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Honestly, I think what the MAGAts are really offended about is that Biden said "semi"; made it sound like they lacked commitment (and maybe were a little gay.)

Also, I'm a little more confident in dismissing them as uniformly stupid and uneducated. This is because I mark a very real distinction between years in school ("Schooling") and education. While schooling can greatly facilitate education, the first is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the latter. Having one myself, I've a pretty good idea of what goes into earning a Ph.D., and dogged determination will get the job done as well, and generally more easily, than substantive intelligence.

Regardless of whether these ignorant buffoons have attended enough school to know how to spell "Morons", they "silo" what they've been exposed to (note, I do NOT say "learned") so that the pieces form nothing like a comprehensive, coherent picture. (Robert Altemeyer, author of "The Authoritarians," uses the term "compartmentalization.") So even though Tip O'Neill has a Ph.D. in history, I probably had a more synoptic grasp of history as a B.A. philosophy major from Occidental College. (To the extent that O'Neill actually realizes that what he says is viciously false, neo-fascist twaddle, then that makes him an entirely different, and more disgusting monster.)

In any event, what I would characterize as education, and not mere schooling, is that comprehensive coherence; the making of connections rather than siloing bits of trivia in isolated compartments where they do nothing to inform a total picture. Some of the best educated people I've ever met never formally graduated high school.

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Education has to me always represented the ability to synthesize and evaluate information based on real-world conditions. Absent that, you’re just “schooled.”

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