Thursday, January 19, 2006

Two Kinds o' Stupid

I aired this view before Movie Night this week, so I decided that earned it a place here. Before we get started, let me review what I mean by the word "stupid", which I think is an adjective that sees far too much use. In my view, there's a difference between "stupid" and "foolish." Stupid people actually lack intelligence, and thus have difficulty acquiring, remembering, processing and applying information. There are very few genuinely stupid people in the world. Foolish people may be quite intelligent, but they consistently make poor decisions and lack even basic intuition. There are lots of foolish people in the world. An example of stupid but not foolish is Sam Gamgee of the Lord of the Rings, who doesn't know very much in terms of information and isn't great at thinking on his feet, but who was wise enough to resist the lure of the Ring. An example of foolish but not stupid is Michelle Malkin, a conservative asshole who last year wrote a book called "Defending Internment", in which she attempts to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII.

Back to topic. I find that stupid people fall into two basic categories: bird stupid and ox stupid. Bird-stupids can be manipulated because they are at least dimly aware that they don't know very much. Ox-stupids are convinced that they know better than everyone, and are therefore nearly impossible to sway. Give me bird-stupid any day.

Looking back on this post, I realize it was a long wind-up for a very short delivery. Eeep.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was listening to a recorded Car Talk show on the way into work yesterday, and they were talking about made up words that are based on real words. One of the words they introduced was 'stupiphany,' which should be fairly obvious how it's used. I liked that one. I've had a few stupiphanies in my time. :)

Tim