For a long time, the most popular archived posts on this site have been those about the children to talk of past lives, which has never surprised me given how interesting and enigmatic those kids are.
But recently a rival has appeared – the post Autism | Isaac Asimov and the Joys of Autism.
This is very welcome to me, for, if I often say Joseph Conrad was my literary father, Isaac Asimov is like a dear uncle to me.
With this in mind, and forced to contemplate things like the Ukraine war every day, and the possibility of increased chaos in the future, I examined my large collection of Isaac Asimov quotes for something relevant. There are many that tempted me, but I’ll start with the shortest one.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
To get where he is, Vladimir Putin must be a highly intelligent man. But Hitler was intelligent too. It was only when Hitler invaded Russia that he revealed that he was also incompetent. When Putin invaded the Ukraine, he didn’t realize that he was really invading most of the world, which is why most of the world has come to the aid of the Ukraine (the United Nations vote in March condemning Russia for the invasion was 141 to 5). That’s when Putin revealed that he too is incompetent.
Alan Conrad 