Stocks and Bigots on the Internet
Anti-Semites have long found a happy hunting ground on the Internet. In some recent items such as this one I described how virulent haters continue to flourish on Usenet discussion groups.
A reader tells me that haters are now flocking to financial message boards, where talk of stocks and bonds is mixed in with hate-Jew messages and anti-Zionist rants. One frequent locale is the Yahoo message board of Overstock.com, whose CEO is the anti-Israel yahoo Patrick Byrne, famed for his “jihad” rants and fervent belief that Tom Friedman is too pro-Israel.
Apparently the Byrne virus affects adherents to his stock, because Overstock fans on the Yahoo Overstock message board post messages with titles such as “The Zionist Regime is an Injustice,” quoting approvingly Iranian fruitcake Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Anti-Semitic sentiments casually fly back and forth, and “Zionist” is used as a term of derision for people who don’t like the stock.
I’m ordering up some CDs today. Guess where I’m not buying them from?
Follow-up: As can be seen below, Byrne responded to this post in a lengthy rant that — interestingly — failed to denounce the anti-Semitism that is the subject of this item. His rant contained a number of obscure references and seemed targeted mainly at a corporate audience and not the readers of this site.
I suggested to him that he might want to condemn the ant-Semitism that I wrote about on the Yahoo board.
As of April 22 he had not done so. It doesn’t bother him, I guess. Something to keep in mind the next time you want to buy something online. As I said in the item, there is one online retailer that I am not patronizing.
Yup. How’s this, from noon today:
“militant jews are only capable of antagonism.”
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=1600670676&tid=ostk&sid=1600670676&mid=87758
Lots of stuff like that on the OSTK board. That’s a lot milder than you see on some stock boards (FCEL — http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&board=4687441&tid=erc&mid=216218&sid=4687441)
The difference is that on the OSTK this is a running stream of converation, very mainstream to the discussion, and not something a crazy drops in now and then.
Comment by Fred Flinstone
— April 16, 2006 @ 11:57 am
Apparently this is a recognized characteristic of this message board. Note this post today:
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=1600670676&tid=ostk&sid=1600670676&mid=87760
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 16, 2006 @ 12:27 pm
Hi. This is Patrick.
There is an awful lot of “Chewbacca Defense” stuff these days, and I have to wonder if this is part of it. However, I am going to take your blog as sincere but naive, because (ironically enough) I have been here before and thought you were pretty good. So I will reply this once, but if this turns into Chewbacca Defense (i.e., trying to flood reasonable argument with meaningless responses containing half-baked and false assumptions) I’ll just ignore it, but ask my supporters to just quote from this should they choose to respond themselves.
I do not think I have ever commented publicly on the Israel-Arab dispute. What I did in one blog was say that, regarding that dispute, Tom Friedman makes a habit of pretending to weigh the evidence, then always takes Israel’s side. I have not said that he is wrongto take Israel’s side, just that the “Let’s see, Arabs, israel, Arabs, Israel…. OK, this time I gotta go with Israel!” routine gets a little old. (As a matter of fact, I think he is sometimes insufficiently pro-Israel for my taste, but that is a logically unrelated point.)
I brought this issue up in the conext of discussing Jim Cramer’s and Herb Greenberg’s endless discussions of me. They run more or less like this (in paraphrase):
Jim: “Byrne might be a good guy!”
Herb: “No he’s a bad guy.”
Jim: “Are you sure? I thought he might be a good guy.”
Herb: “No he’s a bad guy.”
Jim: “OK, you win, he’s a bad guy.”
Over and over every time they discussed me. it reminded me of Friedman. That’s all.
Now another point someone made about this observation of mine was that everyone in it was Jewish: Friedman, Cramer, and Herb. Well…. I honestly never thought about that, nor would have cared if I had. For the record, the guys I am suing are not only Rocker, but a guy named Cohodes (sounds Greek), Bettis (sounds Dutch), Vickrey (British of some sort) and Klieber (German).
Now about the postings on Yahoo: again, you sound sincere, so I will respond sincerely.
Yes, there was one guy in this anti-naked shorting movement who started trying to make it into Christian Main Street versus Jewish Wall Street: I told him I never wanted to hear from him nor see any of that stuff again. Some guy brought it up on a Christian radio show and I told him, on air, that I had no truck with any of that stuff. And to the extent I ahve any influence with them, I have told the whole Pajamahadeen that I would tolerate none of that crapola.
That said, a funny thing started happening in mid-February. A bunch of strangers started showing up on message boards, apparently agreeing with us, but then within a few days, posting anti-Semitic comments. None of them are coming from anyone known to us old-timers in the anti-naked shorting movement. Our collective hunch is that these are agents provocateurs sent by the miscreants to post such stuff, so that innocent viewers might start thinking that the people in the anti-NSS crowd are bigots and loonies, when in fact, that is all simply being planted there. Again, none of the people posting that stuff are known to any of the rest of us as legitimate collaborators, which strengthens our hunch that they are shills sent by the bad guys to try to discredit us.
I hope this response suffices. Again, I took the time to write it because I think you are sincere. If this turns into another Chewbacca Defense thing, at least this will be in the record form which others may quote.
Sincerely,
Patrick
Comment by HannibalofCarthage
— April 16, 2006 @ 9:32 pm
Mr. Byrne, if you are “sincerely” disturbed by the anti-Semitism on the Yahoo board devoted to your company, why aren’t you clearly and unequivocally condemning it there?
All you’d have to do is put your hands on your keyboard and type out, “I read what was on this board and it was horrible stuff and turned my stomach.”
Instead you are here, spinning like a top and attacking your enemies. You know, I could care less and I doubt very much that the readers of this website could care less about your dispute with this and that and your “chewbacca” whatever.
I think it is very interesting and also significant that you ramble on about a dispute nobody here cares about and make no such condemnation on the Yahoo board devoted to your stock. Also I note that in your entire rant here you make no specific condemnation of the anti-Semitic comments and “Zionist” jibes that I cited. Given your obvious Internet savvy and interest in your public image, I assume that this omission is no accident.
Incidentally I would think that if these anti-Semites really were disguised enemies of your company, that would give you even more impetus to issue the condemnation, or perhaps pretend to express outrage since you very obviously are not outraged by anti-Semitism.
As for your comment on Tom Friedman: Assuming you are serious in your preposterous comment that he “always takes Israel’s side,” that would go a long way to explain your lack of outrage toward the anti-Semitism that I noted in my item.
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 17, 2006 @ 8:23 am
Mr. Byrne, I just went on the Yahoo board and saw that there is discussion underway about how “Jews of Quality” support you and your company and how “millitant Jews” oppose you.
Is that a fact? Is this a new “quality standard” among Jews — whether they like your company or not? A person can be an apostate or a Marxist, or a member of Hamas, but if they like Overstock.com they are OK?
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 17, 2006 @ 8:43 am
Well, as expected this conversation is turning Chewbacca-like in its failure to commit to basic tenets of reason and evidence. That said, I will swat these dopey allegations, not because I expect it to have any effect on Mediacrity, but simply so that reasonable folks will have something from which they can quote from me, on the record, should Mediacrity continue his rant.
1) Mediacrity asks, “why aren’t you clearly and unequivocally condemning” this stuff. He evidently missed the part above where I described how I made clear my sentiments on this matter here and elsewhere: “I told him I never wanted to hear from him nor see any of that stuff again. Some guy brought it up on a Christian radio show and I told him, on air, that I had no truck with any of that stuff. And to the extent I ahve any influence with them, I have told the whole Pajamahadeen that I would tolerate none of that crapola.” I would have imagined that, “crapola” was pretty clear and uneqivocal. I didn’t post this on Yahoo! because I don’t post on Yahoo, precisely because the conversation is as insipid as Mediacrity’s has proven to be.
2) Notice that anything I say, no matter how gentle and friendly, was denounced as “fervent” and “rant.” Favored Chewbacca technqiue.
3) I am told that Mediacrity is the general counsel of Bloomberg. Is that true, Mediacrity? If so, what does it tell us that a news organization would employ someone with such limited ability to track simple statements without coloring them with his own feelings?
Patrick
Comment by HannibalofCarthage
— April 22, 2006 @ 3:27 pm
Ah, I see I missed some of Mediacrits’ sharp reasoning:
“Mr. Byrne, I just went on the Yahoo board and saw that there is discussion underway about how ‘Jews of Quality’ support you and your company and how ‘millitant Jews’ oppose you.
Is that a fact? Is this a new quality standard’ among Jews — whether they like your company or not? A person can be an apostate or a Marxist, or a member of Hamas, but if they like Overstock.com they are OK?”
I confess, Mediacrit, I get lost here in your arcane distinctions. The distinction between “Jews of quality” and “militant Jews” is in my eyes a weak one: what about “militant Jews of quality”? From your question it appears that you think there cannot be a “militant Jew of quality”: what do you have against militant Jews? You ask what I would feel about a “Jew of quality” who was “an apostate or a Marxist, or a member of Hamas” but also liked Overstock.com, but I draw your attention to the case where the “Jew of quality” is a militant, and also an apostate, a Marxist, and a member of Hamas.
So you are raising the possibility of a militant apostate “Jew of quality” member of Hamas, asking me how he would feel about Overstock, and what should my feelings be about him.
That’s a tough one.
Patrick
Comment by HannibalofCarthage
— April 22, 2006 @ 3:52 pm
Mr. Byrne, you’ve posted now three times on this site and I have come away with the following concerning your attitude toward the anti-Semitic comments on the Yahoo Overstock message board:
1. A “chewbacca” something or other is going on. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
2. At some point in the past you told somebody you were opposed to anti-Semitism.
3. My questions concerning subsequent anti-Semitic posts befuddled you.
4. I am the general counsel of Bloomberg.
Last but not least I come to the subject matter of this item:
5. You have nothing to say about the anti-Semitism on the Yahoo message boards. You still don’t after three posts on this message board.
The last is what I find most interesting about this exchange. This is a website that focuses on Jewish issues. This would be a golden opportunity for you to clarify your position on the posts that I quoted in my item.
Interesting how the words, “I condemn them” are foreign to your lips. I must assume that you don’t condemn them, because if you did feel that way, you would have said so by now. But please, if you do condemn those posts, feel free to say so and clarify your position. It would be helpful if you would be clear and speak in plain language, and avoid jargon like “chewbacca” that mean nothing to me or to most people.
Concerning Tom Friedman, who is considered by many on this board to be anything but pro-Israel, I would appreciate your describing how you came to the conclusion that he always sided with Israel. Please be as specific as you can.
Speaking of which, I said you are anti-Israel and you did not directly respond to that. You said that you have never stated your position on the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
Perhaps you could describe your views on the Israel-Palestinian dispute. Please be frank on that subject.
You can continue to post on me and what a terrible fellow I am and how bad my judgment has been, but I think that the readers of this website are more interested in Middle East than your opinion of me.
As for point No. 3, yes, Mr. Byrne, I am the general counsel of Bloomberg! You found me out. When I am not serving as general counsel of Bloomberg, I am chief rabbi of Israel and Deputy Chief of the Papago Indian Tribe.
Yes, I am making fun of you. But please, do not let that deter you from responding.
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 22, 2006 @ 5:44 pm
Hi Mediacrity:
Well, I did not expect to be deposed at length this fine afternoon, and have a party to go to, so I am not going to bother writing the lengthy briefing materials you request. I don’t think I need to, however, to dispose of this matter. here goes: I will follow the “Your quote my response” convention.
1. A “chewbacca” something or other is going on. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
The “‘chewbacca’ somether or other” you are “still trying to figure out”? It’s, “Chewbacca Defense.” I put it in my first post, in quotes (tough to figure out: what threw you, the quotation marks?) As Wikipedia puts it, “It is used to refer to any legal strategy or propaganda strategy that seeks to overwhelm its audience with nonsensical arguments, as a way of confusing the audience and drowning out legitimate opposing arguments. It is thus a kind of logical fallacy: specifically, a red herring fallacy and non sequitur similar to argumentum ad nauseam.”
I recommend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_Defense
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=61727
2. At some point in the past you told somebody you were opposed to anti-Semitism.
Yes, in interviews, on radio, and specifically to the set of supporters you are trying to discredit.
3. My questions concerning subsequent anti-Semitic posts befuddled you.
Nothing you have said could befuddle me, but I bet that felt delicious to type.
4. I am the general counsel of Bloomberg.
Mazeltoff.
Last but not least I come to the subject matter of this item:
5. You have nothing to say about the anti-Semitism on the Yahoo message boards. You still don’t after three posts on this message board.
The last is what I find most interesting about this exchange. This is a website that focuses on Jewish issues. This would be a golden opportunity for you to clarify your position on the posts that I quoted in my message.
Interesting how the words, “I condemn them” are foreign to your lips. I must assume that you don’t condemn them, because if you did feel that way, you would have said so by now. But please, if you do condemn those posts, feel free to say so and clarify your position. It would be helpful if you would be clear and speak in plain language, and avoid jargon like “chewbacca” that mean nothing to me or to most people.
OK, I thought “crapola” was pretty clear, but maybe that is jargon to you. “Crapini”? “Horseshit”? Apparently calling statements “crapola” is insufficiently clear for even one with such an acute mind as your own, so I will state, “I condemn all anti-Semitic statements, whether they be related to the naked shorting issue, or not.” Hint: next time someone refers to something by any cognate of “crap” it is probably a condemnation.
Concerning Tom Friedman, who is considered by many on this board to be anything but pro-Israel, I would appreciate your describing how you came to the conclusion that he always sided with Israel. Please be as specific as you can.
Yeahhh. Well, I would appreciate you spending your Saturday night writing me 10 pages on the significance of Molly Bloom’s buttocks to James Joyce. Oh wait, that’s right, we’re not each other’s bosses or professors and don’t assign memorandi and term papers.
In brief: he makes a pretense of sympathy for the Arab side but then takes the Israeli on any substantive issue. That is OK, I do on most myself. I just don’t cloak it with a lot of feigned even-handedness (as a puny intellectual Friedman lacks the spine to just stand for anything without a lot of hand-wringing about it). In the days leading up to the Iraq invasion it was hard to read anything he wrote wrote on Arabic culture and history without picking up a scent of “those dirty Arabs,” however, and I do not condone that.
My main objection to Friedman, however, is not his pusillanimous and snivelling way of defending Israel, instead of the way I do (”Same values as America, tougher neighborhood”). My main objection to him is on grounds of banality.
Speaking of which, I said you are anti-Israel and you did not directly respond to that.
That is wht the Chewbacca Defense is all about. Just throw out a bunch of baseless and unconnected stuff and say, “Ah-ha! You never responded to this or that piece of mud!”
You said that you have never stated your position on the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
Perhaps you could describe your views on the Israel-Palestinian dispute. Please be frank on that subject.
See above.
You can continue to post on me and what a terrible fellow I am and how bad my judgment has been, but I think that the readers of this website are more interested in Middle East than your opinion of me.
But I am doing this for my amusement, and I am more interested in you and your motives.
As for point No. 3, yes, Mr. Byrne, I am the general counsel of Bloomberg! You found me out. When I am not serving as general counsel of Bloomberg, I am chief rabbi of Israel and Deputy Chief of the Papago Indian Tribe.
Yes, I am making fun of you.
Yes, but in a rather flat and uninspired way, I must say. Try to pick it up, would you?
But please, do not let that deter you from responding.
No worries, I didn’t.
So, Counselor, I’m told that you guys at Bloomberg think “Byrne is Satan” (no kidding, actual quote). Two questions:
1) Why?
2) Would that have any bearing on your decision to start banging this old tired drum?
Patrick
Comment by HannibalofCarthage
— April 22, 2006 @ 6:29 pm
Thank you for your definition of “chewbacca.” It describes perfectly what you have been doing in your messages.
Your assessment of Tom Friedman definitely does not fall under that definition. It is very clear, in that it has got to be one of the stupidest things I have ever read concerning that person. It is an ignorant, bigoted assessment of a writer who is anything but pro-Israel and is constantly criticized in this and other websites in that regard.
That you could make such comments at all demonstrates that you know as little about Tom Friedman’s columns as you do about anything else you “addressed” in your bizarre correspondence.
I did not ask your views on anti-Semitism as a whole. I asked if you would specifically condemn the remarks that appeared on the Yahoo board. OK, here if not on that board itself, and after four posts you are still unwilling to do so.
Why? It is easy. You appear to be an educated man. Why is it so difficult to write, “I condemn the posts on the Yahoo board”? Why do you keep evading?
A general condemnation of anti-Semitism in theory is meaningless. Even Alex Seredin, the Internet bigot, said on this site that he “condemns all anti-Semitism” — even while calling people “kikes” on Usenet boards.
You say one thing that is interesting, which that I am trying to “discredit your supporters.” I presume that is the reason you do not denounce the incessant anti-Semitism of the people boosting your company — that they are your “supporters.” Why do you not renounce the support of bigots?
Lastly, and to clarify, I am not the general counsel of Bloomberg. I said it was a “joke” and that I was “making fun of you” I urge you to go back to Wkipedia and look up that word and that phrase. Nor am I the chief rabbi of Israel or the deputy chief of the Papagos. I included those phrases to demonstrate the absurdity of your remark. If you go to Wikipedia and study the concept of “joke” you may find more enlightenment on that subject.
Not that there is anything wrong with being general counsel of Bloomberg. Since you apparently dislike this person, I assume he must also be quite a good person as well and I am honored to be (rather oddly) “accused” of being him.
I do not know why “you guys at Bloomberg” — as you put it — “think ‘Byrne is Satan’ (no kidding, actual quote).” Nor do I think that is correct. My guess is that they are doing what I am doing, which is making fun of you.
P.S. It is “mazel tov.” Please keep that in mind next time you address snide comments to a Jewish website.
P.P.S. I ran “general counsel of Bloomberg” in Google and came up with a Karl Kilb — see http://www.htsfund.org/christoforous.html. Is this the dastardly general counsel of Bloomberg to which you refer? If not, please give me the name of that person, as I would like to alert him to this correspondence as I am sure he would find it as bizarre and amusing as I do.
P.P.P.S. You run a public company? Amazing.
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 22, 2006 @ 10:33 pm
Mr. Byrne’s “chewbacca” has definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. Another lost customer here.
Mr. Byrne uses “Hannibal of Carthage” as his moniker. Just a historical reminder that Hannibal eventually became a military advisor to Antiochus III, plunderer and violator of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Comment by Shy Guy
— April 23, 2006 @ 6:34 am
I also am both outraged and offended by Byrne’s comments, particularly his vulgarity and noxious comments on Friedman.
I share Mediacrity’s curiosity as to why Byrne has failed to specifically condemn the message board anti-Semitism. It apparently is not something that bothers him when it comes from his friends and supporters.
Comment by Ben Benson
— April 23, 2006 @ 8:33 am
Good point re the obscenities that he used. I ordinarily would have edited them using astericks, but I thought that this person’s vileness was material to the discussion.
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 23, 2006 @ 10:58 am
Hi Mediacrity,
This really is getting Chewbacca Defense-like. Simple criticism of Friedman is without argument deemed “bigoted” and “noxious” (though you also criticize him) calling something “crapola” and “horseshit” is an insufficiently clear condemnation, a universal condemnation (which includes Yahoo, right?) is not specific enough, the moniker “Hannibal” is subtle allusion to approval for Antioch III (who many think betrayed Hannibal) etc. The truth is, it looks to me like you are too used to hanging out with Guilty White People who fall over themselves apologizing at the drop of an outrage-hat, feigned or sincere. I see the game: I make a comparison between Thomas Friedman’s rhetorical style and Jim’s/Herb’s, and then you accuse me of anti-Semitism or report that others do, and then I am supposed to fall over myself promising that it is not true, and in the process you try to get me to concede anything else you are going for. I think I’ve seen that movie before once or twice. I am simply not buying into the control games, and the outrage looks pretty stretched and forced to me: sorry that this appears to discomfit you so.
“It is ‘mazel tov.’ Please keep that in mind next time you address snide comments to a Jewish website.”
It was not snide and technically, it is “מַזָּל טוֹב.” (if that appears correctly here). I used to write it “mazal tov” but then a Jewish person in England told me “mazeltoff” was the better Anglicisation. Anyway, here are almost 2,000 “Jewish website” that use “mazeltoff” and Google suggests “mazeltoff” as a correction so you cold take it up with them if it matters (which it doesn’t, as it is apparently just a different Anglicisation, as I said):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=mazeltoff&spell=1
The rest is just more fourth grade “I’m making fun of you!” sneers that only matters to guys who care a lot about what others think of them (and cannot comprehend others who don’t) so I think the discussion dies a natual death there.
Bye-bye all. - Patrick
PS As far as Friedman goes (which was, as I recall, the subject of all this before Chewbacca showed up), nothing I could say could top this really spectacular review by Taibbi (WARNING: do not read, Mediacrity, if your clearly delicate nerves are shaken by a few naughty words).
FLATHEAD
The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.
By Matt Taibbi
I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world’s manganese supply. Who knew what it meant—but one had to assume the worst
“It’s going to be called The Flattening,” he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing.
It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called The World Is Flat. It didn’t matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.
So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:
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.
Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
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.
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.
It’s impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical approach. It’s not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called “the most important columnist in America today.” That it’s Friedman’s own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman’s own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he’s in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country’s most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.
Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick’s potential, and it’s absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he’s choosing to argue that the world is flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen to argue that the moon was made of cheese.
And that’s basically what he’s doing here. The internet is speeding up business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than ever. Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical gist of The World Is Flat. It’s brilliant. Only an America-hater could fail to appreciate it.
Start with the title.
The book’s genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:
As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.”
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!
This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting—ironically, as it were—with Columbus’s discovery that the world is round.
Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the “flat world” into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.
“Let me… share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round,” he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.
To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman “had Lufthansa business class.” When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: “Gigabites of Taste.” Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: “No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas.”
After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. 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. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.
And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I’m not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman’s book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author’s metaphors.
God strike me dead if I’m joking about this. Judge for yourself. After the initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and gone back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a monstrous mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the “ten great flatteners,” which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that’s a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: “Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual.” These technologies Friedman calls “steroids,” because they are “amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.”
According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them. Although these 10 flatteners existed already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree—a period of time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0, with Globalization 1.0 beginning with Columbus—they did not come together to bring about Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the 10 flatteners had, with the help of the steroids, gone through their “Triple Convergence.” The first convergence is the merging of software and hardware to the degree that makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub (the product featured in Friedman’s favorite television commercial) possible. The second convergence came when new technologies combined with new ways of doing business. The third convergence came when the people of certain low-wage industrial countries—India, Russia, China, among others—walked onto the playing field. Thanks to steroids, incidentally, they occasionally are “not just walking” but “jogging and even sprinting” onto the playing field.
Now let’s say that the steroids speed things up by a factor of two. It could be any number, but let’s be conservative and say two. The whole point of the book is to describe the journey from Globalization 2.0 (Friedman’s first bestselling book) to Globalization 3.0 (his current bestselling book). To get from 2.0 to 3.0, you take 10 flatteners, and you have them converge—let’s say this means squaring them, because that seems to be the idea—three times. By now, the flattening factor is about a thousand. Add a few steroids in there, and we’re dealing with a flattening factor somewhere in the several thousands at any given page of the book. We’re talking about a metaphor that mathematically adds up to a four-digit number. If you’re like me, you’re already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this numerical jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For instance:
And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you a Thomas Friedman metaphor, a set of upside-down antlers with four thousand points: the icing on your uber-steroid-flattener-cake!
Let’s speak Friedmanese for a moment and examine just a few of the notches on these antlers (Friedman, incidentally, measures the flattening of the world in notches, i.e. “The flattening process had to go another notch”; I’m not sure where the notches go in the flat plane, but there they are.) Flattener #1 is actually two flatteners, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the Windows operating system. In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like “Windows” is introduced; you wince, knowing what’s coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn’t disappoint. His description of the early 90s:
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?
Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?
Comment by HannibalofCarthage
— April 23, 2006 @ 8:50 pm
Hi All,
I just woke up thinking, You know, there might be some sincere people on this board. Maybe I have just grown too cynical, having gotten accustomed to financial boards where apparently everyone is shilling for someone.
But on this blogsite, it occurs to me now that there may be sincere people who really care about the issues, and who, not knowing me, wonder if there is anything to this (to me, respectfully, somewhat uptight) claim that because I called Friedman banal and compared his fake hand-wringing to Cramer and Herb’s, that it is a sign of anti-Semitism. So if there be such a person really on this board, I say: Of course I decry the anti-Semitism on Yahoo. Jesus H. Christ! What are you kidding me? Could anyone really think I don’t denounce those knuckleheads? I know that, and I check all the time to make sure this is not going to turn into some kind of Christian vs. Jewish thing, and am using my influence to keep people from talking about it that way. So give me a break: please don’t you make this about Christian vs. America.
Mazal?
And I really do mean it: if you really were sincerely wondering if there was any truth to it, of course I denounce those knuckleads on Yahoo (who all showed up together on the same day).
Patrick
Comment by HannibalofCarthage
— April 23, 2006 @ 10:00 pm
You still haven’t explained how you came to the ridiculous, inaccurate and, in my view, bigoted assertion that Tom Friedman — whose insensitivity toward Israel is well-documented — “always sides with Israel.”
The lengthy article you discourteously posted — a link would have sufficed — does not address your bizarre view of Friedman, as you know full well.
This is not the Senate and a fillibuster is poor netiquette, Mr. Byrne.
Could anyone really think I don’t denounce those knuckleheads?
Of course. Because when you took it upon yourself to come to this site, you denounced everybody but those “knuckleheads.” Instead you lashed out at me and your personal enemies, all totally irrelevant to the subject of message board bigotry.
You finally addressed the subject of my post –which, I repeat, is anti-Semitism on the message board — grudgingly, and only after posting a series of odd, sneering, sometimes obscene ramblings that sought to dissemble and divert. Or as you put it, “Chewbacca.”
All that being said, I must admit that reading your bizarre rants and taunts has been an entertaining if disturbing spectacle.
However, I must admit to a nagging thought. You are the chief executive of a company. Don’t you have anything better to do than to engage in public histrionics on someone else’s website?
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 24, 2006 @ 7:55 am
Byrne has the support of legions of rednecks and Internet bigots. He doesn’t want to lose their support, which is why he was so quick to come on this site and attack you, not them. Getting a clear condemnation of their specific conduct was like pulling teath.
If you want to hear more ignorant ravings from Byrne, go on Christian radio network and listen to how he raves on and on about the “Israeli mafia” how Israelis supposedly control 75% of the Ecstasy trade. He said “every rabbit hole” you “go down” leads to the Israeli mafia.
http://cfrn.net/investigates/
Under “Interview Archive” you go to the “Patrick Bryne” segment and click on the “MP3″ icon.
You can listen to him tell the interviewer that Israelis control 75% of the Ecstasy trade and that the Israeli mob and the Italian mob are at the bottom of every rabbit hole in this conspiracy.
Comment by Fred Flinstone
— April 24, 2006 @ 12:50 pm
The slippery Mr. Byrne is continuing to evade the issue.
He says that he “decries the anti-Semitism on Yahoo.” The problem is that, as we all know, such general declarations are useless. The anti-Semitism on Internet message boards or the opinion pages of Islamic newspapers never say they anti-Semitic.
What he very conspicuously has not done, and what any responsible corporate officer would do, is make a firm and specific denunciation of specific comments made on the message boards.
For example, just for the heck of it I went to the Yahoo Overstock board and I found someone saying as follows:
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=1600670676&tid=ostk&sid=1600670676&mid=89292
“How many of the people bashing are jewish? We know you use software to hide your identity, dont be afraid, just answer.
“It seems to be a jewish issue to all of you, tell us, how many of the perpetrators of the criminal trading against Overstock are jews? You seem to know.
“What do you think of the jews trading illegally against this stock? Do you find it wrong to accuse them just beacuse theyre jews?
“Youve often derided Islam and threatened muslims on this site- are you zionists, who believe mulsims should be treated inhumanely?
“Lets talk jews a while, first you cowards explain a bit about yourselves.”
Either Mr. Byrne should specifically and clearly renounce and decry posts such as this or I say, “be gone.” He has wasted significant amoiunts of bandwith with his insulting and condescending posts. I for one am sick and tired of him.
Oh, and last and certainly not least, here is one shopper who is not going to ever use Overstock.com.
Comment by Ben Benson
— April 24, 2006 @ 3:15 pm
“A reader tells me that haters are now flocking to financial message boards, where talk of stocks and bonds is mixed in with hate-Jew messages and anti-Zionist rants. One frequent locale is the Yahoo message board of Overstock.com, whose CEO is the anti-Israel yahoo Patrick Byrne, famed for his “jihad” rants and fervent belief that Tom Friedman is too pro-Israel.”
Mediacrity,
what evidence, other than that Dr. Byrne doesn’t like Tom Friedman’s method of reasoning, and thinks he more often than not sides with Israel, makes you so sure that he is an anti-Semite? Can you please be specific in answering?
Thank You,
HOTM
Comment by HOTM
— April 24, 2006 @ 3:24 pm
I didn’t say he was anti-Semitic and he didn’t say he didn’t like Friedman’s method of reasoning, so you’re 0 for 2. He said he thought Friedman “always sides with Israel.” His subsequent rant on the subject of Friedman’s “reasoning” is nothing but a lot of obfuscation and spin.
I have had quite a bit enough of Mr. Byrne’s dissembling, and I am not going to permit any further clogging of this comment section by pals of Mr. Byrne coming here to rant and/or spin.
Most moderators would have either deleted or severely edited most of Mr. Byrne’s posts. I have allowed them because I feel that the spectacle of a CEO making a fool of himself is a matter of public interest.
Comment by Mediacrity
— April 24, 2006 @ 4:05 pm
Here is an other example of the routine, daily barage of anti-Semitism on the Yahoo Overstock message boards:
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=1600670676&tid=ostk&sid=1600670676&mid=89298
“Maybe they think people wont pursue action against crooks because theyre jews…theyre wrong. ”
Patrick Byrne should stop blowing smoke and specifically, and by name, denounce his anti-Semitic supporters. Otherwise as far as I am concerned he is no better than they are.
Comment by Ben Benson
— April 24, 2006 @ 4:38 pm