Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect? I wasn’t. either, until I ran across this titillating article in The Washington Post. They used it as an attempt to explain Trump, and apparently it interested a lot of other people, too – searches of the term surged after May 2015, and remained high for a considerable period after that.
I’m sure everyone remembers Trump’s turn-your-teeth-sideways-irritating habit of speaking in hyperbole – if he was accused of being a racist, he would respond with “You’ll never find anyone who’s less of a racist than me”. Literally, nowhere in the world. Gandhi, maybe? Martin Luther King? Not even in the running, apparently. By the same reasoning, but if racism was something to which everyone aspired, Trump would claim, “You’ll never find anyone who’s more of a racist than me”. It just basically depended on whether you were talking about turds or truffles.
Because this was such an annoying habit, and because the President of the United States is seen and heard on television a fair bit, everyone was exposed to it, and people sought an explanation for it. And the psychological and behavioral phenomenon seemed to fit like a glove; “put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.”
You might say “Well, I knew that. There’s a brag-ass idiot at every party I’ve ever been to”. But we might be talking about completely different things. Some people are merely parroting – loudly – the last opinion they heard from someone they thought sounded smart, because we all like to sound smart and when we run up against something about which we know nothing, we try to changed the subject until we’re on safer ground. Some people just naturally boast about themselves. But the Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing, with psychological tests and everything to prove that it exists and that its effects are predictable.
Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters.”
Darwin called it, ‘way back in 1871; “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” This might go a long way toward explaining the boastful self-confidence that made those in striking range want to break a chair over Trump’s head. But there was another word in there that should have jumped out and screamed at you when your eye skipped over it – experts.
It is common practice now for media outlets discussing a particular subject to refer to any gawping simpleton with two feet and a heartbeat as an ‘expert’, so long as his or her ‘expert opinion’ coincides with ‘the narrative’. Routinely, no substantiation is provided as to the ‘expert’s’ credentials; you’re just supposed to figure he or she must know, because everything he said corroborates the media’s story. Once you had to attain some pretty impressive standards in your field before you could be considered an expert, but nowadays you merely need to be warm to the touch and breathe without assistance, because the narrator or journalist assumes you don’t know anything about the subject, either, and as long as what they say and what the expert says have some observable parallels, sold!
Thus we find ourselves where matters of the utmost gravity and consequence are routinely endorsed by smackheads who talk a good, confident game, who know little to nothing about what they’re saying – but who are nonetheless touted as experts, while many believe them just because they say things like “Oh, absolutely” and “there’s no doubt”.
And those are the people who are driving and making and cementing decisions that are going to affect the world for a long, long time. A world that is going to be different from the one it was two weeks ago, and unrecognizable as the one it was two years ago. Influencers who shape the opinions of the ignorant and herd them into crowds, yelling for this or that.
Let’s look at an example; GQ’s, “The Improbable Rise and Endless Heroism of Volodymir Zelensky” by Michael Idov.
Michael Idov is Latvian by birth, and has lived in the USA for 20 years, 14 of them in New York, which he claims to love. He was appointed editor of GQ Russia magazine in 2012. GQ is not a political magazine, it is a style magazine for men. When Michael Idov writes a story about Russia, he is often courting ‘dissidents’ like Pussy Riot, and seems to savor the scent of rebellion. That’s fine as long as it remains an individual preference. It’s a little different when he’s holding Zelensky up as an inspirational leader.
To be fair, he does mention that Zelensky’s popularity upon which he swept the presidential vote did not last long with his own people. He promised to normalize relations with Russia, and end the war. Since his popularity sank like it was tied to Jeffrey Epstein, it is not hard to figure out that the people wanted those things, and expected them to happen, and they didn’t. He appointed old friends to ministerial positions, and although that is hardly unusual for Ukraine, he had implied his leadership would be different.
But Idov is plainly taken with the man.
“You’ve been told I’m going to bomb Donbass,” Zelensky said, countering the official Kremlin justification for the strike. “Bomb what? The stadium where me and the local guys cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend’s mom lives?” He name-checked the arena, the street where the bar stood, the bar itself; he was acting like a parent of an abducted child in a movie, addressing the abductor on TV news and saying the child’s name over and over. It was an incredibly savvy double play—Zelensky clearly knew this tactic was a Hollywood cliche of sorts, and used it for both its direct purpose (humanize Ukrainians) and its meta-purpose (Putin is a serial killer).
That might all have been ‘incredibly savvy’. And I don’t think anyone truly thought Zelensky was going to bomb anything himself. But Ukraine was a different place in 2012. If you doubt it, look at Sergei Prokofiev International airport, Donetsk, in 2012, after more than $12 million was spent on renovations for the same Euro 2012 where Zelensky and his friends cheered their hearts out.

And now.
As Lou Reed sang to Sweet Jane, those were different times. Ukraine and Russia were still brotherly nations, Nazi-lovers knew to keep their mouths shut about their fetish unless they were with their own kind, and the hryvnia was trading at about 8 to the US dollar instead of the 25 it was right after the Glorious Maidan Revolution of Dignity, or the 27 it is right now.
And maybe Zelensky’s best friend’s mom still lives in Lugansk. But I bet she’s a lot happier to see Russian
soldiers than she would be to see Zelensky right now. Considering, you know, that the Ukrainian Army has been shelling Donetsk and Lugansk for 8 years now, day in, day out. The bar where he and his friends raised a glass to drown their sorrows might still be there, or it might be a smoking pile of bricks and twisted metal, like the airport. This is a map of ceasefire violations, as recorded by the OSCE Monitoring Mission, on the Ukrainian line of demarcation for February 21st, just before the balloon went up. Where are most of the explosions happening? Obviously, on the DPR/LPR side of the line. Where’s the heaviest concentration? Lugansk.
Not Zelensky personally, of course. The Army. Which works for the Defense Minister. Who works for Zelensky. During all those years of shelling, how much territory has been taken by the rebel regions, advancing on the rest of Ukraine? None. Do you think maybe they just want to be left alone, and that if the Ukrainian Army was not shooting across the line at them every day, there might not be any shooting at all? Kind of a moot point now, though, isn’t it? You can’t turn back the clock.
Which brings us to where we are now. Zelensky, speaking at the Munich Conference, suggested that if the west would not come to Ukraine’s aid, it might have to look to nuclear weapons to guarantee its security. That was the last straw. President Putin recognized the DPR and LPR as independent states within Ukraine, making the border between those regions and Russia an international one rather than Ukrainian in Russia’s estimation, and responded swiftly to a plea for military assistance from those regions, which had already evacuated most of their women and children to Russia as the increased intensity of the bombardment from Ukraine suggested an infantry and/or armored push was imminent.
The republics have to win every time, or be rolled over. Ukraine only has to win once; upon driving all the way to the border, the west would exclaim in unanimity, Huzzah! Ukraine is whole again! And immediately order Russia in no uncertain terms to not intervene in the workings of a sovereign state which had broad latitude to safeguard that sovereignty. And then the punishment would begin. Is that an unreasonable forecast? I don’t think so – did you want to look at those airport photos again?
So now, a Russian operation is ongoing to ‘de-Nazify’ and disarm Ukraine, and to pressure it to sign a promise that it will remain neutral and not try to join NATO. Russia does not intend to occupy Ukraine, or change its leadership, provided those conditions are met.
But the experts – and the combined journalistic persuasion of the western media – are telling Ukraine that it is gallant, it is brave, its defiance and courage are inspirational. And, most importantly – that it is winning.
This is the sort of deliberate bullshit that is making the Ukrainian delegation to peace talks adopt a starting position that it wants a cease-fire so that Russian forces can withdraw, and surrender Crimea and Donetsk and Lugansk. Propaganda like the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, a mythical Ukrainian fighter plane whose pilot cruises the skies above Kiev, potting Russian aircraft effortlessly and racking up a score of kills that catapulted him to top air ace of the world in less than a week. Thousands of Russian soldiers killed every day. The Russian population is turning against Putin, he will be overthrown any day now. Entire Russian armored and artillery formations are defecting to Ukraine, turning their weapons upon their former countrymen, for whom all is lost.
The west knows objectively that these things are not true, and that Ukraine is decidedly not winning; the USA predicted Kiev would fall in 96 hours, and that was under the assumption that Russia would launch an irresistible hammer-blow of combined arms that would crush all before it rather than the slow, deliberate campaign it has undertaken, with pauses when leaders are engaged in negotiations. At such junctures, the western media shouts that Russian forces have had to stop and regroup because of the unexpected fierceness of Ukrainian resistance. This contributes to mind-boggling foolishness like Kiev issuing automatic weapons to anyone with a Ukrainian passport – including junkies, alcoholics and rival gangs – as ‘civil defense’. How many of those assault rifles are not going to be returned later? How many of them will end up on the black market and funneled into organized crime worldwide? How much longer will the happy talk prolong the war?