It's what plants crave
I'd say it's more people who are repeatedly told they are smart can be very stupid.
Many of then might even be "smart", but the important part is having unwarranted confidence.
Complicating things is that society rewards confidence way more than it rewards competence. If I'm honest about a lack of competence in a certain area but someone else lies during the interview, good chance they are going to get the job over me.
The reality is that everyone can be very very stupid, and so long as each and every one of us is willing to accept and recognize our weakness we aren't as likely to be assholes.
Our three weapons are...
Just to remind everyone in 2016 people had pretty much already planned their Clinton victory parties and everyone "knew" that Trump was going to lose, the polling was so clear and Trump was such a joke. Perhaps some even took care of "more important" stuff than voting because it was so sure.
So keep your excitement to take you to the voting booths rather than letting it make you complacent.
How about when a republican Tweeted:
"Bummed to learn that @deesnider, the man with the perfect song written decades ago about the attack on traditional, conservative American values… “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is riding the train in the wrong direction. How could it be that he sang for us but now fights for them?
And Dee Snider:
You think i wrote a song in support of "traditional American values"? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! You funny.
Frankly, people act really weird in a crisis. Like totally unexpected behaviors and fixations on stuff you'd think you wouldn't think about. Basically people tend to kind of short circuit when faced with an unfamiliar, panic situation. If people were acting particularly weird before the first shot, that would be suspicious. But once shots are fired, all bets are off for "weird" reactions. Haven't been in a shooting event, but have seen people react to other traumatic stuff and it's all over the place.
Another interesting thing to consider.
To be clear, he is rich. But he's not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.
With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat's, SuSE's and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.
His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.
His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.
It's used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.
People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.
Now there's more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.
Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.
I've been sick of him from the first moment I met an adherent. I mentioned how I like to avoid debt and pay it down early and the person said "Oh, so you listen to Dave Ramsey?" I confessed to having no idea who they were talking about, and they swore that I was being obtuse because I couldn't have come up with "interest sucks" on my own.
At my house we mock the dogs for freaking out over the doorbell. "Yeah, a malicious person is going to bother ringing the doorbell"
This guy is on the level of our dogs.
We had a big mandatory meeting where an executive came in to tell us all to be happy we weren't getting our bonuses or pay raises, and used a weird analogy about poor people being perfectly happy, because they have realistic expectations and that's all you need to be happy.
He then had to leave early, as he quipped he was sharing a ride with a fellow executive on the private jet, and if he didn't leave right then, he'd have to suffer flying commercial.
A company offered me a million dollars to work for them, but then I remembered the ping pong table at my current employer and said no way. Totally worth it.
Those would be parallel killers rather than serial killers.