Please remember this next time there's an election.
The numbers are undisputable. City voters (who tend to be better educated) overwhelmingly vote one way versus rural voters. We can discuss the reasons for it, but if you don't even agree that this is a fact then I don't know how to discuss it.
- Right-leaning individuals are more likely to want to live in rural areas. Arguably to be left alone by leftist policies. So there is an element of filtering. Additionally, perhaps rural-living individuals are simply less-likely to go to higher education.
- People with more education have spent more time being indoctrinated by left-wing education. Let's be honest, schooling is heavily biased towards the left, especially higher-education.
- Maybe left-leaning individuals are more likely to send their kids for higher education and degrees.
- And the opposite of above. As an example, because I lean "right", I'm less likely to send my kids to an American indoctrination camp to get a degree. You could laugh and judge and claim disbelief, but this is very real and I'm serious. I've literally had smart, well thinking friends from school turn into zombies spouting left-wing talking points after moving to an American college. And not "smart" left-leaning talking points, they're arguably brain-washed and not even using their intelligence to reason their left-leaning views with me.
- People with more education are more likely to have been pressured by peer-groups to vote left. See: Cancel culture and intimidation on campuses against right-leaning individuals/speakers. And the opposite of that, left-leaning individuals are pushed out of rural areas due to pressure or push back from locals.
- People in urban centers are more likely to be exposed to political ads, campaigns, and things like "DEI" re-education programs in workplaces.
- Rural areas are less likely to have or fund arguably weird teaching policies to children at a young age. E.g. the whole drag-queen story hour stuff that the right is upset about.
- Left-leaning policies and programs are more likely to get funding by NGOs.
So you want to argue numbers, let's argue them. But don't pretend like there aren't any variables that drive those numbers other than "oh uneducated (implying stupid) people vote right" which if you are honest, was exactly the angle you were going for as a dog-whistle to other "educated" or "left-leaning" readers.
This is a novel argument, one that I have not seen discussed a lot. If this is the truth then great.
But I am worried that it is not true. I am worried that what is really happening is that Billionaires are taking advantage of less educated voters by convincing them to vote against their self interests. They do so by shifting their focus to the "values and cultural issues" of the moment. In the past, it was gay marriage and abortion; today, it's trans kids and DEI. Once these issues dominate the conversation, little attention is paid to the real priorities and actions of these billionaires: Cuts to funds that research cancer (the topic of this thread), cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other welfare programs, cuts to education, cuts to development assistance to the poorest in the world and so on, all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
If you're interested in this angle here's a book I can recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Ame...
To come back to the previous topic: n=1, but I moved out of a city to escape the bullshit and find some common-sense. I have a master's degree and my wife is an MD. We are not the only ones in our circle that deliberatly moved into a rural area :)
Which means are justified to solve climate change and achieve world peace? And if we sacrifice everything our society is built on to reach those ends, where does that leave us?
Another way of putting this would be “I’ve seen people go off and get exposed to new ideas, and when they came back they no longer agreed with me.” But that doesn’t mean we should block access to learning.
From my perspective, it sounds like your friends were exposed to ideas that would have been previously unavailable to them, and having had their horizons expanded, came to modify their views on certain things they had been effectively taught as dogma until that point. Then, when they came back and tried to communicate those newfound viewpoints, they were dismissed as brainwashed zombies who weren’t using their intelligence. I certainly would not consider it worth my time to argue with someone who believes me to be indoctrinated beyond hope and dismisses my intellectual capability simply because he or she disagrees with me.
hackernews is just reddit in slow motion