Quote of the Day
"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."- Robert Frost
In this definition, most successful people in the business and scientific world would be considered liberal. Speaking from personal experience, doing rigorous science requires one to propose multiple theories or interpretations for the same piece of data. Your co-workers helps you out by demanding endless control experiments to elimit each competing theory. On the other hand, a lack of conclusive evidence often left one to flip-flop between those different theories, but that does not mean you can't have a plan.
Of course, John Kerry is getting killed by the call-sign "flip-flopping," while we love Bush for his stubborness, I mean, resolve. It seems there are at least two explanations for his inflexibility, One, he hears, and people around him tells him, what he wants to hear. Two, he lacks any capacity for curiosity of the unfamiliar. Three, he's uncannily focused and goal-driven. But in any case, steadily holding on to one's old beliefs when new evidence points to the contrary should not be a quality for a world leader to have. Horrifying as it may seem, I would much prefer a Nixon over a Bush 43. Can you imagine what the world would be like if this was 1971, and Bush 43 has us in Vietnam, and the hope of ping-pong politics glimmering on the horizon? He would almost certainly have done the opposite of Nixon in both cases.
posted by hedgehog @ 6:19 PM
1 Comments:
Ahhh, politics and baseball. Does life get better than this? After a little self-ejumacation on the lovely world of proxy servers (bless the dear soul in Argentina for his open server), I'm finally able to read blogs from country-that-shall-remain-nameless. But here's a clue: It's sitting on top of the largest coal reserve in the world. It's also a place where there are on average 280 reported traffic related deaths every day. Note there was a spike last month however. Don't know why. But then again, in Feb a woman hit 9 people in succession and was caught on the road again in May after she hit another 7 people, with a "legal" drivers license. So perhaps not so mysterious after all.
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