It’s a big mistake to thing of people as stupid: they’d be far less dangerous if they actually were.

The problem isn’t lack of intelligence but the information space they inhabit and the feeling that they have somehow been mistreated. There’s an entire genre of “why are leopards eating my face?” schadenfreude posts about MAGAs asking why Trump is doing some “surprising” thing he said he was going to do for years. Because they’re _not_ stupid, once they’ve thrown in with a side they’ll put a lot of effort into coming up with rationalizations or attacks to try to “balance” things out. The bitter grievances are really powerful because they let people talk themselves into seeing things as necessary sacrifices: sure, you’re losing Medicaid and paying more in taxes but the alternative is living in a world where Riley Gaines was forced to tie for fifth so I guess you just have to tighten your belt on behalf of female athletes.

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krapp a day ago | parent [-]

With all due respect, what you're describing is still stupidity. 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds' as Emerson said.

The people who voted for Trump (or against Biden) because they hadn't been paying attention over the last decade and just thought the price of eggs was too high were stupid. The people who knew exactly what Trump was about and just didn't think the leopards would eat their faces were stupid. The people who voted because they just wanted to be entertained watching the world burn were stupid.

There's more than one kind of stupidity, and when they combine en masse into a big dumb avalanche it can absolutely be dangerous.

	▲	acdha 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair, I guess my point was not to underestimate your opponents: assume that they’re just as smart and motivated but are using their talents based on the Fox News cinematic universe / Christian nationalism. I live in DC so right now a lot of my neighbors are having surreal conversations with their extended family members who are saying things which would make sense if you started with certain false pretenses like all of the police statistics being faked. One of them was telling me about how they were talking with someone who had an Ivy degree, serious job, etc. but wouldn’t believe that our downtown wasn’t a movie gangland even though his own relative was telling him they take young kids in those area all the time and never see anything more unsafe than an out of control toddler on a bike. They kept coming up with complicated “maybe you missed” theories because they couldn’t bear to question that one starting premise. If you want to call that stupid, sure, but I think we might want a different term it.