CSotD: What a Fool Believes
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is about people who don’t realize how little they know about a particular topic. It’s not confined to stupid people and could apply, for instance, to a well-qualified, highly educated physician who spouts nonsense about tectonic plate shifting despite geology not being his area of expertise.
There aren’t many people who are universally stupid, though one of the challenges in education is finding what people are potentially good at and helping them train in that area, whether it involves parsing Shakespeare or doing good auto body repair.
Ironically, Dunning-Kruger often seems to apply to people who think that kids who understand Shakespeare are smarter than kids who understand how to use a spectrophotometer to duplicate the color of an eight-year-old Chevy. Having letters after your name doesn’t make you immune to the effect, nor is it supposed to.
In any case, there’s a real problem when Dunning-Kruger, which is fairly common, collides with a toxic level of narcissism, which is how you end up with people who venture into a wide range of places where they not only have no knowledge but have no knowledge of how little competence they possess.
Which brings us to that old saying that it’s best to keep silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Which then brings us to Bagley’s cartoon, because there’s no point in arguing with someone who knows everything. Or assumes he does.
McKee is one of many cartoonists and commentators who speculate about how MAGA voters must regret having trusted Trump to protect their interests, and current GOP policies truly are hurting working-class Americans, including those concentrated in Red States.
It’s also true that, though Trump boasts of having high approval ratings, the polls show otherwise, his response being that he wants to ban polls that don’t match his inflated self-image.
Note that he continues to flog the nonsensical idea that tariffs are paid by other countries as well as additional counterfactual boasts that don’t stand up to the most basic examination.
Wuerker points out that his tariffs are having real effects on farmers, but among the True Believers there is a blame-shifting that protects Dear Leader even as farms and ranches edge towards bankruptcy: Since Trump is invariably honest, the fact-checkers must surely be lying.
Will the farming community turn against him? Well, he promised more coal mining jobs in 2016 and that never happened in his first term, but it didn’t seem to hurt him in coal country when he ran again in 2024.
Now he’s gone from damaging farmers with his tariffs to making deals with Argentina that hurt the cattle industry, and, again, there are complaints coming from that sector.
But it’s hard to tell whether the complaints reflect widespread opinion or just the loudest voices, or to sort out authentic American ranchers from the bots and foreign trolls.
When all else fails, Dear Leader just spins more lies, but he doesn’t wait for all else to fail: He’s willing to begin lying the moment he’s challenged.
The latest example is his contention that the Ontario government concocted a phony tape of Reagan speaking out against tariffs, which — since the entire speech from which that commercial was edited is available on YouTube — would also require the Reagan Foundation to have faked a non-existent speech.
He could just as well announce that a flock of penguins had flown over the White House. Discussions of whether penguins can fly would never dent the True Believers’ faith in what Dear Leader told them.
(And here’s a photo to prove he really did say that!)
There have always been braggarts, liars and fakes on social media, but the growth of artificial intelligence has made it easier for them to, in the words of Steve Bannon, “flood the zone” with so much material that the media can’t report on it all, much less sort through it like sparrows picking undigested oats from a manure pile.
And it doesn’t have to be significant to create distrust and division. Social media has seen so many bogus claims about various team owners and major corporations objecting to having a Latino superstar at the Super Bowl halftime show that, as Granlund noted, the Commissioner had to come out and state that Bad Bunny was not being canceled.
The overt racism in this disinformation campaign is evil enough, but there’s also a message about rampant gullibility, since anyone older than 10 should realize that contracts exist and that you can’t just cancel a major performance and swap in another high profile star.
It’s as fundamentally foolish as Kosplay Kristi’s plan to send ICE to arrest gardeners and motel maids among the people paying more than $6,000 per ticket to see the game and the American singer at the half-time show.
It doesn’t even matter if the explanation for our situation comes from a star of the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour.”
As said here before, it’s an issue of group loyalty. In 1980, New Orleans Saints fans invented the practice of wearing a bag over your head to hide your shame but going to the game anyway, when the “Aints” compiled a 1-15 record, and Handelsman notes that the team is currently 1-7, while Louisiana State just fired their head coach and offensive coordinator without so much as a bayou-leave.
Still, the stands won’t be empty in either stadium.
However, I don’t think election officials would let people vote with bags over their heads.
In fact, Cousineau suggests that there could be advantages to publicly demonstrating loyalty to Dear Leader, even if you aren’t feeling it.
Meanwhile, Brodner riffs on Margaret Bourke-White’s classic 1937 photo from the Louisville Flood, in which a line of Black residents lining up for aid contrast with a billboard depicting cheerful, successful white folks.
The contrast in Bourke-White’s shot was stunning but perhaps unfair, since people of any race or income needed help in the wake of the flood.
But the Department of Labor’s brand-new poster series can’t be dismissed as anything but a call to build der Vaterlands’ future.
Where is Victor Lazlo, now that we need him?
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