It's Scientific

My sister and I used to watch this sleezy TV show called "Degrassi".  It's a series about all the drama at a fictional high school, and probably isn't very good viewing material for impressionable teenage minds, but oh well, it's too late now.  The people in this show were crazy!  They were always getting into fights, and cheating on their boyfriends, and becoming anorexic or bisexual or juvenile delinquints.  My sister and I would just sit there marveling at it all.  "High school is not nearly this interesting in real life," she would say.  "People are not nearly this stupid in real life," I would reply.
Well apparently they are.  How else do you explain all the ridiculous things you hear in the news, like someone feeding their baby Mountain Dew or blowing up their meth lab or shooting someone in the face for looking at them funny?  People are just stupid!  No, that's not a nice expression.  In the world of young-child care we say "silly".  But seriously, if someone flips you off driving down the highway, should you a) ignore it or b) blow their head off and go to prison for 40 years?  I guess the insult is just too much for people with "swag".
Of course we all do stupid things sometimes.  Why just yesterday I called a vertical bar graph a "straight-up-and-down line thingey".  In a room full of highly intelligent college students.  But I have determined that there must be a stupidity continuum.  On one side there are the people who are suing Mickey D's for making them obese.  Then there are those people who do dumb things all the time, but the things they do aren't that bad.  I guess those are the people we are always saying must be blonde at heart (even though they are rarely actually blonde).  Next there are people like me, occasionally doing "brainless" things and humiliating ourselves forever.  I mean, laughing it off.  And finally, at the complete opposite end of the continuum, are the perfectionists (refer to previous article).  
This continuum is not backed by research, so is probably not completely accurate.  But I think that if our government ever gets silly enough to go around paying for research on stupidity continua, it will be pretty close.