Thomas Friedman: The Earth Is Full | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Friedman: The Earth Is Full

nytimes.com

16 pointsrblion11 comments

Friedman is an idiot[1], but even a stopped clock is right twice a day[2].

[1] Try reading The World is Flat — it's 300 (edit: apparently 600!) pages of stupid platitudes and anecdotes. I literally threw it away after I made it through the first third. It's like The Four Hour Workweek meets the worst aspects of American liberalism (and that's spoken as a self-described liberal).

[2] Unless you're: a) using a digital clock, or b) anywhere in the world that has abandoned the AM/PM system.

It's one of few books that I've just put down and thought was completely useless and unnecessarily verbose. I couldn't get near finishing it.. The copy I have (hard cover, ughh) weighs in @ 600 pages of drivel.

Have you read " The world without us " - it was a demonstration of the zoological vocabulary of the author and nothing more. Freaking horrible book.

re: [1] bahaha, I remember when in the first few chapters he talks about how he felt so brilliant when he came up with the title he had to tell his wife about it.

The next six months will be the critical period for Earth.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_%28unit%29 )

after reading this [1] I realized I no longer had to take Friedman seriously.

[1] http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html

Most of the article is critical of Friedman's writing and communication style. For example the author quotes Friedman:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Then the author critiques: Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This critique was surprising to me. I found Friedman's passage to be quite understandable and it did not offend on any level. Being "herded on board" is a common phrase, and "hunting for space" is also a common phrase. To me they are fine used together because I don't actually expect the writer to be latching onto the herding metaphor in such a committed way. They are simply cliched phrases and the metaphorical herding phrase isn't meant to be used as a metaphor but rather a cliched way to communicate a common experience. Perhaps this style of writing is less than ideal, but for someone critiquing a book about ideas it seems weak to complain about the writing and communication style and ignore the actual ideas that are being presented.

'"The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been, but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned."

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?'

Such a good summary of Friedman's book: Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought.

I'd agree with the gravity of the problems described, but I sincerely disagree with the almost-inevitable turn to optimism towards the end. "Gilding insists he is a realist". Straightfacedly Friedman hands on the assurance that given the choice to trod on as always or change, we'll suddenly wake up and give up greed, sloth, consumerism for some happiness-based economy (which is bullshit, in a catatonic collapse nobody's happy, no one except a few mavericks I guess).

How is that supposed to happen? I get it, miraculously, so we don't have to get off our precious asses now and can wait it out till the crisis sweeps us off into some kind of all-together-now rapture.

Already the ice-caps are melting off, within my lifetime world population has doubled, food-prices are rising, life for very many people in this world is starting to get more difficult, bit by bit. Yes, there is technological advancement, yet the price of energy has steadily been rising, at the same time fundamental world problems are on the rise as well. It does not suffice to assume that we invariably will find technologies in time to mitigate all these problems. We are in for trouble and very many people will feel the consequences.

How harsh they'll be is hard to tell in advance, but there's reasonable evidence that they (and arising social dynamics, i.e. war) could be lethal to the social and economic world system du jour, when given several decades to do their magic.

So it's better to think ahead and take action, as individuals and as society.

Whoop-de-do, what are we going to do about it? Mass murder? Birth rate control(ala China)? Build more land? This type of nonsense is no better than the rapture preacher.

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