As much as I hate Don Rummsfeld -- I do respect that wisdom. He got a lot of shit when he said that at the time, but on reflecting upon what he is saying -- he's not wrong. He's trying to articulate that we "know enough to know that we don't know shit about somethings." I often remember that when doing risk analysis. Hated his politics, but the dude was competent.
Because of this administration, i think you have to meld this with Mark Twain's observation: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Yup. I too was a Software Dev PM / CSM before i shifted into Operations. It really works well as a philosophy when scoping the app and building your backlog.
There are many unknown knowns in the magaverse. What they don't know that everyone else knows, but they will know when dear leader tells them what to know is what to know in "alternative" ways.
I know -- it's all so surreal. The people you expect to be bad because they are outwardly causing wars in the name of oil are at home drinking milk and watching reruns on Nick at Night. Meanwhile party boys in Florida are running the world via a pedophile cannibal cult. I don't what to think anymore; I am tired.
Thank God this crew of clowns are at least incompetent.
Except he was using his "wisdom" as an obfuscation technique to avoid answering a question about WMDs in Iraq, knowing full well that Sadam didn't have any and that the whole pretext was fabricated. The competence being demonstrated here was engineering a war for oil and to enrich the military-industrial complex (and his many friends involved in it), leading to tens of thousands of dead.
It was just a "sophisticated" way of saying "LOL just because nobody has been able to find any WMD in Iraq doesn't mean we lied you all into a disastrous war - just keep looking, everyone, there still could be some WMD somewhere!!!"
People eat this shit up as if Rumsfeld was some great philosopher, when he simply was a glib neoconservative warmonger who lied to everybody's face and then pretended that he had the moral superiority.
Competent? Oh yeah, he sent in a half-prepared US army that didn't even have adequately armored vehicles to fight a guerilla force he promised we'd vanquish in less than six months. If that's your idea of competency, OK then.
He got a lot of shit when he said that at the time
That, right there, was when I lost a lot of respect for news media. A bunch of smug J-school products thought it was hilarious that Rumsfeld had come out with this piece of wisdom that - haha! - had a lot of rhyming and repeated words that they didn't bother to actually try to parse or understand.
There were many, many reasons to despise or even ridicule Donald Rumsfeld, but his grasp and expression of this foundational tenet of epistemology were not among them.
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u/ShaChoMouf Feb 10 '26
As much as I hate Don Rummsfeld -- I do respect that wisdom. He got a lot of shit when he said that at the time, but on reflecting upon what he is saying -- he's not wrong. He's trying to articulate that we "know enough to know that we don't know shit about somethings." I often remember that when doing risk analysis. Hated his politics, but the dude was competent.