Tag / stupidity

by Edward Champion

Dave Piepkorn: The Stupidest Local Politician in America

Dave Piepkorn isn’t just stupid. He’s racist and mean and anti-science and officious. The good people of Fargo, North Dakota must remove this dunderhead from office for the greater good.

It goes without saying that Ken Doll dumb white males are part of a significant epidemic now plaguing America. We can usually tolerate such privileged dunces because they can be laughed out of a boardroom or deservedly ridiculed in a local bar. But what happens when such a hideously arrogant and hopelessly stupid lowlife with an inflated sense of importance presides over vital city affairs? You get a guy like Dave Piepkorn.

The good people of Fargo, North Dakota have apparently decided that Dave Piepkorn, arguably the stupidest man to hold local office in the United States, should continue to serve as their Deputy Mayor and City Commissioner. Dave Piepkorn first came to my attentions on Sunday morning, when a video shared by journalist Aaron Rupar went viral on Twitter.

The video documents an October 5, 2020 meeting of the Fargo City Commission, whereby the dutiful leaders of a city populated by 125,000 people discussed a mask mandate. But the maskless Piepkorn embarrassingly states, in full defiance of the science, that masks are no defense against COVID-19.

“And the facts are I’m just as protected as you are wearing that mask of COVID-19,” said Piepkorn. “COVID-19 passes right through that mask. Isn’t that correct?”

There is then a pause, almost as if the collected attendees are collecting their jaws from the floor, understanding with shock and shame just how much of a putz they have in the number two slot. One of Piepkorn’s fellow commissioners, along with the audience, shout numerous noes.

Piepkorn responds with the haughty smirk of a six-year-old sociopath who has gleefully stomped on a helpless salamander with his sneaker. The meeting is closed for public comment. And then Piepkorn continues, “But basically a virus, it doesn’t — it goes, it goes right through the mask. And so for us to start mandating something that doesn’t work, that doesn’t make sense. And as far as the people…”

There are additional stunned reactions from the crowd that one hears off-mike.

And Piepkorn, who clearly doesn’t understand that the hill he has chosen to die on stands in the face of rudimentary rationale that even a preschooler can understand, then grows imperious. His voice takes on the raised autocratic tone of a twisted Karen using her privilege to ruin a Black man by making a phony 911 call for a purely manufactured offense:

“Okay, here’s how it goes. Once again, if you behave yourselves, you can stay in the room. You’re welcome to. But if you don’t, you’re going to be asked to leave. And if you don’t leave, then the police will escort you out. Is that clear?”

The meeting continues.

“The masks are not effective with the virus. Period. That’s proven. The coronavirus passes through. And so it’s false to tell people that they’re going to be safe by wearing that. And as far as sitting six feet apart, it’s liberty. If you don’t want to sit next to each other, then you don’t have to. You can go someplace else or watch it on TV. Or on the Internet. So thank you very much.”

A few weeks after this meeting, North Dakota has now seen its biggest upswing in COVID infections and deaths in some time. Cass County — home to Piepkorn’s Fargo — is now the second most infected vicinity in North Dakota. And it’s all thanks to feebleminded fuckwits like Piepkorn, who scatter falsehoods into the wind like poisonous seeds permanently sullying a promising orchard.

In short, Dave Piepkorn is the living embodiment of Idiocracy, though with more of an ego-driven tinge than Mike Judge’s characters. He refuses to consider other viewpoints. He refuses to grasp science. He is dense when it comes to comprehending basic facts. He is, in short, a contemptible clod who is better suited to work as an assistant plumber rather than as assistant to the highest local office in the land. And that’s only because no respectable building contractor in North Dakota would ever trust this incompetent buffoon to fix the pipes by himself. It also doesn’t help that Piepkorn’s face is so ugly that he looks as if he’s the secret love child of Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Boris Karloff. Honestly, with a visage so hideous, you’d think that Piepkorn would be on the side of wearing a mask, if only to disguise his aesthetic limitations.

This isn’t the first time that Piepkorn has been a clueless contrarian. He has partaken in comparatively more innocent acts of idiocy, such as being the only no vote in a measure back in May that allowed vegetable and flower gardens to be grown on local boulevards. (The measure passed anyway.) And this certainly isn’t the first time that Piepkorn has demonstrated that he has slightly more brain cells than a gerbil. In a September 9, 2019 Fargo City Commission meeting, Piepkorn condemned fellow Commissioner Tony Gehring for not being present during a special assessment task force meeting. Gehring swiftly pointed out that he was then being deployed by the military. “Sorry, Dave,” snapped Gehring in disbelief. But this didn’t stop dimwitted Piepkorn from actually attempting to follow through on this failed gotcha moment after being publicly embarrassed by Gehring. “It’s just ironic that you seem to be, um, very upset about it, but then your not at the meetings.” It’s certainly no surprise that Piepkorn is too dense to comprehend that irony usually happens when the subject is unaware of his actions and does the opposite of what he says he will. And I suppose it’s ironic that a poltroon like Piepkorn doesn’t see the irony in his own failed attempts to point out irony. (Although, if Piepkorn is reading this, that concept may be a little tricky for his bradykinetic brain to understand.)

It’s easy to simply dismiss Dave Piepkorn as some jaunty jackass who is embarrassing the most populous city in North Dakota. But when you place such an unqualified pillock in power, just as if we have seen nationally, there are often dangerous ramifications.

Piepkorn is also a racist whose atavistic words and actions have ignited racially charged violence in the region. One little known fact is that 8% of the Fargo population was born in another country. These people fled to North Dakota from war and devastation in an attempt to build a new life and contribute to the promise of America. But for repugnant xenophobes like Piepkorn, refugees are clearly a scourge. In September 2016, Piepkorn stood in the way of a refugee resettlement program operated by Lutheran Social Services. When not condemning the money going to a nonprofit devoted to helping people who had fled violence, Piepkorn made unsubstantiated racist remarks claiming that Somali refugees were more inclined to commit crime. Less than a year after Piepkorn expressed his bigotry, Somali-American Shuib Ali was assaulted in a hate crime. Moreover, Piepkorn’s opposition to benevolent organizations helping out anyone who isn’t white has resulted in local racists turning into Piepkorn fans, showing their true colors and loudly ranting against Somalis.

Dave Piepkorn is living proof that fatuous and flatulent imbeciles must not be allowed to hold power. Given how much of a local embarrassment Piepkorn is, perhaps the good people of Fargo can restore their city back to good grace by initiating a new recall campaign, ensuring that Piepkorn never holds any form of political office ever again.

by Edward Champion

The Unbearable Stupidity of Chris Cillizza

There are few people in journalism who are as unbearably stupid as CNN’s Chris Cillizza.

Like most professional pundits who lull us to sleep with dull platitudes, Chris Cillizza is an imperious tadpole who somehow believes that he has the legs to win a frog jumping contest. Cillizza’s sophism was shrewdly sussed out by Dave Weigel in 2014 and his style, if we can call it that, has long been the bane of anyone who genuinely cares about thinking and journalism. That this aquatic larva is a grown-ass 43-year-old man who has failed to show one whit of growth or intelligence over his astonishingly worthless career and that he continues to fulminate with unbearable stupidity is one of the great embarrassments of current American discourse. And make no mistake. Chris Cillizza is a fool with a capital F. The only reason Cillizza remains tolerated is because his dimwitted dispatches get traffic. Cillizza cynically gives the people the anti-intellectual snake oil that they apparently want. Much like Chuck Todd, Cillizza fell upward into an unfathomable position of influence when this insufferable oaf doesn’t even have the logistical acumen to manage an Arby’s.

It says something fairly significant about our tolerance for stupidity that this inarticulate crank is allowed to get away with this. Watch this unlikely avuncular figure and you will witness a man who cannot form a sentence without falling into a narcissistic longueur. On television, he speaks somewhere between a loutish mansplainer who you can’t escape from during a weekend corporate retreat and a tenured professor who just hit the bottle after coming out of rehab for the seventh time. Monosllyabic words boom from this hulking fool’s mouth with the force of a howitzer firing blanks on the wrong battlefield, as if words like “Big!” and “So!” and “Two!” were the key to understanding why the bog bodies in Northern Europe were preserved for so long.

Cillizza’s spurious and illogical arguments can drive any reasonable person crazy. They’ve certainly caused me to scream obscenities. My neighbor knocks on the door. And before I can say anything, my neighbor says, “Another Cillizza article?” I nod my head in shame. Then I offer the neighbor some scotch and all is well. Until the next unfathomably stupid Cillizza take. In 2018, Deadspin‘s Albert Burneko described Cillizza as “an amoral rat whose professional existence…is predicated entirely on cynical indifference to truth or fact or consequence.” None other than John Legend took Cillizza to task for his ongoing efforts to perpetuate false equivalency.

Chris Cillizza’s present fount of unbridled fatuity is a January 6, 2020 column entitled “What Elizabeth Warren’s statements on Qasem Soleimani really tell us.” You see, the facts never really matter with Cillizza. It’s the impression that does. Even when there is no logical underpinning for how the impression was formed.

Perhaps Cillizza has problems with women who are leagues smarter than him. I really don’t know. What I do know is that this column represented a complete failure of basic rational thinking. Cillizza attempted to impugn presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren by insisting that Soleimani couldn’t possibly be both “a murderer” and “a senior foreign military official.” But that’s not true. Objectively speaking, both statements are true. Soleimani was not only responsible for the deaths of 603 American soldiers, but he was a military man considered to be Iran’s “vice president.” Soleimani’s murder by the United States has kickstarted one of the most volatile situations in the Middle East that can be imagined — one that may lead to needless deaths of Americans and Iranians. One would think that Cillizza would focus on the very dangerous and wildly erratic man in the White House who has ignited this madness without a plan.

But for Cillizza, Warren’s statements are “mind-bending” and “confusing.” When, in fact, there is nothing confusing whatsoever about what Warren said. It is no more difficult to grasp than me telling you that, while I am very fond of dried cranberries, cranberry juice, and cranberry salad, I really don’t care for cranberry sauce.

Sorry. Cillizza is calling me right now. Hang on.

Me: Hello?
Cillizza: That’s mind-bending, Ed! And confusing! I thought you said you liked cranberries!
Me: I do, Chris. I’ve just sent you a video of me dancing a jig after chugging down a bottle of cranberry juice. I just don’t like the texture or the taste of cranberry sauce.
Cillizza: You’ve changed, Ed, from your previous position. And you can’t afford to do that.
Me: I’m not running for office.
Cillizza: You are either for cranberries or against them!
Me: Have you ever heard of a concept called ambiguity? Subtlety? Taste? Hell, why am I even asking?
Cillizza: Are you a member of al-Qaeda, Ed?
Me: Dude.
Cillizza: That’s a long way from where you started this week. A long way.

At least this is the conversation I imagine in my mind.

Obviously, when a person thinks in such absolutes and with such paralogia, there’s simply no appealing to him. But when a thinker this shoddy is entrusted to pontificate for eight figures on CNN, it does make one ponder just how much a news organization will tolerate. Then again, we’re seeing The New York Times cite white supremacists as news sources. Perhaps the only way we can save the Fourth Estate — at a time in which we very much need it — is to start a movement to demand better thinking from all pundits and, if they fail to say anything cogent or useful, starve spastic rodents like Cillizza of the attention they have so cynically and gleefully cultivated.

by Edward Champion

The Feeble and Completely Pointless Thought Experiment of Roger Simon

Roger Simon’s “thought experiment” reveals that even a veteran journalist who should know better succumbs to the same attention-seeking asininity as anyone else.

It is a well-documented fact that Twitter turns the finest minds of our planet into simpering and sophist children flicking inconsequential 280 character bagatelles into the digital ether and that these portentous pronouncements are often misconstrued as High Thought, if not The Truth, about The Way Things Are in Today’s World. And even though I accept the deplorable trolling and the gormless groupthink, and the fact that nobody seems to offer pushback or nuance or a charitable consideration of another viewpoint, nothing could quite prepare me this morning for the lethal combination of hubris and stupidity that I discovered in this tweet from Roger Simon:

Now Roger Simon is not some doddering dude yelling some crazy lager-fueled bullshit at the top of his lungs in a bar. He is the bestselling author of Show Time. He was a long-running columnist at Politico. He has a history of legitimately provoking thought, such as this subtly trenchant piece on how the right-wing media caused a repulsive furor after exposing private messages sent through Ezra Klein’s Journolist.

But here, Simon has clearly lost his marbles, capitulating to the worst “hot take” tendencies that desperate self-appointed pundits retreat to when they’re trying to file six thoughtless blog posts each day that get people outraged and thus tweeting about it in high histrionics. It stands against the kind of journalism that Simon purports to stand for.

I certainly want Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to live as long as possible. But what rankles me about this tweet is how it epitomizes everything that I detest about a certain strain of magical thinking that has increasingly come to replace reason: (a) the guilt-laden plea to donate one day of your life for the greater good (and thus the “better” person), which in and of itself implies that the 10,000 people sacrificed their day weren’t going to live a meaningful day in the first place, thus mitigating the selflessness, (b) the refusal to accept that something as grief-enabling as death is a process of life and thus an existential reality that we all have to accept, which causes us to become stronger and more empathetic to our fellow humans, and (c) the warped “solution” to the troubling Supreme Court situation, cemented by the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh swinging the high court into a 5-4 tilt to the far right, involves Ginsberg hanging on for dear life and that this is the only apparent idea to preserve a politically balanced high court for the next few decades.

The trolley problem is a thought experiment. Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment. Hell, even The Man in the High Castle is a thought experiment. In all of these cases, the speculative proposition causes us to think about something tangible in our thoughts and our everyday lives. In the case of the trolley problem, we have to come to terms with the morality of whether killing one person to save multiple lives makes us complicit in the singular death. In the case of Plutarch, we are asked to consider whether constantly replacing the rotting parts of a ship ad infinitum means that the ship can indeed be the same as it was when it first started out. In the Amazon television series, we see how 20th century American life under a hypothetical Nazi victory reveals dark quotidian parallels to the world we live in today, causing us to reexamine whether our tacit acceptance of consumerism and comfort might share some qualities with the same vile impulses behind death camps and slaughtering the weak.

But Simon’s proposition has no such larger moral philosophy, much less any realist allegory, in mind. His proposition was so condescending and badly considered that it provoked anger and befuddlement from the left and right. And this sort of nonsense disheartens me. Once again, we have someone who should know better trafficking and even reveling in stupidity (just read his replies on his Twitter feed). And it serves to uphold my thesis that everyone on Twitter — even a seemingly distinguished veteran journalist — inevitably succumbs to the cloying attention-seeking asininity that is systematically tearing this nation apart and preventing us from finding real solutions to very serious problems.