It is fundamentally hilarious that anyone thinks smart people and jerks don't overlap heavily.

--signed, a journalist who reported on Wall Street https://twitter.com/ericmgarcia/status/1348659258011897861

Intelligence and entitlement go together because we have an ableist society that has told people that intelligence is an inherent good. It's fine! But it's way harder to find smart people who are decent, who lack arrogance, who have empathy and humility.

Another big secret is that "smart people" aren't as smart as many people think. And there are different kinds of intelligence - mathematical, visual, musical, verbal - which allows genius to exist separate of traditional education.

Where I get really salty about this is politics. Paul Ryan was constantly given credit by Hill reporters for being smart and a "wonk" when he demonstrated multiples times that he had no understanding of police as well as low impulse control.

TL;DR intelligence is overpraised and over-rewarded as a human quality and Ted Cruz is your proof.

While we're here!

It's incredibly classist to portray poor ppl as ignorant or unintelligent. It's false, for one thing -- formal education does not grant intelligence, just information. For another, it is a LOT of work to be poor and many privileged people could never cut it.

Additionally. People don't get promoted because they're smart, they get promoted because they want to be -- because they're ambitious. Ambition and intelligence are two different things, which only *sometimes* overlap. People at the top are not necessarily smart.

It's helpful to see humans as complex and flawed that there are no contradictions. They can be smart at one thing and bad at another. It's normal. No one is good at everything. We can try to get better at some things, and that's growth.

Here's why I'm often right about people. I do not look for "intelligence." I look for what they're good at - their specific skill -- and their character, which is a thing they can actually influence if they put in the work to listen and grow their empathy.

All of this is understanding of intelligence as a limited quality is completely alien to centrist Democrats, which is why they are intensely arrogant and consistently get things wrong politically. They think intelligence is the only quality and so they fail to read the room.

A big part of centrist Democrats being passive about monsters like Ted Cruz political is that "he's smart." This is how we ended up with a Congress that seems to completely lack a moral compass, or at least traded it in for arrogant self-congratulation about who's "smart."

Please see this excellent thread from @megpillow on how our ideas of "smart" can be classist and ableist. 100% true. https://twitter.com/megpillow/status/1348374744048037892