Thomas Friedman, why don't you break up?

have they been away? i thought their voices had just been drowned out by the sea of clickbait crap.

huge lol @ eephus

A+

"I was shocked that my Tunisian cab driver had never heard of the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis Show, but after I recounted the plot of an episode he agreed with me that all of world's Maynard G. Krebs need to be taught the lesson of force."

The Arab Spring is failing not for lack of bandwidth, but for lack of human understanding that can only be forged when someone is late for breakfast, and you say, "Thank you for being late."

Felix Salmon is great

i don't even understand what Friedman is trying to get at

my theory all along has been he's severely aphasic

Among the many questions I have is how do you "forge" a lack of understanding, or a lack of anything for that matter.

i totally get "lack of human understanding which can only be forged", it's just missing a comma--what i don't understand is why the hell anyone would ever thank anyone for being late

Friedman had just explained that he is writing a book called ‘The World is Fast’, a sequel to a previous book of his called ‘The World is Flat’.... The title of the final chapter of his new book is ‘Thank You for Being Late’....

Some dumb new Friedmanism apparently. buy the book and find out

I guess I get that by "which can only be forged" he means "which can only be the result of," but it's a very awkward and inept way of putting it. And I'm not sure who is late and who is thanking the person for being late, and what that means, and I'm also not entirely clear on what "lack of bandwidth" would be with respect to a revolution.

Being important CEO types, Tom Friedman’s friends are sometimes 15 minutes late for their breakfast meetings. And when that happens, Tom Friedman thanks his friend for being late, since his guest’s tardiness has given him 15 minutes of peace and quiet, during which he can think peacefully. Hence the title of the chapter.

This is the only way to forge human understanding.

olol

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/07/22/a-brief-theory-of-very-serious-people/

@mtaibbi
Friedman has to be trolling people with this column.

https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/667005782190399488

Really, you don't have to read the rest of it.

looooooooooooooool

TF is beyond both parody and therapy.

Has anyone done a TF generator yet?

the New York Times has one

Ha

http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php

When thinking about the recent troubles, it's important to remember three things: One, people don't behave like muppets, so attempts to treat them as such inevitably look foolish. Muppets never suddenly shift their course in order to fit with a predetermined set of beliefs. Two, Romania has spent decades torn by civil war and ethnic hatred, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, freedom is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If authoritarianism is Romania's ironing board, then freedom is certainly its faucet.

is that from the random op ed generator or from this week's column?

If u can't tell, does it matter? (Random generator)

Oh boo.

I think a good name for Thomas Friedman's next book would be "The 3D-Printed Scimitar"

"Deutschland, Uber, Allah"

I've had the phrase " disrupting the world of camels" in my head all day.

Taibbi on Mr I Don't Know

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/thomas-friedman-takes-on-isis-20151119

Yep, didn't want to go too deep on the article itself but it's just straight up wrong in every way imaginable. Dubai is a terrible example of Arab start-up capitalism - most Emiratis are pretty much paid to do nothing, Kuwait has invested zip in the post-oil economy and is doomed unless it changes course PDQ, the "isles of decency" Tunisia and Jordan have more ISIS fighters per capita than any other countries in the world by a margin of three to one, Iran has a spectacularly good education system and has dramatically improved quality of life over the last thirty years, Saudi Arabia has a thriving industrial sector because of forward thinking investment in manufacturing, etc, etc.

yeah but capitalism! A hundred Starbucks will bloom.

Saudi has 91 Starbucks at the moment so it's not beyond the realms of possibility.

Wednesday's lede:

"Just get me talking about the world today and I can pretty well ruin any dinner party."

Are Thomas Friedman still an item?

later in that column: Bernie Sanders' ideas "died in 1989"

a single payer national medical system is a "dead" idea? Christ! who's going to tell all those Medicare recipients? and Europe? and Canada? and most of the rest of the world?

raising tax rates on the super wealthy is a dead idea? he fucking wishes.

birth of Taylor Swift killed Bernie's ideas duh

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CofAv3nXEAArs9t.jpg

peter parker is among the undecideds

omg

this summer is actually the 10th anniversary of me learning about and hating Thomas Friedman

also the 20th friediversary

The bigger Clinton’s margin of victory, the less dependent she’d be, I hope, on the left wing of her party, and the more likely she’d work with Republicans, as she vowed during the last debate...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/opinion/can-the-us-win-this-election.html?_r=0

persuasive!

I say “hope” because I don’t know who the real Hillary is — the more Bernie Sanderish one speaking publicly or the more Bill Clintonish one who spoke privately to Goldman Sachs.

I know, Tom. I know.

Tom Friedman should have to eat the New York Times every time he publishes in it

pretty sure he does with a side of risotto

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/a-brief-selection-from-the-index-to-thomas-friedmans-ne-1789617753

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-reviews-thomas-friedman-book-thank-you-for-being-late-w453529

saw this guy in a garage last year. I didn't hold the elevator for him.

'as a man in a garage elevator told me last year, the world economy is like shoegaze -- it looks both down *and* forward . . . and uses a whole lot of effects pedals'