h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't completely agree. In addition to persistence you need a vector, a direction in which to persist successfully.

*image: John Cleese as boxer on a training run who meets a parked car in his path and doesn't know what to do so he turns around and runs back the way he came -Monty P.*

We'll all need a lot of persistence with the change to Barlesque now.

I suppose it depends on what your values are. The values espoused by Coolidge appear to be material success.

Some of those unrewarded geniuses and educated derelicts did a lot more for the human race than he ever did.

Let those who can do, do. Then the persistent types can steal their ideas and make a pile of money with it, as usual.

I didn't take it to mean strictly material things but rather a call to keep trying to make your goals happen. Things require an effort. Just being intelligent, just having a degree doesn't ensure success. For some people success equals power or a fat bank account. For others it means friendships and making a difference in your community. For some it means renouncing the world altogether. Whatever i means to us personally, it still requires a consistent effort. I suppose there arfe those who have success fall in their laps, but that has never been my personal experience.

As an example, I have taken a very poorly run, impoverished library and turned it into one my community is proud of. If I had given up when the going got tough, if I had believed the naysayers who said it was impossible, we would still be sitting in a building falling down around us with a levy less than half what it is now, offering substandard services because that was all we could afordand bemoaning our fate.

You may not like Coolidge personally, I'm not overly fond of him, but why does that make every sentiment he expressed suspect?

I think your point about persistence in personal goals is a good one. I agree that it depends on what your goals are: persistence in a bad cause would just be...well, persistence in a bad cause.

I just doubted that Coolidge was talking about that. It's probably a holdover from working with the history lessons on those leaders of the 1920s. They set the US economy up for a fall, big-time, by believing that business should control politics. It always seemed to me that the bootstrap philosophy of these 'successful' men was a way of saying that people who weren't successful in their way didn't count - and that it was their own fault, somehow. They just didn't try hard enough. Like Coolidge's dismissive statement about 'educated derelicts'.

If you look on the quote sites, the word 'persistence' would appear to be connected with people whose goals were material success - fame, fortune, whatever. Maybe people who are looking for something else think about it in a different way, I don't know. Maybe those were the only quotes they could find.

Maybe another way to talk about facing difficulties is to say, 'Don't lose hope?' The Dalai Lama said, 'No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.'

I think he's talking about persistence, but maybe I'm wrong.

If persistence only applies to material things, then what word should we use for more noble aspirations? Dedication, perhaps?

The most often adjective to describe me is stubborn. The truth is, I wasn't smart enough to know that what I wanted to do here was impossible.

I was thinking about your quote before I opened this, and I'd just got to the word 'stubborn' in my head. Two minds with the same thought.

I think stubbornness can be a good thing. If you know what to be stubborn about. You knew what you wanted and kept at it, which is a cool thing to do. I'm usually stubborn enough to hang around and work at a thing until they run me off.

I know a whole lot of people who fit the definition of insanity - doing the same things over and over again, and expecting a different result.

I don't see anything wrong at all with sticking to your guns. (I just objected to that darn Coolidge dissing people who don't succeed. A lot of good people don't get where they wanted to be. Don't make them derelicts or losers.)

Agreed, Dmitri. Just because people fail at material pursuits doesn't make them losers or derelicts. I know quite a few people who are genuinely good people who can't seem to accomplish much beyond having everyone who knows them like them. But that's quite a lot, if you ask me.

Amen. When I think of the happiest older people I knew as a kid, well, they didn't have much materially. But they were rich in other ways.

I remember being taken to a mountainside as a child. The lady who lived there, in a tar-paper shack, was 80. She said she had everything she needed - and there was a spring close by, about a half-mile away...

She seemed gloriously content.

Dmitri, that reminds me of my Great Aunt Alice. I think that hill folk were generally content. They seemed to grasp the importance of living in the moment, of appreciating small pleasures. Let's face it, being maerialistic wouldn't have done them much good. That would have only made them miserable. And they understood that interpersonal relationships not only brought lifelong friendships, but it also often meant survival. Nope, when it comes to people with both generosity of what few worldly goods they possessd and generosity of spirit, I can't think of anyone I'd rather have on my side in a time of need than common hill folk.

Since I'm pontificating I'll add that their impoverished condition was certainly not due to lack of intelligence. I'd like to see some Harvard or Oxford-educated big wigs manage as well under the same conditions, let alone any better. Eeking out an exsistence in the hills is not easy.

So why did they stay? Why didn't that inate intelligence and determination cause them to pack their bags and seek out an easier life? Sit on Aunt Alice's front porch and just open your eyes and look around you. Really look. It's amazingly beautiful. Then open yourself up to the "feel" of the hills. They are ancient. The oldest land mass in North America. There's something there, not sure what, but a sense of place that you can tap into if you'll let yourself.

I live in the foothills. It isn't particularly pretty here. I'm caught in that narrow strip of land between the mountains and the prairie, so we have features of both. I'm sure it was nice enough at one time, before the mining comanies came in. They raped and pillaged and destroyed what beauty ever exsisted. Then they went off and left all of the open shafts, tailing piles and derelict building behind them. We're gradually cleaning it all up, but it is costing hundreds of millions of dollars and likely won't be comleted in my lifetime.

I remember telling a good friend not too many year ago that I'd like to live someplace beautiful before I die. At the time I was standing on the Cornish coast gazing out to sea. That is another amazingly beautiful area. When I made the statement, that's what I wanted. I wanted to be someplace beautiful and for me exotic. But know what? All I have to do is relocate an hour south and I'll be in that beautiful place. It will sure cost less and I won't have to learn how to drive on the left side of the road.

And now for something comletely different. Sunday, January 23.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

--Joseph Goebbels

The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

--Mark Twain, Advice to Youth

I've changed my mind. I think I'll post Goebbels' entire quote.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

A very good quote, very apt to the way people form opinions these days.

I'd like to add a little background to Goebbels' theory here - which matches the ideas Hitler expressed in 'Mein Kampf'.

Yep, I have read 'Mein Kampf'. I hasten to add that I do not own any firearms.

Anyway, it might help us in our current situation of mass propaganda in the form of 'infotainment', etc, to think about where it all began. Where Hitler and Goebbels learned their trade.

The British press. During World War I.

This is not a disputable fact. Nor is it a personal opinion. It's taught in history courses, if you get the right ones (like the one I wrote, er...) Well, anyway...

The US was a growing power. Neutral, it was trading with both parties in WWI equally. Made sense - America's business was business. Also, 1/4 of the US was of German ancestry. No lie. So how to get the US on the British side? Use the fact that English was the common language, and send LOTS of press releases their way. It worked. Almost everybody still remembers that Germany was the aggressor in WWI, that German soldiers killed babies, that Germany was in violation of international law, that Germans were in secret talks with the dictator of Mexico...

The last statement is the only one that is true. (The attempt to deal with Mexico was a political embarassement.) The rest of it is very effective propaganda.

As soon as President Wilson decided he had to give in and send the troops in on the British side, he did the next logical thing:

He hired all the ad agencies in the US to sell the war - and sell they did.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:'Destroy_this_mad_brute'_WWI_propaganda_poster_(US_version).jpg

And the US government surpressed dissent by passing the Espionage Act - which led to Eugene V Debs campaigning for President in 1920, from JAIL. Because he opposed that draft. If you opposed the draft, you were in violation of the Espionage Act.

All of these statements are verifiable. But just in case, I'm making a copy of my post...

What I wanted to say was, right on, Hypatia - fighting to keep freedom of speech going is probably the single most important defence against tyranny we've got.

I don't disagree with anything youse guys are saying. I just thought I'd throw in a tangential Twain:

Give me the truth and I'll stretch it and make it funny.

Nothing wrong with making it funny.