or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
•
"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
September 06, 2005
The Eternal Puzzle
Avedon Carol has been trying to find out who originally said this:
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
Whoever it was, they were right. If you were sitting on the roof of your New Orleans house last week waiting to drown, you probably weren't wondering whether the Bush administration was acting out of incompetence or malice or a heady combination of both.
Farther away from the destruction, though, it's hard not to ask: idiots? evil? evil idiots?
In any case, it's good to remember that this is a conundrum that has arisen throughout the ages in many countries. For instance, here's George Orwell, writing more than sixty years ago:
It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on... and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time.Posted at September 6, 2005 02:45 PM | TrackBack
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
Thats our bumkin in chief all right or as my ol man use to call all boneheads, "Non Comus Menace".
"Mr. Sideshow came in earlier and quoted to me a permutation of Arthur C. Clarke's famous formulation that I'd never heard before:
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
from:
http://sideshow.me.uk/ssep05.htm#041417
via:
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/quote_of_the_day/
did you hear this one:
from the former Miami-Dade emergency management chief commenting on FEMA director Brown:
"He's done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm"
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054585
Quoting Orwell is all very well and good, but at a time like this, the best quotations may be found from Ayn Rand.
But since people hate Any Rand, and anyone who's worth anything has already read Atlas Shrugged and doesn't need to be reminded how well that applies, I won't bother putting anything in quotes.
Posted by: alexis S at September 8, 2005 08:57 AMI ran across something similar to this in Idries Shah's book Reflections, which I read maybe 20 years ago - something to the effect that
"You would be surprised how often your thoughtlessness is interpreted as malice, and vice versa."
Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. at September 9, 2005 04:52 PM
