Thomas Friedman, why don't you break up?

I’m rereading this line and contorting my face in a number of ways

Check the map. It’s far away.

*checks the map. checks the scale. confirms far*

thomas friedman spins the globe. around and around it goes. he puts the finger on it and stops it on the other side, right on afghanistan. he checks the scale

he furiously pulls out his palm pilot and with quaking hands writes a note to remember for the morning: "it's far away"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4roxM8hUMk

Aghanistan...istan so far away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UofYl3dataU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyK1bZZ7E-s

It is beyond my powers of imagination that "give war a chance" was ever written or published unironically.

is he dead yet

He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary "for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat".

This is Afghanistan we're talking about. Check the map. It's far away.

https://i.imgur.com/acTZjmp.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIIxlgcuQRU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFaSpca_3Q

This is his super villain speech

The world is bubble

i was going to post that speech but i felt too much second hand embarrassment to even copy the link once i looked it up

http://i.imgur.com/fKBZsdw.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/IsYX0BS.png

But what if humanity tried giving war a chance? Has anyone thought of that?

war, while it poses many downsides, has been responsible for many advances. the drone technology that was developed to fight terrorism in the middle east has been adapted to deliver amazon packages to consumers. so overall, a complicated issue, not 'all good' or 'all bad'.

war - what if it's good for some people

commercial innovation per war death is higher than innovation per civilian death

there is a common perception that companies are REQUIRED to maximize profit over all other prioritized. although i have skimmed a full page of google search results of op-eds suggesting that it isn't technically true, let's face, it's fucking true

My colostomy bag is smarter and has more nuance than Thomas Friedman

not a joke, incredibly

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FDHYQpvVQAQKdH5?format=jpg&name=small

I saw that today and actually burst out laughing in bed, waking up my partner in the process.

Friedman started coasting so long ago he came to a complete standstill in 2010

by 2015 he was encrusted with fungus

“i’m sure they would buddy! hey have you cleaned your room yet?” https://t.co/H0mcU6ggdw

— edie (@multiplebears) November 1, 2021

We’ve never seen this tactic before from Beijing: We’ll clean our air, but only if you let us buzz Taiwan’s airspace and choke off the air of freedom in Hong Kong.

He is so good at metaphors.

The earth is FLAT, don't you know.

My column: Biden-Cheney 2024? https://t.co/T3OaMtWbhC

— Thomas L. Friedman (@tomfriedman) January 12, 2022

jfc

great job on the pin, NYT graphics dept

Pretty sure we are being punked.

Imagine The Consensus! The Alignment!

AOC/MTG

Cruz/Sanders

looooooooooooool

what a fool

Thomas Friedman, professional wise man, dreams things that never were and asks, "why not?"

I haven't actually read the column and don't see any need to, I'm just going to imagine it takes the form of a conversation with a commonsense taxi driver — an aspiring immigrant putting his son through Harvard by driving 23 hours a day and trading in crypto between fares, who just doesn't understand why "those people can't work together for all of us."

Saving a democratic system requires huge political sacrifice, added Levitsky. “It means A.O.C. campaigning for Liz Cheney” and it means Liz Cheney “putting on the shelf” many policy goals she and other Republicans cherish. “But that is what it takes, and if you don’t do it, just look back and see why democracy collapsed in countries like Germany, Spain and Chile. The democratic forces there should have done it, but they didn’t.”

Liz Cheney or facism. Not a choice, but an echo.

When you accidentally click a link to a new piece of his on Putin, shrug and vaguely read it, and then encounter this bit of combined sociopolitical and music criticism:

If you look at his behavior, it seems that Putin is quite frightened today by two subjects: arithmetic and Russian history.

To understand why these subjects frighten him, you need to first consider the atmosphere enveloping him — something neatly captured, as it happens, in lyrics from the song “Everybody Talks” by one of my favorite rock groups, Neon Trees. The key refrain is:

Hey, baby, won’t you look my way?
I can be your new addiction.
Hey, baby, what you got to say?
All you’re giving me is fiction.
I’m a sorry sucker, and this happens all the time.
I find out that everybody talks.
Everybody talks, everybody talks.
It started with a whisper.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a foreign affairs writer reporting from autocratic countries is that no matter how tightly controlled a place is, no matter how brutal and iron-fisted its dictator, EVERYBODY TALKS.

Tom Friedman has Still Got It pic.twitter.com/LuMI8CBucn

— Keith Harris (@useful_noise) May 7, 2023

does anyone know what year this photo is from

https://i.imgur.com/jjJGUfk.png

Year of the Walrus

I sometimes think about the time a C-suite exec at my then-employer was speaking at a departmental meeting and went on a tangent about something in Friedman's The World is Flat book and I left thinking... wow, I don't know about this exec

and he was gone from the company within the year

I remember Taibbi's classic take-down of that book. I wonder which of them is worse these days though.

I think Friedman's never tried to be unorthodox and if someone's coming to his work and picking up ideas from it, that's... probably an indictment of how well-informed they are

His writing can be terrible but it's just an articulation of things his readers already believe, but haven't written bad articles about

absolute king shit

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GFbhdU9XAAAUPFv?format=jpg&name=900x900

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GFb_ZW_XUAAndy3?format=jpg&name=small

also says My guess is that the next week or so is likely to be the most important in the Gaza war since Hamas launched it on Oct. 7.

just the least self-aware person in the world