Comments on: Recombinant Friedman https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:11:21 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Doug K https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69946 Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:11:21 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69946 Friedman and Brooks have expensive private pedestals from which they pollute the public stream of discourse. Clearly there are great jobs to be found in comforting the comfortable; panglossing the news for complacent elites.
Friedman is mostly just vacuous, where the average Brooks column is an entropic pothole from which you emerge knowing less than when you started reading.

]]> By: Barry https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69673 Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:22:05 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69673 Michael says:
“I laughed through this, so thanks. Th. Friedman and David Brooks are two “thinkers” who take up a lot of public space, and I don’t understand why. They both seem like pretentious frauds spiced with idiocy. ”

If I were teaching a class on ‘Media as Power Structure Propaganda’, I’d feature Friedman’s columns prominently. If you think of him and Brooks as establishment propagandists, then what they say and how they say it looks much more appropriate.

]]> By: ezra abrams https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69511 Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:53:59 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69511 before he became a pundit, TF was a good reporter; from leb to beirut has some outstanding bits
?peter principle at work

during the beirut civil war, when you couldn’t drive down the street without being stopped by a gang of ak47 armed thugs, TF is astonished to discover a thriving luxury resort on the Med.
Wealthy woman of a certain age with drinks, etc etc
TF asks the manager, how on earth do you do this amid all the chaos and gunfire ?
well says the manager we have our own security
? say TF
well says the manager, suppose a couple of jeeps full of guys with submachine guns showed up at the front door – we could handle that, no problem.

]]> By: Withywindle https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69509 Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:03:54 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69509 I’ve had a number of pretty interesting conversations with taxi drivers over the years. (Jim Jarmusch must have too.) They just don’t map well onto Thomas Friedman columns. (The best, actually, are listening to “this is the story of my life,” on long rides to or from an airport.)

]]> By: JohnR https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69508 Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:36:15 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69508 After literally moments of focused concentration, I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Friedman does indeed talk to his cab drivers. I don’t think he listens to them in quite the same way, though. I suspect that he has an internal translator of sorts which simply replaces the various noises that come from the direction of the driver (“Whaddaya, nuts?!”) with facile Deep Thoughts from his inexhaustible Storage Banks O’ Buzzphrases. The impressive thing is that (if I am correct) this happens in the eyeblink of time between his ear detecting the vibrations in the air, and his brain turning those vibrations into seemingly coherent chunks of language. That’s a pretty impressive on-the-fly translator; Star Trek couldn’t do better. It’s a shame he’s putting it to such a picayune purpose – like using a Cray to play tic-tac-to.

]]> By: Michael https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69504 Mon, 03 Jun 2013 06:27:53 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69504 I laughed through this, so thanks. Th. Friedman and David Brooks are two “thinkers” who take up a lot of public space, and I don’t understand why. They both seem like pretentious frauds spiced with idiocy.

Nassim Taleb often mentions that a consultation with a random cabbie is as good as paying your stockbroker. Maybe Friedman has been reading Taleb in an effort to get ideas for his drivel?

]]> By: bruce https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69470 Fri, 31 May 2013 21:27:54 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69470 Robert Parker’s Spenser liked Thomas Friedman. So, if fictional characters who are also idealized author surrogates count, that’s one.

Friedman’s articles slide right through my brain- not even bad. Afterwards I don’t remember a thing.

]]> By: yie https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69467 Fri, 31 May 2013 18:33:19 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69467 Your characterization of Nick seems unfair and you’ve put Ellinora’s words in his mouth. =\

]]> By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69461 Fri, 31 May 2013 14:25:32 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69461 I really don’t think so. I talked not too long ago with someone who is working with him on a current project and even he was rather sheepish about it, saying that Friedman’s prominence made him a useful way to get attention but that he was more or less empty-headed, a Zelig of the punditry, overtaken by every trend or fad that crossed his desk.

]]> By: Withywindle https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2013/05/29/recombinant-friedman/comment-page-1/#comment-69460 Fri, 31 May 2013 14:22:19 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2363#comment-69460 He seems to be mocked by people right across the political spectrum. Are there any bloggers out there who, contrarianly, give him kudos?

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