Tag: people

Gerald jeered in dinner discussion
August 19, 2016 by Karen Mikkelsbergen

Gerald Waterson badly lost a series of discussions with his friends last Thursday. The 36yr (old) county clerk of Decatur, IL, didn’t have a Scandinavian example for any point he wanted to make.

During dinner, Gerald proposed e.g., that social security could not continue in its current form with the lax immigration policies, that a fully sustainable energy supply were feasible, that only college grads should be allowed to teach at high schools, that longer prison terms don’t increase general security and that tomato is a vegetable.

“Those were interesting proposals,” Dean Farmour (35) remembers. “We were honestly interested to have ourselves convinced. His arguments however were lacking every time again. Gerald only had a huge stack of scientific reports at hand and a slew of scientific theories. But he did not have one single example from Scandinavia. Not one!”

Megan Drimble (36) too, was disappointed by the defective argumentation of Geralds vision. “If you’re so sure that longer prison terms don’t work, then you’d better have something more than just fifty years of data from a number of countries. I’d like to have data from just one Finnish province, please!”

Megan herself successfully defended that the hunt for moose would need to be deregulated in Georgia: “Isn’t it crazy that the state legislature doesn’t just allow it? In Sweden, the moose hunt accounts for the prevention of many traffic casualties and of serious damage to forests.”

Gerald now knows what to do. “I always thought that I had studied sufficiently on any subject I thought to know but I was jeered at for that. Next time, I’ll make sure to always have some obscure Scandinavian research at hand. The Danish psychologist Sören Larsen showed, by the way, that to give me a far more convincing posture, too.”

[Original, in Dutch, on the Speld; translated with permission]