23 Replies to “In Conversation With Tom Friedman’s House, A Continuing Series ….”

  1. That’s problem with Chinese internet crackdowns. After you ban one website, you still feel like banning another a half hour later.

  2. China is evil evil evil. They are single-handedly responsible for the starvation deaths of millions of North Koreans.

  3. Ooooo, that’s a bad idea. Millions of sexually frustrated only-child-boys suddenly have their outlet turned off, what do you think that’s gonna lead too? Man, I wish I had the blow up doll concession in China, though, ’cause someone has to make money off that one child policy.

  5. Ann Althouse nails it big time !! – although what she says is nothing new to sda readers – Kate being the best at making one see the light.
    This ‘Benevolent Dictator’ idea was suggested to me just lately. No, not by some wacko, but by a successful retiree who had a very responsible career all his life. If anybody would be able to see the fallacy in Friedman’s idea it would be him.
    Problem is, he takes in a lot of MSNBC (TV and web page).
    However!, he quickly saw the light with a little sda tonic and in the end agreed – how long would this Dictator remain Benevolent even if there was such a thing!? Or those around him/her ?? And no, it has never worked before.
    Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
    Power of the pen corrupts. Absolute power of the pen corrupts absolutely.
    The Ruling Class has it’s shirt in a not over the Internet because it is beginning to spoil their centuries long fun. Too bad, so sad 🙁

  6. Banning a hundred in the morning, another hundred in the afternoon, pretty soon, you’re talking real banning.
    The need to control those masses, is never sated.
    But bringing the internet under the control of the FCC is for your benefit too… it’s all for you.

  7. “A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer.”
    I’d probably replace ‘often’ with ‘always’, but otherwise, this statement is bang on.
    BANG. ON.

  9. If you check on Google Map you will find 7117 Bradley Blvd Bethesda has become much more lush since the hardscrabble days of the original photo. No doubt some benevolent dictator in the landscaping business gave the owners exactly what they required.

  10. Dictators are always benevolent when you do no more nor less than what they want you to do.
    When you try to live outside of their dictats is when the dictatorship becomes hard on your life and liberty.

  11. Dictators are always given their power by the people they govern (rule!). Many people prefer that other people be told what to do/think; when the Dictator clamps the iron fist around the former fools it is too late for everyone. People need to study history and the nature of mankind. The knowledge of History might make some of the lefto airheads re-evaluate if they knew what happened to most of Stalin’s pals when they overstepped the boundaries of the beast.

  12. Apparently ol Tommy boy is away for four months.
    It’s even money on Twitter as to wether China called him back for consultations or if he is painting that little shack at the top of the page.

  14. Gord, wasn’t long ago we had polititians paying for idiots like Gore to speak, now, get one of the fools to fess up hey Lorne Calvert. We had more fools sitting through David Suzuki’s Shakedown The Elementary Schools Across Canada speeches, all while the Canadians watched this taxpayer maggot motor on, in his big diesel burning bus. Now we have all of southern Alberta covered with windmills, long way to go on this SCAM still with idiots like Friedman and the rest of the Simpsons Martins Travers twisting the story and failing to publish facts.

  15. Jema54, with Stalin there was no boundaries. Asked by one of his inner circle why he continued to have purges, killing millions. Stalin replied, “It keeps the population from being complacent!” or words to that effect. These guys just love the killing.
    Pinochet was one of the only benevolent dictators I am aware of. He saved his country from becoming communist with Castro, built it back to financial health then resigned. It still is one of the best run countries in South America. Of course our leftists still hate him.

  16. Oh, if only we could execute people for treason against the state after a summary trial where they are guilty until impossibly proven innocent, and then make their families pay for the bullets used to kill them.
    Then we could really accomplish a lot!
    Power corrupts, but absolute power is freaking cool!

  17. People like “benevolent dictatorships” because they see themselves and their buddies as the guys in charge.
    What they don’t get is:
    A. One guy’s benevolence is another’s malevolence.
    B. Once you have a dictatorship, you either have to make hard decisions that result, sooner or later, in people getting killed so you can stay in power…or you yourself are killed by someone more ruthless.
    That being said, I have no illusions; when I become Tyrant for Life, Dread Overlord & General Arsehole in Charge of Buck-Stopping, heads will roll. In a humane way. (Do unto others, eh?)
    But mostly I will ignore the lot of you and be heartless, cold and distant personage. Also goverment will be a lot smaller, I don’t need armies of bureaucrats.

  18. So that leaves only…. what… 2,540,000 sites left for frustrated men to visit in China?
    But seriously, just think of all the late teen-early 20s girls with daddy issues that are out of work now.
    That’s going to have an effect on the ol’ unemployment rate.

  20. Well, if I could be dictator for a day, I’d sent Thomas Friedman to a Chinese gulag and see if it teaches him a lesson. 😀

  21. Thomas Friedman and his fellow travelers are beavering away just as hard as they can to get the Internet censored. Julian Assange, my friends.
    Of course, even the Chicoms might have trouble swooping down and arresting people in a country as heavily armed as the USA. I think Friedman has forgotten that part, and he has this notion that the peasants are going to bend over for him the same way they do in Europe and Asia.
    Tea Party bodes not well for Mr. Friedman, I think.

  22. It seems that statists never learn from history. Virtually every totalitarian state has had government intervention as the major cause of death and you think people would have learned by now that you don’t give absolute power to single individuals.
    The group of men who founded the US were well aware of the totalitarian impulse that everyone has and created a system which made it as difficult as possible for an individual to become dictator. But people like Friedman always think that they’re far superior to those dictators of the past and they won’t make the same mistakes that Stalin and Pol Pot made. Human nature hasn’t changed and giving one individual absolute power is as smart as giving a 2 year old a loaded rifle.
    One reason that Friedman and the current crop of deluded statists think that they can get away with dictatorship is that they are under the delusion that people are born as blank slates and are intrinsically good. Anything bad they do is as a result of poor education or upbringing so by ensuring that everyone is brought up correctly, we’ll have paradise on earth.
    The presence of a heavily armed populace in the USA must be terribly inconvenient for the idealists who just want a dictatorship for a short while.

  23. “The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.”
    – George Orwell, pacifist and socialist, in Notes on Nationalism (1945)

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