"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
Over the past few years I have heard a reasonably famous quote from a controversial character being bandied around by people as an example of political nonsense. Without wanting to get drawn into the relative merit (or otherwise) of one Donald Rumsfeld, I cannot help but feel that he gets a raw deal on this score. You see, I have never really understood why people think it is nonsense. I am not sure whether my brain is hardwired to think in a convoluted and ambiguous way (it could be true, I have been accused of this, and I have also spent time locked in rooms with French post-modern feminist thinkers), but from the moment that I heard it, I couldn't see the fuss made about the quote. it seemed to make perfect sense to me right off the bat. Let's go over the quote again before I move on: ...there are known "knowns". There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also un...