Some More Politicians Who Managed To Get Their Feet In Their Mouths.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

It always amazes me that politicians, who should be well aware that every word they say will be recorded somewhere, are so prone to speak without thinking.

On the other hand maybe they do think about what they are going to say and see nothing wrong with it. That is a very distinct possibility.

Either way it’s good for the rest of us.

We all like to laugh and who better to laugh at than a stupid politician.

Enjoy.

.

”Feminism was established so as

to allow unattractive women easier access

to the mainstream of society.”

Rush Limbaugh

 

.

.

“Schwarzenegger is going to find out that,

unlike a Hollywood movie set,

the bullets coming at him in this campaign

are going to be real bullets.”

Bob Mulholland, campaign adviser

for the California Democratic Party

 

.

.

 “We are not without accomplishment.

We have managed to distribute poverty equally.”

Nguen Co Thatch,

Vietnamese Foreign Minister.

 

.

.

“When the President does it

that means that it’s not illegal.”

Richard M. Nixon

 

.

.

“During my service in

the United States Congress,

I took the initiative in

creating the Internet.”

 Al Gore.

 

.

.

“Exercise freaks

… are the ones putting stress

on the health care system.”

Rush Limbaugh

 

.

.

“Capital punishment is our way

of demonstrating the sanctity of life.”

Orrin Hatch

 

.

.

“If you’ve seen one city slum,

you’ve seen them all.”

Spiro Agnew

 

.

. 

“From time to time there are going to

be things that occur that are acts of God

that cannot be prevented.”

Rick Perry,

on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010

 

.

. 

”Well, I learned a lot….

I went down to (Latin America) to find out

from them and (learn) their views.

You’d be surprised.

They’re all individual countries.”

Ronald Reagan

 

.

. 

“We know that no one person can succeed

unless everybody else succeeds.”

Howard Dean.

 

.

.

“The more toppings a man has on his pizza,

I believe the more manly he is.

A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables!

He would call that a sissy pizza.”

Herman Cain

 

.

 .

“What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind.

Or not to have a mind at all.

How true that is.”

Vice President Dan Quayle

 

.

.

“I’ve now been in 57 states

– I think one left to go.”

Barack Obama

at a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon.

 

.

.

“Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see ya.”

Joe Biden

to Missouri State Sen. Chuck Graham

… who’s in a wheelchair

 

.

.

“In America,

anybody may become president,

and I suppose it’s just one of the risks you take.”

Adlai Stevenson

two-time Democratic presidential nominee

.

===================================

.

A Little Knowledge IS A Dangerous Thing, When It’s In The Mind Of The Moron

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

 .

I mentioned a while ago in a post about Prof Cipolla’s “Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity” that two psychologists at Cornell University had written a study with the fabulous title, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Leads to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

Their names were Dunning and Kruger and their work developed into what is now known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”. They were awarded a Nobel Prize for their paper on the subject in 2000.

 

Graphical representation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect

 

Stated scientifically, the “Dunning–Kruger Effect” is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average.

This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

It further states that actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.

Kruger and Dunning conclude, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others……..this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

The effect has been shown by experiment in several ways. Dunning and Kruger tested students on a series of criteria such as humour, grammar, and logic and compared the actual test results with each student’s estimations of their performance.

Those who scored lowest on the test, in the bottom quartile, were found to have “grossly overestimated” their scores. Conversely, those with the highest scores underestimated their performance in comparison to others.

The tendency for those who scored well to underestimate their performance was explained as a form of psychological projection: those who found the tasks easy (and thus scored highly) mistakenly thought that they would also be easy for others.

This is similar to the “impostor syndrome” — found notably in graduate students and high achieving women — whereby high achievers fail to recognize their talents as they think that others must be equally good.

The Imposter Syndrome

 .

Put in layman’s terms, people who suffer from the “Dunning Kruger Effect” are so dumb not only do they fail to realize that they themselves are dumb, they actually believe themselves to be much more competent than everyone else.

It is a very dangerous phenomenon.

 

The idea isn’t a new one. Many people have come to the same conclusion independently, many of them a lot more famous than these two scientists.

For example, in 1871, Charles Darwin, in “The Descent of Man”, stated that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”.

In the 1930s Bertrand Russell, in “The Triumph of Stupidity”, said that “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

And in his 1996 book “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot”, Al Franken described the phenomenon of “pseudo-certainty” which was rampantly being displayed by pundits and politicians such as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who would use “common sense” as the basis for their confidently-made assertions, which were made without actually backing them up with time-consuming research or actual facts. In his own way Franken associates all this quite candidly with the term “being a fucking moron”.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect in action

 

So there you have it. It really isn’t just me sounding off or having a bit of a rant now and again. There is hard scientific evidence to show not only that stupidity exists big time, but that many of those possessing this infirmity are blissfully unaware of their problem.

Remember folks, please “Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”