Posted on 04/06/2005 7:33:32 AM PDT by Valin
The world was *larger* than Columbus reckoned. :0)
DA! Somewhere there is a connection break between my brain and fingertips! Thanks for the correction!
Well put.
The plant I work in is going to move out of state sometime soon. So many people I work with are OMG(!) what will I do! I keep telling them if you're a good worker and have lots of little pieces of paper that say I can do....this, you're always be able to get a good job.
That is largely true. I wish it were a more fluid system, though. Because the labor market is less efficient than financial markets (employees don't see all available jobs and salaries, employers don't know everyone who's looking, and there are costs beyond salary incurred in hiring someone) people and companies waste a lot of time and money trying to find good matches.
Tom Friedman shows sheer ignorance of history, which isn't surprising, since he seems to be ignorant about almost everything else.
Earth to Friedman: Nobody in the middle ages or the Renaissance with any kind of education thought that the world was flat. The ancient Greeks figured out that it was round, the the Ptolemaic model, which everyone accepted until the time of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, had a spherical earth at the center of the solar system.
It's perfectly clear in Dante's Commedia. Dante goes down through the center of a spherical earth, through hell, and out the other side, emerging on the island of Purgatory opposite Italy.
The only quarrel Columbus had with this common knowledge was that he suffered from the delusion that the sphere of the earth was much smaller than commonly thought, and therefore that it would be easy to sail around it. That's why he thought he had arrived in Asia when he hit America.
The rest of this column is also nonsense. Here we are, back to "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," with technology transforming the world. If only everyone had technology, there would be no more war. Ha. Who can look at the history of the past thousand years and even begin to imagine that the advancement of science will, in itself, put an end to war?
RE: Who can look at the history of the past thousand years and even begin to imagine that the advancement of science will, in itself, put an end to war?
I'll raise you 3000. Who can look at the past 4000 years and conclude such a thing? View it from the perspective of our supposedly former adversaries. Here was the US / West, in its Cold War stance, being very guarded about sharing technology and engaging economically with Communists and other anti Western forces. Now, all of the sudden, based on some apparent liberalization in Eastern Europe, and the reengineering of the USSR into something beyond that, the West suddenly starts sharing technology, investing money and allowing businesses to go into places that were, and in some cases, still are, pretty scary. Now ask yourself, if you are sitting there in your anti Western office, are you going to perhaps put on an act, and appear to be a "made over" anti Western fiend? Perhaps, maybe you'll even allow a few Golden Arches to go up? And then, some Western pinhead writes a book stating that the erection of said Golden Arches means that there is "no way" you will ever attack the West ... "I wan't some more of those Golden Arches!" ;)
I put it at a thousand years, because that's about when the scientific and technological revolution began in Christian Europe. There was plenty of sophisticated science earlier in Sumer, Greece, China, etc., but nothing like the kind of steady building of one advance upon another that began as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. See Lynn Thorndike's many books on medieval technology.
But of course before that development began it would be difficult or impossible to find any connection between technological development and peace.
Friedman seems to imagine that as soon as the Arabs have Lexuses in their garages and laptop computers in their tents they will suddenly become nonviolent. Nonsense. It's well known that most of the al Qaeda leaders are rich and well educated, and that they seem to have a fascination with laptop computers.
BTTT.
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