Thomas Friedman, why don't you break up?

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

When you have been spewing BS for so long you have no longer have a sense of the stench.

“Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today?”

I’m no Middle East expert, but I’m gonna go with yes here.