Usually You Can't Underestimate People

"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." -- H.L. Mencken

What a terrible quote, right? (Totally valid, but awful nonetheless.) Mencken's got lots more where that came from, on all sorts of topics ranging from love to marriage to politics to generalized cynical pissiness. He was the archetypical Snarky McSnarkerson.* His writings were offensive in so many categories that he was, in a way, universally acceptable no matter how racist, sexist, Anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and otherwise grotesque he became--he was an equal-opportunity hater.

At this point, this post could go in one of two directions. Having introduced Mencken, I could either talk about (a) how I accidentally underestimated the determination and engineering skills of one Jeffrey Vaughan or (b) how much I hate Libertarians and why.

Let's do both. Read on.


* To wit, more Mencken quotables:

Historian: An unsuccessful novelist.

Husband: A No. 16 neck in a No. 15 1/2 collar.

Idealist: One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another.

Morality: The theory that every human act must either be right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.

Newspaper: a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

...and my favorite:

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.