Stupid
Related: dumbing down of culture - folly - intellectuals - brain - list of qualities
"There are three things required for happiness: good health, selfishness, and stupidity, and without stupidity the others are useless." -- Gustave Flaubert
Definition
Stupidity is the quality or condition of being stupid, or lacking intelligence. This quality can be attributed to both an individual himself (e.g. John is stupid.) or his actions, words or beliefs (e.g., John's policies are stupid.). The term can thus also refer to poor use of judgement, or insensitivity to nuances in a person who is otherwise intelligent. The determination of who is stupid is relatively difficult, despite attempts to measure intelligence (and thus stupidity) such as IQ tests. The adjective is also used as a general pejorative. (e.g., I didn't borrow your stupid cap - go look for it yourself.) --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity
Books
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Stupidity (2001) - Avital Ronell
[Amazon.com]
"The foremost thinker of the repressed conditions of knowledge, Avital Ronell, with the Nietzschean audacity characteristic of her thought, probes the philosophical no-man's land of stupidity. With dazzling readings of Musil, Schlegel, Dostoevsky, and Wordsworth, Ronell conjures a figure of non-knowledge whose sovereign failures of cognition constitute a radical challenge to the philosophical, political and ethical premises of the discourses of modernity." -- Jean-Luc Nancy, author of The Sense of the World "Avital Ronell has dared to approach a topic that effectively undoes any knowing or analytic posture, even any questioning stance. Advancing in full awareness of her vulnerability (and demonstrating constantly how this vulnerability exceeds awareness), she confronts the philosophical, psychosomatic, and ethico-political effects of her non-object through brilliant readings of a host of writers for whom stupidity (or idiocy) has become a haunting obsession or a kind of ambiguous promise. And throughout this process, she pursues a stunning meditation on the act of writing itself." -- Christopher Fynsk, author of Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and other Scenes of Origin --amazon.comAvital Ronell is Professor and Chair of German and Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University, as well as a member of the faculty of the European Graduate School. She is a literary critic, feminist, and philosopher, perhaps best known as the "black lady" of deconstruction. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avital_Ronell [Jun 2006]
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Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! (2001) - Michael Moore
[Amazon.com]
Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! is a book by Michael Moore published in 2001. As of April 2003, it had spent 50 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (eight weeks at #1) for hardcover nonfiction and is in its 43rd printing. It is generally known by its short title, Stupid White Men.The book is highly critical of recent U.S. government policies in general, and the policies of the Bush administration in particular. Because of this, it has caused a large amount of controversy, with strong criticism and accusation of factual inaccuracy, mostly from the right wing of American politics. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_White_Men [Jun 2006]