The Dunning-Kruger Effect Olympics
Otto Spelled Backwards is Still Otto
You Cannot Take Our Honour
One of the few individuals to stand up to Adolph Hitler in his lust for power was a man named Otto Wels. Wels was the head of the Social Democrats, and these were among the first “enemies within” that Hitler rounded up and put in concentration camps. Following the Reichstag fire, and prior to passing The Enabling Act (which gave Hitler unlimited powers), Wels stood before a makeshift assembly and protested what he saw as the undermining of the country’s democracy and its Constitution.
“A real national community cannot be based on it. Its first prerequisite is equal law. The government may protect itself against raw excesses of polemics; it may rigorously prevent incitements to acts of violence and acts of violence in and of themselves.” –Otto Wels
It should be noted that Wels had to flee his country as Hitler began to systematically arrest and detain his political ‘enemies’ in the first concentration camps. For the story of what happened to those individuals, watch: Rick Steves' The Story of Fascism.
There is a lot of anger right now and talk of The Resistance, yadada yadada. But how much resistance is needed and how much standing back and standing by is required? JVL wrote a good piece last week: A Modest Proposal: Let T***p Be T***p
The theory is that the Resistance might better be served by simply allowing the crazy to unfold, even if it hurts people. Yes, some people may be injured, including MAGAts. If your neighbor’s autistic child suffers because they “Close down the Department of Education,” it is sad, but it doesn’t really affect you, and it may provide some incentive for persuasion for these people to make different choices in their lives. If your friend’s business suffers because he is saddled with high tariffs or has employees hauled away by Santa Monica Goebbels Stephen Miller, oh well. Such is life.
The Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk Administration: Only the Best People
JVL is probably on to something, even if that something requires checking empathy at the door. The first season of the T***p reality show was filled with jackals, weirdos and chaos. Season Two looks to be bordering on the truly ludicrous. Just like in Spaceballs, Lightspeed is too slow.
We don’t need to be quants or Bayesian analysts so see what is coming, we have eyes. You can pretend, and if you’re in the MAGA cult, you may land on a Panglossian view of Season Two. The reality is that it will most likely be more like a disaster film. The U.S.S.R. T***ptanic to be precise.
The Cristofascists behind Project 2025 have been savoring this moment for 45 years. This is their moment! Again, don’t be fooled by the sleight of hand, Project 2025 is NOT conservative, and it is NOT Christian. It is simply the wet dream of The Council for National Policy.
We are about to bear witness to the Dunning-Kruger Effect Olympics.
“Overestimation, another kind of overconfidence, refers to the discrepancy between someone’s skills and their perception of those skills. People who overestimate themselves frequently engage in wishful thinking with harmful consequences.”—Psychology Today
“Rather than rewarding intellectual humility, we to too often mistakenly conflate certainty with false confidence and power. Too many people rise to top following the strategy of always certain but often wrong.” –Brian Klaas: Fluke
If they want to take away insurance from everyday Americans, our job is not to argue or fight. Let them take away the insurance and maybe your next-door neighbor goes bankrupt when they are facing cancer. We already live in a world where the bulk of GoFundMe accounts are to cover medical expenses, so what else is new?
Choose Your Hills
In The Power of Myth, Joseph Cambell says: “It’s a great day to die.” We need to be very selective regarding the hills on which to die. If they want to start a nuclear war, we should be speaking out. But the random marching in the streets will get tiring very quickly.
“They’re not hanging on. That’s the message of the myth. You as you know yourself are not the final term of your being. And you must die to that, one way or another, in giving of yourself to something, or in being annihilated actually physically, to return, you might say, or to recognize.” –Joseph Campbell
When the author Harold S. Kushner wrote: When Bad Things Happen to Good People, he uses his stature as a Rabbi to link God to all things and for us to trust in a God who knows what they are doing. Like Campbell, Kushner is asking us to die to our egos in order to participate in the realm of Spirit.
“…for all those people who wanted to go on believing, but whose anger at God made it hard for them to hold on to their faith and be comforted by religion.” -- When Bad Things Happen to Good People
We clearly are now living in a world where Good Things Happen to Bad People. But raging against the machine is fruitless. Recognizing what is real and what is the false narrative of the ego is one hill on which to die. Don’t give up the fight.