I would like to broker a discussion on the American right wing and its peculiar hostility towards intellectualism. While there is a certain emphasis on values that is necessary for the American left to function (namely the value of giving the disadvantaged a leg up rather than letting the market sort things out), i do feel that the left wing in America is far more amicable to science and the pursuit of knowledge as a moral good than the right, where the pursuit of knowledge is viewed with suspicion at best, despite the fact that the party leadership on the Right is all reasonably well-educated, they tend to propound education as elitist (Rick Santorum, who was once a lawyer meaning he went through college and law school, has implied that college education is elitist).

It seems like the Right, in its belief that government is bad, has absorbed the idea that people who know about government are bad, and would be less fit governors, with the growing myth that the self-made outsider is better than the experienced civil servant, which one sees with the Republican Party's brief flirtation with Herman Cain, a man with zero political experience (evidenced by his ill-conceived 9-9-9 plan), as being superior to Washington types.

You see it also in the rejection of fairly well-established scientific facts as well: being homosexual isn't a choice, human activity is causing climate change, and yes, humanity evolved from lower life forms. Money flowing from right-wing think tanks fund entire branches of psuedoscience to try to disprove these things, but what is more important is that the rank-and-file conservatives pick up the ideas that various branches of science are false and take them in as core conviction, and then look with suspicion on anyone who takes these facts for what they are: proven as far as empirical science is able.

The right embraces mythology more frequently than the left, which is evidenced by the number of falsehoods that are constantly spun out by the party compared to the falsehoods that were embraced by the left (9/11 truthers being a wacko movement that the left wing flirted with, but importantly a movement that was fairly conclusively silenced by science). At the same time as 9/11 truthing was defeated as evidence emerged, no amount of evidence can seem to shut up the Obama Birthers, or the 89% of Mississippi residents who think Obama isn't Christian, or hell, the large part of the Republican base that thinks Mitt Romney isn't Christian (of course, these are the kind of people that would likely say Rick Santorum isn't Christian either. He's "Catholic.") They know what they know, and no-one better qualified than them is going to interfere with their conviction using something as trivial as fact.

The last point i think is important, it's that Conviction > Objectivity on the right. You don't need to know anything about a given topic, you simply need to have faith, to have conviction, similar to George W. Bush who "knew" that going into Iraq was the right thing to do, or similar to Sarah Palin, who (it is increasingly clear from people who worked with the woman) knew dangerously little about anything and seemed to be damn proud of it, and when people point out that this is bad, as it is, she and her supporters accuse them of being elitist. Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann openly embraced revisionist history on a few points, and the Texas Board of Education tried to write out Thomas Jefferson for being too radical. Money shouldn't be going to public education anyway, as its dangerous letting the state teach our children (and treasonous to ever think of giving the people entrusted with that responsibility more money), because what is the value of our children knowing anything more than how to hold a job? While the American left may try to dilute reality in the drive for political correctness, they never veer away from objective fact, merely from subjective labeling of objective fact. For Republicans, meanwhile, it's cool to be dumb, and watching the current Republican Primaries is watching an intellectual race to the bottom. Perhaps next we'll see Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum on stage smacking themselves over the head with hammers, to prove that they can kill more brain-cells than the others and thus become less of a dangerous, pointy-headed intellectual.

This part in particular made me laugh after we just found out that Obamacare is going to cost roughly double what the CBO originally projected. When the right pointed out that the numbers were being gamed, the left stuck its fingers in its collective ears and said, "LALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU, RACIST SCUM!" The left is either just as stupid as the right, or they're just infinitely more intellectually dishonest. Or, hey, why not both?

I'm not sure about your post... but I have been wanting to post these pics for awhile




As you can see Republicans on a whole generally have a higher level of education compared to Democrats.

There is a difference between gross costs and net costs.

Believe me, liberials are too busy dropping out of school to follow the latest "Occupy" movement.

I went to a fairly liberal college here in Virginia and I swear it was constant war in the student common area.

*shudders*

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Your source is imgur.com? Is there an accompanying article?

Yes, and while the estimated net cost is actually slightly down from its all time high, it still shows what bullshit the whole process was. When the Democrats gamed the CBO to get the number they needed and then ran around gloating about how this will "only" cost $900 billion and we need to PASS THIS BILL. Now the CBO is still relying on garbage accounting tricks, including only taking into account the first 9 years for its 10 year estimate, and is now counting on about 4 million less people to be covered, and the numbers are starting to look worse. And these are estimates. I doubt there's been a federal government program in the last century that hasn't cost 2-5 times more than its original estimate.

OT: There was an interesting bit on this at Reason a while back. I'm not really sure that the genesis of Republican anti-intellectualism was Dan Quayle's potatoe moment, but the gist of the thing rings true.

Rather than argue about what lurks in the shadows, I'd like you to hear my point that Republicans are now going crazy over this number, as you did, without even taking note (or being told by your media), that the net costs at the beginning was 900B, for 9 years, and now sits at 1.13T accounting for 11 years.

Meanwhile, even talking about Obama makes you furious, which is admirable in itself how the right media is able to make people so angry that they stop paying attention to the numbers.

PS: That 4 million less people is accounting for the 4 million who's unemployment is now up. There has been no reduction in coverage by the plan, the only change is that unemployment benefits is up for many. The savings results from the insurance signups that people are going to have to do on their own, and fees relating to not having insurance.

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The estimated net costs of expanding healthcare coverage under President Barack Obama's landmark restructuring have been reduced by $48 billion through 2021, though fewer people would be covered under private insurance plans, a new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office showed on Tuesday.

By reducing the estimated net 2012-2021 costs to $1.083 trillion from $1.131 trillion a year ago, the CBO report could help Democrats blunt some of the criticism over the high costs of extending coverage to some 47 million uninsured Americans, as they try to tout savings elsewhere in the law.

These cost reductions are largely due to lower estimates for subsidies and tax credits associated with the law's planned insurance exchanges for individual coverage.

The CBO also added another year to its overall cost estimate for the insurance provisions, extending it out to 2022, for an 11-year net cost of $1.252 billion."

""Those amounts do not encompass all of the budgetary impacts of the ACA because that legislation has many other provisions, including some that will cause significant reductions in Medicare spending and others that will generate added tax revenues, relative to what would have occurred under prior law. CBO and JCT have previously estimated that the ACA will, on net, reduce budget deficits over the 2012â€"2021 period; that estimate of the overall budgetary impact of the ACA has not been updated.4""

I know it's very conspiratorial minded (not to mention anti-intellectual) of me to point this out, but if the gross cost has doubled then it's not exactly arguing about monsters in the shadows. If the assumed pay fors don't come through, and they likely won't (especially the fake "savings" and tax hikes), the net cost will rise as well. It might help further the dialog if you don't assume that everyone who disagrees with you is a NewsMax readin', Rush Limbaugh listenin', stump toothed hillbilly who goes into a blind rage at the very mention of Obama.

Also, since it doesn't even kick in until 2014, 2012-2022 is not 11 years. Maths fail. But the leftist mantra seems to be, "It's not anti-intellectualism when WE do it."