“… I feel funny — I don’t know why, but I know it must somehow be Tony Fauci’s fault” 
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except how does that explain all the libertarian tech-bros ( or people like the conservative supreme court justices.) there are plenty of educated people who are right wing, and plenty of working class folks who don’t value traditional education who are left wing.
personally, i put it down to empathy and curiosity. while those are technically a form of education, it’s not book learning.
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Perhaps it is a rejection of education rather than a lack. Educated people can reject what they have learned, just as uneducated people can reject the very notion of learning.
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sure – except even rejecting education doesn’t make a person right wing. ex: blue collar unions often lean left; college educated wall street types often lean right.
and in my life at least, i have had tons of friends who don’t value education and even reject it. they don’t read much beyond popular fiction. they don’t follow the news. they didn’t get beyond a high school education. and yet, they’re far more left than most of my educated friends; and far more likely to have done direct political action, or volunteer in the community, and on.
i think perhaps it’s because the world itself doesn’t have a moral compass. that’s something we create. that means it’s as easy to marshal facts and education for “evil” as it is for “good”. so instead, you have to start with a base of “people matter”, and go from there. educated or not.
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When I say reject education, I don’t mean simply deciding not to pursue further education or considering it unessential. I mean harboring an active belief that education is bad or even harmful. Your friends who aren’t all that into education personally probably wouldn’t go so far as to say that education should be limited or narrowed down to just things that make money in general, but a lot of well-educated stock brokers will say just that. That is what I mean by rejection of education.
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FAR right-wing. @milliefink said “far right-wing”, and in my haste I forgot to put the “far” in. We’re talking MAGAts and other folks, not the more centrist ones.
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There are educated MAGAts. Oh, very much so. It’s not a question of education or smarts, IMHO. It’s more a desire to dominate others or a need to be seen as intrinsically better than, frequently in those who really don’t think they would ever be “better than” based on personal qualities, so it must be intrinsic to whiteness, maleness, straightness, or other -nesses. Oh, and the ability to enjoy the suffering of those lesser-thans who are, after all, subhuman and only good for entertainment and service.
(God, I feel awful after typing that!)
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I would add that there are two general ways to be wrong about something – passively, where you have never heard the truth, and actively, where you have but also have invented reasons to ignore it. The first is more common but the second is more dangerous, and educated people can be very good at it.
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But then, is that honestly, actually an intelligent position? 
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High intelligence, terrible wisdom is how I would put it in D&D terms.
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No stat should be a “dump” stat.
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Intelligence and education are not the same thing. And talking about education is difficult, because we lost the vocabulary and context in which education was foreshadowed by the enlightenment and framed in the early 19th century.
Education, so quote from the Wikipedia, is acquiring the means of realizing individual possibility. This resonates with the ideas of individualism so cherished by the right-wingers, but they ignore that education must undeniably include a certain cultivation of the mind and character. People obviously cannot be considered educated unless, regardless of their material circumstances, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens.
In a nutshell, we can have people who went to famous schools like Eaton, Harvard, la Sorbonne but did not acquire the means to grow their mind and their character. Sadly, we can find schools of thoughts at the famous schools of education who refuse the education of the character - which propagate, which proliferate, and which propagandise.
At the same time we can find blue-collar workers in lowly jobs who never received higher formal ‘education’, but who built both their knowledge as well as their mind and character. This was the ideal of the ealy 20th centuries reformers. The schools of thoughts mentioned above formed themselves, in my opinion, out of the particular urge to prevent that this came to fruition. Education for the masses, true education, education which includes ethics, mindfulness, open-mindedness, and worst of all: action out of this! - that kind of education is, in fact, what many educational systems around the world are formed to prevent.
Remember that other topic of late?
If you don’t control education, you cannot control the future.
I think that’s, in a wall of text, what was said above:
(These are not technically a form of education, these are at the core of education. If you do not cultivate these, if you do even discourage these, you are not educating, but indoctrinateing.
And that’s what’s happening. And it has been happening for much longer than the above-quoted ideals of education have been sent in that letter.
ETA, since we are technically on the Corona topic:
Parents with higher level education were more likely to hesitate to vaccinate their children against COVID-19.
Well, yeah. Observable in Germany as well, by overlaying sociological data with geographic data of infections. I’ve seen some some rough and I think still unpublished research results at the University of Duisburg-Essen, which was rather two-fold in that regard. High levels of continuous infections in “poor” neighborhoods, and high levels of vaccination hesitancy in quite well-off neighborhoods, resulting in strong but somewhat confined outbreaks. It fits my narrative that formal education is in no way translating to being intelligent, ethical, and self-aware.
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it’s a bit no true scottsman i think.
we want educated people to be the good guys because we want to be good and we value education. but i don’t think it’s intrinsically so.
left leaning people use facts to try to show how we are all interconnected and equally deserving of what life has to offer; right leaning people ( in my opinion ) don’t value that interconnectedness and don’t believe people are equally deserving – so they use knowledge to different ends. knowledge itself doesn’t care. that’s up to us.
eta:
i think that’s very well said; and true.
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Does that U.S. chart somehow dip into negative deaths?
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negative excess deaths. I read that as Covid is currently not a significant factor in US mortality. Morbidity due to long covid and other complications is another story entirely, but it has long been predicted that it would eventually become a seasonal affliction like flu. Too early to tell for sure, but that seems to be the direction we are headed.
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FTA:
The current COVID situation
COVID-19 is still killing hundreds of Americans each week, according to the most recent data available from the CDC, and the unvaccinated are much more likely to be among them.
Yet they leave us to search wastewater reports. 
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They would get higher vaccination uptake if they made a combination vaccine with influenza vaccine.
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