There’s a big difference between intelligence and low cunning.
Donald Trump has constantly lied and failed upwards. He is not a smart man.
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WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 1 day agoI don’t understand how people see this kind of thing and think, “this guy is dumb.”
For a decade the world has been seeing constant evidence that when you lie brazenly and repeatedly enough you become untouchable. This guy isn’t an idiot- he just knows (probably rightly) that he has everything to gain and nothing to lose by pretending to be.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
Okay, so what does that say about everyone who’s failed to outsmart him?
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 18 hours ago
They’re not as rich as him. If you have shit tons of money you can be a braindead moron and still fail upwards.
5too@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I’m remembering the old duelist’s adage, that the worst opponent to have is an amateur - because you have no idea what kind of idiocy they’ll try
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
After 30 or so years of witnessing firsthand that the amateur really only has one or two moves, though… at a certain point that adage kind of falls apart.
Soup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No one truly intelligent is seeking their own personal profit over everyone else. The simple fact is that these people are just lucky and have never had to ever consider the consequences of their actions. They aren’t happy, their lives don’t change between a few hundred million dollars and a billion dollars, they just chase a bigger number because the highest level their brains function at is like a monkey that wants all the fruit to itself.
I think about it this way: Neurodivergent are usually considered bad at communicating, except the worst communicators I’ve ever met have been neurotypical people. They live in a world built for them, where anyone not following the script must be broken so it not their fault. You look at these billionaires and they aren’t behaving like this because they’re smart, because there’s a plan, it’s because they refuse to admit they’re lucky and any failure was someone who just didn’t listen to the enough. It’s not their awful planning, it’s the employee who was unable to follow their bullshit.
These people are not intelligent, they just have enough money to be wrong a thousand times and only think about how smart they were that thousand and oneth time. They throw a million darts at the board and claim the single bullseye was all their raw skill.
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
My point is that they aren’t making mistakes. They’re not attempting A but doing B because they don’t know any better. What they are doing is intentional and very often successful.
Soup@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
That doesn’t make them intelligent, and you need to re-read my comment until you understand just how many failures these people experience that they can simply ignore. In many ways you could even argue that what they’re doing isn’t intentional, they’re just reacting in the moment and we can all see how the furthest they can really look ahead is about a couple days.
Look at Musk, there have literally been whole teams of people who made it their job to distract the stupid child so he couldn’t fuck up their company. Jeff Bezos is making terrible decisions and his creativity was “bookstore but online”, yet it looks like success the same way a toddler with a shotgun will get all the cookies they want.
“Intentional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. These are some of the dumbest, most over-confident people alive right now and they are nothing without their ability to ignore major financial failures.
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
And yet they’re seemingly untouchable while their opposition flails around and impotently shakes their fists. Great, they’re dumb and overconfident- they’re still seemingly doing exactly what they need to do in order to “win” and rub everyone else’s nose in it.
If decent people were half as interested in stopping these shitheads as they are in reassuring themselves of their intellectual superiority, they might actually have something to fear.