11.02.16
Another one of the Good Boys on how to avoid the Apocalypse
It’s very amusing in a mean way to see how shook up the pundits are at almost every newspaper in the country. And none more so than those at the New York Times. Faced with the somewhat less than remote possibility that HRC will have blown it by Tuesday, they’re using up all their digital wind in blandishments to those they’ve had absolutely no use for in the last decade. For the love of God, people, you cannot vote for Donald J. Trump. The glaring paradox is these lickspittles to wealth have much to do with why millions of people will be voting for DJT.
Yesterday it was grandee David Leonhardt and today it’s the top shelf chanteur for globalism, Tom Friedman. Friedman has spent his entire career writing how everyone below the super business class and tech industry has to suck it up and get used to the fact that cheap laborers in Asia have eaten everyone else’s hash so billionaires could thrive. There’s nothing for us here.
Maybe you can design T-shirts. Become a brand. Innovate! Disrupt! Write an app that is downloaded three million times. Get viral on Twitter with a billion followers. Say you can make medical radioisotopes at home out of lead foil and old radium paint and create new microorganisms that eat bark and shit gasoline and antibiotics in your garage. Start a company to harvest the plastic waste piles in China. Engineer 3D meat manufacturing or a thermostat that connects to the internet and promptly gets infected by malware. Make sure it all scales. Invent the next perpetual motion machine! Rent out your couch to someone with less money while you go back to living with mom and dad or a friend. See if you can lease your tool box. Stand in a ticket line for some rich person.
It was destiny that the lazy American be displaced and the jobs sent overseas. To each according to his talent in the global workplace. Plus, war is good. Someone in the Middle East has to “suck on it.”
Root hog or die!
And like Leonhardt yesterday, the seven figure whitemansplainer to beat all whitemansplainers, is sure the Trump Apocalypse will be bad. And he describes what will happen and what YOU must do.
It will “cause enormous instability and systemic vertigo.” Which is bad.
Friedman has no answers. It’s a short column. He’s so damn slack this time he doesn’t even go into the usual brain loop of asking a wise cabby in Mumbai or Singapore for advice to the wounded American voter.
Here’s what he does offer. A bromide: A plan and some ideas “can open new futures.”
IBM’s Watson wrote a pop song, “Not Easy,” that went to No. 4 in the Apple store for about 10 minutes this month, or something. Demonstrating computers can write shitty songs. And this is going to make songwriters who haven’t been able to make any money with their tunes for over a decade, what, exactly?
And it wouldn’t be Friedman if there wasn’t a stab at a coinage — in this case, STEMpathy workers, as the new in demand thing.
“[Jobs] that blend STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, math) with human empathy.”
Friedman himself has never had any talent in science, technology, engineering and math, global or local.
As for empathy, not seeing that, either.
That’s Tom Friedman getting hit with a cream pie at a lecture. He got off rather lightly. Also note, I wasn’t kidding about him recommending to get on the plastic waste pile bandwagon in China.
And you, too, can have this tune for your device absolutely free (because, y’know, IBM Watson could’ve written it) here.