Updated 4/18/2012
Heartiest congratulations to Thomas P. Friedman, and to his alter id, really, Tom Friedman, on his or their receipt of the Eschaton One True Wanker of the Decade Award passed out in honor of Atrios's 10th anniversary of pernicious bloggery.
It must be great to be recognized for all that slogging, for the ability to find the one neoliberal taxi driver in any town, no matter how exotic (everywhere I go all the taxi drivers are [jump]
Communists), to retain hope in the darkest hour (it'll just be another six months!), and to improvise platitudes, expressions that are so profoundly imbued with the conventional wisdom that they are clichés in spite of never having been uttered before!
For anyone lured here under false pretenses, I should explain that this has nothing to do with any actual wanking but with a literary metaphor for a certain kind of writing, smug, ponderous, and generally wrong about things, in which an author seems to be so wrapped up in his own earnest thoughts that it's as if he were making sweaty, strenuous love to them.
For the other kind of wanking, go read between the lines at Pajamas Media, although I should say that this little blog of mine may be the only one in history to have given recognition to noble endeavors in pro-bono wanking-for-real, in a note of last December on ex-congressman and notable Down-Under sperm donor Bill Johnson.
Update 4/18
In all the excitement, I didn't even notice Friedman's column in yesterday's Times. He doesn't make any direct reference to the Eschaton award, but I think there's a kind of acknowledgment there, in that it's among his all-time wankiest, in the Radical Centrism aspect. Here's a Shorter:
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| Mean Girls. From Mustachios on Everything. |
Heartiest congratulations to Thomas P. Friedman, and to his alter id, really, Tom Friedman, on his or their receipt of the Eschaton One True Wanker of the Decade Award passed out in honor of Atrios's 10th anniversary of pernicious bloggery.
It must be great to be recognized for all that slogging, for the ability to find the one neoliberal taxi driver in any town, no matter how exotic (everywhere I go all the taxi drivers are [jump]
Communists), to retain hope in the darkest hour (it'll just be another six months!), and to improvise platitudes, expressions that are so profoundly imbued with the conventional wisdom that they are clichés in spite of never having been uttered before!
For anyone lured here under false pretenses, I should explain that this has nothing to do with any actual wanking but with a literary metaphor for a certain kind of writing, smug, ponderous, and generally wrong about things, in which an author seems to be so wrapped up in his own earnest thoughts that it's as if he were making sweaty, strenuous love to them.
For the other kind of wanking, go read between the lines at Pajamas Media, although I should say that this little blog of mine may be the only one in history to have given recognition to noble endeavors in pro-bono wanking-for-real, in a note of last December on ex-congressman and notable Down-Under sperm donor Bill Johnson.
In all the excitement, I didn't even notice Friedman's column in yesterday's Times. He doesn't make any direct reference to the Eschaton award, but I think there's a kind of acknowledgment there, in that it's among his all-time wankiest, in the Radical Centrism aspect. Here's a Shorter:
The Amtrak Acela is looking really decrepit, therefore Mike Bloomberg needs to run for president.Because nobody fixes escalators like Bloomberg does? Not quite. In fact, Friedman doesn't care if he even wins; he just wants him in there ennobling the discourse up to those Bloomberg levels.
Bloomberg doesn’t have to win to succeed — or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election and, most importantly, the course of the next administration, no matter who heads it. By running on important issues and offering sensible programs for addressing them — and showing that he had the support of the growing number of Americans who describe themselves as independents — he would compel the two candidates to gravitate toward some of his positions as Election Day neared.The utter banality of the main idea, the Centrism that will save us all, combined with the extraordinarily daydreamy quality of the story chosen to embody it (think, "I dreamed I was an accountant in my Maidenform bra")—it's like a definition of what wanking is all about.
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