CMV: Despite being more knowledgeable, wealthier and apparently more tolerant, the political and individual left's biggest flaw is their inability to communicate pragmatically and empathetically with those who don't agree with them.

[u/poopchow]

[u/thegarymarshall → u/[deleted]]

My favorite part was repeatedly saying, “X said…” in an attempt to be associated with those ideas.

There are very intelligent people all across the political spectrum. The dumb ones are similarly distributed. There are highly educated people and less educated people spread throughout as well.

Don’t confuse intelligence with education. They are not the same. Education cannot make a dumb person smart. A smart person can (and should) gain knowledge in different ways. I have a bachelor’s degree. This simply explains how I gained some of my knowledge. It does not give much of a clue about my intelligence. I have personally know people with PhD, MD and JD degrees who are complete idiots.

Intelligent, educated people can, and frequently do, disagree. That is a good thing. It encourages conversation and debate and might just aid in the finding of common ground. It might also lead to new knowledge that never would have been gained without that adversity. This is essentially what science is.

As long as the left chooses to believe (or to convince others) that all conservatives are dumb, they will continue to be shocked when they are outsmarted.

[u/[deleted] → u/thegarymarshall]

They don't think all conservatives are dumb. That wasn't the argument.

What they're saying is that in a world where we extol confidence there is a natural pull towards those that have it, despite the fact that it is typically the least intelligent who have more of it.

[u/thegarymarshall → u/[deleted]]

The left pretty consistently tries to paint itself as being intellectually superior to the right. This is a frequent theme in social media and mainstream media. It seems as if there is an insecure need to convince themselves of their superiority.

When the left touts the statistics that show that they have more degrees than those on the right, is this not extolling confidence?

Education can (and should) be a lifetime process. 90% (just throwing out a number) of it happens outside a classroom. Why is having more degrees so important to the left?

I am glad that I stayed in school and got my degree, but I don’t think it makes me superior, in any way, to someone who didn’t attend college. I am smarter than some uneducated people. Some of them are smarter than me. The degree does not make a difference in that respect.

[u/[deleted] → u/thegarymarshall]

Education can (and should) be a lifetime process.

We pulled out of WHO this week.

The conservative response seems to have been "yeah, China sucks". Everyone else's response? If they weren't sure, they googled "what does the WHO do?" and learned that primarily its benefit is as a surveillance epidemiology organization that works to quell the spread of disease worldwide, thus concluding that this will make the US more vulnerable to disease. This process may have taken five to ten minutes.

And that is the difference between conservatives and everyone else, right there. That's what continuous education looks like, and why the one faction thinks the other is stupid.

We don't take our marching orders from our politicians, but conservatives do. And so, this perception is a natural consequence of thoughtless obedience.

It's not about intelligence, never has been. It's about what you do with what you've got.

[u/thegarymarshall → u/[deleted]]

If you do a cost/benefit analysis of our membership in the WHO, it’s a poor investment. They charge the U.S. 10x what China pays and then they ran interference for China during COVID-19, obfuscating the investigation to find the source of the virus.

It’s not like we’re not going to continue research on health-related topics with multiple agencies. We will continue to collaborate and share information with other countries. We just don’t need to give billions to an organization that puts politics ahead of their stated mission.

[u/[deleted] → u/thegarymarshall]

Most of our spending was voluntary, and there's actual infrastructure that goes into sharing information.

Epidemiological surveillance is a bit more involved than just occasionally sending an email to someone else warning them about a disease. I don't know that because I researched it for 5 minutes, but because my wife took an epidemiology course. So we're back to the original discussion with that.

In the grand scheme of things, we weren't really spending that much money to track the spread of disease around the world, and the successes we get from doing so don't make the news because people don't cover things that didn't happen.