In yesterday’s blog, I outlined how Fintan O’Toole offered his unique solution to the Brexit mess: Sinn Féin’s seven MPs would resign their seats, leaving them to be occupied by independents such as Dame Nuala O’Loan, who would then go into the House of Commons and vote down a no-deal Brexit. Afterwards they’d give SF back their seats. I pointed out some holes I saw in Fintan’s plan.
Today Fintan is back in the Irish Times saddle, protesting against the Sinn Féin response to his cunning plan. Instead of taking the document and thinking carefully about it and discussing its clear worth, inside two hours Sinn Féin had dismissed it as an impossible fantasy. Fintan doesn’t explain why it took them a full two hours. Which brings things to the point I made yesterday: Fintan would like to target Sinn Féin as the source of the Brexit mess. What a shower, eh?
In today’s Irish Times there is another piece by David McWilliams. He’s talking about the Tory Party and Brexit, and puts forward the theory that dumb people are frequently very confident before coming a cropper and smart people tend to be less confident and frequently succeed. When these confident dumb people succeed, they congratulate themselves on their intelligence. When- as happens more often – they fail, they blame not themselves or their schemes, but other people. In psychology it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
McWilliams cites the example of an 18-stone bank-robber in Pittsburgh who entered a bank with a gun, smiled at the security cameras, demanded and took several thousands of the green stuff, and made his getaway. Within hours he was apprehended, which shocked him deeply. “But I wore the juice!” he protested to the cops. The juice in questions was lemon juice, which he’d sprayed all over his face, in the belief that since lemon juice could be used for invisible writing, it likewise would make his face invisible. A classic example of a supremely stupid person being completely confident in his own incompetence because he’s too stupid to know how stupid he is.
I wonder if Fintan has read his colleague’s article.
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