Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
When I read articles reporting incidents of Trump voters – Republicans – doing something not very bright, and then read the comments, I often see riffs on the idea “Donald Trump says he loves the uneducated.” But, you know, that’s not exactly what he said. He said, “I love the poorly educated.” I understood that to mean, in essence, that not knowing anything is not quite good enough for Trump. He loves people who know things that aren’t true.
But it’s also true that Democrats tend to have more education that Republicans, even without regard to the quality. Let’s take this statistic: today, roughly 54% of college graduates identify Democratic or leaning to the Democrats, whereas only 39% identify Republican or leaning Republican.
It wasn’t always like this. As recently as 1994, the numbers went exactly the other way. (Hence my insistence on the distinction between “un-” and “poorly.” What were those colleges teaching, “The Works and Philosopy of Ayn Rand”?)
But that isn’t all. That was people with four-year degrees. When it comes to people with degrees above the four-year level, today, 63% are or lean Democratic, with only 31% going to the dark side. But back in the mid-1990’s, the split was more like 45% Republican, 47% Democratic. All these figures are from Pew Research Center.
The Republican advantage among people with a high school diploma or less is even more stark if one looks just at white people (no surprise, of course). There the divide today is roughly 47% Republican to 45% Democratic. That too is a shift from the 1990’s, when the numbers were not quite the other way.
This of course is no surprise to anyone who as lived as long as most of us here. Republicans have been bashing both education and intelligence verbally since, to my personal recollection, 1952, when Nixon called Stevenson an “egghead.” And I was only 7. That remark may have slipped by some, because it was also applicable to the fact that Adlai was balding. But it didn’t slip by my family. We knew it was anti-intellectual.
Then there was William F Buckley in 1963 claiming that he
should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
Reagan and Bush the younger also said some too-stupid-to-be-believed things. And we have for some tome seen that the hostility is not just to people who have good educations, but to the colleges and universities themselves. In 2017, Pew found that
a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58 percent) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45 percent last year.
This is the road to Betsy DeVos. The only surprise should be that it didn’t happen faster. In a way, it’s too bad it didn’t. We might have taken better counter-measures sooner if it had.
And we also have here a true example of Republican hypocrisy. I have contended, and stand by, the fact that some of what looks like hypocrisy in Republicans isn’t – it’s just that they are going by a different moral standard from ours (in my opinion a decidedly IMmoral standard, but they apply it consistently.) But I really cannot call this anything but hypocrisy:
As a rule, in every Congress including this majority-Republican body, nearly every member has a four-year degree, and the number of House and Senate legislators who possess postgraduate educations is far higher than in the general population. If nothing else that proves the elite GOP lawmakers actually do value education, at least when they’re thinking about themselves and their children. It’s only their voters they want to keep disinterested in learning, convinced that knowing less is somehow better.
Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone – you come to us from the cradle of learning on the non-Abrahamic side of our culture. But on the Abrahamic side, our heritage is also pride in that we are “People of the Book.” I’m not sure how – but I hope you can help us recover our pride in knowledge and learning, as well as intelligence.
The Furies and I will be back.
Cross posted to Care2 HERE.
He yelled to his wife to grab the baby and run, which she did. But the car had been rammed three times with the baby inside. Mohammadi’s reaction was “I’m so lucky they are both OK.”
Yes, that’s Jim Bakker’s (new, trophy) wife, and his show is her platform If only there were such a thing! Maybe mental illnesses could be treated which are now going untreated for lack of funds and lack of caring.
Well, I don’t want to go where he’s going, that’s for sure.
including links to their 
the Federal guidelines. Although not legally enforceable, they are at least calculated based on actual cancer risks. California looks at two isotopes of radium separately, which the EPA does not. It looks to me, however, like the radium from my water utility is running somewhere between twenty and a hundred times what California recommends. I have a household reverse osmosis filter, though, and even though it comes in already filtered, I run it through the refrigerator filter anyway if I plan to drink it. Or cook with it.
computer programs in place of our old systems. With algorithm-based systems, we can make faster, less variable predictions about the likelihood of people ending up in the criminal justice system again, or recidivism. But it’s become increasingly apparent that 
The two evaluated the risk assessment software COMPAS—Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions—and the results were shocking. Participants only had seven details about offenders, compared to 137 given to COMPAS, and were accurate 67 percent of the time.
COMPAS software, wrote an “Official Response” on its website that alleges Dressel’s research “actually adds to a growing number of independent studies that have confirmed that COMPAS achieves good predictability and matches the increasingly accepted AUC standard.” However, they make no mention of the racial bias and say they will review the materials from the study for accuracy.
Pennsylvania Republicans are willing to go above and beyond to prevent losing. The map they have been using for years has resulted in Pennsylvania sending 5 Democrats and 13 Republicans to Congress … and similar proportions in the two State houses … despite the fact that Trump won the state by less than one point. The (gerrymandering) case went to the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court this year, and the court overwhelmingly said that new maps must be drawn, the current ones being outrageous. In a panic, Republicans sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court for a Stay to try to salvage 2018. This request went to Justice Alito. Justice Alito could have asked the rest of the court to look at it. He didn’t. He essentially said, “Nuts” and sent it back.
Republicans have the numbers to do this. They need a majority in their House, and they have that. They need a supermajority in their Senate, and they have that too. And, they are not just thinking of 2018. They are thinking of 2021, when a new census will require new maps. Even if they can hold their majorities till then, similar gerrymandered maps will be tossed out by the Supreme Court if it still has its present makeup. Pennsylvania Supreme Court judges are elected … but incumbents only face retention elections, which are gimmes. They also have mandatory retirement at 75. The next Democratic justice to hit 75 will do so in 2022.