UnderpantsWeevil

Per the CNN story, its certainly possible he had a mental break after failing to get a job in the forestry service and just decided to take it out on a couple of firefighters before offing himself.

Did his parents holding extremist political views and a fetish for firearms play a role in his actions? Would be more unbelievable if they didn't. But I don't think he'd have been better off with a couple of parents who were firmly in the Ted Cruz camp or disaffected Liz Cheney die-hards, either.

If I was to take a wild guess, I'd say this was the direct result of a kid who was out of high school, unemployed, with no real future on the horizon, who was terminally online in a community of (likely a large number of bot-accounts and trolls) telling him he's worthless and should just off himself.

A classic problem of "surplus males" that plague every militant reactionary society.

Even the stupidest of fools is bound to develop a skill or two along the way

"He's the worst chess grandmaster of the lot. Never stops playing, keeps ranking up, just coasting along on the sheer number of games he's played badly and learned from. Hands down, dumb as shit, I would only lose to him 99.95% of the time."

Again, I think the term "stupid" is just a pejorative at this point. If he was a democrat who kept winning upset elections and outfoxing supposedly superior opponents, what kind of liberal would talk about him this way?

I think his stupidity is a selling point as well

He's not fixated on looking like a braniac, which means he's not getting caught in the Tucker Carlson trap of "You don't even know how many people are in Iran! How can you support bombing them?" Trump isn't claiming he's got the encyclopedia memorized. Much like Bush Jr and Reagan, he's focused on what plays well with the audience, not what sounds "smart" to the debate judges.

Is that stupid? Not when it accomplishes your intended goals.

Incidentally, one of the "dumbest" things Trump did in the wake of his '24 win was that ridiculous cryptocurrency that let him take bribes openly from foreign governments. It quickly restored him from "billionaire on paper" to "real fucking billionaire". Not because it was so insidiously clever or legalistic, but because the Biden DOJ never prosecuted him when he was out of office. What's more, the courts that Democrats refused to stack when they had a majority, have given him a free pass on criminal misconduct.

You can give a lot of credit for that to Mitch McConnell, as he spent his whole Senate career carefully staking appointed positions and encouraging career hires with Federalist Society flacks. But Trump's the guy who is going to capitalize on all McConnell's hard work and Clinton/Obama/Biden's passivity. So who really looks like the dumb-dumb here?

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

Okay, sure. But consider that they didn't earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.

Intelligence is sometimes a handicap in politics.

Idk if I'd call it a handicap. I'd say it is tangential to the goal of building a large base of supporters, particularly when the "intelligent" move you see before you is to fatten your own wallet or adhere to some big money economic orthodoxy in order to climb the corporate ladder.

Like, the classic examples of this were Hillary v Obama in 2008 and Hillary v Donald in 2016. Hillary Clinton was clearly smarter - and in many ways more politically savvy - than Trump. She was arguably more experienced and politically educated than Obama. And they were both miles ahead of the rest of the GOP field. Hillary had run circles around her Republican rivals for decades, cultivated networks of plutocrats that would have otherwise been Republican stalwarts, built large organizations throughout the Atlantic Coast and the Southwest to power her ambitions during the Bush Era, and added substantially to her family fortune from historical right-wing sources while at the head of the liberal leadership team in an era when Democrats as a party were on the decline.

But she got the rug pulled on her in the '08 primary, simply because she refused to admit she was wrong on her Iraq War vote six years earlier. And she got beaten again, by a whisper thin margin, because her business friendly calculus in backing NAFTA for thirty years finally caught up with her.

As far as Trump goes, I would say his intelligence was never a hindrance he had to manage in any way because he is, was, and always will be abundantly stupid.

I would argue that Trump was significantly smarter than the median GOP primary candidate in '16 and '24. A lot of folks love to pillar him as stupid, but he clearly has an ability to read a room and reflect those feelings back to a crowd in a way DeSantis and Huckabee and Jeb! did not. He wasn't afraid to say the Iraq War was a mistake. He regularly bragged about his role in government corruption when it was clear voters assumed everyone was corrupt and considered this a point of transparency. He was more openly racist, when the base demanded more racism, and (often quixotically) more openly LGBTQ+ friendly when the base stopped giving a fuck about villainizing gay relationships. Call it Emotional Intelligence, if nothing else. The man might not even be literate, but he's clearly clever as a fox and twice as predatory.

But I also think he's a product of the historical moment. His popularity is largely a consequence of decades of political orthodoxy on Rich People Being Better Than You, hammered into the heads of his base voters. He was given a big megaphone to say "I'm a rich white guy with a hot wife, vote for me" in an era when being a rich white guy with a hot wife was a great way to build a popular base of voters.

He lucked into office in 2016 in the same way Obama lucked into office in 2008. In a prior moment, it wouldn't have worked. In this moment, he was the man that fit what Americans were being sold as Presidential.

This is, broadly speaking, cool and useful advice.

But I keep seeing people enthusiastically post "You know you can get university research papers for free from Quasi-Illegal Source XYZ" without anyone really illustrating what all this cutting edge research is supposed to help me accomplish. Posting this to /c/gradstudentresearchers would make more sense than /c/microblogmemes.

So I checked Wikipedia

Show me a conflict within the borders of the Ottoman Empire that killed more people than the Napoleonic Wars.

I know it’s easier to blame everything on the US

Trying to explain to the judge that blaming Jeffrey Dahmer for all those bodies in the fridge is the easy answer and the jury needs to approach things more critically.

I mean, if it makes you feel any better, the blame falls off the US once you spin the clock back before McKinley. The societal collapse during the 17th and 18th centuries are largely a consequence of imperial policies of England, France, and Spain.

Eh. Intelligence is clearly not how you get ahead in elected politics. Even when Biden wasn't teetering on the edge of senility, he was still dumb as bricks. Didn't stop him from being a senior Senator, then a VP, then a President. Meanwhile, the Smarties like Romney and Cruz and Buttigieg and Bloomberg routinely face-plant in the face of even the most mild popular opposition.

The British Government considers being Arab as synonymous with being a terrorist. Not, incidentally, any differently than how Israelis see them.

Of course, the Brits were a colonial power that spent centuries quelling domestic revolts in order to extract natural resources and exploiting cheap labor. Also, not that different from their Israeli peers.

I’m pretty sure the middle east has had some sort of internal or external conflict going on for all of history

Prior to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East enjoyed centuries of peace and prosperity. From the 13th to 20th centuries, you were far safer in Damascus or Baghdad or Tehran than Paris or Berlin or Rome. Europe was in a continuous state of civil conflict during this period.

The Middle Eastern states were a popular refuge for European civilians fleeing the 30-Years-War, the Napoleonic Wars, the various wars of consolidation and independence following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the World Wars. Countries from Morocco to Iran were all common destinations thanks to their unaligned status and divorce from the conflicts in Europe. More common even than the Americas. In fact, a big early appeal of the Palestinian Mandate was that it allowed Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike to escape the pogroms north of the Mediterranean.

In the early years, at the start of the Cold War, a number of the former European colonies broke away from their now-destitute colonial masters. This lead to brief civil struggles, largely centered around the capitals where all those European WW1/2 refugees had piled in. But by and large, the democratization of the Middle East was far more peaceful than the democraticization of Europe.

It wasn't until the 1950s, when spy games between the US and the USSR began to topple unaligned governments, that war in the Middle East became commonplace. But what we're seeing today is a novelty of the 20th/21st century. You're ignoring centuries of peaceful coexistence and fixating on a few ancient (Crusades) and a few very recent (Soviet/Post-Soviet) violent flare ups.

A real picture of colonialism, when the seven largest English-speaking populations after the United States are drowning in US debt and surrounded by US military bases.

Imagine if IBM and Ford and Chase National Bank had pretended like Germany didn't exist, rather than flooding the country with cheap capital and credit.

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