Stupidity is selective. This is interesting. I don't know if what you describe is actually what happened in Venezuela -- for instance Maduro's power is (probably) legitimate, scary as that thought may or may not be. Who knows if that was his actual thought process: "I'm above this protesting in the streets, I'm the southern hemisphere's Putin, they'll never get rid of me." We don't know. Maybe he made one stupid decision on the heels of the 100 brilliant ones that it took to get elected president. Selection bias. - Glibness is all I have time for tonight; I've read six Wikipedia pages and a handful of Democracy Now-ilk articles and I'm in the middle of a 20-page long CEPR report because I want to replace the glibness with intelligence by tomorrow morning. Maybe I should have held off commenting until then.It's a much greater offense to purposefully engineer a situation where people then believe that they've accumulated enough wealth and power through illegitimate means to simply crush any opposition that rears its head, than for a fool to act without understanding any of the stakes.
There is something about that that creates monsters.