Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Really Tom watch

I weary somewhat of repeating this, but if you are reading Thomas M. Friedman in the New York Times, you are not getting Really Tom Friedman in the cloud, and I do mean cloud.

Look at China. While they were busily denouncing traitors to Communism, or having Great Leaps Forward, or goosing the numbers on Five Years’ Plans, they stayed poor, and more importantly they stayed boring. Seriously. If you have no idea what China was like after the Cultural Revolution, go watch John Adams’ Nixon in China on YouTube. Sooooo Booooring. Many dissidents willingly went to jail just to have the sensory experience of torture.

At least that’s what I read in my “Historic China Enthusiast Book of Guidance in Travels English Vergin” which I picked up last week in Vladivostock. As this booklet reminds us, it’s important to think of people less as beings with values, than as groups with interests. And it’s important to remember volcanoes. For like volcanoes, people are impossible to understand or reason with. They flow like magma beneath the crust of authoritarian regimes, as in Syria, and when they come to the surface who knows what kind of poisonous vapors they’ll release. And that’s the mote in your eye.
I honestly don't know why I love the guy—he's as ignorant as Proust's M. Norpois, or even Chris Mathews, who said

        • on Hardball that all employees at Catholic schools and hospitals ARE Catholics. He argued the point strenuously for several minutes.
          Then he stepped back and said, well, everyone at HIS school was Catholic.
          Really, Chris?

(h/t/ my friendly interlocutor at Kos, Brooke in Seattle)—and he wears that idiotic mustache, and he still hasn't blogrolled me. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, I guess.
From MomAdvice


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