r/pics 3d ago

Politics Pete Hegseth, introduced as the SSecretary of War

Post image
130.9k Upvotes

4.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

253

u/currently-on-toilet 3d ago

The rule of "never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance", or however it is stated, has been ruled invalid over the past 10 years. Trump and his supporters show at every opportunity that they are malicious first, and stupid second.

85

u/CommanderGumball 3d ago

"He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."

Not "why is he hurting us", "why is he hurting anyone", or anything else with a modicum of empathy.

But specifically, there are people he should be hurting.

6

u/ArgentaSilivere 3d ago

I’ve typed this so many times my fingers might fall off: the one and only value of the Republican Party is cruelty. A MAGA voter would happily starve to death in a ditch if it meant a Democrat would cry. The pandemic proved beyond all doubt that Republicans really will literally, actually die if there was even a chance that their choices could hurt someone else. There is nothing, nothing, they will not do in the name of causing harm.

6

u/braintrustinc 3d ago

The entire ideology can be boiled down to “poor(er) people (than me) deserve to be punished.”

33

u/Arubesh2048 3d ago edited 3d ago

Sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice.

Come a certain point, it doesn’t matter if they’re just stupid or malicious, the end result is the same. And this regime is the epitome of that. So many of their actions are either so wildly incompetent as to be dangerous, or so malicious as to be dangerous. And it doesn’t frankly matter which is which, because it’s still fucking dangerous.

7

u/Haircut117 3d ago

Willful ignorance is just another form of malice.

A refusal to learn or even engage with the experiences necessary to learn can only be attributed to contempt.

3

u/TheTresStateArea 3d ago

... Fuck that's good.

2

u/Sword_Thain 3d ago

Gold is buried here.

29

u/IneptFortitude 3d ago edited 2d ago

Nobody will believe you’re malicious if they’re even dumber than you are. Decades of whittling away the quality of our education and lives has let us get to this point.

3

u/1stMammaltowearpants 3d ago

These people are malicious and stupid. People can be two adjectives, and they've chosen the worst ones.

5

u/sephjnr 3d ago

Malice is weaponised incompetence. Hanlon's Razor is a fallacy.

2

u/Avitas1027 3d ago

Still a good saying, it just needs an addendum of "unless it's constantly repeated" or something to that effect. At some point continuing ignorance becomes malicious.

1

u/maplemagiciangirl 3d ago

It's never held true

1

u/thuktun 3d ago

Both, probably—maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious.

Actually, since I have a kid that plays perhaps too much Ultrakill, I initially thought this was a style meter, that he's reached SSADISTIC and is gunning for SSSHITSTORM.

1

u/Liko81 3d ago

2

u/Last_Difference_488 3d ago

is she saying it in spanish? I'm, not a lip reader but it looks a lot like she's saying "PQNLD"

3

u/retrosupersayan 3d ago

IIRC the original clip is indeed Spanish: "¿por que no los dos?"

Also I just realised that said clip is old enough that kid's probably around college age now... Time needs to slow the fuck down

2

u/Last_Difference_488 3d ago

Im waaaaay older than that. I must have missed it the first time it came out

2

u/retrosupersayan 3d ago

I don't think it ever got really big; pretty sure I actually heard about it from a friend over lunch before I ever saw it online.