helmintholog: In what dungeon dimension:
Can the words
As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.not be followed by these.The president has therefore accepted my resignation.?It seems an offence against grammar that they were not, as
if the meaning of the word had simply been abolished and when Rumsfeld
spoke of “responsibility” he was in fact using an Azerbaijani term for
boiled sweets, which just happened to be a homonym for the English word.It reminds me of the time when a Soviet-ear poet was jailed for
seven years for foul crime of denying that freedom of speech existed in
the Soviet Union. Destroying the meaning of “democracy” seems to me
much less serious than destroying the meaning of “responsibility”.
Plenty of fairly decent societies have functioned without much
democracy. In the end, perhaps, democracy is largely a mechanism for
forcing the powerful to take responsibility. But no society is worth
defending – no society is even a society – where “responsibility” means
nothing at all…
Back to web/tech/geek links soon; need to wash the taste out of my mouth.