GarbageShootAlt

There is nothing wrong with being kind and empathetic, but it's the core of Marxism to attempt a scientific approach at socialism that is independent of particular proclivities or values among individuals. If your system requires people to be "virtuous" according to some arbitrary definition of the term (as all definitions of the term would be), your system will live only on luck and die very quickly.

There are elements of "human nature" which are important to Marx, but they are more fundamental and generalizable, like how humans transform their environment to suit their desires, etc. Ideology is usually relevant on a sociological level, e.g. "In all ages, the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class."

Personally being kind and empathetic is a good thing, in fact a very good thing, so long as you know where it can lead you astray. This is something that the film "Young Marx" deals with excellently, for example in this scene.

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.

Could a self-identified Makhnovist be anything but a cultist?

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".

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.

I think too many people get caught up on a consumer-identity mode of relating to these things. It's way more useful to have good fundamental understanding. For very early socialism, Engels provides an excellent summary in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, since the bulk of pre-Marxist philosophers were put by Marx and Engels in the "utopian" category. Text. Audiobook.

While I think Conquest of Bread is probably worth looking at for an economic skeptic of the idea of a classless, moneyless society, generally it seems to me to be the best strategy to prioritize looking at works that were associated with actual projects of socialist states, and the first person to lead such an endeavor that made it to the "actual nation-building" stage was Lenin.

That was one case where I was really baffled by how stupid the anarcho-bidenists were, seeing literal "communism doesn't work in practice" people on the same side and not thinking "huh, maybe there's a problem with my position?"