Critical thinking gets treated like a personal attack. And god forgive you ask a question that doesn’t fit neatly on a bumper sticker and next thing you know, you’re called a ‘hater.’
… The thing about stupidity is that eventually, it bumps into the hard wall of reality.
… Intelligence isn’t dead, it’s just hungover.
The Death of Intelligence: Why Modern Society Celebrates Stupidity 22:42 Min.
by The Functional Melancholic, Apr 30, 2025 
(And, in my view and experiences throughout my life, society celebrates and rewards human cruelty against other humans and other species; the more religious (notably Christian and Jewish), the more vicious the cruelty.
This below is an excellent intelligent presentation on human stupidity:
America is experiencing systemic collapse with the death of critical thinking, and the rise of willful ignorance. Anti-intellectualism is on the rise.
In this brutally honest video sprinkled with dark humor, I talk about the absurdist social issues of late stage capitalism, brain drain, mental health and toxic positivity. I discuss why thinking is now considered “elitist,” and why refusing to join the parade of stupidity is now an act of quiet rebellion. We didn’t just trip and fall into stupidity — we sprinted there, high-fiving ourselves the whole way down.
If you’re exhausted by a world that seems to celebrate stupidity, you’re not alone. And you’re not crazy.
The Times They Aren’t a-Changin’, The progressive confidence of the Sixties and Seventies seems almost ridiculous in retrospect. Ugly and mean is strutting and flaunting by Neil Macdonald, May 05, 2025, The Dire Wolf
My niece, a perpetually sunny person, abruptly asked the other day: “Do you believe people are basically good?”
“No.”
“You know, I’m beginning to think that, too.”
I regretted my answer; Why categorically repudiate a young person’s optimism? I tend to see the world through dark glass, but I enjoy upbeat people, and their cheerful insistence that good will out, whatever.
But of course, it doesn’t. In these times, holding relentlessly to optimism is like stubbornly preferring the goofy, happy-ending Disney version of The Little Mermaid over the sadness and despair of the original masterpiece.
The confident progressiveness of the Seventies seems pathetically Polyannaish in retrospect, founded as it was on the idea that we were on a steady march toward something better. Bob Dylan, it turns out, was laughably wrong. The times were not a-changin’ – human nature is immutable.
The cumulative efforts of the civil rights movement are being erased at remarkable speed by America’s new leadership. Programs advantaging minorities are gone. Historical literature on the fight for minority rights is being suppressed, condemned as unpatriotic and divisive. Accounts of Black and minority advances are purged from U.S. government websites. And naked racism, which had churlishly held its tongue in public for decades, is celebrating.
Last week, a Minnesota woman named Shilo Hendrix was filmed by a bystander after she repeatedly called a black child the word so beloved by White supremacists. Not particularly unusual, in itself, but what happened next was telling.
The bystander challenged her use of the slur, to which she responded by telling him it was none of his business and giving him the finger, so he posted the video online, which, Hendrix claimed, caused her and her family “great turmoil.”
Accordingly, she went to a Christian crowdfunding site and appealed to her fellow travellers. A slew of Americans responded with great sympathy, and, so far, about half a million dollars to help her deal with her anguish.
And the vitriol of the Christian website’s readers toward the Black child was so extreme the site decided to restrict comments. You know, as Jesus would do. The man who shot the video, meanwhile has been identified publicly and has gone shtum, almost certainly fearing for his life.
Granted, it’s just one story. Perhaps just a scotoma. But it sure seems of a piece with our times.
The elected leader of the richest country in history, decorating the Oval Office with a vulgar display of gilt and gold, then shutting down financial aid to poor nations, while smilingly deploying ICE, the immigration enforcement agency that increasingly operates as his secret police, carrying out waves of covert arrests and summary deportations, even of American citizens (at least those who aren’t White), subverting and outright defying America’s courts, which, as happens in most countries that employ secret police, will probably soon be presided over by compliant judges who won’t need to be defied.
Donald Trump was asked by a reporter a few days ago whether he has to obey the Constitution, as his oath of office requires. His answer: “I don’t know.”
Now, he wants to mark his own birthday with a huge military parade in the streets of the capital, with thousands of troops, and displays of weaponry, with place of pride, no doubt, reserved for some of the violent rioters or war criminals he’s pardoned. I’ve covered countries where the leaders hold self-glorifying military parades. I was always happy to leave.
2022: Morten Morland cartoon of Putin’s garish Victory Day Parade
At the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the new administration has ordered the removal of a memorial to victims of gun violence. There is no place for such maudlin snivelling in the new, manly America. The AR-15 is a national treasure, not something to be feared.
The American war on trans people continues; woe to educational institutions that make any move to protect these dysphoric, vulnerable, bullied souls, who pose such a threat to American masculinity, and to America’s precious children. That most child abusers are heterosexual men is just fake news put out by bothersome lefty scientists. We’ll see about their funding, too.
MAGA’s enemies in the mainstream media, meanwhile, are capitulating. Of course they are. They are ghosts, supplanted by influencers and rumor-mongers, operating on a broken business model. People want to read news they agree with, and don’t want to pay for it. As Press Freedom Day came and went last week, we were reminded of the damage: Journalists worldwide under physical threat as never before, journalists in the West struggling to make a living, as their authoritarian adversaries, grinning wolfishly, tighten the garrotte.
The American president is one of them, slashing at National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, entities he detests for their even-handedness and fact-checking.Vulgar bully ultra stupid Trumpie KKKopyKat Piss Pants Poilievre does too.
He actually crowned himself on social media a few months back, then, this past weekend, pushed out an AI-generated image of himself as the next pope, just as the Vatican’s cardinals prepared to choose a replacement for the gentle, decent, anti-Trump who was so hated by American conservatives. Every single Italian I’ve spoken to regarded that AI image as malignant narcissism, a phrase that in the age of Trump has been so sorely overused as to be ineffective, the result of flooding the zone with shit.
From Trump’s myrmidons: Come on, folks, it was a joke. From his electoral base: whinnying laughter.
We are of course supposed to take his territorial ambitions on Canada as a joke, too; saying he will use economic pressure to annex America’s former ally was just a jest, people, come on, lighten up. After all, he said this past weekend he probably won’t use military force, didn’t he? Well, maybe in Greenland.
It may even have been a joke when he said “I run the country, and the world.” But I’ll take him at his word.
All the things I have so far cited, I realize, are American. But that’s what makes them so significant, at least to me: probably foolishly, I hang onto the notion that America, for all its occasional ugliness, is a place that generally tries to do the right thing.
But really, for how long? The Washington Post had a story today about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where rapists and murderers can evade punishment by volunteering to slaughter Ukrainians, participating in the invasion Trump once described as “genius,” and which he now regards as inevitable and acceptable.
When those rapists and murderers who survive the front lines return home, they often rape and murder again. And re-apply for military service. And are re-pardoned.
Can anyone imagine Trump adopting the same policy? I can. I mean, pardons.
Are people basically good, my dear? You’ll have to puzzle that one out yourself.
Steve van Leeuwen:
Man Neil, that was grim but true.. Human nature is unchangable. Homo Homini Lupus est… Except that is a real insult to wolves.
Refer also to:
