Mark Twain, Adolf Hitler And The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Stupid People Don't Know They're Stupid 
"If you're incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.… [T]he skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."^[5]
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-dunning-kruger-effect-stupid-dont.html

"The Death Of Epistemolgy"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/are-polls-skewed-death-of-epistemology.html

Carl Sagan: "The Incomparable Boon Of Science"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/12/carl-sagan-incomparable-boon-of-science.html

Carl Sagan On Mystery: "Why Common Sense Blinds Us To The Universe, And How To Live With The Unknown"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/carl-sagan-on-mystery-why-common-sense.html

Carl Sagan On The Power Of Books And Reading As The Path To Democracy

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/11/carl-sagan-on-power-of-books-and.html


General Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis Describes Trump As A Dolt Who Does Not Read And Has No Interest In Learning
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/09/jim-mattis-describes-trump-as-dolt-who.html
  

"All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Hitler On Propaganda
Mein Kampf, Excerpts From Chapter 6
(According to Trump's first wife Ivana, Donald kept a book of Hitler's speeches in a bedside cabinet. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/07/donald-trump-kept-book-of-hitlers.html)

"Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda in be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:

It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.

Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound ...

What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?

We would only shake our heads.

Exactly the same applies to political advertising.

The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly." Mein Kampf, Chapter 6

"You will never learn what I am thinking. And those who boast most loudly that they know my thought, to such people I lie even more."

• Hitler's statement to Franz Halder, as quoted in The Psychopathic God (1993) by Robert George Leeson Waite, p. xi

Hitler's Munich Speech, April 12, 1922:

"There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction - to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power - that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago. Here, too, there can be no compromise - there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew." 

 "Mediocre Philosophy Sells: It Makes The Half Literate... Feel Smart

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/05/reprise-mediocre-philosophy-sells-it.html