9/13/2014

Theory Versus Practice

Having dealt with some rather accusatory and close-minded academics venting their fact-deficient and emotion laden vitriol in the Letters pages of one of our local newspapers over the past five years or so, it became apparent to anyone reading their diatribes that they had no experience dealing with the real world. After reading them for a while it became a sport to predict what any one of them would write about a particular subject or cause du jour.

All of their arguments are based upon theory, not practical experience. It certainly explains why all four of them espouse the supposed virtues of socialism. They don't come right out and say that, but they go on and on about the evils of capitalism and how it must be replaced with something else. (Too bad they can't tell the difference between capitalism and crony capitalism. As far as they are concerned they are the same thing...which they are not.) This 'something else' is socialism, a failed ideology that has killed far more people than just about any other political system in history. But that doesn't seem to bother them...or they refuse to believe that such a system can be far more brutal than anything they've been railing against.

The one thing they all have in common: they are incapable at looking at things from other people's point of view. As academics one would think they should be able to do so. But has become all too common these days, academics in subjects other than the hard sciences tend to be close-minded and blind to the fact that they are so. (I'm not saying the same type of academic doesn't exist there as well, it's just much less prevalent.) On more than one occasion when I've had the opportunity to debate one of them face to face they have been incapable of actual debate. All they could do was repeat the same old canards as if by repetition others would somehow “see the light” and what they were saying would be true. They didn't feel the need to back up any of their points with verifiable evidence. More often than not their 'debate' degenerated into laying blame for every evil, real or imagined, on Republicans, George W. Bush, Halliburton, Big Oil, and a whole host of other leftist imaginary bugaboos that needed to be eliminated in order for everything to be perfect. But from history we know no such thing will occur. Their perfect world is nothing of the kind. Instead it is a world of misery and tyranny.

The academics fall under the sway of the Non-Reciprocal Theorem Of Theory Versus Practice which states: “In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice they are not.”


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