> incompetence is malice

A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".

This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.

Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.

It does occur to me that you can be both malicious and stupid at the same time.

> adequately explained by stupidity

What is the adequate explanation via stupidity in this case though? If there is one that sure maybe we should lean that way without further evidence.

It feels like lately there are people committing malice knowingly trying to justify it as just a joke or unknowingly doing something from stupidity to make it more palatable to people that will then excuse them.

I think this rule may have always been fake when anyone with even a little bit of power did it.

I've never understood why this is taken seriously. Law has clear concepts of bad faith and mens rea, and this implies they're irrelevant.

Of course it's unproductive to start from assumptions of bad faith, which is a fair point. Bad faith requires evidence of intent, stupidity doesn't.

But there are still situations where bad faith is a reasonable hypothesis to test. And some negative actors are clever enough to operate deliberately inside a zone of plausible deniability.