No Strings Attached

I've learned something new today: the origin of the phrase "no strings attached".

Paging John Galt

Making Light on Kieran Healy on Thomas Friedman

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. [Emphasis added.]

I...I...I don't know to say this...but I think I'm having an Ayn Rand flashback to Atlas Shrugged.

I know I'm paging John Galt in my title, but I fear the only ones who'll answer are Cherry Taggert and Eddie Willers.