Comments on: You’re Out of Your Element, Tommy

By: catherine

catherine — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 12:10:59 +0000

If Indian and other non-European businessmen all stopped traveling on planes for, oh, say, the next month, would that keep Flathead from writing anything about globalization ever again?

Oh, please say yes. How could we get them to do this?

By: Ben Alpers

Ben Alpers — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:19:27 +0000

Max, why should Friedman pick up a newspaper when he could instead talk to yet another international businessman in yet another airport? They all have such fascinating things to tell him about global capitalism (and they’re all so suprisingly positive about it!).

By: JLo

JLo — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 12:00:58 +0000

Over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.

By: Jeffrey Lewis

Jeffrey Lewis — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:25:51 +0000

Just to pile on old Flathead.

"... put your whole country on a diet."

Wow, nothing is funnier than a child dying of hunger. That's a fucking hoot, the thought of some kid slowly starving to death.

A famine, by the way, is looking likely in any event in North Korea this year. North Korea is sending millions of people into the countryside to work on farms each weekend, prompting Anthea Webb, spokeswoman for the World Food Program, to say:

Unless something happens very soon, by the end of August, the only people we'll be feeding are 12,000 children in hospitals.

[snip]

Our people are beginning to be very concerned that this combination of factors in a worst-case scenario could put us back to a situation of the early '90s. The potential for famine is quite strong.

Boy, I'll tell, there is nothing quite as funny as kids dying from famine! Pass the scotch, let me tell you the one about the Priest, the Pastor and the Rabbi who walk into a bar ...

What an asshole.

By: Cheryl Rofer

Cheryl Rofer — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 07:43:16 +0000

Um…the NYT link seems to be dead already.

[I’ve changed the link to the version that ran in the IHT. For the record, the NYT link is “here”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/opinion/11friedman.html?hp ACW]

By: J.

J. — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 07:18:54 +0000

Preach it, brother! Good comments.

By: JLo

JLo — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:54:31 +0000

Indeed. I’ve just reviewed this frame (I’m pretty sure it’s where the Jesus has just rolled and is eyeballing the Dude & Co.) and did not see a cat. Doesn’t matter whether you rented it shoes or bought it a beer. Is this a clever way of calling TF a nasty name?

[I changed the photo. Mark it 8, Dude. ACW]

By: Max Postman

Max Postman — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:43:27 +0000

Furthermore, North Korea has said explicitly that they would consider economic sanctions to be an act of war. If Friedman had picked up a newspaper literally once in the last year and a half he might have known this. To quote the Guardian:

“Giving its first response to an ultimatum issued on Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a statement by the Korean Central News Agency said: ‘Sanctions mean a war and the war knows no mercy.”

That sure sounds like an explicit threat to use nuclear weapons to me. So, Friedman’s solution to the problem of nuclear proliferation is for a nuclear power (China) to deliberately provoke another nuclear power (North Korea) into a first strike.

Thomas Friedman’s caveman politics have no place in a nuclear world.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 18:36:41 +0000

Well put (although I usually avoid denunciations of Tom Friedman unless they include a thorough mocking of his metaphors), but why is there a cat on the dude’s lap?