcrossFromMe). I bet he’s so geeky he installs every shitty little piece of software he finds on the internet because it would be cool. That will leave you messing with any computer pretty much nonstop.
I’m a purist on the carbon side. I disable everything, even adobe reader internet plug in (because it is a virus vector entry point) and I never have to mess around fixing any flakeyness. Now, on the BSD side, I have all kinds of random stuff downloaded into /sw via Fink and that causes no issues. I think it prefers to be treated like the unix box it is.
Nellcote
I wonder if the Friedman FamilyFortune was parked with Bernie Madoff.
demimondian
@The Other Steve: Um, I remind you that I did exactly that with my blog, and I still get ten hits a year.
On a good year.
Reverend Dennis
Okay, here’s a funny from WaPo:
See, it was "restraint" – not enabling. It was "leadership" – not complicity.
4jkb4ia
I read my husband that whole column because the second paragraph was about the terrible airport. He nodded seriously.
I hope everyone at Balloon Juice has a good movie to see tomorrow. We are getting highly desperate. I am planning latkes and a ricotta frittata for protein for dinner tomorrow, but Chinese food would be out of the question.
Zifnab
@Incertus:
Honey? Sweet checks? Snuggle buns?
Really, I’ll settle for anything that induces the gag reflex in others.
That’s kinda sad. I really liked the Freakonomics book and I thought it took a good statistical approach to life’s problems. That said, sometimes you’ve got to step back and assume you just don’t have all the numbers. I can understand people heavy on the math and light on the psychology can look at the rock bottom gas prices and get confused at stagnant SUV sales.
But Levitt more or less abandons any kind of mathematical analysis and dives off the deep end of pop psych. That’s a shame to watch.
4jkb4ia
"The Day The Earth Stood Still" is still playing. We are saved. The sad thing is that I held that up to my husband as the classic example of "Can’t they think of anything new?"
demimondian
@Incertus: You can use the term I use for my partner of…um..thirty years: "de facto better half" (DFBH, for short).
Laura W
It appears that I will be enjoying two episodes of A&E’s Intervention (with my Mumms sparkling Brut Noir), that I taped last Monday. I planned to enjoy them tonight, but I’m all hung up on CNN with Suzanne Malveaux’s one-hour Baba Wawa-style interview with the Obamas.
I don’t know if it’s fresh or a repeat, but I can’t recall ever seeing a more revealing and freakin’ candid interview with either one of them, let alone both, one-at-a-time. Barack very forthcoming about his father’s (rather dysfunctional) role in his life, and Michelle is totally spillin’ it about their relationship, the struggles, the births, misperceptions of them. Vulnerability on parade!
Man I eat this shit up, sap that I am.
It’s pretty awesome to realize these two people will be our next leaders.
Try to catch it if you can. Up next: What Barack’s moves on the basketball court reveal!
Zifnab
Higher taxes.
/wingnut
Zuzu's Petals
@4jkb4ia:
Speaking of Christmas day movies and Chinese food – which we were on a prior thread as well – here is a recent bit of commentary from NPR on that very topic.
Reliving An Ancient Tradition…In Movie Theaters
Will Hunting
Guys-
The Other Steve is actually the "PC" guy from the Apple commercials. I kind of feel for him at this point…
Comrade Darkness
It’s this just a subset of "people have stopped buying all vehicles" with the exception of when they do "they want to spend as little as possible." Honestly, mileage doesn’t have to factor in much at all. High mileage is directly correlated with low price, with only a few outliers.
MikeJ
Is she wearing a beret? She hit her journalistic peak in the blizzard of ’96 as a local reporter in DC. Easily the cutest of the reporters forced to stand by the side of the road and videotape no snowplows.
iluvsummr
Whenever I see Tom Friedman’s name, I think of making a donation to Brown University on behalf of the pie throwers. Someday when I get off the South African Airways flight to Joburg from New York, I’ll whip out my iPhone, retie my gele and make a donation to Brown using the loan funds paid back to my Kiva account by the Peruvian entrepreneur who supplies hooks and eyes to Syrian lingerie makers. I jus’ looove this interconnected world.
BethanyAnne
@Laura W: hehehe
Phoenix Woman
Matt Taibbi’s riff on Thomas Friedman makes me think of Mark Twain’s brilliant and similar disembowelling of James Fenimore Cooper’s prose style.
Of course, Taibbi tells the unvarnished truth, whereas Friedman tells lies that please the people in his social set, so Taibbi will never be ‘respectable’.
north_star
Friedman lives in an 11000 square foot house on 7.5 acres in Maryland with his wife, where he planted over 200 trees. Why is he writing a book about living a Green lifestyle again.
His house does have solar panels though.
DougJ
I agree. But the people who say NAFTA killed our industrial sector (and there are such people) are just wrong. We have a much larger trade deficit with China, and, I suspect, a much larger portion of what we import from China is industrial (we get all kinds of non-industrial products from Mexico — coffee, beer, etc.).
leo
Letting our factories go to seed and buying all our products from the Chinese (and others) on credit didn’t help much either.
You don’t think much about infrastructure when you’re going broke.
leo
P.S. Great quote from Clyde Prestowitz on tonight’s NewsHour:
Phoebe
DougJ,
Thank you for this:
That explains it perfectly.
Could you come up with something to explain Sarah Palin’s way of speaking, which fascinates/depresses me still? I know what she’s doing, but I can’t find the right words.
Thank you.
Joel
Friedman is like a goofy uncle. I like him more than most here, but his cute phrases and writing style are quite bad.
Grumpy Code Monkey
I first read that Taibbi review a couple of years ago (in fact I have it bookmarked because I enjoy it so much), before I knew who either Taibbi or Friedman were. Up there with Mencken’s criticisms of Warren Harding’s speeches.
@TenguPhule:
I think your Mac experiences constitute a bit of an outlier, although there have been individual Mac models through the years that were, not to put too fine a point on it, utter crap. My experiences have been mixed. My family bought an original Macintosh (the old 128K B&W beige box) back in ’84, but it died after a little over a year due to a flaky power supply; I later learned this was a common problem with the first-generation Macs. My next Mac was the IIci, and it was a freaking tank; lasted close to a decade. The next was a first-generation G4 which died within 9 months due to a bad motherboard. I’m now working on an Intel-based Mini that I got a couple of years ago, and it’s still trucking along (on 10.4 — I feel no pressing need to upgrade).
The Other Steve
Ahh the brilliance of Apple marketing.
Take a competitor who has 95% marketshare and turn them into the little guy that everybody feels sorry for. :-)
The Other Steve
I’m not sure about that. If you read the Mac blogs the reason Apple is so brilliant is because of how great their service is.
It’s a bit like being impressed by the Jaguar mechanics. At some point though, you realize you shouldn’t have to take your car back to the mechanics once a month to fix something.
And then you buy a Toyota, aka Dell.
Phoenix Woman
@Phoebe:
The term is "word salad".
T. Scheisskopf
Look, let’s get something straight from Jump Street:
Matt Taibbi is one of the finest word-pushers out there. Some compare him to The Late Good Doctor, but that’s unfair: Taibbi’s liver is in far better shape.
Taibbi gives me hope. He is fearless and he always talks The True Dinkum. Unvarnished. His dad, newsman Mike Taibbi, taught him well.
And I am not saying that because he signed up for the newsletter on our website, either. ;-)
Cyrus
My dad read "The World Is Flat" shortly after its release and really liked it. Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, he also has gray hair and a mustache. He recommended that I read it but I was reluctant, just because of Friedman’s reputation on blogs. In the end, I read about half of it before putting it aside. I gave him links to some criticism of Friedman, but I don’t know if he took it seriously or anything.
Yglesias’ "Heads in the Sand" starts with a summary of the record of predictions that inspired the term "Friedman Unit." I got that book for my dad for Christmas. The introduction wasn’t the only reason, but it sure didn’t hurt.
TenguPhule
Hey now, there is no call to insult Toyota like that!
Andrew Lehman
Friedman is useful in a fashion that allows for insight into the best that conventional wisdom has to offer. LIke most of us, he behaves as if it is not appropriate to examine our own presuppositions or assumptions, and then writes about those developments he observes that threaten our presuppositions or assumptions. He wants Western self beliefs to be revered while behaving like he’s the man to call attention to what should change. There is a deep hypocrisy to his writing. He’s like a food critic evaluating cooking only by the images he sees, failing to share with us that he hates to eat.
Altruse
I heard some Indian reporter describe Friedman as "as shallow as a puddle." Pretty well says it all.
Andrew
Yeah, I agree he sucks now, but he wasn’t that bad when the mid-east was his specialty.
When there was no more one could possibly write about that due to the stalemate and lack of even an effort by Bush to change the situation, he switched to the superficial crap he writes now.
Gene S
When I read Friedman’s recent Op-Ed piece, I sent him an e-mail suggesting that his unstinting support and approval of the Bush-Cheney regime had contributed to the mess we’re in, especially by supporting their efforts to block any progress towards addressing the problems about which he was complaining.
Gary Farber -IV
Hmmm. Name three. Most of the "Mac blogs" I read are full of complaints because they expect better of their investments. I don’t read "Windows blogs" because I don’t use it (what’s your excuse?) but as far as I can tell if Windows is guilty of anything it’s teaching people that their experience of a personal computer should be about that of someone in Bumfuck Africa, where they don’t have a steady electrical supply. Really, I saw one of the Windows mags in a library a year ago and the cover story was about how you’d better re-install Windows right now to make sure it’d still work.
Why don’t you try the one about Macs (not "Mac’s") having only one mouse button, that’d work…
Re Friedman, my guess is that eventually people will be worshiping him, only they won’t know if it’s Tom or Milton. And it won’t matter, they’re both in the dustbin of history. Only Tom is around to dodge the shoe, though.
Cat
"I’m not sure there’s another pundit/writer who’s been so popular for so long, who’s also been such a tool."
Two words: David Brooks
Josh Hueco
@T. Scheisskopf:
I love Taibbi too. It’s nice to see my generation’s penchant for mopey cynicism finally produce something beyond Kevin Smith films and South Park reruns.
jb_oahu
I was similarly impressed with Hong Kong, and had similar feelings coming back to the U.S. I give Friedman credit as a tireless cheerleader for getting the U.S. back on the progressive technology track derailed by the 2000 election. We need more like him.
RS
Always glad to see a Friedman pile-on. He is, after George Will, our most self-impressed purveyor of pseudo-intellectual bullshit.
Several years ago I caught a debate between Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz broadcast on C-Span. Friedman hogged the stage, wasting the hour with his fucking platitudes. Stiglitz, when he was allowed to talk, tried to speak to serious issues. What I remember most though is the "What the fuck?" expression Stiglitz would get when Friedman would offer one of his trite but unfortunately frequent observations.