Sheep escaping dogs has not been achieved here. They now use llama or alpacas who do a wonderful job of herding the sheep and stomping dogs to a bloody death.

[gutenberg.org]

@FrayedBear Well then Assange showed the sheep how to escape llamas and alpacas.

The sheep being the sheople.

@rogerbenham Sadly

[en.m.wikipedia.org]

These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Corollary: a stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager.

As is evident from the third law, Cipolla identifies two factors to consider when exploring human behaviour:

Benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself.

Benefits and losses that an individual causes to others.

Graph with the benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself and causes to others.

"By creating a graph with the first factor on the x-axis and the second on the y-axis, we obtain four groups of people, with an additional category (ineffectual people) either existing in its own right or drawn from the members of each previous category whose position with respect to both axes is least extreme:

Helpless people
contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it (and especially by the "bandit" sector of it); note, however, that extreme altruists and pacifists may willingly and consciously (rather than helplessly) accept a place in this category for moral or ethical reasonsIntelligent people
contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefitsStupid people
whose efforts are counterproductive to both their and others' interestsBandits
pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare

Cipolla further refines his definition of "bandits" and "naive people" by noting that members of these groups can either add to or detract from the general welfare, depending on the relative gains (or losses) that they cause themselves and society. A bandit may enrich himself more or less than he impoverishes society, and a naive person may enrich society more or less than he impoverishes himself and/or allows himself to be impoverished. Graphically, this idea is represented by a line of slope -1, which bisects the second and fourth quadrants and intersects the y-axis at the origin. The naive people to the left of this line are thus "semi-stupid" because their conduct creates/allows a net drain of societal welfare; some bandits may fit this description as well, although many bandits such as sociopaths, psychopaths, and non-pathological "jerks" and amoralists may act with full knowledge of the net negative consequences to a society that they neither identify with nor care about.

@FrayedBear Guten nacht gutenberg.

@rogerbenham

@FrayedBear Stupid people: We all are. We all make stupid mistakes.

I'm not at all sure where this is going vis a vis Assange.

@rogerbenham It depends on whether the vociferous agitators marching under banners of Me too, Misogenist, Misandrist, Bernie's, Trumpians, Yankee, Commie, LGBTQ, WASP, realise that none advance unless everyone does likewise.

@FrayedBear I'm out of this FB. You are writing on levels I don't understand.

@rogerbenham apology - my brain works faster than my fingers or voice. I'm responding to your implication contained in not knowing where it is going and saying it will go nowhere unless many people and groups realise that they are largely, through their narcissism part of the problems rather than solution.