Blogs May 1, 2013 at 2:05 pm

Comments

1
Thomas Friedman is a blithering, soft-headed fool. There, I said it.
2
Freidman totally pegs the dipshit meter.
3
Thomas Friedman has a giant house with any number of rooms he barely remembers and he wanders into those rooms to be inspired to write about American waste and want.
4
I'm going to pile on here...

"If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone."

It's scary that Friedman can make such a statement in the NYT and it will be taken as truth. Dividing the world in terms of motivation, and implying that is classic Friedman bullshit. It's also a perfect example of the saying, "If they get you asking the wrong questions, it doesn't matter what the answer is."
5
He sounds like nothing so much as a corporate motivational speaker. "You too can succeed through the power of success!"
6
@4,

I honestly can't even understand what in the fuck he's talking about. There are tons of boundaries.

Let's say you have a great idea for a business. No matter how self-motivated you are, that idea is going nowhere unless you can get a loan or seed money from a private investor like an angel or a venture capitalist. Even if you managed to get that business off the ground, any number of things completely out of your control could ruin that business within a year (or even after 20 years of grueling hard work on the part of the self-motivated individualist).

Yes, the government these days does approximately fuck-all to regulate business and stonewall the "self-motivated", but there are still a million and one factors out there that can ruin you.
7
More of the same Just-World delusion that fuels the ugliest strains of laissez-faire capitalism; Saying that this world is tailored for self-motivated people is just a backwards way of saying poor people are poor because they're lazy.
8
My best guess is that Friedman, on some level, recognizes that he's a hack who's enjoys far more success than he deserves, and so can you!
9
Please for the love of god stop encouraging that useless hack Thomas Friedman to coin new awful catchphrases. "A 401(k) world", really? Really?
10
What happens when all the workers become ambitious and start small businesses? Oh wait, that won't ever happen and screw them. Hire 'em, fire 'em... the lower classes are like ants.

Freidman is a total idiot.
11
@6: there's a simple reason for that. He doesn't have any clue what the fuck he's talking about.

Twenty years ago, Friedman was actually a decent reporter, doing excellent on-the-ground work in the middle east. I imagine he hated every minute of it, especially the part where fuddy-duddy editors kept insisting that he actually speak English. But there is no escaping the Peter Principle: he got promoted to weekly columnist, and there he found the perfect venue for all of his worst tendencies as a writer, of which his desperate, grasping attempts to mint new slogans is the worst of all. (One imagines he returns home every day to throw darts at a framed picture of Malcolm Gladwell: "the tipping point? Why didn't I think of that?!")

There is only one Friedman-related neologism that is worth knowing, and that is the Friedman Unit.
12
Friedman married into BIG money. We should all be so successful and self motivated.
13
A grown up labor/leftist movement would be pretty neat.

Especially one that that moved beyond tactics that just make activists look silly. Like puppetry, costumes, and unfocused rallies with shitty speakers and bad music.
14
I hope Mr. Friedman suffers some form of untreatable cancer and that health insurance won't cover and then loses all of his money as he plunges into the depths of poverty.

I mean "it's a 401K world" Right?
15
Does Freidman even read his own newspaper? The Times has had a series of columns on how unaccountable corporate board members and CEOs are. They aren't paid on performance - anything but. And some of the most productive, hardest working people make very little money. The system is rigged by and for the protected class. There's been a lot written about that too, by the Times' Hedrick Smith and others that Friedman apparently can't be bothered to read.

Friedman, who was a cheerleader for the Iraq War, stating over and over again for several years how in six months, we'd be around the corner in Iraq. Talk about lack of performance - yet he's still got his cushy job.

As far as 401(k)s - they've been a tremendous failure in providing for retirement - it's a form of glorified gambling. Moving from pensions to 401(k)s has simply moved money from the working people to the very rich, widening the gap between the very rich and the rest of us.
16
Oh, I think I already read that column:
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com
17
What a delusional asshole.
18
Sure, I guess this holds up for a very particular narrow notion of "self-motivated" in which you possess the particular blend of ambition, confidence that blurs into narcissism, greed, and a little bit of psychopathy that the culture he's describing wants. Oh, yeah, and don't forget to be male and white.

Heaven fucking forfend you're motivated to do something that doesn't involve making money at the expense of consumers and competitors. That's not "self-motivated."
19
A tornado doesn't care how "self-motivated" you are.

Cancer doesn't care how "self-motivated" you are.

A hurricane doesn't care how "self-motivated" you are.

Nor does any number of outside factors and tragedies -- the safety net is there for even the "self-motivated".
20
> The problem is, not every "self-motivated" person can succeed

Nonsense! We live in a Just World, everybody gets what they deserve, so stop bothering those of us who have proved our worthiness by doing well as if there were something we could or should do about so-called 'problems' so-called 'people' whine about.

Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes.
21
@15,

I'm pretty sure I remember Friedman (unless it was another hack I'm confusing with him) who made the case that, since cab drivers he met in Baghdad just love democracy, our ventures in Iraq would totally work out for the best.

Never mind that cab drivers in poor countries are often well-educated, cosmopolitan professionals who can't find a job in their field. A journalist taking the word of a cab driver in Baghdad as gospel is like a foreign journalist traveling to Seattle in late 2002 and figuring that the majority of the country must hate Bush and oppose the war in Iraq.

What actually matters is the opinion of the majority, and the majority population in most impoverished countries generally hates anything that makes democracy work (such as protection of minority rights and equal representation for women).
22
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/20… for a good antidote to that Friedman column, complete with the information (that I did not know) that he married a woman who by 2007 was worth over a billion dollars in inherited real estate trust fund money.

According to Wikipedia, in the 2008 crash the company that is the source of his wealth lost most of its value and went bankrupt in 2009, leaving his family with a mere $25 million. Poor, poor, millionaire Thomas Friedman. It's no wonder everything he writes is written from the perspective of someone who never has to encounter the reality that most people live in.
23
What he meant to write was "in this 401(k) world, if you are self-motivated and hit the lottery, there are no limits. Otherwise, you're fucked. Hard work doesn't mean anything anymore, only the creation of more and more complicated financial derivatives or the stupidest fucking app in the world that happens to get bought by Facebook".
24
May Day should be about treating the most vulnerable with dignity and respect, because we're not just a bunch of animals.

Will SLOG be posting something, anything, about this, then?

http://www.france24.com/en/20130501-forc…

I'd imagine a Republican President who was allowing this to happen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-feed…

...would have inspired Paul Constant to post something about how awful he is.

"The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit."
25
“What they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence you don’t understand? You don’t think we don’t care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy--we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this. Okay’,” Friedman said. Friedman advocating attacking Iraq as the least problematic target to teach the Arab world not to get too uppity. He is an amoral stupid self-obsessed, pathetic evil little man.
26
Very well stated Paul, I couldn't agree more!!!

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.