Darwin and Dunning-Kruger

Dan Piraro, in a post about, essentially, our dying  country (it’s monstrously banjaxed at the very least), mentions the Darwin Awards.

One famous recipient mailed a letter bomb with insufficient postage. When it was returned to his address, he opened it and blew himself up. This seems the perfect metaphor for those who voted for the United States’ 45th and 47th president, the Naranja Narcissist.

Thanks to decades of flag-wrapped propaganda disguised as news, a (barely large enough) minority of US citizens fell in love with a spoiled-rich-kid-turned-failed businessman-turned-reality-show-phony who claimed to hate all the same people they did, and used him to mail a letter bomb to the rest of us. Now, his inability to do anything other than talk like a schoolyard bully while stealing people’s lunch money has caused their democracy to blow up in their faces. (source) 

My only quibble with Piraro’s assessment of who should be awarded the Darwin is that Prez Pedo's flag waving, addlepated, white trash cult must share the win with the wealthy (yeah, I’m looking at you MusKKK, Bozos, Zuck, Thiel, Adelson, the Uihleins, the Winklevoss Twins, etc.) who were well aware of Trump’s utter incompetence as well as his brain’s batshit totality. They backed him anyway, contributing millions to push the election in his favor. They thought he was controllable, that he was their tool. They were complete fools and we’re the ones paying the price, not them.

If we the people/the government held the Confederacy accountable for treason; if Ford hadn’t pardoned Nixon; if Reagan hadn’t rigged the Iran hostage crisis in order to win the presidency; if Oliver North and John Poindexter had not been pardoned for their Iran Contra crimes; had George W. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld paid the price for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay would this nation be in the vile, fractious, sick and most likely terminal condition that we are today? 

Gore Vidal famously said, “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ George Santayana

Bizarro, Dan Piraro

I mean, HOW is it even possible for a person who has been convicted of 34 felonies to be elected to the highest office of the land?!!!! Without laws on the books prohibiting convicted criminals, all it took was basic Republican chicanery, skulduggery, and gaslighting. Add in the apathy and complacency of the masses. Shake on a dose of naïveté and idiocy – “that can’t possibly happen here!” “I just don’t like her laugh” and “burn it all down!” et voila, we have a dead country.

A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims… but accomplice.
~ author unknown. Possibly Rudyard Kipling. Often misattributed to Orwell. 

Piraro asks, “Can an entire species be a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”

 The Dunning-Kruger Effect is when someone overestimates their knowledge and abilities because they’re lacking self-awareness – they can’t see their own lack of knowledge and ability. Essentially, it’s when you’re too stupid to know how stupid you are. 

e.g. Trump is a Dunning-Kruger President. He has a Dunning-Kruger administration. His children are Dunning-Kruger. He has a Dunning-Kruger wife and a Dunning-Kruger MAGA cult.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
~ Darwin

Pearls Before Swine, Stephan Pastis