• surph_ninja@lemmy.worldEnglish
    412·
    20 hours ago

    You think you’re playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.

    You can only DARVO and spell out your own strategy over and over so many times before people realize you’re projecting.

    Maybe not every person critical of US foreign policy is a bot.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
      62·
      18 hours ago

      You think you’re playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.

      You win today’s Thomas Friedman award for nonsensical metaphors.

      It’s not competitive on the same level as “When you’re in a hole, stop digging. When you’re in three holes, bring a lot of shovels.” But then, what is?’

      Edit: I got the quote wrong.

      Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying-and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

      Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute.

      Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May: “The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.” First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense?

      It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

      Courtesy of the formerly-glorious Matt Taibbi.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
          3·
          17 hours ago

          It is mind-boggling that he was taken seriously for decades as an economic and foreign policy thinker. He’s a pre-LLM argument for the idea that being able to put any number of sentences together so they scan is not an indication that there’s any intelligence behind the text. He’s a walking wrong answer. He was unerringly backwards about so many things, on such a basic level that even a very casual critical reading could identify the flaws, and no one noticed at what was supposed to be the highest levels of American journalism, save for a handful of heretics who had to shout from the margins and were basically ignored for basically his entire career.

          https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html

          Enjoy. I started rereading it just now, and it’s just as great as it was back when everyone was reading Judy Miller and Paul Krugman.

          This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.