I have made an important discovery about myself. I do not do well with only four hours of sleep.
I think we have a very good chance of holding the Senate and even an outside chance of holding onto the House. That outcome would be little short of a miracle. I have had somewhat the same thought that Marc Susselman expressed about the 2024 election. If Trump does not get the Republican nomination, I doubt that he will run as an independent candidate but he will almost certainly try to take as many of his own supporters as he can away from the Republicans and that would have the same effect.
The first item on my bucket list, as they call it, is to sit in front of my television set and see Trump led away in an orange jumpsuit. It does not seem too much to ask for.
Next Monday I start lecturing on Marcuse. I am not sure whether that is perfectly appropriate or wildly irrelevant. We shall see.
Now, let me take a nap…
Prof. Wolff was correct, when he predicted immediately after the Dobbs decision that it would motivate women to vote and support the Democrats, which is precisely what happened, despite polls which were indicating that the effect of the Dobbs decision has waned. It didn’t, and women turned out in droves and made the decisive difference in yesterday’ outcomes, dissipating the anticipated Red Wave.
ReplyDeletePost-script:
ReplyDeleteNow all eyes are on Georgia. Any thoughts on how the 3% who did not vote for either Walker or Warnick will vote in December? What motivates Georgian African-Americans to vote for Walker over Warnick? Any statistics on how many do so?
I propose its time for another campaign contribution challenge to drum up support for Minister Warnick.
If Arizona and Nevada come through, Georgia isn't necessary to keep control of the senate. In the House, McCarty is screwed because the MTG nutballs will be controlling.
ReplyDelete"What motivates Georgian African-Americans to vote for Walker over Warnick?"
The same as Georgian whites, some combination of ignorant, stupid, and evil.
There is, isn't there, the other side too?
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_dog_Democrat
ReplyDeleteDemocrats flipped three state legislative bodies: the Minnesota Senate and the Michigan House and Senate. With control of both legislative bodies in both states, which also have Democratic governors. the Dems have two trifectas. I like to think that our small contributions to the DLCC helped make these gains possible.
Advertising trivia.
ReplyDeleteRecently I have been seeing TV advertisements for a company named BDO, with the catch-line, “Those who know, know BDO.”
Well, I did not know what BDO stood for or what it did, so I Googled it. “BDO” stands for “Binder Dijker Otte,” “an international network of public accounting, tax, consulting and business advisory firms which provide professional services under the name BDO.” Its revenue for 2021 totaled $11.8 billion.
Now I know, and you know too.
Per the Philadelphia Inquirer, Democrats believe they have taken the Pennsylvania House.
ReplyDeleteRPW’s comment about what Trump might/will do if he decides to run in 2024 but doesn’t get the Republican nomination reminds me of the closing lines of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals—that [such an egomaniac] would rather will nothingness than not will.
ReplyDeleteInteresting timing in Kherson. Seems the Kremlin did a whip count.
ReplyDeleteRe-reading the heading on this post by Prof. Wolff, the following thought popped into my head:
ReplyDeleteThere should be a morning after pill to abort adverse election results that only liberals and Democrats would be able to use. Use by any others would be ineffective and cause nausea.
Prediction:
ReplyDeleteSome time between Trump's indictment and Easter, the majority of shoehorn sycophants will declare for DeSantis. This will destabilize Republicans and benefit Dems for 2024.
I just donated to the Warnock campaign. I plan to make more contributions. Walker while a great athlete, is another sycophant, sucking up to the criminal Donald J. Trump. Trump we know is a malignant narcissist, pathological liar, sociopath. I don't want the democrats to lose the senate, since the house is most likely be a loss, despite what Professor Wolff thinks, I do hope he is right. Citizen's United, I believe has given Walker dark money campaign life. although, I wonder why more people and especially African American's have not put Warnock over the 50% mark. I don't know the reason's why or if that is true or not. I would think that many folks on Professor Wolff's blog will come through with contributions to Warnock's bid to maintain his senate seat.
ReplyDeleteCharles L.,
ReplyDeleteThe answer to your question can be found in H. L. Mencken’s observation, made close to a century ago: “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
ReplyDeleteI prefer the version attributed to P.T. Barnum: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Much more oomph!
David,
ReplyDeleteP. T. Barnum never said the version you have quoted. That version was a popularization of Mencken’s actual quotation which I offered above. See
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-broke-underestimating.html
The Barnum quotation you are thinking of is, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but there is some question whether Barnum actually said this as well. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_minute
Why do people on the left always suppose (that's true in Chile too) that people on the right are stupid?
ReplyDeleteMaybe for some people expressing their hatred of blacks and making sure that women do not have reproductive freedom is more important to them than anything else, even than slightly expanding the welfare state as most Democrats propose?
Is that a sign of stupidity or of something else?
Of course the fact that liberal elites (like us) consider Republican voters to be stupid is just another factor that motivates them to vote Republican.
s. wallerstein,
ReplyDeleteYou would agree that there are, in fact, stupid people. And one of the indicia of stupidity is the quality of the decisions one makes, including decisions regarding politics and what is your own best interests, economic and social. Out of curiosity, I did a Google search to find if there are any statistics on IQ distributions among Democrats versus Republicans, and came across a work titled, “Cognitive ability and party identity in the United States,” by Noah Carl, described as “an independent researcher.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265852713_Cognitive_ability_and_party_identity_in_the_United_State
The abstract about the work states:
Abstract
Carl (2014) analysed data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), and found that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat. An important qualification was that the measure of verbal intelligence used was relatively crude, namely a 10-word vocabulary test. This study examines three other measures of cognitive ability from the GSS: a test of probability knowledge, a test of verbal reasoning, and an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. In all three cases, individuals who identify as Republican score slightly higher than those who identify as Democrat; the unadjusted differences are 1–3 IQ points, 2–4 IQ points and 2–3 IQ points, respectively. Path analyses indicate that the associations between cognitive ability and party identity are largely but not totally accounted for by socio-economic position: individuals with higher cognitive ability tend to have better socio-economic positions, and individuals with better socio-economic positions are more likely to identify as Republican. These results are consistent with Carl's (2014) hypothesis that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans.
What does this mean in terms of the Republicans and their self-abasing support of Trump? I suspect it means that higher intelligence may also correlate with greater focus on self-survival and greed, which means the Republicans will abandon Trump as soon as they see that his fortunes are waning, and they will turn to De Santis.
As a side note regarding H. L. Mcncken, Mencken had a checkered history of making anti-Semitic remarks. The following is from the Wikipedia article about him.
ReplyDelete“In the 1930 edition of Treatise on the Gods, Mencken wrote:
The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.[44]
That passage was removed from subsequent editions at his express direction.[45]
Chaz Bufe, an admirer of Mencken, wrote that Mencken's various anti-Semitic statements should be understood in the context that Mencken made bombastic and over-the-top denunciations of almost any national, religious, and ethnic group. That said, Bufe still wrote that some of Mencken's statements were "odious", such as his claim in his 1918 introduction to Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ that "The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world".[46]
Author Gore Vidal later deflected claims of anti-Semitism against Mencken:
“Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when The New York Times, say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, 1938, Mencken writes (The Baltimore Sun), "It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them." He then reviews the various schemes to rescue the Jews from the Nazis.[47]”
As Germany gradually conquered Europe, Mencken attacked Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States and called for their wholesale admission:
There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?[47]”
What does it mean "in people's best interests"?
ReplyDeleteI've made many decisions in my life which were not in my economic "best interests" and yet looking back on my life, je ne regrette rien.
Just as I've fallen in love several times against my "best interests" and don't regret it, maybe for some people expressing their hatred trumps their "best interests".
Don't we on the left at times let our hatred of Trump and fascism trump our "best interests"?
We'd all probably be richer if we were more willing to play along with the needs of the ruling elite instead of criticizing them constantly.
In fact, I'd say that a sign of stupidity or at least of lack of imagination is constantly calculating one's best interests.
"We'd all probably be richer if we were more willing to play along with the needs of the ruling elite instead of criticizing them constantly."
ReplyDeleteNSM as several states that consistently vote Republican have also had to use the initiative process to take advantage of the ACA's Medicaid expansion. This has led to rural hospital closures and lots of unnecessary illness and death. They then go on to re-elect the very Republicans who refused to adopt the expansion. Rinse and repeat for many issues.
Folks 65+ vote Republican when Republicans have repeatedly said they are going to deep six Social Security and Medicare while also passing tax cuts for the wealthy. Folks 50+ (who are really going to be screwed) still vote majority Republican.
Back in the day I'd occasionally do voter outreach. Post James Watt (in the 1980s'90s) I'd bring up the environment and the reply would be that Republicans can't be horrible on environmental issues because, "what about Teddy Roosevelt and the national parks," i.e. they vote based on half remembered grade school lessons.
As I pointed out above, some combination of ignorance, stupidity, and evil explains most of our problems. Most of that is ignorance. People have lives and we stopped teaching serious history and any civics decades ago. No foundation and no time plus a clueless/mendacious media.
I follow Jill Stein's Twitter and read folks on the far right. Stupidity is ubiquitous especially at the extremes right and left. I tuned into a couple of Trump rallies back in 2015/6. It hit me that these were basically WWE - like events. If one votes based on kayfabe one is stupid. A universal truth is that if, in any situation, you don't who the mark is, you're the mark.
As for evil, take a look at those lynching post cards, our tech bro elites, or the reaction on the Right to the attempted assignation of Nancy Pelosi - figure ~25% of the population.
Trump, of course, is a perfect example of a trifecta. DeSantis, like Cruz, Hawley, Pompeo, Abbott, Murdock, the Kochs, etc. are all simply evil.
BTW, the Democrats won or barely lost in Wisconsin on statewide offices while the state senate has a 2/3+ Republican super majority and the house is one vote short of a Republican super majority. Perhaps its time to enforce this: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government..."
Marc @ 4:43 pm
ReplyDeleteA few quick things.
First, according to the abstract itself, what this paper measures is mostly a proxy for SES (socio-economic status or position). People w higher SES tend to do better on these cognitive ability measures, again according to the abstract. (So it's not very interesting or surprising, imo, bc kind of predictable.)
Second, as the Dem Party increasingly becomes the party of, among others, so-called coastal elites, one can expect the average SES of Dem voters -- and therefore their scores on these cognitive ability measures -- to increase (and, perhaps, Repub overall scores to decrease). (But who really cares?)
The real question at hand is whether this kind of paper allows one to say that Repubs, because they score slightly higher on these measures, are "smarter" than Dems, and I think the answer is no. Voters in general are not "stupid." They vary along a number of dimensions, but I think "general intelligence," assuming such a thing exists and can be measured (which btw the cited paper is not doing), is not a particularly interesting attribute on which to compare voters.
People can hypothesize whatever they want, such as this guy Carl hypothesizing that economic conservatives (i.e., "classical liberals" -- meaning proponents of relatively smaller govt, laissez-faire, "free" markets, neo-liberalism, take yr pick of label) are smarter than "social conservatives," but the evidence seems underwhelming. I find all of this pretty much irrelevant to what one might want to know about the electorate in order to do sensible analysis and/or predict outcomes.
p.s. Ignorance, being misinformed, having a skewed sense of one's interests, being in thrall to some form of false consciousness, as a Marxist might say -- none of that is the same as stupidity.
ReplyDelete"Stupidity" is a mostly unhelpful category in this context. Freely bandying about the label "stupidity" allows those doing the bandying to reinforce their own sense of moral superiority and presumed superior insight. Whether it does anything more constructive than that is very doubtful.
s. wallerstein asks: Why do people on the left always suppose (that's true in Chile too) that people on the right are stupid?
ReplyDeleteI'd guess a lot of that just has to do with the stereotyping of rural and/or religious and/or non-college-educated people. Not that I'm not constantly guilty of stereotyping. (Often it's easy and unavoidable to be in the habit of making superficial snap judgments of people.)
But when I think about it, I really doubt that "stupidity" explains conservatism, or that there are vastly more "stupid" people on the right than on the left. There are fewer college-educated, city-living, non-religious people on the right; but obviously, having a college degree etc. is not the same thing as being intelligent.
The way it looks to me, a person's political identity is normally shaped in large part by things other than intelligence and the intellectual assessment of competing ideologies; it seems mostly to come down to your social environment: whomever you know and are inclined to trust and respect, as well as the opposite - whomever you're inclined to fear, despise, and distrust.
I think that most people are at least half-consciously partisan, and that it's hardly possible to be so without making the (quite logical) inference that the views characteristic of one's opposing party are (at worst) willful, self-serving distortions of reality, or (at best) easy, natural errors that arise from inadequate experiential knowledge and reflection; and furthermore, that these views are systematically reinforced by dubious media, peers, commentators, teachers, and other "sources of information" (or people taken as reliable providers-of-cues for the formation of convictions).
So, I figure that pretty much anyone who thinks about politics to some degree has the sense, "The 'other guys' are full of shit"; and that many of a person's beliefs about the unobserved world are simply the consequences of whom they've taken those "other guys" to be. As with what I said about stereotyping, we take intellectual shortcuts. ("If conservatives characteristically say X, then not-X is probably true. Further investigation is optional.")
However, though this might sound wacky, I think everyone's in the predicament of being unable to prove that they themselves (and their ideological peers and information-sources) aren't the true "other guys." It's difficult and impractical, maybe ultimately useless, to face this thought - that we and those like us might after all be very badly wrong - so we tend to avoid anything that'd force us to confront it (say, becoming better-exposed to the most sophisticated defenders of the ideologies we reject). This is the sort of thing that comes to my mind when people speak of political identity, of choosing sides.
Sorry this was lengthier than I thought it'd be.
LFC, s. wallerstein, and Michael,
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I think you are all being a bit too coy. Based on your past comments on this blog, I believe that you believe, in your heart of hearts, that a woman is entitled to have control over her body and has a right to decide, within certain broad limits perhaps, whether she wishes to carry a pregnancy to term; that an unfettered right to gun ownership is not warranted; that discrimination based on an individual’s race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender and sexual orientation is improper and should be illegal; that climate change is being caused by human activity and is a serious problem which our society has an obligation to address. I also believe that in your heart of hearts, to the extent that other people disagree with you regarding one or more of these issues, you believe, regardless their rationales, that such individuals are somewhat ignorant, and/or less intelligent than you, and/or somewhat stupid, and that you are being less than candid in your sophisticated formulations expressed above.
"Less than candid" - them's fightin' words! ;)
ReplyDeleteI think I can partly agree with you, Marc, but I definitely want to resist diagnosing the pro-lifer (etc.) as less intelligent than me; comparing and contrasting people's intellectual abilities always feels gross to me. Maybe I can defend or clarify this by saying a couple things. (I'm still trying to sort this stuff out, so there might be some deep inconsistencies I haven't noticed.)
For one thing, I'm sure I haven't seen every actual or possible attempt to justify the right-to-life position (etc.), and I'm sure that some of those attempts - say, if I were to consult with some conservative Catholic who happened to be a professional philosopher - would be exceptionally challenging for me to respond to after a fair and thorough hearing; I wouldn't be astonished even to find myself at a loss to refute them, and have to settle for the strong suspicion that they could be refuted by someone with more time, knowledge, and ability than me. This amounts to the hunch that the right-to-life arguments must all fail, though I might be unable to say precisely how in every case. It seems to me that people hold onto and nurture such hunches largely for non-intellectual reasons, or rather on account of social-psychological causes. In this way we all fall short of perfect intellectual integrity (as if that's within anyone's reach), but life often demands that we act on the best hunches we have.
I do however think that intelligent people are likelier to find the most popular right-to-life arguments unsatisfying, and to be able to correctly diagnose their fallacies. I also think there can be, and very frequently are, powerful non-intellectual forces at play which motivate intelligent people to rationalize the arguments' conclusions in other ways.
"'Stupidity" is a mostly unhelpful category in this context."
ReplyDeleteJust curious. How many elected folks and activists, esp. on the right and far left have you interacted with? Intelligence and stupidity are two very different things.
Anyway, a good week: Democracy dodged a bullet here and the fish in the Dnipro are eating well.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI would agree that “intelligence” and “stupidity” are two very different things, only because their adjective forms, “intelligent” and “stupid” are at opposite poles. But are not the terms “stupid” and “not intelligent” equivalent, with “stupid” being a much more blunt expression? If I say, “What he just did was stupid,” is this not the same as saying, “What he just did was not intelligent”?
A Google search has produced the following:
ReplyDeletehttps://wikidiff.com/unintelligent/stupid
Wherein it states:
Unintelligent is a synonym of stupid.
As adjectives the difference between unintelligent and stupid
is that unintelligent is not intelligent while stupid is lacking in intelligence or exhibiting the quality of having been done by someone lacking in intelligence.
As a adverb stupid is
(slang|dated) extremely.
As a noun stupid is
a stupid person; a fool.
Marc,
ReplyDeleteThis might interest you. Leiter here blogs about Michigan voting in the elections and there is space to comment if you wish to.
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/11/why-did-the-democrats-do-relatively-well-the-michigan-experience.html
I think an IQ test does not measure what is unreflectively called stupidity in everyday life. The IQ test measures the time in which a person is able to solve a specific problem. The statistical average of the time required then provides the reference value for the so-called intelligence quotient.
ReplyDeleteThe voting behavior of voters that can be called "stupid" results from much more immediate or direct experiences that everyone can make personally when talking to a person about a certain political topic. I think one can come to the conclusion that what one hears is rightly labeled stupidity.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to someone who, due to an illness and his age, can no longer work and has to live on state support. Not an easy situation for this person. But he gave his undivided political sympathy to a party that explicitly wants to significantly cut spending for recipients of this kind of support. Representatives of this party repeatedly stated in public that they wanted to cut off the money of all "benefit scroungers". However, he justified his sympathy with the "argument" that all "other politicians" were liars who were not interested in people in his situation. Instead, a policy would be made for the rich.
A single opinion, sure. But not an isolated one. Farmers who are affected by historically unprecedented drought and who are experiencing major crop losses and who nevertheless call climate change a "lie of science" or "lies of corrupt politicians".
One can, of course, find many other labels for this kind of belief, from ignorance and stupidity to "objective delusion context." But, because one can confidently call it stupidity, unfortunately, the question of how it comes about is far from being answered.
s. wallerstein,
ReplyDeleteShouldn’t you distinguish between a person being likeable and charming, despite their political views, and a devil be damned outlook on life, and intelligence?
By the way, if you would like to see some really intelligent people compete against each other, watch Jeopardy tonight and next week. Contestants who won 5 or more games during the last year are facing off against each other, and they are quite amazing. Last night, the winner of the professors’ competition, Sam Buttrey, faced off against Matt Amodio, who has a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale, and came away the winner. Amodio holds the 3d longest record for Jeopardy wins, at 38 weeks. Prof. Buttrey is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and looks to be in his mid-60s. The final Jeopardy question last night was:
By ferry, the distance between these 2 paired Mediterranean islands is about 40 miles from Alcudia to Ciutadella.
I had no idea, and guessed Sicily and Sardinia. Wrong. All three contestants had the correct answer: What are Majorca and Minorca? I had never even heard of Minorca (which makes me far less intelligent than any of the contestants). Prof. Buttrey, who went into Final Jeopardy with the most money, came out the final winner, $33,601.
You can watch the episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhnHsutNK6Y
Tonight, the contestants are Mattea Roach, Eric Ahasic and Andrew He.
If my thesis is correct, among the contestants who are American citizens (Mattea Roach is Canadian), the Democrats should far outnumber the Republicans.
Post-script:
ReplyDeletes. wallerstein, thank you for the reference to Leiter's blog. I read it, and he is spot on. The Democrats now control the governorship and both the Michigan house and senate, for the first time in 40 years. Gretchen Whitmer is a very savvy politician.
Marc
ReplyDeleteI'm not *entirely* sure what "intelligence" is, but the fact that you'd never heard of Minorca has nothing to do with intelligence; it has to do with breadth of knowledge. Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing.
Anonymous @3:14 a.m.
ReplyDeleteI used to be (slightly) more politically active than I am now. The number of political activists I've interacted with in recent years is small, though not zero.
If you want to use the category "stupidity" and label swaths of people as idiots and fools, be my guest. If you and the other people who read LGM every single day and like its sneering, manichean view of the world want to take credit for the (relatively) good midterm election results, again be my guest. I really don't care who takes credit for what.
LFC,
ReplyDeleteI take your point, and thought that as well as I wrote that comment. However, the contestants who win on Jeopardy have extraordinarily good memories, even if they are only remembering trivia. But a good memory is, I believe, also a factor in intelligence, and therefore I give the winning contestants credit for high intelligence as well.
Marc
ReplyDeleteFair enough.
The one word that explains why the recent masses of the comprehensively impoverished right, votes Republican, is resentment.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteYes. "Resentment" says a lot more than "stupidity".
I've been trying all morning to think what I mean by "stupidity" or "intelligence" with my mind going in circles.
In some sense, "stupidity" is a word that people who consider themselves to be "intelligent" use to feel superior to those who don't think like they do.
"Resentment", on the other hand, is a clear descriptive psychological term.
There's a lot of resentment in rightwing thinking.
^I think you're right - there seems to be a pejorative quality to the word "stupid" that isn't there with "unintelligent." (Sorry what follows will be far removed from the politics conversation!)
ReplyDeleteWhat does "intelligence" mean? - I think of this as amounting to two basic questions: (1) What is intelligence? (I think this is very similar to asking: What is cognition? Or, what is the basic character of logical thought?) And the other question would be: (2) In what ways can intelligence be quantified?
In other words, Chomsky is intelligent, but so is William James's polyp.* But in what ways can we say that Chomsky's intelligence is "more than" the polyp's?
To answer that (in the way of an amateur guess), my go-to image, borrowed I think from A.J. Ayer, is of God's encounter with a math textbook: If the first page of the text contains all of its axioms, definitions, and postulates, and the ensuing hundreds of pages are a collection of theorems logically derived from these, then upon reading Page 1, God can instantly "see" the entirety of the book's theorems (as well as any the author overlooked), and "see" them with the same clarity and immediacy as a human being "sees" the validity of modus ponens. ("P is true. But if P is true, then Q is true. Therefore, Q is true.")
From what I can tell, there are two ways of quantifying the intellectual difference between the God and the human in this story: the number of correct inferences made, and the speed with which they are made (i.e., how many theorems the reader "sees" to follow from the Page 1 material, and how quickly the reader "sees" them).
*The quote goes: "All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hollo! Thingumabob again!' ever flitted through its mind."
SW (et al.): You might want to look up the meaning(s) of stupid in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. The term is pretty definitionally flexible in standard English, and various meanings have accrued to it over the years (indeed, centuries). Looking it up sure beats wracking one’s brain over what the word means (and can mean). It has a long history. I also looked the term up in the OED (which I have in CD form), and that gives even more information on the word than M-W’s does. One of the standard meanings of stupid, according to M-W’s, is “marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting [= senseless], as in ‘a stupid decision.’” I think that sense of stupid applies to a lot of political decisions and beliefs. It’s not as if generally intelligent people can’t be stupid—i.e., make stupid decisions or believe stupid things. Your mention of resentment reminds me of Nietzsche’s use of that term/idea (or Ressentiment) in the Genealogy of Morals in connection with herd/slave morality. I’m inclined to agree with you, though, that resentment is a better way of describing the driving force here than is stupidity.
ReplyDeleteMy problem was more with the concept of "stupid person" than of "stupid decision". I tried to think of someone whom I considered to be stupid and I couldn't think of anyone.
ReplyDeleteAs for intelligence, a psychologist once told me that intelligence had to do with the ability to bring more variables to bear to any given situation or something like that.
However, in recent years psychologists have taught us about multiple forms of intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, etc. and thus, the classic concept of intelligence, the one that IQ tests measure or are supposed to measure, no longer seems apt. The same person can have a high intellligence in traditional terms and have zero social intelligence and vice versa.
In addition, research has shown that intelligence testing is influenced by social and cultural factors. Blacks and working class people in general routinely score less on them than people who comes from educated families, etc. However, in so many situations, a working person or a poor black can "outsmart" an intellectual with 7 Phd's from elite universities.
So the concepts of "intelligence" and "stupidity" are confusing. I agree with you, Fritz Poebel, about the usefulness here of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment.
Marc, I forgot to click the name line but it strikes me that acting to ones detriment in any aspect out of mere resentment is stupid but it may be that I have an idiosyncratic concept of stupidity. In my view a certain level of intelligence is necessary for stupidity to kick in - consider Musk and Putin. I've seen folks come up against circumstances that were not easily solved suddenly act stupidly in that area while maintaining their intelligence and common sense in the rest of their lives.
ReplyDeletes.w., it's entirely possible to like someone because of their personality if their self destructive behavior doesn't actually impact ones life. I've known a number of likeable criminals, rogues, and reprobates. Your example sounds like someone suffering the effects of trauma/mental illness.
LFC, not understanding the hating on LGM or what a (now) obscure Central Asian religion has to do with anything. If one side does a Schmittian heel turn the other side has no option but to prevail or die (metaphor). LGM, Daily Kos, Balloon Juice, etc. are on the non-tankie left. Do you believe we didn't dodge a bullet thia week?
I'm still happy for our fish friends.
It's a small world:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:22.9/centery:4.5/zoom:2
aaall
ReplyDeleteOf course I agree that "we" dodged a bullet this week, meaning by that that the results of the midterms, though as of right now not yet fully known, could have been much worse.
I've decided to Ieave it at that. I have to say that I don't really understand your reference to the fish in the Dnipro river, but I guess that can be chalked up to my... [fill in the blank with whatever word you want].
LFC,
ReplyDeleteI believe that aaall is referring to the Russian retreat from Kherson City. The Dnipro River borders Kherson. (This is important, because it may be a question on Jeopardy tonight.)
I am aware of the Russian retreat, but I thought he might have something more particular in mind w the ref to fish. No matter.
ReplyDeleteHe is referring to the fish in the Dnipro River feeding on Russian soldiers. A gory image, to be sure.
ReplyDeleteI would always be cautious about reports from the front. Wisely, they should be put on hold for a week or two to see if they were correct.
ReplyDeleteA postscript or two on stupidity, if I try to eat soup with a fork, that's obviously stupid. It doesn't necessarily mean that I have a resentment against spoons.
Looking back, I can say that there were enough situations in my life where I was stupid. In fact, calling people "stupid" whose actions do not make sense at first glance does not bring any insight.
Then there is Myshkin, from Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" and the fact that the author did not give his book the title "The Fool".
My partner has a Russian half sister, the result of a short relationship that her father, a Chilean communist murdered by Pinochet, had in the Soviet Union some 55 years ago.
ReplyDeleteHer nephew, Anatole, just arrived in Chile, fleeing from military service in Ukraine. He's a nice kid, around 20, thrilled to be able to drink Coca Cola again since it's no longer found in Russia. He loves video games and social media as kids his age do everywhere.
Those Russian soldiers being eaten by the fish are kids like him whose families did not have the resources to pay for a long trip to Chile, which meant leaving Russia by land, traveling overland to Turkey, paying for food and hotels on the way, etc.
So a little bit of empathy, please, for the Russian soldiers forced to fight and die in Putin's war of aggression.
“[I]f I try to eat soup with a fork, that's obviously stupid. It doesn't necessarily mean that I have a resentment against spoons.” Splendid! I wish I had thought of that!
ReplyDeletes. wallerstein,
Congratulations to Anatole and his successful escape from Putin’s maniacal war effort. aaall’s fish comment, although harsh on its surface, was aimed at Putin as a denunciation of his egomania, which is costing Ukrainians, and Russians alike, untold misery and grief.
Yesterday, the United States celebrated Veterans’ Day, honoring its men and women who have served in the military over the last three centuries. PBS aired interviews with veterans who have served in the U.S.’s most recent conflicts. Among the interviewees were many veterans who served in the Vietnam War, who recalled how, when they came back to the U.S. after their tour of duty, they were greeted with scorn and criticism by many of their fellow Americans, Americans who they thought they were serving when they went overseas. Among those who scorned and criticized them were many American college students who had the luxury of being able to claim a college exemption from the draft. The Vietnam vets were criticized for having served, rather than refusing to serve, and either escaping to Canada (as some of my high school colleagues did), or risk going to jail rather than serving. I, and you, benefited from having a college exemption (until 1971, when the lottery draft forced me to join the Army Reserve). Although I would guess that a Russian prison is much harsher than an American prison (witness Britney Griner, who was transferred to a Russian penal colony, possibly in Siberia, yesterday), the Russian inductees have the same choice that Americans who served in Vietnam did – escape or refuse to serve. Russian soldiers who are succumbing to the Ukrainian offensive who do not have the means to escape as did Anatole, have the choice of refusing to serve, rather than do Putin’s bidding. Empathy, for them, Yes, with a measure of criticism for not refusing to serve.
Writing the above comment, memories of my service in the U.S. Army Reserve came streaming back to me. At the time I signed up for the Reserve, I was a 23-year old philosophy graduate student at the University of Michigan. I knew absolutely nothing about the military, other than what I saw in movies. I had never fired a real weapon – only the toy guns I received as presents during the holidays (against my mother’s wishes). When I signed up, I thought, based on absolutely no information, that college students who joined either the Army Reserve or National Guard were trained in special basic training units separate from the run of the mill inductees. Boy, was I wrong. The first night I spent at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, I learned from second-hand reports that a teen-ager in the barracks was charging admission for people to watch him eat glass! I thought, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
ReplyDeleteI have a distinct memory of leaving the barracks every morning to go for chow at the mess hall and seeing one of the inductees digging a hole, with a drill sergeant looking on. He asserted that he was a conscientious objector and refused to put his hand on a weapon. So, like the scene in Cool Hand Luke, they had him out in the field, from sunrise to sunset, digging a hole, then filling the hole, then digging it, refilling it, digging it, refilling it, …
After basic training (which I finished in the best physical shape I have ever been in), I was transferred to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, to be trained as an artilleryman on 105 mm. howitzers. There is no thrill in the world like lifting a 105 mm. shell, placing it in the breach of a howitzer, holding the shell in place with your fist to ensure that it does not slide out and fall on the ground and explode, and praying that your hand does not get amputated as the breach door is closed, and pushes your fist to the side.
During both of my tours, I experienced numerous statements and acts of anti-Semitism. I had experienced anti-Semitism growing up (like the guy in high-school who asked me if Frankenstein was Jewish), but nothing as crude and, frankly dangerous, as what I experienced in the military. like, on the chow line, being asked by the server if I wanted my hot dog circumcised. Or the guy from Lubbock, Texas, who, one morning as we were standing outside the barracks waiting to go for chow, said to me, “Susselman, the hair on your head is like the hair on my cock.” I said nothing (like Bob Seger sings in Looking Back, you always are outnumbered, so you dare not make a stand), but I did think to myself, but dared not say, “Yeah, well the hair on your mouth is like the hair on my cock.
One incident, which almost ended in my being killed, involved a very big farm-boy from Kansas, who had no teeth and wore dentures, was about 6 ft., 3 inches tall and weighed in the vicinity of 275 lbs., whom I had to wake at 3 A.M. to relieve me from my nightly fire watch duty. That night, I had the 2 A.M. watch. When I went to wake my relief, listed on the roster, he said he was too sick to do the fire watch. So I went to the First Sergeant and asked him what to do. He said, “Go wake Clevenger.” So, I went to wake Clevenger. Clevenger was not in a good mood. The next morning, Clevenger came over to my bunk, pulled me out of the bed, lifted me up, and as he screamed, “No mother-fuckin’ Jew is going to wake me up in the middle of the night and get away with it,” he carried me around the barracks like a toy doll and banged my head against the frame of each of the bunks, and then, when he was done, dropped me on the floor and walked away. Not a single person in the barracks came to my help or defense. Being a philosophy major, and not particularly aggressive, I did not report it to the First Sergeant. Now that I am an attorney, and fight bullies every day, I know I should have turned him in and had him court-martialed for assault and battery.
s.w., while my concerns are mainly with the million or so Ukrainians (including a couple hundred thousand children) relocated to Russia as well as the Ukrainian civilians tortured and murdered by Russian soldiers and collaborators and the civilians suffering from Russian war crimes, I do have mixed feelings about the Russian casualties. Recently impressed mobniks are a sad case and I hope they can find a chance to surrender. Soldiers who committed war crimes, no sympathy. Reducing the retreating Russian forces is necessary and legitimate.
ReplyDeleteGlad Anatole made it out. Russia is a lost cause that has lost hundreds of thousands of the very people that were needed for the future.
aaall,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the explanation. I now understand your point of view better.