this is the only link i can find to Matt Taibbi's original takedown of Thomas Friedman:
http://delong.typepad.com/...
this Taibbi article helped me to realize that i was not, in fact, insane or addled. the Great Man Friedman really was an ass. Thankyou, Matt! i was not alone!
below the squiggle is my review of friedman's book. i wrote it and posted it on Amazon. it is not necessary to have bought the book from Amazon to review it on Amazon.
friedman makes me do a face-palm every time. he and david brooks represent, to me, most everything that is rotten, fraudulent and pseudo-intellectual in many political ideas and essays. they are foolish rich men purveying bad ideas because they form pretty metaphors and fill up some column inches. anecdotes and metaphors sell your rotten ideas to the unwary every time! Newt Gingrich is also a grand master of this form of shilling for the pseudo-idea.
i encourage you to write your own interviews on Amazon to fight the tide of conservative propaganda. as someone considers buying a book by say, Friedman or D'Souza, a scathing negative review by a liberal may be the only signal available to a potential reader that this book is BS and that there is another side to the story.
this diary may only be useful for the link to the Radio New Zealand interview of Friedman. enjoy it - it is delightful to hear, for once, the Great Man challenged! he is obviously accustomed to much more obsequious interviewers. i culled that link from Glenn Greenwald's Salon blog.
Amazon Review of "That Used to be Us", by thomas friedman.
for years, tom friedman has advocated free trade and laissez-faire capitalism. these policies are the accepted conventional wisdom, have been for 20 to 30 years, and have been implemented and pushed relentlessly by both political parties. americans were informed that we no longer needed a manufacturing base, we were going to be a Knowledge Economy, driven by services like finance and insurance, design and telecommunications. all the factory hands were going to be knowledge workers and web designers.
friedman advocated laissez-faire free trade poicies from his perch at NYT for years. these policies are anti-worker, anti-protectionism, anti-union and anti-government.
now we reap what we have sown these many years - and tom friedman does not care for it one bit! wages are declining, our manufacturing base has disappeared, the trade schools that the unions ran (the best trade school outside of Germany, by the way) are mostly gone, our financial system has collapsed, and we are not educating engineers and scientists. and mr. friedman does not like it!
the title of this book should be "Whoops, on Second Thought, Maybe I Was Wrong! Sorry!" thomas friedman is a poseur. thomas friedman is a shallow fraud. unfortunately he himself is not aware of this, so he continues to babble his bad metaphors and spread his misinformation. please do not listen to thomas friedman.
mr. friedman's metaphors and anecdotes make his misinformation tasty and easy to digest. they are also easy to regurgitate, which will be very useful to you in a social setting. you may seem to be the cleverest person at the cocktail party! these anecdotes and metaphors are clever enough to make you believe that you have actually learned things, when, in fact, you have become more poorly informed than you were previously.
here is an interview with mr. friedman on NZ radio. Lord Friedman certainly does not like his precepts challenged by a mere journalist! he is not having none of it sir, no!
http://www.radionz.co.nz/...
do not listen to thomas friedman.