Still, "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

To put it simply: this is not adequately explained by stupidity.

in a practical sense, well executed stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

I really hate that aphorism. Malicious people love it though. “Fool me once…”

> Still, "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

¿Porque no los dos?

> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...

Except these people have stated their intentions as malicious over and over and over so there is no need to 'ascribe' anything to them.

But was that malice, or stupidity? Do you think they disbanded pandemic prep because they wanted people to die in a pandemic? It seems much more likely that they were too stupid to realize that being unprepared for a pandemic is way more costly than being prepared for one.

There's certainly a lot of malice: asking for names of FBI agents who worked on Jan 6 cases, and in putting Tulsi Gabbard over the CIA, refusing to enforce the laws against offering bribes to foreign officials, cutting agencies regulating Trump's and Musk's businesses. But cutting pandemic prep, firing people working on basic technology... that shows that they're both malicious and stupid.

It doesn't really matter what their intent is when the result is the same.

Also...

> Do you think they disbanded pandemic prep because they wanted people to die in a pandemic

Are you familiar with the term reckless?

> It doesn't really matter what their intent is when the result is the same.

I mean, yeah, people die regardless of the motive. There's some saying about how boys may throw rocks in jest, but the frogs die in earnest. That's why it's important that people in power try to be careful not to kill people, and why it's important to elect people who are careful and try not to kill people.

But somewhere up the thread, someone said "I'm beginning to think it's malicious and not stupid". If that matters to you, then it matters.

> Are you familiar with the term reckless?

Are they culpable for their decision? Absolutely. The Hebrew word in the Bible translated "foolish" doesn't actually denote a lack of raw brainpower, but a certain kind of flaw in moral character. You can be both intelligent and foolish, just as you can have below-average brainpower and be wise.

But foolish is not malicious. Malice means you intend evil; foolish means you willingly ignored reality to your own detriment. I don't think Trump wanted people to die; he just found the necessity of spending money for pandemic planning inconvenient, and so ignored it.

Packing the top military with loyalists? He certainly intends evil there.

Saying this is stupidity is an underestimation. One does not simply become the most powerful and the richest man on earth by playing stupid. In fact we are stupid for believing so- that's exactly what they want.