The sad thing is that the Republicans are probably looking at that exact same picture and thinking, “Glad I’m not like that Democrat.”
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Maybe, but I think it also depends on the phd field and (frankly) often times the gender and race of the holder of the phd or whatever kind of degree in engineering.
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I went through graduate school hearing this: you get your bachelor’s when you think you know everything. You get your master’s when you realize you don’t know anything. You get your PhD when you realize no one else knows anything, either.
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Haha, that’s better than what my favorite professor told us, which his professor had told him early on:
BS= bullshit
MS= More shit
PhD=piled higher and deeper
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I didn’t see your comment when you made it, sorry, so I’ll reply now.
From my (anarcho-communist and adjacent) perspective, that is more a centre-left position (Maybe it’s a tankie position too, but I try to avoid tankies for similar reasons that I try to avoid the far-right). Maybe it’s because anarchist and Marxist theory explains how people can fall into a far-right mindset if they don’t become socialist.
But it has never been a secret that a significant part of the far right is well educated. Go on to youtube (In incognito mode!) with your brain in it’s most critical state and carefully watch a few far right videos, or watch a few breadtube debunking videos. The far right videos are wrong but the presenters are often smart too, and that is part of why they are so dangerous.
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This is why it matters to pay mind to class. For most people, the ability to get a good education that leads to an advanced degree comes from having a good solid, upper middle class background at the very least.
Not to Godwin this, but the middle and elite classes were the primary basis of support for the Nazis, the Italian fascists, and Franco in Spain. The fascists promised to protect the status quo against the Communists or socialists who were active in all three places during the interwar period, who now had the example of the Soviet Union (though many were ignoring what was happening under Stalin, of course). Communism was the larger threat than an unfree, unequal society and not because of Stalin, but in spite of him! Stalin, it strikes me, just gave them a more robust excuse to go after their own home grown commies, no matter what they were actually seeking (a democratic socialist government all the way to a Soviet style communist government, I’m guessing, and of course various forms of anarchist governance, too).
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My unqualified take is to defer to experts, like Hannah Ardent. She believed that Totalitarianism (and its wannabe followers like Trumpism) have their start in loneliness. Smart, thoughtful people can be very lonely.
Here’s an interesting take on what the pandemic might lead to, with its loneliness.
Loneliness, Arendt posits, is the defining condition of totalitarianism and the common ground of all terror. … Isolation, she writes, “may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.” Isolation is the inability to act together with others, which, according to Arendt, is the source of a person’s political power. Isolation renders people impotent.
One can be lonely and not isolated, or isolated and not lonely. A person who is isolated cannot act with others, but still can act—still can create and send those creations out into the world. Loneliness is the inability to act altogether, either with others or alone. Arendt links loneliness to the states of uprootedness and superfluousness: having no place in the world, nothing to give to the world. This, in turn, is linked to the loss of what she calls “common sense”—the shared reality that allows us to know ourselves, to know where we end and the world begins, and how we are connected to others. [1]
[my emphasis]
The important point Ardent made is that we’re dealing with a problem whose roots lie in feelings of loneliness and its accompanying powerlessness. Whether you agree with that or not, it’s pretty clear we’ve got a problem that is not well defined by metrics such as education etc.
[1] The Political Consequences of Loneliness and Isolation During the Pandemic | The New Yorker
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If he’s like a lot of oil industry folks I’ve known, he might’ve done overseas work in low- or no-tax places. People doing this will often stash the cash somewhere safe and quiet, like the Channel Islands or Switzerland. My guess is that Switzerland was the first stop in his plan, to stop by the bank and rearrange some financial matters. From there, he could go anywhere.
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That is the best description/definition of “common sense” I’ve ever seen. Thanks for posting the whole thing. Ardent is a gift.
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The fact is, some of these people were Democrats not too long ago. It bears repeating – this is a cult-like phenomenon, people have been literally radicalized and altered, yada yada.
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We have a strong contender for Best Pun on bb, February 2021 I see! 
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