{"id":7271,"date":"2017-05-08T16:28:02","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T23:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/?p=7271"},"modified":"2026-03-19T13:53:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T20:53:38","slug":"improve-not-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/improve-not-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Improve &#8211; Not Change"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/static\/sys-images\/Guardian\/About\/General\/2013\/4\/2\/1364917234126\/Bushfires-at-Grampians-Na-008.jpg?w=300&amp;q=55&amp;auto=format&amp;usm=12&amp;fit=max&amp;s=02634bdc9ce4868b1f7ef77f912284c5\" alt=\"Fire Makes \" width=\"300\" height=\"180\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><strong>Fire Makes &#8220;Change&#8221;<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n<p>You want to &#8220;change&#8221; the world?<\/p>\n<p>Whoa. That&#8217;s frightening.<\/p>\n<p><strong>George W. Bush <em>changed<\/em> the world<\/strong> . . . acclaimed worldwide for making our world <strong>worse<\/strong>. In a horrible way.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Ronald Reagan\u00a0 also &#8220;changed&#8221; the world.<\/p>\n<p>And most recently Candidate <strong>Obama<\/strong> asked us to &#8220;hope&#8221; for &#8220;<strong>Change<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Well, as President he sure did make &#8220;change.&#8221; <strong>Obama quadrupled the number of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan#Civilian_casualties\">innocent civilians killed by US CIA and Air Force drone attacks<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the problem with using a <strong>powerfully ambiguous word<\/strong> like &#8220;<em><strong>change<\/strong><\/em>.&#8221; it can be used in contradictory ways.<\/p>\n<p>What I hope you mean is &#8212; you want to <strong>&#8220;improve&#8221;<\/strong> the world.<\/p>\n<p>While the term &#8220;improve&#8221; is still ambiguous, but at least it indicates a direction towards something better.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"># # #<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You want to &#8220;change&#8221; the world? Whoa. That&#8217;s frightening. George W. Bush changed the world . . . acclaimed worldwide for making our world worse. In a horrible way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-precision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7271"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8287,"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7271\/revisions\/8287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daviddilworth.com\/pol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}