Transcription
Hey! You! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Talkin' to all of you. You with the bag on the seat next to you, the bag big enough you gave it a name. Bags ain’t people, bags don’t give a shit. That’s a seat for a conscious being you're taking away, I’m talkin' to you!
Also, stop naming inanimate objects. Once you name it, you give it agency. It’s not real, fuck off and lemme sit there. You, guy who didn’t write down his verification code, so he’s gotta go a few rounds of emails with Amazon Prime before we can even start watching anything for movie night, leavin' us to sit and wonder if you can be trusted ever again, I’m talkin' to you.
You tuckin' your polo shirt into your shorts, fuck you doin'? You’re not a comic strip cartoon dad at the Grand Canyon in the 60s, and if you are, get back in that time machine. We got enough boomers fuckin' it up in this timeline. You there, boy, what day is it? Trick question, dipshit! I already know what day it is. Today’s the day you learn that the speakerphone option on your smartphone is for private calls, not the fuckin' Walgreens. We can hear you, you’re not gettin' away with it.
You’re yellin' in the mic like it’s a police dispatch. The microphone amplifies the sound so you don’t have to, but here you are, screaming bloody fucknuts into the tiny mic, like a coked CEO screamin' at an administrative assistant who’s just tryin' to get through till Friday. Meanwhile, whatever child you’re talkin' to sounds like a drowning raccoon, and it’s comin' through loud and clear 'cause you still got that speakerphone on. Round and around and around we go, humanity. Spin the wheel, place your bets. You all lost 'cause you forgot to bet on Stupid.
Stupid. Dumbfuck. Foolish. Thick. Moron. There’s no way to escape it. The math doesn’t lie, and they ran the numbers. It turns out you can’t fix, beat, escape, or avoid stupid; best to just bet on it. You can bet on stupid 'cause it turns out it is everywhere—behind you, in the room with us right now. And if you’re lookin' around for it and don't see it, surprise, chump: It’s you!
Now I hear you, why is the bird mad at me? 'Cause I gotta live here too, and I’m just tryna cross the road. You got cars, trains, planes, scooters, hogs, and various other intelligent means of travel on paper. But get you in a four-way stop and you shit the evolutionary bed, makin' the ducks shake their heads 'cause they can get it together. Fuckin' chickens can cross the road, man, what’s your excuse?
It’s okay, we’ll get through it. We got the math 'cause smart people did the reading and not just posted a half-spelled post by your Uncle Patriot on Facebook. The late, great Prof. Carlo M. Cipolla, back in 1976, crunched the numbers harder than 3D Doritos and just as dangerous. He was an Italian economic historian (fuck’s that? I dunno, I musta caught stupid from someone over this past week, so I’m just ridin' it out). But he like also came up with some social law to group collective humans into 5 categories: Helpless, Intelligent, Bandits, and Stupid.
Yeah, that was only four categories, and if you caught that, then you can continue. The rest of you better not prove my point. Cipolla posited that the Stupid flavor of human was the most dangerous 'cause it’s the hardest to imagine. Like you get it when someone steals something (the bandit, in Prof Cipolla’s People Wheel or whatever it’s called): “The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational, and if you are rational you can predict it.”
But Stupid is hard to rationalize 'cause it’s fuckin' stupid: “Reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior.” So Cipolla came up with the 5 Laws of Human Stupidity, which was originally a joke letter he wrote his buds, but the more they thought about it, the more they all realized, “Oh fuck.”
Law #1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. On Friday, November 1st, in the year of your DUH 2024, in the MPV Gallery in the municipality of Oster-Vehk in the Netherlands, four super valuable prints from Andy Warhol’s 1985 portrait series REIGNING QUEENS were boosted during an art heist. Each portrait had a different Queen on them: Queen Elizabeth II of the UK, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Queen Ntfombi Twala of Eswatini, formerly Swaziland. Naturally, one can assume since these portraits are Andy Warhols, they’re Warholth money—Andy-eed they are! One of the Queen Elizabths sold for over $683K at Sotheby's, and they got all four—gotta catch 'em all!
So one can naturally deduce that they would be robbed by humans that know their worth and the lengths it will take to successfully nab them. But remember the first law of stupid.
Law #2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person (basically it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you look like: Anyone can be stupid). The art thieves, having been art thieves, knew that these prints were valuable and on display in a lil gallery in the Netherlands where everyone’s just hot and unassuming, so perfect heist probability. So yeah, these Bandits definitely were ready to get a plus one on their account from fleecing these super pricey prints—predictable and rational if you think about it. Reasonable to believe if you know what the fuck a Warhol’s worth, you’re probably gonna go about gettin' it the best way you can, but like, remember law number 2.
Law #3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. This is Cipolla's Golden Rule 'cause basically, it is actually safe to assume that “Stupid makes an ass outta everyone.”
The bandits on the day, arrived at the gallery, set some explosives to the front door, hoping to blow off the lock, get inside, grab the Queens, and drive off with them—simple, rational, bandits. But hey, remember Law 3.
Law #4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. The bandits set the charges a lil high, and instead of knockin' a lil hole in the door they could Catwoman through, it blew up the fucking building. “The bomb attack was so violent that my entire building through, it blew up the fucking building,” as well as damaging the building across the street.
And then, having nabbed all four of the Queens and made their stealthy escape through the crater they just blew in the side of the neighborhood, they realized there wasn’t enough room in the car for all four. So they ripped two of them outta their frames, making them totally worthless now on the market, and dumped the other two in the street before making their getaway into the Friday morning mist (which was probably just debris from the warhead they detonated tryin' to get in).
Humans, obviously I get bein' Bandits. Nobody has money, shits expensive, and no one cares about you or what you need. I’d boost a train or two just to get by. I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; it looks fun and the quips are quotable. But what I don’t get, don’t understand, can’t fathom, can’t rationalize is you have The Thomas Crown Affair, The Town, Baby Driver, Widows, DRIVE, HEAT, Ronin, Inside Man, Lock Stock, Jackie Brown, fuckin' Heist, fucking THIEF which was filmed at this bar, and five Ocean’s 11 movies to figure this out.
And these yutzes' master plan was to blow the walls off a whole ass building like the fuckin' Beagle Boys from DuckTales, before ditchin' the shit that didn’t fit in the van and drivin' off like they were tryin' to help a friend move a couch and gave up, leaving a fuckin' canyon in the streets of Oster-Vehk.
Which brings me to the final Law, Law #5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. “The result of the action of a perfect bandit is purely and simply a transfer of wealth and/or welfare. Society as a whole is neither better nor worse off.” But “Stupid people cause losses to other people with no counterpart of gains on their own account. Thus, society as a whole is impoverished.” And 'cause these jags were stupid enough to not check if the fuckin' prints could even fit in the car, two of them are worthless, two of them damaged, and an entire street and building’s got to get work done. And who’s gonna do that? People.
It's a slippery slope, Stupid is. Once you start down that road, you’ll probably trip, take a header into a stop sign, which will break off its post, roll down the hill, leaving the intersection open to interpretation. And well, you know how you fuckin' drive—couple of sideswipes and a head-on collision, and now that whole ass road is bumper to bumper, and no one’s gettin' anywhere. And in the back somewhere is a guy gonna miss the movie all 'cause Stupid.
Which will lead to more stupid in powerful places, and I dunno—what do you wear in a kakistocracy? Is it boots or Crocs? Probably Crocs, whatever, you’ll find out soon enough.
Humans, I may be drunk, and that’s on me, but it’s probably 'cause of something you did, so I blame you. That’s the power of stupid.