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Thursday, July 23, 2015

A 'second rate' doctor (Dawson) treating 'second rate' wartime patients (the SBEs) with medicine from a 'second rate' drug producer (the penicillium slime) and in the process, upending simplistic notions of linear Progress

When Jesus talked of "the first being last and the last being first", this sort of 'upending' talk was really one more of his famous hard sayings, designed usually to abruptly awake the intellectually smug and sleepy, rather than being offered as a serious description of His Father's world.

Equally, any idea that simply upending the current state of affairs in industry by replacing capitalist factory bosses with worker factory bosses would really improve things on the shop floor has been revealed to be, over and over, mere eyewash.

The hungriest of workers are just as capable of deceit and greed directed against others as the fattest of fat cats.

A more subtle and yet more probing claim is to insist that the smart aren't always smart and the dumb aren't always dump - that we all have qualities and weaknesses.

To accept all the assumptions of the usually smart without question is as dangerous as quickly dismissing all the qualities of the usually dumb as useless, without examining them all more carefully.

This was the implicit claim of a scientist from the second tier (Martin Henry Dawson) who lacked either the ability or the urge to talk scientific rhetoric about his insights - who preferred muchly to show, rather than to simply tell ...

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