“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t, and can’t teach, create a fake ecological disaster so that they can get grant money.”
from the comments at this post at NeuralNetWriter
11 thoughts on “Thought for the Day”
Comments are closed.
Not just money, but lots and lots of power, influence, and prestige…didn’t Algore win an Academy Award/Nobel Prize for his “contributions?”
Someone pointed out the othe day that when Gorbachev left the old USSR, he took up with the “greens” in San Franciso—-so more than metaphorically, green became the new red.
If this story gets half the coverage/scrutiny it deserves, many will be discredited or fired…I’m not holding my breath.
J. Scott,
…so more than metaphorically, green became the new red.
Yeah, my spouse was still in college back circa 1990 and noted that all the people who had been in radical leftist often communist political groups simply picked up in mass and joined or created environmental groups.
The central drive of leftism is to create a world in which articulate-intellectuals dominate and control the economically productive. Marxism and environmentalism are just rationalizations for creating that dominance.
In his 1960 book “Science and Government,” C P Snow posited that the most important decisions of society would increasingly be made, in secret, by experts, based on knowledge which the average person could not hope to understand. (As examples, he used the pre-WWII secret debate over air defense technology and the mid-WWI secret debate over strategic bombing)
Snow was talking mainly about national defense matters…I doubt he ever envisaged that secrecy would be applied to something like the study of climate change.
Regarding the ability of the average voters to understand the issues–the argument that voters need to be able to understand science & technology in order to fulfill their duty as citizens has been used since the early 1950s as leverage for directing more money at education. They got the money; they did not produce any increases in the average understanding of science–quite the contrary. Another large-scale fraud.
David, You said, “Another large-scale fraud.” Concur. I would submit that every major agenda item of the left for the last 40 years has been a fraud; designed to decrease individual liberty and increase the power of the state.
The obsession with secrecy by such groups makes them spectacularly susceptible to the disgruntled IT worker who finally has had it with these idiots messing up his database.
One of my favorite conservative novels is “Sincerely, Willis Wayde,” by Marquand. Nobody has heard of it in years. One tiny bit of wisdom from that novel is a scene between the boy, whose parents live on the mill owner’s estate, and the gardener. One day, just to pass the time of day, Willis asks the gardener how things are going. The gardener then goes into a rant about how the bugs are eating all his plants. He ends his rant by saying, “They just don’t know how things are here up at the Big House. I don’t know how it will all come out.”
The moral for me was that even the lowliest of the workers has his problems that seem overwhelming. I suspect that some IT professional (As they say now) got fed up with people messing up his database and outed the lot. The CRU web site yesterday was confessing that the original raw data had not been preserved. Now that part of the site is down. They screwed up his database and they are paying the price.
I had always heard that those who can’t, and can’t teach, teach teachers.
The quote is certainly snappy, but I disagree to a certain point, and that point is this—the people who allegedly “can’t” have gained enormous power and influence across the globe, both culturally and politically, while those who supposedly “can” find themselves outmaneuvered and outfoxed on a daily basis.
In the final analysis, this is a contest of will and committment, not aggregate skill or knowledge. If those who are driven to dominate others are not opposed with an equal or stronger determination by those who strive for individual rights and liberties, than the former will succeed, and the latter, for all their competence and “can do-ism”, will be shackled to a yoke fashioned by others.
It is long past time for scoffing at the opposition. They are within reach of the total state they have yearned for since time immemorial.
The victors in this struggle will be the side that understands its position most clearly, and strives to achieve its goals most relentlessly.
From where I am sitting, the side of dominence and control is ascendent around the world, while the side of the individual is uncoordinated and flailing about in a spasm of sputtering, but ineffectual, indignation.
Flippancy may be good for a chuckle, but it won’t stop the coming calamitous decisions being made in Copenhagen and elsewhere.
VeryRetired,
The basic problem is that people who can are busy doing things. They don’t have the idle time to pursue the political fad of the day. By contrast those who can’t are intrinsically idle. They do have time to talk and attend because they have no productive work to do.
Shannon— I understand your point and don’t disagree. Most people I know could not be bothered with following all the twists and turns of this or that political maneuvering.
I find that frame of mind understandable and healthy, to a certain point. We are at that certain point now, both in this country and in the world.
It will do us little good as a society if any number of our productive citizens can talk for hours about their work, or football, or the latest sex scandal, while the “can’ts” spend their hours and days planning their next move to take over another aspect of our lives.
It is all well and good to be the best plumber or brain surgeon or computer programmer around, but if they all end up marching around in nice, neat battalions while those whose only goal was to control them shout out the commands and the cadence, then what has all their tecnical competence created?
To paraphrase Anton Chygur in “No Country For Old Men”, as he prepares to kill another person whose gotten in his way, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, what good was the rule?”
If so many of us are too busy and too disinterested to become involved in the messy, dirty, nasty struggle to preserve our freedoms and liberties, what good was all that competence and productivity, if it delivered the world to tyranny?
Very Retired, brilliantly observed:
And, “If so many of us are too busy and too disinterested to become involved in the messy, dirty, nasty struggle to preserve our freedoms and liberties, what good was all that competence and productivity, if it delivered the world to tyranny?”
The problem is not only the busy and disinterested, but even more so the noisy “collaborators” who haven’t been able to volunteer fast enough as foot soldiers in the controllers’ army of PC propagandists to gain some temporary advantage or to hold on a little longer to some job. That includes every democrat in Congress, 95%+ of academics, and every business person who spends all day agreeing with the socialist complaints of his (curiously enough) dwindling clientele. Being human, they find the least painful way to join the opposition is to adopt the beliefs of the opposition. Less struggling with a prickly conscience that way.
Granted, an individual act of resistance has about as much chance of succeeding as a pie has of not being crushed by the wheel of an approaching truck. Hence the ineffectualness of our “sputtering” indignation. But individual acts of resistance can add up, and enough pies on the highway can send even an 18 wheeler into the ditch.
“the people who allegedly “can’t” have gained enormous power and influence across the globe, both culturally and politically, while those who supposedly “can” find themselves outmaneuvered and outfoxed on a daily basis.”
VeryRetired, how about “those who can’t justify their receipts by the service they provide hire a lobbyist, join a union (or professional association), become civil servants, apply for public assistance or, more traditionally, teach. ” Not quite as pithy though, is it? There’s a lot of “them”/us around these days and I’d say it’s the problem morally and practically with governing in the U.S.