GarbageShootAlt

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

One should never stop investigating new things, but let's not pretend ideology is a matter of credentialed or non-credentialed education or sheer "intelligence" or "knowledge". These things factor in, but what people think they have the highest incentive to ascribe to is just as important. This is part of the reason that academics aren't more open-minded on average but just more adept at defending their positions (or seeing where some element isn't necessary and letting go of it to better defend the core).

That said, Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is a cool book.

It might be interesting to start a conversation on the appropriate comm there about whichever rule is being enforced (check the modlog) and challenge the rule.

Aristotle had the benefit of not having millennia of literature to be working in relation with, and himself is quite responsible for the promotion of metaphysics as a philosophical field, which is perhaps the most obscure branch of philosophy.

Philosophy has a tendency to need to use very specialized language to avoid problems of ambiguity and to precisely identify concepts that have no reason to come up in the vast, vast majority of conversation among laypeople.

Yeah, there was some point to it back in Aristotle's day, but you can tell how much someone doesn't know about logic from the degree to which they lean on pat lists of informal fallacies. Formal fallacies, as in those produced by incorrect inference in classical logic (or an argument that can be accurately reduced to classical logic), are infinite in a similar way to how "wrong answers to math equations" is an infinite category. "Informal fallacies" are a catalogue of rhetorical tricks and cognitive biases that it is good to be aware of but which don't have very much to do with logic as a field.

If you're barge in to drop some "truth bombs", you could try saying literally anything other than "China bad".

It's good practice to link the pamphlet or at least name it

Yeah I mean, in that regard, just look at the entire weight of history. There are vanishingly few instances where people merely communicating was able to bring about what could reasonably be described as revolutionary change, with the Velvet Revolution being something of an ironic counterexample.

Huh, looks like I linked it incorrectly. Here is the link plainly:

http://www.abstraktdergi.net/this-ruthless-criticism-of-all-that-exists-marxism-as-science/

It's an essay by J Moufawad-Paul on how Marxism's status as an attempt at a scientific understanding of political-economy is its very foundation and must be defended, both from self-professed "Marxists" who disparage this element as well as liberal academics who do just as you describe, treating it as merely another "lens" and functionally as a sort of rhetorical flavor and roleplay rather than a method to understand the world:

My position, however, which is the position of multiple revolutionary movements and the great world historical revolutions, is that we cannot be ecumenical. Whereas today’s chic critical theorists uphold a variety of post-Marxist European theoretical tendencies so as to dismiss and castigate Marx, I uphold Marxism to castigate these theoretical tendencies. I am not claiming, to be clear, that we cannot borrow from some of the insights of these tendencies but only that, as tendencies, they are theoretically inferior to Marxism regardless of the latter’s purported flaws. Weheliye [a "post-Marxist" academic] reduces every European theoretical tendency to the same state of “white European thinkers [who] are granted a carte blanche” but, in this reduction, misses a key point: it is only the Marxist tendency that can account for and surmount this carte blanche, thus necessarily generating theoretical offspring critical of its erroneous aspects, because of what it is: a science.

That is, the reason why those of us who are committed to Marxism can and should uphold this commitment in the face of other theoretical tendencies is because the theoretical trajectory initiated by Marx and Engels, which goes by the name of historical materialism, was one that was scientific. Unlike the so-called “radical” theories generated by or drawn upon its discontents, historical materialism is not a mere quirk of the humanities based on some academic’s thoughts about reality translated into an intriguing terminological set. Rather it is a natural explanation of natural phenomena that has generated a truth procedure and thus falls within the gamut of science. And it is precisely this claim that has made Marxism the scapegoat of those theories that, from their very inception, have also sought to destabilize and usurp the very conception of a historical/social science.

I do think Weber and Foucault are quite interesting and can be useful, but they do not hold the same ground that Marx and his successors do.

Sometimes it's better to just wait and observe for a bit. In most subjects, if Marx is even brought up, it is in a pluralistic but not necessarily negative light. This also works as a means of undermining it, but that's as a biproduct of liberal ideology rather than an agenda as such.

Red bashing is a thing in philosophy, history, and poli-sci. Econ just ignores him and literary and sociological courses tend to have a positive view.

Yeah, though just like physical fitness it's wildly easier to be high-performing if you start that process of training while you are a child rather than later in life.

I wouldn't go that far. Intelligence is still a physical phenomenon produced by highly complex and somewhat varied systems. There's going to be different levels of intelligence, like there are different levels of empathy, of strength, of immunity, and so on. Strong evidence would be needed to counter this. That doesn't mean people don't exaggerate these differences, look at them too uncritically, or misunderstand both what they are and their origins (which are mostly in child-rearing).

What is more likely bullshit is the concept of "general intelligence" or "G", which is basically an illusion of statistical question-begging that has been very useful to phrenologists and basically no one else.