I got a theory, but you’re not gonna like it.

I take a lot of guff for openly saying that I think most people are dumb. Whenever you say this, someone inevitably pops up and says “50% of people are below average by definition.”

While that’s not really how it works, it also dodges something I’m starting to think we need to admit:

In this modern world, totally average human intelligence is actually kinda goddamn stupid.

The more complex the civilization, the more intelligence is required to navigate it.

By “intelligence” I mean:

• capacity to absorb information
• process it
• contextualize it
• make connections
• do useful things with it

This was not always the case.

Up until relatively recently, you didn’t need to know much to be perfectly happy and functional. If you were born to a farmer’s family, you learned everything you needed from helping the old man and old lady around the farm. When they got too old or sick, you took the reins, prospered, had a family, and taught your kids the same way. You had a place in the order of things. Nobody asked you to answer hard questions or shape the destinies of strangers.

In the West, that changed in the eighteenth century when we invented modern democracy (not the ancient Greek version—don’t be tedious).

Suddenly people were expected to understand complex systems involving people nothing like them doing things they knew nothing about—but those things still mattered.

A Bavarian woodsman had no clue how the fishing industry worked, nor did he need to. That didn’t make him an ignoramus; it just wasn’t his world.

But now you were asked—allowed, even—to vote on what society did. Considered progress, sure. But it also placed a new burden on the proletariat: responsibility for anything beyond feeding their family and paying taxes to whatever inbred idiot made the decisions.

At the same time, we shifted from feudal agrarian → mercantile → industrial → post-industrial. All new, all fast-changing.

For millennia the amount of genuinely new information needed in a lifetime was near zero. Maybe one big idea per generation.

Suddenly entire industries were replaced every couple generations… then every couple decades… now every couple months.

Why? Because information became the currency, and information is defined by novelty (thanks, Claude Shannon).

Being skilled no longer meant apprentice → journeyman → master. It meant keeping up with relentless change and innovation. Civilization rewarded those who could—and left everyone else behind.

When you look at Americans who make the dumbest political decisions (aside from bigotry and religious fanaticism), the #1 reason is: they don’t want to learn things.

Every election, politicians pander to dying industries: coal, oil, old-school manufacturing. The workers are proud their parents did the same job… and apparently can’t grasp that the world has changed so much since their parents bought a house at 25 with overtime at the plant that they might as well have time-traveled here.

They complain about being left behind, but they ignored roughly everyone warning them to adapt. You can’t keep voting for people who only benefit capitalists and still expect solid ground under working-class boots. You can’t demand cheap goods while removing every limit on what capitalists can do.

Yes, it’s complex. It requires reading and critical thinking.

But for nearly twenty years everyone has had instant, free access to all the information all the time.

And here’s the counter: “People don’t know how to access it, process it, contextualize it, or think critically.”

Exactly. That’s my entire fucking point.

Our civilization has hit an inflection point where merely average intelligence is no longer enough to understand how almost anything works.

People still grasp what their great-grandparents did: their job, their hobbies, their local community, whatever mass media is trending. Not much else.

That’s simply not enough anymore to make informed decisions or even hold informed opinions.

Yet this is precisely when social media encourages everyone to not only have but share uninformed opinions—and expect to be heard, respected, taken seriously. Not because it’s wise, but because engagement makes rich people richer.

People are simultaneously told it’s their right and duty to participate in democracy regardless of preparation. That idea collapses the second you think about it—unless you see it as a well-meaning attempt to fix historic discrimination against minorities who were barred from education and voice.

But at some point: do we really want to encourage participation from people who don’t know how anything works—when one dumb vote in Nowheresville can rain bombs, starvation, or ecosystem collapse halfway around the planet?

I’m not saying ditch democracy. It’s still better than autocracy.

But maybe it’s time to revisit the idea that you should at least understand what kind of government you have before voting on what it does.

Literacy tests were white-supremacist garbage in the 19th century when Black people were deliberately kept uneducated. That’s not today’s world. We could design gatekeeping that doesn’t discriminate on race or class.

Or we can stay committed to absolute freedom with zero responsibility: that people too unintelligent to understand society should not only be heard but allowed to dictate taxes, policy, and killing done in our names.

Maybe that really is an inalienable right.

But look around.

If enough people are so easily confounded by modern life that they elect a mentally unsound psychopathic con-man game-show host as emperor—and the system is so broken it allows this, allows him to run amok, and singlehandedly torches America’s stability and global standing—

maybe we’ve spent way too much time talking about freedom and way too little about responsibility.

Can we really keep a functioning society on vibes only?

i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil

Congrats to @pluralistic for coining the word #enshitification [☜ this is my mistaken misspelling] (See footnotes 2 and 3) — as something that is named is more easily discussed, weighed, and planned about than a concept that exists only as vague concern. And the government of #Norway has thoughts and words on it and thinks they can help make it stop. 100 page PDF

https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-free-pathways-to-a-fair-technological-future.pdf

Correction: The preferred spelling is #enshittification https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/enshittification

International Women’s Day: The cis women who are fiercely fighting transphobia

https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/03/08/international-womens-day-trans/

#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA

"Images verified by Human Rights Watch show Israel fired white phosphorus in populated areas of southern Lebanon."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/israel-unlawfully-used-white-phosphorus-in-lebanon-hrw

#whitephosphorus #israel #lebanon #humanrightswatch #hrw

Listen,

It is possible to criticize something without abjectly despising it. 404 can have bad takes; I'm still paying for their journalism because it's usually very good.

Proton's marketing and social team are kind of yutzes, but the service is very good for what it is, and much better than the normative choice.

Seeking infallibility will eat all your time and get you nowhere.

Is it War?

this feels very computer illiterate of me, but what's up w meshtastic??

it looks interesting and I'm v intrigued by the idea of a decentralized network, and the versatility of it, but I'm not totally convinced. with the amt of posts and videos ive seen abt it here and elsewhere, and by the very nature of decentralized systems, it requires a lot of users, and so it's hard to feel like this isn't all some marketing tactic for a new and interesting but ultimately niche and unhelpful gadget.

does anyone here have any experience using meshtastic stuff to improve the community around them? I want to believe but I don't want another gadget collecting dust 😅

404 Media reports that Swiss authorities turned over some identifying info about a user of an account associated with Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City. This video is a brief summary. (Note: there is no defend the forest "group" as this video suggests.)

I accidentally launched Nautilus as a file manager and almost vomited, how tf do people use gnome… Gross.

It has a not all too different vibe from the “fisher price” style of windows xp, not quite as clownish but still pretty bad… like wtf is this a PC or a phablet?

I’m sure it works great for some people, I’m just surprised its still sorta kinda the default, in as much as anything can be a “default option” on linux.

Maybe it looks less bad when its all together and you know how to use it, i’d imagine my system would probably feel pretty terrible to most anyone but me so to each their own of course.

I decided to record mew’s purring while he was laying on me a couple weeks ago, I didn’t know it at the time but it was the last time I’d hear him purring so strongly and happily. I’m glad i decided to record it.

It was hard to lose him so quickly after the diagnosis, but It was also nice to be able to plan for it.

Said goodbye to my orange buddy yesterday. This is the last pic of him and one of the first pics of him.

He had the most wonderful smile.

a lot of the time when i'm troubleshooting a computer at work i usually end up having to ask the age old question: Is The Computer Fucked Or Is It Just Because Windows Really Fucking Sucks

I just beat the Guinness world record for speed-picking by 4 seconds!

Single-pin-picking, 8 differently-keyed, 4-pin, standard¹ padlocks, in 56 seconds.

And I did it while wearing a fluffy bear suit.

¹ the current record holder used laminated Master locks with no security pins, but I didn't want all the comments on my video to be "Master lock sucks" jokes, so I used Brinks instead.

#AlicePics #Locksport #Lockpicking #GuinnessWorldRecord

When people come to the aid of weak ass Dems with the defense of “What do you expect them to do in the minority?”, reply sharply,

“Call for a general strike.”

The pedophile traitor party is going to call you “radical leftists” no matter what you do, so why not earn the title? Just call for a general strike.

Call for a general strike.

Call for a general strike.

Do it.

#GeneralStrike

Talarico is ahead with 35% in.

Fixed a few nagging issues with Ngnix Proxy logs today.

Mr. Hitler, Mr. Hitler
Tell me what are you going to do
Declared war on Uncle Sammy
Bit off more than you can chew

Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground
Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
We're gonna lay you fascists down

Once I seen them fascists
In a little Belgian town
There was trouble, there was sorrow
And the bombs were raining down

Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground
Dig a hole, dig a hole in thе meadow
We're gonna lay you fascists down

Mr. Hitlеr talked to Göring
And here's what he did say
"I can't figure out these goddamn snows
They're too damn hot for me"

Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground
Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow
Gonna lay you fascists down

-Dropkick Murphys (Ft. Woody Guthrie)-

I’ve been listening to Dropkick Murphys “This Machine Still Kills Fascists” and remembering that time the copyright holders of “This land” tried to sue some online animation creators for putting out a parody of the song and it turned out the corp didnt even own the rights in the first place.

Copyright “enforcement” is a scam

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/08/song-belongs-you-and-me

#OtD 2 Mar 1955 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to vacate her bus seat for whites. Her case wasn't taken up by civil rights leaders for legal technical reasons, as well as public opinion worries about her class and dark skin https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9207/claudette-colvin-arrested