There has got to be a song in there somewhere……
This new ‘Age’ has been a long time coming….although the basics have been rumbling around since about 1980…..and in the last dozen years it has become a full blown epidemic.
The stupidity has invade all aspects of our government and people….but for this post I will basically write on our foreign policy…..
The role of stupidity in determining the course of history is often underestimated by historians. They neglect it as too crude and shallow a factor to be the cause of crucial events, preferring to unearth more sophisticated and intellectually respectable explanations. Calling a leader “a fool” may be pervasive as abuse, but is seldom accepted as the underlying reason for a calamitous decision.
This is surely a mistake. “Never lose your sense of the superficial,” said the newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe and his advice applies as much to historic trends as it does to daily news. Yet pundits like to feel that they are digging deeper than a personal failing, and seldom focus on plain and simple stupidity as the reason why leaders make unforced errors.
This kind of individual inadequacy is not equally present in all periods and it may be that in some eras the scope for chronic blunderers to do damage is higher than in others. It was certainly high in 1914, for instance, when dim-witted leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm 11 in Germany, Tsar Nicholas 11 in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were making the decisive moves leading to a European war that more intelligent leaders might have avoided as being much against their interests and putting at risk the future of their regimes.
The Age of Stupidity: From Johnson and Biden to Putin and Xi Jinping
After all the wars that were a failure….and yet the rhetoric is to prepare for yet another war we will suck at in the future.
Both Russia and the US have poked at each other over time until Ukraine has to pay the price…..now we are poking the Sleeping Dragon that is China….right now it is over Taiwan….
How much longer will this ‘stupidity’ continue?
Well my guess is it will not end any time soon….as linger as the Congress and the White House can be bribed this will continue until this country is completely bankrupt and the people living in squalor so the oligarchs can have their yachts and free money from the government….
I wish I could live long enough to see a government ‘of the people and by the people’…..but that is a lie that will not be achieved in my lifetime.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 
Actually — and you should know this to be true — The United States government has never been about “Of the people, By the people and For the people” especially if you are going to try to include every living soul as a person who dwells within the borders and legally under auspices of the reigning regime at any given time.
Let me explain:
The Founding Fathers made it expressly clear in their efforts at memorializing their intents into documents such as the Constitution that “The People” (In their view) was limited to rich white slave owners. The “Of the People, By the people” song and dance was never intended to include peons and commoners.
So pragmatically, we have never had a government that could righteously or legitimately claim to be as broad in scope of intent as a lot of dreamers and wishful thinkers would love for it to be … it has always been a government of the haves and the have nots…. with the majority of the good things going to the haves and the crumbs that fell off the tables of the rich were gobbled up by everybody else … in desperation to survive.
Seems to me that ‘dumbing down’ has been happening since the fall of the Roman Empire, chuq.
Best wishes, Pete.
Pretty much….chuq