Stupid Is As Stupid Does

The great 20th-century philosopher,
Forrest Gump

Curmie comes by his sobriquet honestly, and there are times he just needs to vent against the raging stupidity of humanity in general. So here are a few items prompting Curmie to scream into the void. In no particular order… 

#1. This ad for Bounty. The premise is that the couple has just won the lottery, but in the excitement hubby knocks over his drink (soda? juice?), and it threatens to soil (de-legitimize?) the winning ticket. So it’s important that they have a really good paper towel, you see? 

Erm… no. It doesn’t matter how good your paper towel is if the spill will have done its damage before you can grab a sheet from the roll under the sink (or wherever). You want to protect that lottery ticket? Pick the damned thing up before the liquid can get there! Then you can mop up the spill. Anyone who does otherwise is apparently stupid enough to use the product in question. 

#2. Facebook. Gentle Reader, if you know Curmie personally, you know that he’s the president of a national organization.  In that capacity (and as an admin of the Facebook page), he announced that the deadline for applications for a rather hefty scholarship had been extended for a couple of weeks, and he posted a link to the page on the organization’s website from which the application can be downloaded. 

The next morning, Facebook’s algorithm proved itself even stupider than humans (well, not stupider than the particular humans who programmed it) by proclaiming the post “spam” and threatening dire consequences should Curmie similarly misbehave in the future. Of course, virtually everyone Curmie knows has been thrown into FB jail for alleged but usually imaginary offenses against their Divinely Inspired (i.e., Total Bullshit) “community standards.” 

Like a lot of other folks, Curmie has a history with Facebook, as you can see here and here, for example. My favorite Facebook story, though, had nothing to do with me: it’s the saga of the sexy onions from a year and half ago. Sigh. 

#3. FEMA Follies. FEMA has been an enduring punchline if not always a national embarrassment since Heckuva Job Brownie didn’t do a heckuva job. But most of their failures have been simple incompetence. This one is different: it’s fraud (not theirs, necessarily), and it damned well better be treated as such. After a September storm caused extensive damage in western Alaska, FEMA stepped in to help out. So far, so good, right? 

Alas, no, Gentle Reader. When residents sought out documents in such native languages as Yup’ik or Inupiaq, they encountered some… ahem… “translations” that were, shall we say, less than useful. When Monty Python riffs on horrible translations, it’s at least moderately funny (even if it isn’t one of Curmie’s favorite bits). When it happens in real life, it’s less amusing, and unless you think there’s a legitimate reason to say “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny” in an official government document, we’ve got a problem here. 

Whoever put together the faux translations seems to have used languages that aren’t indigenous to the area, trotted out a decades-old Russian text, and otherwise just fucked around, obviously thinking this whole business was a colossal joke. Those weren’t the exact words of Gary Holton, a University of Hawaii at Manoa linguistics professor and a former director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. What he did say was “They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense”; he called the final product a “word salad.” 

FEMA fired Accent on Languages, the company that “translated” the documents. Of course, anything less than a lawsuit and a prosecution for fraud is insufficient. Meanwhile, of course, Jeremy Zidek, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, claims that the mistranslations did not create delays or problems. It is unclear whether Zidek can see Russia from his house. What is undeniable is that if he were Pinocchio, he couldn’t see the end of his nose without a telescope. 

#4. Well, it’s Missouri. What do you expect? Apologies to anyone offended by Curmie’s allowing his inner Kansan to sneak out for a second, there. But seriously, are there no actual problems in the Show-Me State that merit the attention of the legislature? Apparently not, because the male GOP majority has decided that policing their female colleagues’ accoutrement is of paramount importance. (Note: to be fair, this absurdity was introduced by a Republican woman). 

It’s those arms, you see. They’re almost as distracting to the pseud-prude crowd as (gasp!) high school girls’ shoulders. Exactly what problem is allegedly being solved here is not entirely clear. What is, is that state reps Raychel Proudie and Ashley Aune err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole in declaring this measure “ridiculous.” 

#5. California Capers, Exhibit A. Curmie hasn’t voted for a politician in years; it’s always been lesser-of-two-evils time (or, perhaps more accurately, the evil of two lessers). In other words, the Loony Left is as scary as the Jewish Space Lasers crowd on the right. There are two discrete issues here: what is a sensible, ethical, and pragmatic choice on the one hand, and what is politically efficacious on the other. Needless to say, if an action is so problematic in terms of the former criterion that it offends the sensibilities of any rational person, then there is a price to be paid in terms of the latter. 

There are, in short, a lot of people like Curmie—not in political philosophy, perhaps, but in voting for the candidates of Political Party X simply because they’re not quite as nauseating as those of Political Party Y. Nothing makes the right happier, therefore, than someone on the left not merely doing something the average person would regard as transcendently stupid (because it is), but bragging about it. And if the idiots in question are from California, the right-wing ideologues are in something very much akin to ecstasy. 

Naturally, the Bay Area Woke Folk are happy to oblige. A San Francisco panel has recommended the following for each of its black residents who meet any two of eight criteria in light of “decades of harm they have experienced”: a one-time payment of $5 million (yes, apiece!), plus wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households. Yes, really. The cost would be equal to approximately the city’s total budget for three and a half years… oh, did I mention they’re already running in the red? 

If you’re looking for how actual racists can get elected, look no further, because this proposal, presented with straight faces, apparently, makes anyone even remotely associated with the left look like an utter idiot. Frankly, Curmie resents it. 

Have at least some black SF residents experienced prejudice during their lifetimes? No doubt. To the tune of $5,000,000 apiece? It is remotely possible that a few have, but Curmie would need to see some proof. In fact, because of affirmative action set-asides and similar programs, one could make a case that the average black San Franciscan has already been compensated more than they deserve. 

It’s also telling that other groups who have certainly been the victims of prejudice—there are no doubt some life-long American citizens now living in the city who were interned during WWII simply because of their Japanese descent, for example—go unrecompensed in this proposal. 

There are no words that can adequately express the level of disdain Curmie holds for anyone supporting this ludicrous and almost certainly unconstitutional recommendation. 

#6: California Capers, Exhibit B. If there is one more step past “California” to really float the boat of the right, it’s adding in… “university.” After all, that’s where all those commie pinko weirdos are indoctrinating our precious babies with such seditious ideas as “other people have different experiences and therefore different perspectives.” 

Right on cue, the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California has decided not merely to fulfill the right wing’s stereotype of academics, particularly of those in the social sciences, but to surpass in idiocy even that tortured misrepresentation. Wanna guess what word they’ve decided to drop from their active vocabulary? Go on, guess… If you said “field,” Gentle Reader, you’ve either already ready about this story, or you’re wasting your time reading this blog: you should be crafting B-movie plots with diabolical villains named Professor Psychoto and Dr. Deviance. 

Yes, because, you see, “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” The acceptable word is now “practicum,” by the way, a reasonable enough synonym for the meaning of “field” most appropriate to the study of social work… but having little in common with the definition associated with the work undertaken by slaves. 

Look, if you want to argue that people ought to be circumspect about how to employ words with multiple meanings, one of which is offensive, Curmie gets it.  But it takes a contortion of mythic proportions to get to anything actually problematic about “field.” 

Ultimately, Curmie feels compelled to warn you, Gentle Reader, to watch where you step when you walk through that practicum, as there is an incredible amount of bullshit out there.