A Revanchement Of Retards

Not the sharpest bullet in the clip…

I sometimes find myself pitying the mid-wits that provide the fluffy infill of popular culture. It’s a tough gig, being a mid-wit; not smart enough to recognize the glass ceiling of one’s own intellectual capacity, not dumb enough to have been set aside and forced to ride the short bus of life. The true curse of the mid-wit is that they simply don’t know what they don’t know, and can’t imagine that anything else exists beyond the limits of their intellectual grasp. Every single thing the mid-wit “knows” they know only because it is, to them, axiomatic. A thing is true because it obviously can’t be any other way.
And of course, these axioms weren’t derived through carefully honed philosophic introspection, they were taught verbatim at an impressionable point in a mid-wit’s life, accepted without consideration.
Because Obvious.
This is how we get ground-breaking investigative journalism. I’m sure you’ve seen this by now, but let’s roll through it again:

The Five Most Dangerous Guns In ‘Murica

• Pistols
• Revolvers (And Also Handguns)
• Rifles
• Shotguns
• Derringers

This list, in addition to being vague, useless and ill-informed, at least manages to convey the true ignorance of the mid-wits destined to live and die by the axiom – it’s clear that, despite the “reporter’s” invocation of culling through “FBI, CDC and ATF data” for this “report”, the reporter knows nothing about the subject or anything related to the subject. In fact, it’s pretty clear her first draft went something like this:

The Most Dangerous Guns In ‘Murica

• All of them

Of course, her editor correctly realized that a one-item “listicle” just wouldn’t cut the mustard here, so on the rewrite, the editor likely asked for a little more, with something to make a reader click through to more pages (for revenue!):

The Two Most Dangerous Guns In ‘Murica

• Guns that go “BANG!”
• Guns that haven’t yet gone “BANG!” but will at any moment.

Weary from pondering all of the life choices that led the editor to this specific time and place, he once again hands back the “listicle”, advising the reporter to maybe break it out into something specific, you know, like which specific guns could be called “most dangerous”. Yet, knowing nothing about guns, but “knowing” that there’s nothing more to know than the knowledge that guns are icky and evil, the reporter decides to get as specific as she knows how, and the published article is the result.
Nevermind that three of the five are all the same “type” of gun, nor that the “list” unintentionally covers just about everything. The one true lesson that this affair belies is the notion that people who know ridiculously little about a subject that they are passionately adamant about (for or against, in this case against) are the most dangerous cretins of all in a propaganda war, because they simply have no interest in filling in the gaps of their own ignorance.