Recognising intelligence

Watching those scenes on Capitol Hill, I couldn't help feeling that most of the rioters actually looked dim.....either that or they were high on drugs or drink.

 I chastised myself for making connections between appearance and brain cells, because often it's possible to be completely wrong. 

But the fact that most took no measures to mask their faces seemed to prove my initial impressions justified. They made it easy for the police to arrest and charge them subsequently. Many laid themselves open to covid infection.

And when they opened their mouths on camera, my prejudice was largely confirmed.

Has Trump been aiming to sway the simplest of the masses and are these types really the majority in the USA? Are we Brits similarly simple?

Trumps rise to the Presidency was because he targeted all the fringe voters and being on the edge of society especially people with right wing views and promised them a voice and it worked.

There are a lot of rednecks who follow him but from what i've seen there are a lot of average Americans who were sucked in by him and believed he would be a change from your usual career politicians.

Here's hoping he does get impeached again and it actually happens as that would stop him running again.

I'm not sure you can reason with some people.

Is it lack of intelligence or rather the lack of education coupled with the social norms they live in and believe?

Take our ourselves for instance, how many believed/still believe Anderson raped and pillaged the club to enrich himself simply because they were ignorant/uneducated about how company law and finance work?  How many believe the  mates of the government earned themselves millions from PPE contracts when politicians play no part whatsoever in the evaluation and awarding of the contracts?  How many of us were led by belief that we were going to walk the league this season even though we knew next to nothing about the manager or players we signed?

I don't doubt that there would have been plenty who stormed the Capitol building with high IQ's and as such on that measure be considered intelligent - but they still did what most of us are appalled at.

The majority of those who voted in the referendum voted from Brexit, and plenty who did were intelligent people.

Intelligence or lack of it is not the real reason alone why people do what they do, they have to be 'whipped up' and energised to do such things (radicalised in a sense) and if you have people with their own agendas like the ST and Iles stirring people up over Anderson, Maugham over the Government and PPE in particular, Johnson and Farage in their Brexit bus with the signage on the side of it about giving the EU £350m a week and Trump at the rally just before the storming of the Capitol, then you end up with many 'intelligent' people doing the most stupid of things.

So I would imagine that a number of people who simply 'looked dim' weren't actually dim at all but just got caught up in a belief that fed into their prejudices and fears.

How intelligent do you have to be, Sluffy, to grasp that a club that couldn't afford to pay players wages on time, resulting in them going on strike, was not going to be able to find a million quid to pay for Christian Doidge without new money from somewhere?

How intelligent do you have to be to figure out that it was more than unlikely that Dean Holdsworth could run up the best part of a million quid in legal fees in the hope that Eddie Davies would give him BWFC for nowt?

How intelligent do you have to be to have some idea of how much it costs to run a Championship football club when the costs for the previous five years have been published alongside each other?

How intelligent do you have to be to realise that, with the losses of Championship clubs averaging £15m per  annum, BWFC was heading for the buffers and there wasn't a damned thing Ken Anderson could do to stop it without new money coming from somewhere?

Sluffy wrote:

Take our ourselves for instance, how many believed/still believe Anderson raped and pillaged the club to enrich himself simply because they were ignorant/uneducated about how company law and finance work?  How many believe the  mates of the government earned themselves millions from PPE contracts when politicians play no part whatsoever in the evaluation and awarding of the contracts?  How many of us were led by belief that we were going to walk the league this season even though we knew next to nothing about the manager or players we signed?

1. Most people know Anderson used the club to enrich himself although in the end he only walked away with the quarter of a million FV paid him and had his personal debt written off by the ED Trust -but if he'd been any good at the job there would have been a lot more to take out of the club. Here.

2. On the second one are you claiming the DHSC who awarded the PPE contracts isn't the government? Politicians completely control ministerial posts and agendas and control the awarding of contracts as a result. The changing of direction and personnel of government departments every time a new government is elected is why our system suffers from a lack of continuity. Certainly all the evidence suggests there was no fair and impartial process undertaken to award contracts and that a large number of the successful bidders were linked to the Tory party so in answer to your question I imagine most people believe "their mates" were the beneficiaries.

3. I've only heard of a few idiots that actually believe(d) we'd walk this league. Personally I'm glad it looks like we've probably got enough not to be relegated again for the first time in ages.

Can you two stop hijacking threads and pushing this age old crap about KA again please? The thread is about Trump and his supporters.

The oxymorons are manning the barricades, Sluffy. How dare you express an opinion that might confound them.

Nothing to do with being confounded, it's very old news that no one is interested in anymore other than you too. Why not start a thread on it and bore yourselves to death on there and leave the rest of us out of it.

Norpig wrote:Nothing to do with being confounded, it's very old news that no one is interested in anymore other than you too. Why not start a thread on it and bore yourselves to death on there and leave the rest of us out of it.

Did you mean the gobbins aren't interested, Walter? Gobbins rarely are, are they?

Norpig wrote:Can you two stop hijacking threads and pushing this age old crap about KA again please? The thread is about Trump and his supporters.

Well actually the thread is about recognising intelligence and the example given was Trump supporters, which is quite a different thing to what you say above.

I've added to the debate by pointing out that 'intelligence' simply does not exist on its own but rather is built up from learning and experience and is influenced by the society, culture and religion that you are brought up in and inhabit.

I've tried to show by examples that we are all familiar with that lack of knowledge and ignorance of the facts lead people (even those with high IQ's) to come to the wrong conclusions, especially if they readily believe the hype/influencers/propaganda/follow the crowd, etc, without question.

As for Wanderlust he's clearly one of those who likes to believe he knows it all - and doesn't.

To answer his points...

wanderlust wrote:1. Most people know Anderson used the club to enrich himself although in the end he only walked away with the quarter of a million FV paid him and had his personal debt written off by the ED Trust -but if he'd been any good at the job there would have been a lot more to take out of the club. Here.

Anderson was here to turn the club around to sell on and make a profit, so he was always in it for the money, there's no secret about that.

As the club was substantially in debt when he bought it, the running costs exceeded revenue and there were no assets which hadn't been fully leveraged against other than the one that Holdsworth immediately took out the BM loan against, it makes a complete and utter mockery of your three/four year mantra that he was only here to rape and pillage the club!

Bob even gave a few salient financial pointers immediately before your post above, yet you still chose to post the tripe you have???

As a Business Consultant with your prestigious MBA perhaps you could explain how Anderson could have done a 'better job' in order to increase revenue/reduced costs, in order that he could have taken more out of the club because as a Company Secretary of forty years experience (with fwiw an MBA myself) and Bob, a lifelong accountant/auditor would be only too keen to learn, particularly when you resort to linking to the self confessed financial numpty, Marc Iles as your chosen source.

I won't be holding my breath until you do though...

wanderlust wrote:2. On the second one are you claiming the DHSC who awarded the PPE contracts isn't the government? Politicians completely control ministerial posts and agendas and control the awarding of contracts as a result. The changing of direction and personnel of government departments every time a new government is elected is why our system suffers from a lack of continuity. Certainly all the evidence suggests there was no fair and impartial process undertaken to award contracts and that a large number of the successful bidders were linked to the Tory party so in answer to your question I imagine most people believe "their mates" were the beneficiaries.

Don't really know where to begin on this one.

Let's do the easy bit, politicians form policy, the civil service enact it.  Politicians come and go, the civil servants are permanent - they do the work if you like whilst the politicians claim the glory or carry the can for failure.

You are utterly wrong if you believe the politicians 'tell' the civil servants what to do, such as who to give contracts to.  If you think that happens then you might as well join the QAnon nutjobs who believe in the 'deep state'.

The reality is the process is highly regulated with many checks and balances.

The evaluation and awarding of the PPE contracts was totally done by civil servants...

https://boltonnuts.forumotion.co.uk/t21726p120-nepotism-cronyism-watch#417152

This post walks you through the NAO findings which you've linked to...

https://boltonnuts.forumotion.co.uk/t21726p210-nepotism-cronyism-watch#417687

This is the latest on the PAC inquiry...

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/731/covid19-government-procurement-and-supply-of-personal-protective-equipment/publications/

The findings so far indicate failings in the 'reporting' side from the civil servants but no political cronyism yet found.

Personally I doubt there ever will be because the process of evaluation and award is totally within the remit of the civil service and it would necessitate civil servants to be 'bent' / corrupt for it to happen.

wanderlust wrote:3. I've only heard of a few idiots that actually believe(d) we'd walk this league. Personally I'm glad it looks like we've probably got enough not to be relegated again for the first time in ages.

You must have missed the overwhelming optimism on here and everywhere else about the prospects for our season and in a large part I would suggest, why we sold 8,000 season tickets because of it.


So I stand by my original post above, intelligence is based on learning and knowledge and nurtured in the society you live in.  If you are ignorant of the facts (or don't wish to accept them) then it doesn't matter how high your IQ is, you will make dumb, biased and prejudicial choices accordingly.

Simple as that really.

Ten Bobsworth wrote:The oxymorons are manning the barricades, Sluffy. How dare you express an opinion that might confound them.

To be fair to Norpig, he's only posting to try and avert the usual clash between Wanderlust and myself, which is commendable of him.

As for Wanderlust, if people haven't seen through him by now, they never will.

Look, all this sniping at each other over KA solves nothing and adds nothing to this debate so please drop it everyone.

As to the debate itself I know we are a product by and large of our upbringing and we base our beliefs on various factors from 'my dad said this' to 'it was on telly' and of course we get more selective about what we choose to view/hear as we get older which only tends to reinforce pre-existing beliefs no matter how right or wrong they may be.

Trump is NOT the cause of the enormous divisions in the USA but merely a symptom. They have existed as long as America itself and not even the Civil War or Civil Rights movements can do much to change the minds of the bigots no matter how smart the bigots are. What has made these problems far more visible and stark is the advent of mass media, starting with radio and TV and of course now it's the internet and it's virtually unpoliced output.

The fact is those who thought the political system in America was broke believed that long before Trump arrived on the scene. He promised he was an 'outsider' who'd do things in a fresh new way and offered simplistic solutions to problems that don't really exist outside the minds of the far right and (by and large) White Male voters. These people were desperate to hear that their lives sucked bcause someone else had made it that way and the ubiquitous 'they' were going to turn the country into a communist state ruled by Satan worshipping paedophiles and that in fact it had already happened. While the content of the lies is new the concept certainly isn't.

Trump and the GOP strategy is based around 'The Big Lie', an approach designed and in large part perfected by Josef Goebels and the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party, known as 'Nazi' to history). The idea is you tell a lie so big, so outrageous that people believe you must be telling the truth since no one would dare to say it if it wasn't. The fact that that same approach has worked here in the UK concerning in particular Brexit and Covid shows that no one of any nationality is really immune to this technique since most people aren't prepared to do the digging necessary to find out the real truth for themselves.

To compound this problem senior government figures such as McConnell and Pence in the US ignored yet another warning from history. When Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany the then vice-chancellor was a moderate conservative named von papen. He crowed 'we've hired him' to his other rich conservative friends in the mistaken belief that Hitler could be controlled or would even listen to them at all now he had the one thing he wanted; power.

Make no mistake, as awful as the scenes from washington on wednesday were I suspect there's still worse to come whether or not Trump is the legal president. And moderate conservatives around the UK should right now be desperately worried as I am about Boris and his cabal, they do NOT care about Britain or her people, only their own power and their grip on it matters to them. They cannot be controlled, they will not listen, they can only be voted out of office and then left to rant from the fringes until they're forgotten if there is to be a lasting democracy in either country.

Ten Bobsworth wrote:
Did you mean the gobbins aren't interested, Walter? Gobbins rarely are, are they?

I've walked The Gobbins. It's very nice.

boltonbonce wrote:
I've walked The Gobbins. It's very nice.

I'm sure it is Boncey but its not quite what I had in mind.

I tend not to use Lancashire dialect, Bob.

You are  quite correct, Sluffy, that anyone who quotes Marc Iles on finance is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

As to the particular, anyone with a smidgen of nous might have fathomed that, with no money to pay them, Ken Anderson was going to have  to make promises to some of the folk he really relied on.
Promises he would have to make good later, like his lawyers and Paul Aldridge for example. 

Aldridge's company alone was owed £169,800 for the work he'd done for the club and hotel in the knowledge that the club was insolvent.

boltonbonce wrote:I tend not to use Lancashire dialect, Bob.

I do. I like to lob in a birra Cumbrian an'all even though its not my native tongue.
Git amang it!

Ten Bobsworth wrote:
I do. I like to lob in a birra Cumbrian an'all even though its not my native tongue.
Git amang it!

A Cumbrian farmer once threatened to blow my head off, so I tend to be wary of anyone using that foreign lingo.

It just goes to show how little some folk know about government and the nature of government departments. I suspect some folk have watched too much Yes Minister.
For those who are interested, it works like this:
* New Government appoints Cabinet of ministers to enact their new policies
* Minister takes over government department and appoints managers and teams to enact policies. Usually this entails creating new workstreams/sub-departments and the injection of staff who support the policy.
* Existing managers and programmes are usually canned if they go against new government's policy

So for example when Michael Gove was appointed SS for Education:

"Gove terminated the previous Labour government's Building Schools for the Future programme; reformed A-Level and GCSE qualifications, abolishing modular units and coursework in most subjects, in favour of final examinations, and responded to the Trojan Horse scandal"

The Department of Education may not be staffed by politicians, but they did enact the wishes of the politicians - and those who dissented were sidelined. This is true of all Government departments and as amusing as Yes Minister was, it bears no resemblance to the reality of central gevernment departments where programmes, managers and staff come and go with every new policy shift.

As for the Anderson thing - I hope everyone has noticed that it wasn't me who raised the subject (yet again) - it was my shit stirring troll. So less of the "you two" please.