this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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It's funny because I agree and disagree at the same time. I've had varying levels of "there's way more nuance to this" and "how the fuck is everyone complicating this???" throughout my life and have generally come to the conclusion that it's much more complex than that in that everything is both more nuanced and more simple at the same time because politics really is that stupid.
However, in getting involved in political circles and actually getting to know some legitimate decision makers toward the top, some of these fuckers are way more stupid than we think. Like, alarmingly so. I've had moments where some GOP dumbfuck is doing some evil shit and I'm like "I don't think they're doing this maliciously" and some of my more partisan left-ish friends get all offended think I'm defending them, when really it's so much worse; they're doing it because they're legitimately really fucking stupid... and they're part of world leadership. Don't get me wrong, some of them are both stupid and an asshole, but at the end of the day, people in general tend to get the overall picture of politics wrong because it's way more nuanced in how fucking stupid it is.
One more fun thought for y'all: many of the really dumb legislators I've met in the past predate the current GOP alignment. And you see how much dumber the current GOP is versus the GOP of not even a decade ago? Well...
This is the truth I see as well. I'm around a lot of upper crust events, old money decision maker millionaires. I'm taking pictures so I overhear a lot I probably shouldn't, literally the fly on the wall.
They are not doing things maliciously on purpose. It's more like what George Carlin said, it's a club and we ain't in it. They are ignorant to what the upper middle-class and below actually do and they really don't care to learn or can't grasp it. They do things based more on their perspectives in an echo chamber. They don't make friends outside that circle.
Ask them a basic question from highschool science and they will respond with a very wrong answer with absolute confidence. I've met homeless people on the street with more intelligence.
You have to experience things or work for them to gain any knowledge.
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
I think there's a word for that: negligence
Yep. The older I get, the less of a distinction I see between the two. Stupidity and malice always seem to come hand-in-hand.
Evil geniuses and idiots with a heart of gold are mostly just Hollywood inventions. In the real world, intelligence and morality are highly correlated together.
abraca-fuck-you.
Basically: Hanlon's Razor
people respond to incentives.
that's all you need to know.
take the good and the evil, the smart and the stupid out of it, and it will make a lot more sense.
most people would be just as 'evil' as who you are talking about given they had the same levels of power. you false belief is that these people 'in power' are somehow superhuman and can resist the temptations and abuses that come with the power they have... they can't, and don't, and most folks are like that. it's exceptional when someone doesn't abuse their power.
There's so much to address here, it's crazy. I'll give it a shot, I guess.
Incentive in this context is not really that relevant. Sure, Incentivization of systems and all that, but in terms of actual outcomes and how people make decisions, incentives are a terrible predictor of behavior and motive. Additionally, to try and say the one factor is all that matters is ridiculous.
To dismiss morality and my original subject of how dumb some legislators are, conflate incentive and motive as one thing and the only legitimate explanation of evil legislative decisions, then conclude that people are inherently(or even just predisposed to) evil because power is uhh... yeah, that's pretty wild.
You also state that I believe people can/do resist abusing their power. This is a non-starter as nothing I said even suggests such a thing, you made that up. On top of that, I can explicitly state that is, in fact, not my position on the topic of abuse of power. I already reject the framing of power and abuse of it as presented in your comment before any argument is even made. There's so much more to it than just "power corrupts". And power isn't even a factor for many people anyway, even in the context of being in a position of power. People as a whole really aren't that simple.
The only thing I was getting at is that there are people in decision-making positions that appear to make a decision because they're evil or corrupt or whatever else, but in reality, they're just really dumb. This doesn't exclude other factors, nor does this make a definitive statement about reality, it's just an observation from my experience in politics challenging a common incredulity that "they can't really be that stupid" to which I'm backing up the common saying "never attribute to malice what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity".
Which is what us anarchists have been trying to tell everyone forever.
Nobody can be trusted with power. Nobody. The only real solution is to prevent the accumulation of power in the first place.
oh and how do you go about that exactly?
you guys are always going on about these big principles, but you never have actionable plans.
turns out pretty much ever social structure has power, or do you anarchists not have leaders and figure heads you all worship and adore and fight over who is best living the 'legacy' of who who are the 'true' anarchists... hmm almost as if your idealistic theory fails even among it's own adherents...
1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War organized an Anarchist society with over 3 million participants, and they documented much of how exactly they ran it, right down to how they kept the electric trams for public transport going (there is a fantastic book embedded at the bottom of that article, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston Leval, which offers more details on other aspects of how they operated that society).
It's a fantastic historical event we can learn from and build upon, and it bore out quite effectively that a decentralized society functions quite well.
Nonsense. I'd build a perfectly fine utopia!
After culling that 99.9% of the troublesome population.
/jk
Most politicians do evil shit because the system of capitalism compels them to. There is no way to “win” capitalism without being evil. If you aren’t willing to do whatever it takes to win, you will inevitably be eaten by someone who is.