Thursday, February 24, 2011
400+ pages of cheap talk
In case you need convincing that there's a difference between knowledge and conviction, or that higher education's rather unreliable as a means of moral improvement, Maclean's reports that Moummar Gadhafi's son, Saif al-Islam Alqadhafi, currently famous for threatening to unlease a bloody civil war on those who oppose his father's regime (and then following through), obtained a PhD in 2009 from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His dissertation's title: The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Governance Institutions: From ‘Soft Power’ to Collective Decision-Making?
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The lesson I choose to take from this is that if I can't get a job in academia after finishing my PhD, I can always become a crazy dictator.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget nepotism, Adam. Is your dad a dictator?
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, no. I guess I'll have to pull myself up by my own bootstraps.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of precedents for self-made dictators. Mussolini and Pol Pot, for example, had neither parent in the dictating business. They were just school teachers. Perhaps that's the route...
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