…like Cory Gardner of Colorado, who appears to have the ability to appeal to both wings of the Republican Party, as well as to possible crossover voters.
Bush-bashing never goes out of style
My new piece is up at PJ.
NY Times vs. Jill Abranson, and the Sulzberger family
I confess I’m more fascinated than I should be (and perhaps than you are) by the evolving story of the firing of Jill Abramson by the NY Times.
It has a little bit of everything: the hypocrisy of a newspaper I grew up respecting but which I’ve grown to despise in the last fifteen years, the clash of competing liberal protected victim groups, and most of all the mystery of what really happened. We think we know the general outlines by now, but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a bit we don’t know.
One of the unknowns is what really sparked the final denouement. Even writer Ken Auletta, who seems to be the go-to guy on the story and who points out that Abramson’s fall from grace seemed to happen quite quickly at the end, remains puzzled as to what actually transpired.
Today one of his sources tried to retract a statement she allegedly made to him that could get the Times into hot water because it indicated that Sulzberger may have terminated her in part because she hired a lawyer to speak to the paper about her claim that her salary was less than that of her male predecessor. If true, that would be strong evidence of a wrongful firing, and actionable (although it also seems to be the case that Abramson may have signed an agreement not to sue as part of her settlement).
The paper’s attempt to retract seems absurd on its face. Here’s the original quote in the Auletta piece:
Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern.”
And here’s Murphy’s “correction,” conveyed in a later email to Auletta:
I said to you that the issue of bringing a lawyer in was part of a pattern that caused frustration. I NEVER said that it was part of a pattern that led to her firing because that is just not true.”
Murphy would have us believe that there was a whole “pattern” of behavior by Abramson that had caused long-term and repeated “frustration” on the part of management and colleages, that bringing in a lawyer upped the frustration ante that was already high, but that the Times management had carefully constructed a firewall between all that seething frustration and their precipitous firing of Abramson that occurred shortly after the lawyer incident. Nice try, Murphy, but that dog won’t hunt.
My favorite article so far about the whole thing is by Matthew Continetti:
Reading the New York Times’ report on the defenestration of the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, and the coronation, at a hastily arranged meeting Wednesday, of her replacement Dean Baquet, I could not escape the feeling that the Soviet press must have covered the comings and goings of Politburo members in much the same way…
What makes the story so enjoyable, on the most superficial level, is its lurid combination of identity politics””Abramson was the first female editor of the Times, and Baquet is its first African-American editor””and liberal hypocrisy. Equal pay has been one of the rallying cries of the American left, a category that very much includes the New York Times, and the possibility of sexism at the paper is rich indeed. But I have to say I am less interested in equal wages, in comparable worth, and in what the New Yorker calls the “inescapably gendered aspect” of the Times’ latest scandal than I am in how that scandal confirms one of my pet theories. The theory is this: The men and women who own and operate and produce every day the world’s most important newspaper are basically children.
If you’re interested in this story, Continetti’s article is worth reading in its entirety. However, I would add something he leaves out—which is that, when he uses the word “children” to describe the people who operate the Times, the appellation is quite literally true, and not just in the sense that he meant it.
Sulzberger, the main player here, inherited the Times from his father. Like many newspapers, the Times is (among other things) a family business passed down mostly from father to son (although initially through a daughter). As with most such enterprises, the founder is often a person of great drive and accomplishment, and the children often represent a drop-off in the latter if not the former:
Sulzberger was born in Mount Kisco, New York, the son of Barbara Winslow (née Grant) and the previous Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, grandson of Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and the great-grandson of Times owner and publisher Adolph Ochs.
As such, Sulzberger himself is pretty much immune from firing, and probably knew from the start where he’d end up. Here’s the bio of his father and predecessor, and here’s the story of his grandfather (who, although a Reform Jew, was a noted and vocal anti-Zionist who played down the Holocaust in the paper’s pages during the war).
Here is the family’s first NY Times owner Adolph Ochs, who was a self-made man. Note the irony in the following [emphasis mine]:
After borrowing money to purchase The New York Times, [Ochs] formed the New York Times Co., placed the paper on a strong financial foundation, and became the majority stockholder. In 1904, he hired Carr Van Anda as his managing editor. Their focus on objective journalism, in a time when newspapers were openly and highly partisan, and a well-timed price decrease (from 3¢ per issue to 1¢) led to its rescue from near oblivion. The paper’s readership increased from 9,000 at the time of his purchase to 780,000 by the 1920s…
Ochs was engaged in crusading against anti-Semitism.
How did the Sulzbergers get into the act? Ochs’ only daughter married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who inherited the mantle and passed it on to his descendents.
Here’s an article discussing the state of the Times’ ownership by the Sulzbergers. Harry Reid may rail against the Kochs, but they can’t hold a candle to the Sulzbergers:
While other families have had more power for a time””the Roosevelts and the Kennedys come to mind””their time of great power eventually waned. By contrast, the Ochs/Sulzberger dynasty has had a seat at the table in every administration since Adolph Ochs helped put William McKinley in the White House. The family has effectively occupied an ex officio cabinet post that has been a family birthright, passed intact from generation to generation. There is nothing comparable in American history.
Ponder that.
Michael Totten goes to Cuba…
…so you don’t have to.
And believe me, after you’ve read his article, you won’t want to. It’s a brilliant article about a wretched place. Here’s an excerpt:
In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage””$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.”
Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Melié¡ International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Melié¡ said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8”“$10 an hour. But Melié¡ doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers””but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8”“$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day””a child’s allowance…
Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges””enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while””that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month””30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
It didn’t have to be this way. But Communism does that, doesn’t it?
[NOTE: Read the comments to the article as well, and you’ll see that there’s a contingent of leftist Cuba-defenders there who say it’s all America’s fault.]
The NY Times’ war on women
Or rather, on this woman:
New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper Wednesday, sources familiar with the news informed POLITICO.
Managing editor Dean Baquet will take over as executive editor, effective immediately…
“I choose to appoint a new leader for our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects of the management of the newsroom,” Sulzberger said. “This is not about any disagreement between the newsroom and the business side.”…
Throughout her tenure, Abramson suffered from perceptions among staff that she was condescending and combative…
The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta reported that Sulzberger had grown frustrated with Abramson after she pushed for more pay upon learning that her salary was significantly lower than that of her male predecessors.
Whatever the truth may be, Abramson apparently alienated some of those above her, and below her. The “above her” ones seem to have included the key figures of Sulzberger and the “below her” ones her replacement, Dean Baquet, an African-American man who is reported to have been well-liked at the Times and in this previous job.
The Abramson firing has caused a big brouhaha and engendered many articles and much blog commentary. But perhaps the best I’ve seen, the one that strikes me as containing more of the truth than the others (without being the whole truth, of course) is this one that appeared in New York Magazine. It describes a situation in which Sulzberger never wanted Abramson anyway and gave her the job reluctantly at the outset, only to become more annoyed by her. Most of his annoyance seems to have stemmed from her bluntness in telling some people (one of them being Baquet, whom Sulzberger seemed quite tight with) that they weren’t doing their jobs all that well:
“Her relationship with Dean [Baquet] was never ideal,” a senior staffer said. The complicated relationship spilled into public when Politico published a controversial piece last April that detailed Baquet punching a wall in frustration after one encounter with Abramson ”” an outburst instigated by some front-page stories Baquet had approved, which Abramson critiqued with one word: “boring.”
The popular Baquet let it be known that he just might be leaving the Times for a more pleasant job elsewhere, and Sulzberger was loathe to lose a man he liked and felt he could work well with, as well as a member of a favored minority (black) which trumped even Abramson’s favored minority (female).
In a way I could hardly care less about all of this. The Times—as I’ve written in post after post—is a morally bankrupt lying tool of the Democratic Party and the left, and has been for quite some time. It’s also not doing so well, so this action is more or less the equivalent of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But, as I’ve also written many times, despite all this the Times is still highly influential. And so what happens there matters.
The Times’ hypocrisy is hardly news. But this is a particularly interesting example of it:
After a prolonged search in which the Times was without a CEO, casting an uncomfortable spotlight on Sulzberger, he finally chose former BBC director general Mark Thompson. After Thompson had been hired for the job but before he’d started, Abramson sent Matthew Purdy, a hard-charging investigative reporter, to London to examine Thompson’s role in the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC. Abramson’s relationship with the two executives never recovered. “Mark Thompson was fucking pissed,” a source explained. “He was really angry with the Purdy stuff.” So was Sulzberger. “He was livid, in a very passive-aggressive way. These were a set of headaches Jill had created for Arthur.”
In other words, Abramson did her job—if her job is supposed to be investigating important stories. If her job is supposed to be covering up for the Times and making all its decisions look good, and kissing the posterior of all the higher-ups there, then Abramson failed, big time.
This is unintentionally funny:
In his remarks, Sulzberger stressed that the shakeup was in no way a reflection of the Times’ editorial quality.
“It is not about the quality of our journalism, which in my mind has never been better,” he said. “Jill did an outstanding job in preserving and extending the level of excellence of our news report during her time as executive editor and, before that, as managing editor and Washington bureau chief. She’s an accomplished journalist who contributed mightily to our reputation as the world’s most important news provider.”
So it comes down to the fact that Abramson couldn’t get along with the rest of the guys, and they didn’t like her style. Which of course is their prerogative. Even Sulzberger doesn’t seem to be pretending otherwise.
[ADDENDUM: Ann Althouse offers a slightly different but not altogether dissimilar take on the firing.]
Obama: I could fix tons of things, but those darned Republicans have stopped me
This fundraiser speech of Obama’s has gotten attention for his suggestion that a million New Yorkers moving to North Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming would help him and the Democrats out immeasurably.
In fact, it wouldn’t have to be as many as a million. Despite the fact that those states are strongly Republican, they are also very small in population.
But Obama was joking, of course. However, the only reason it was a joke—the only reason—is that New Yorkers aren’t going to do that. Their cultural suffering and dislocation would be too great. Only the most dedicated of political operatives would make the sacrifice, and fortunately (at least so far) there aren’t enough of them yet. But make no mistake about it: if Obama could compel people to do it, he would.
Another interesting part of his speech was the following. It’s interesting not just because it repeats Obama’s favorite blame-the-Republicans excuse, but because its language (“we’ve got tons of them”) is an example of something I first noticed about Obama back in April of 2008, his sloppy youth-oriented mode of speech when speaking off-the-cuff, combined with arrogance. I wrote back then that these are not very charming traits, but they’re even less charming in a two-term president who’s supposedly older and wiser. Nor is passing the buck, which Obama’s been doing for his entire presidency—not to mention his mischaracterizing the positions of Republicans, another favorite activity of his.
Here he is again at yesterday’s fundraiser:
It’s not as if we’ve got no good ideas on policy. We’ve got tons of them. I’ve got a drawer full of things that we know would create jobs, help our middle class, boost incomes, make us more competitive. But we have a party on the other side that has been captured by an ideology that says no to everything because they cling to a rigid theory that the only way to grow the economy is for government to be dismantled and let the market sort things out, and folks at the top doing very well will somehow automatically trickle down to everybody else.”
If only they would let me—I could do it! We could do it! Forget that the Senate has been in Democratic hands for his entire presidency, and the House in Democratic hands for the first two years of it. If only they had full control, everything would be perfect.
More child singers channeling older ones
The other day I wrote about a child singer from Norway who invokes the memory of Billie Holiday.
Here’s a British kid with a different old-fashioned style:
The original:
I’d never heard the full song in the original version before I did the research for this piece. It’s very beautiful. The lyrics were written by an American, Nat Burton, who’d never been to England and didn’t know there were no bluebirds there.
The Cliffs have a symbolic meaning for Brits, or at least they used to at the time the song was written:
The cliffs have great symbolic value in Britain because they face towards Continental Europe across the narrowest part of the English Channel, where invasions have historically threatened and against which the cliffs form a symbolic guard. Because crossing at Dover was the primary route to the continent before the advent of air travel, the white line of cliffs also formed the first or last sight of England for travelers.
Here’s a photo taken from the French coast:
Gluten sensitivity probably doesn’t exist
Celiac disease is real. But short of that, the burgeoning industry that caters to those who claim gluten sensitivity is probably based on a fantasy.
That sort of thing is always tricky, though. If people believe that gluten makes them ill, they probably will feel ill if they know they’ve eaten gluten. So I predict that those who make gluten-free products have nothing to fear.
Is college making people stupid?
Well, it certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much to make them smarter these days. Or rather than “smarter,” let’s say more well-informed and better able to think clearly.
And I strongly believe that this is purposeful. The majority of educators now see their job as indoctrinating students in right (that is, left) thinking/feeling, and countering whatever faulty programs may have gotten there first. So education has become one big re-education camp, telling students that they are privileged (white, of course), racist (white, of course), sexist (male, of course), and how they might redeem themselves.
And it doesn’t just start with college. By now, entering students have been programmed enough earlier on that there isn’t quite as much to re-educate. And yet there’s always room for improvement, isn’t there? And it’s always necessary to bar other points of view from getting through.
Newarks’ new mayor and the Newark old guard: what’s in a name?
This NY Times article is about the contest by which Newark, New Jersey elected its new mayor, Councilman Ras Baraka, who according to the Times is “the fiery scion of a militant poet.”
The contest—between two black Democrats—was both expensive and bitter, pitting a union-supported Newark insider (Baraka) against a man perceived as a power-broker outsider (Jeffries). And the city, Newark—which I knew as a different place in my youth, when we used to go to visit elderly relatives who still lived there—has been plagued with seemingly intractable problems for many a long decade.
The most recent mayor, Cory A. Booker, used his position as a springing-off spot for his current office of US Senator, but Baraka won by running as a Newark insider against the Booker administration, of which Jeffries was seen as a continuation. The article mentions Baraka’s family several times,saying that “Mr. Baraka relied on his family’s name” among other things, and that both candidates lived in Newark’s South Ward, “which has long been the Baraka family’s base of support.” In addition, we have this:
Mr. Baraka, 44, benefited from high name recognition. His father, Amiri Baraka, who died in January, was a leader of Newark’s cultural and political life after the riots of 1967.
So it appears that family, particularly Baraka’s father, and name recognition played a large part in Baraka’s victory. But in the entire 1000-word article, the Times somehow neglects to mention something I’d consider rather important about that family name, something that readers of a certain age (my age, to be exact) remember and that would enable newer readers to place Baraka’s father and understand who he was, and that’s his birth name, Leroi Jones, the name by which he first became famous as a “militant poet.”
The Times probably has good reason to leave this sort of thing out:
Within the African-American community, some compare [Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones] to James Baldwin and call Baraka one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation. Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Baraka’s brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002 – 03), involved controversy over a public reading of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America?” and accusations of anti-semitism, and some negative attention from critics, and politicians.
If you follow the link to the poem you’ll find those accusations are hardly made-up, and you’ll find other examples on Baraka’s Wiki page to show that he was an equal-opportunity hater of almost everyone except black people, with “his advocacy of rape and violence towards, at various times, women, gay people, white people, and Jews.”
And what does “militant poet” mean? In Amiri Baraka’s case, it meant something like this:
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. Now a “black cultural nationalist,” he broke away from the predominantly white Beats and became very critical of the pacifist and integrationist Civil Rights movement. His revolutionary poetry now became more controversial. A poem such as “Black Art” (1965), according to academic Werner Sollors from Harvard University, expressed his need to commit the violence required to “establish a Black World.” “Black Art” quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts Literary Movement and in it, Jones declaimed “we want poems that kill,” which coincided with the rise of armed self-defense and slogans such as “Arm yourself or harm yourself” that promoted confrontation with the white power structure. Rather than use poetry as an escapist mechanism, Baraka saw poetry as a weapon of action. His poetry demanded violence against those he felt were responsible for an unjust society.
Jones changed his name in 1970, when he was 36 years old and already very famous. He became a Marxist in the mid-70s (officially, that is), and in the 80s found a home in academia, settling into a professorship at Stonybrook.
I have no idea how far the Ras Baraka acorn falls from the parental tree, or how many of these views of the father the son shares today. But my guess is that dad had a pretty big influence on him. And the Times, of course, has done a bang-up job of obfuscating the truth about who Baraka’s father was as best it can. While not ignoring him entirely, the article makes him sound like some kindly old Newark patriarch and patron of the arts.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s some background on one of the bitter disputes that were part of the Newark mayoral race. Sounds like Baraka’s election bodes ill for Newark, which has already seen plenty of ill, and for its children’s eduction:
The mayor’s race pits radical Councilman Ras Baraka, who was principal of low-performing Central High, against Shavar Jeffries, a former assistant state attorney general who helped start a successful charter school.
The Newark backlash could have been avoided, says Jeffries. Too often, he said, “education reform . . . comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades. It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.” Reformers “have to build coalitions and educate and advocate,” says Jeffries. “You have to persuade people.”
Baraka won the election.]
The Benghazi “show trial”
Eugene Robinson demonstrates his command of the popular Democrat and MSM (but I repeat myself) meme du jour when he calls the upcoming Benghazi Select Committee hearings a “show trial” and a “farce,” and the Republican Congressmen “inquisitors.” He then adds another common accusation:
It’s impossible to take seriously a House select committee investigation designed not to unearth relevant new facts but to achieve nakedly political goals: rousing the GOP base for the fall election and sullying Hillary Clinton’s record in case she runs for president.
It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this a new low, and the fact that the ploy will probably backfire on Republicans is scant consolation.
Robinson seems to lack a sense of irony. But when he asks, “What’s the point…that Republicans are trying to prove?” the answer is that they strongly suspect the Obama administration was trying “to achieve nakedly political goals” through its handling of Benghazi security and in the aftermath of the attack. And yes, “It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner.” But there is every reason to believe that it was—by the Obama administration.
Karl Popper, changer
The Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper, who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1930s (when he was in his late 30s) and then to London, had flirted with Communism in his youth. Actually, he more than flirted with it, although it was a whirlwind romance that lasted only a few months, came to a bad end, and had a profound effect on his life and his thinking thereafter:
[Popper] remembers that, although he was obviously dissatisfied with the society of its times, he was uneasy because the party obviously promoted a kind of murderous instinct against class-enemies: he was told, however, that this was necessary and that, in any case, it was not meant too seriously; also that in a revolution only victory can serve; and finally that under capitalism there are every day more victims than in the entire revolution. Popper notes that he agreed reluctantly, with the feeling that he had to pay a high price regarding his morality. Something similar happened regarding lies, as the leaders sometimes said one day white and the following day black; this would happen whenever they received a telegram from Moscow with the corresponding indications. When Popper protested, he was told that those contradictions were necessary and should not be criticized, as the unity of the party was essential for the triumph of revolution: although it was possible to commit mistakes, it was not allowed to criticize them openly, because only the discipline of the party could carry a fast victory. Popper remembers again that, although he reluctantly accepted this, he felt that he was sacrificing his personal integrity to the party, and that, when he realized that the leaders were disposed to contradict themselves at any moment, his attitude towards communism suffered a crisis
This is familiar, isn’t it? The slavish devotion to the Party over all, including rationality, was required. Young as he was at the time (age 17), Popper had trouble believing that 2 + 2 = 5, even when the Party demanded it.
The incident that was Popper’s turning point was a demonstration organized by the Communists, in which he took part and where quite a few people were killed by the police. He later wrote:
“I felt that as a Marxist I bore part of the responsibility for the tragedy -at least in principle. Marxist theory demands that the class struggle be intensified, in order to speed up the coming of socialism…”
…[T]he people dead, at least some of them, were young workers: Popper thought that other people who, like himself, were students or intellectuals, had special responsibility for those workers, who relied on the intellectuals. The other is that, as he said many years later, he had approved of the demonstration because it was supported by the communist party; he perhaps had even encouraged the participation of other people; and perhaps some of them were among the dead.
He was also upset by the attitude of the communist leaders. He asked himself whether he had discussed seriously and critically the Marxist theory which served as the basis for the sacrifice of human lives, and he recognized that he had not done it. However, when he arrived at the headquarters of the communist party, he realized that the leaders had an entirely different attitude: revolution made unavoidable the existence of such a type of victims, and furthermore this meant a kind of progress because workers would become every time more angry against the police and so they would become more and more aware of their real class-enemies. Popper’s reaction was clear: he never returned there, and this way, as he commented later, he escaped the Marxist trap…
…[H]e described it in his autobiography this way:
“I was shocked to have to admit to myself that not only had I accepted a complex theory somewhat uncritically, but I had also actually noticed quite a bit that was wrong, in the theory as well as in the practice of communism, but had repressed this -partly out of loyalty to “the cause”, and partly because there is a mechanism of getting oneself more and more deeply involved: once one has sacrificed one’s intellectual conscience over a minor point one does not wish to give up too easily; one wishes to justify the self-sacrifice by convincing oneself of the fundamental goodness of the cause, which is seen to outweigh any little moral or intellectual compromise that may be required. With every such moral or intellectual sacrifice one gets more deeply involved. One becomes ready to back one’s moral or intellectual investments in the cause with further investments. It is like being eager to throw good money after bad. I also saw how this mechanism had been working in my case, and I was horrified.”
I don’t think I’ve come across a better description of the thought process of one type of person who is often attracted to leftism: the idealist. Popper, a supremely rational man, also hated war and was attracted to what he perceived as the pacifism of the Communists (they weren’t really pacifists, but he didn’t know that at the time). For a while, then, as a teenaged activist, his desire to believe he was joining in a good cause trumped his rationality and his ethics, but soon both asserted themselves because they were so strong within him.
But it’s easy to see how other idealists, less rational and less ethical, could keep going for a long time in the Communist cause. And of course idealists are not the only people attracted to the left—there’s an entire group, among them usually the leaders, who are attracted not in spite of the cruelty and power but because of it.
The experience formed the basis of what became Popper’s life work:
This sufficed to make of Popper a fallibilist, strongly suspicious of pseudo-scientific creeds: the Marxist pseudo-scientific prediction of a necessary course of history was very dangerous, and the first condition that Popper would require in the future to any allegedly scientific theory was that it should be held with an attitude of intellectual modesty, namely an attitude that recognizes the magnitude of our ignorance and never forgets that our theories are always tentative and partial trials to progress. Scientific certainty had showed itself deceptive and should be replaced by an attitude of learning through our unavoidable mistakes. Now, mistakes would begin to be considered not as an evil, but as the way which prepares real progress.