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Tag Archives: Common sense
The Gasoline Can as a Model of America’s Decline, by Freed Radical
America was once a simpler and better place. From Freed Radical at theburningplatform.com:
As a person of white privilege (but who says I’m white?), I engage in certain white-oriented activities around the house (which house I own outright as an act of explicit racism). One of those activities is mowing the grass. You may be thinking, “lawn,” but my lawn contains too many weeds to be considered a proper lawn. In that one area I fall down as a white privileged suburbanite. But I do identify as a lawn owner, and that’s what counts.
Anyway, I use a CO2 belching lawn mower that runs on polluting and global warming racist gasoline. I fill my lawn mower with gasoline from what you and I call a gas can. Now I’ve been using gas cans since I was a kid, and my father (possession of which is another indicator of racist white privilege) paid me hard cash to mow the grass, or Coup de grâce, as he humorously put it. We had a gas can like this one:
(image credit: ebay.com via duckduckgo.com)
It also had a little screw on cap for the end of the goose neck tube. There was a paper washer in the cap to prevent gas from spilling or evaporating. If I remember correctly (cue Jeopardy thinking music), our house never burned down and we were never asphyxiated from gasoline fumes, though it is entirely possible some low level exposure turned me into the white privileged racist that I am. Lacking the possibility of a proper randomized double blind study, like they do in all vaccine testing, we may never know.
Posted in Business, Government, History, Morality, Science, Society
Tagged Common sense, Complexity, Gas cans
Man’s Ingenuity and Foolishness, by Theodore Dalrymple
Nowadays, nothing is more scarce than common sense. From Theodore Dalrymple at takimag.com:
I am an admirer of ratcatchers; in my experience, they respect their enemies and love their work. I have never met a bored ratcatcher, or one who gave the impression that he wished he was doing something else. They are always knowledgeable in the ways of the Rat, and since the Rat is cunning, they have always to use their intelligence to the full to outwit him. They have many stories to tell. There is no final victory over the Rat—though he may one day win a victory over us.
Once we had a dead rat under the floorboards of our dining room. I would not have credited that so small a creature could cause such a smell. It was intolerable. We called the municipal ratcatcher and in those days he was a genuine public servant, that is to say a servant of the public. He came straightaway, and one knew at once that he was competent, that he knew what he was talking about (economists and financial advisers rarely give this impression, at least to me). He told us that to find the culprit and remove it he would have to lift the floorboards, which would be a great nuisance to us; alternatively, we could put up with the smell for six weeks and then it would go. We chose the latter.
The municipal ratcatcher was absolutely accurate in his prediction. He knew his rats, dead or alive. After six weeks, the smell disappeared as suddenly as it had started. It was worth the dead-rat smell to encounter disinterested human knowledge and competence.
