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Sorry, but I read the Tagesspiegel piece BEFORE posting. I was initially curious to see whether this was an artifect of translation, and found it was a direct quote.

I think perhaps you did yourself a disservice by citing the Tagesspiegel article, because it is (IMO) little more than a puff piece about Fischer, with no serious analysis and few actual facts (except perhaps the "rolling of the eyes" in the first sentence).

Specifically, it does not explain what Fischer means by "Don't feed the beast"; this is merely the closing tagline. This vacuum certainly facilitated my association.

More generally, we are all judged by the quality of our metaphors, and people like Fischer moreso. The scorn that W received for talking about a "crusade" was entirely justified. I personally would have hoped that Fischer would have been savvy enough to avoid this kind of pitfall.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

by dvx (dvx.clt ät gmail dotcom) on Fri Sep 15th, 2006 at 04:44:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Another metaphor that has been floated in relation to terrorism is "to fight malaria it is not enough to kill mosquitos, you have to drain the swamp".

Metaphors are not neutral and I fault Fischer for painting the problem as a "beast".

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. — Euripides

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Sep 15th, 2006 at 05:10:05 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I think he only used the word "beast" so that he could play with the words "defeat" and "feed"

He would probably agree with your mosquito-swarm metaphor.

Both you could read his piece in the NYT, linked to in the diary to see clarify his position.

by Joerg in Berlin ((joerg.wolf [AT] atlanticreview.org)) on Fri Sep 15th, 2006 at 09:13:48 AM EST
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