have been wondering recently what my blind spots are, what are beliefs I have that are unexamined or based on too little evidence for how much I believe them …
maybe there are common patterns, that people commonly believe false things and I might be challenged in my own beliefs this way
Politically, I’m pretty firm in my anti-capitalist stance and I think I’ve learned enough to be justifiably confident about that. But I’m relatively a lot less educated about the specifics of future socialist alternatives. There’s a bunch of reading out there, but it’s hard to keep my attention focused long enough to do that kind of reading without more structure behind it like I had when I was in school.
It’s great to want to learn theory! If you want, I actually made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, it should help with structure. It’s meant to build up as time goes on, so you aren’t thrown in the deep end at the start.
Thanks. Bookmarking this.
No problem! Let me know if you have any feedback. It also has audiobooks!
There’s no way there’s an entire spoon of plastic in my brain. I know that one study came to that conclusion but that study was wrong. Cmon people that’s insane.
Epstein didn’t kill himself. Epstein island was a Mossad honey trap. Does that one count?
I believe I have a purpose in life (not a higher purpose, just a purpose) but I don’t know what it is yet. I’m working on internal alignment and hope that my purpose will be found or created that way.
I don’t know how exactly it should be implemented but Germany needs a serious inheritance tax. Tbh. due to not having it in the past a wealth tax might be advised as well.
I want to live in a world where a worker** totally can earn 100x what another worker earns, but not in a world where you earn 100x because of daddy’s money. For that we have to get rid of insane inheritance. I also think this rectifies criminal generational wealth like the church or old noble families.
Let’s be honest: Life is good in Germany so only few people actually complain about that, but it is a * unfair system and I can understand everyone who doesn’t want to play in it.
Hillary Clinton is bisexual, leaning lesbian, and was having an affair with Anthony Weiner’s wife.
It fits a lot of the behavior and side comments of people close to the situation, including the email scandal and his behavior at the time. But I have no real information and never expect to.
Short-form video is destroying attention spans and critical thinking skills. The level of brainrot I see in people who are hooked on Tiktok or other platforms is staggering. “I saw 500 10-second videos about this topic and now believe it with every ounce of my being, because the algorithm specifically pushes this particular point of view.” seems to be a common occurrence these days.
The internet itself pushes an agenda. Do a google search and the results aren’t happenstance, unless you dictate what you want but even then results will still have an agenda.
people said the same thing about books, radio, television, and movies at one time or another
I also think the same way. If it was short form content of the same subject, ok maaaaybe the brain won’t be so clusterfucked. but as it is, it’s so random it’s just frying our brains.
Basically everyone has little knowledge about the vast majority of things. People who have strong beliefs generally think they have good evidence for them (even if what they think is clearly untrue and their evidence is nonsensical).
I’ve heard of “appeal to authority” and such, but at the end of the day I think that it’s generally sensible to just believe the mainstream expert consensus on something until you’re given good evidence otherwise, especially if you’re dealing with hard science.
Of course it’s ideal to know more about a topic than basic things you were told and took as fact and this should be paired with some level of media literacy and critical thinking, though.
I believe what scientists say about vaccines, climate change, etc. is right even though I don’t know all the exact research myself. Does that count?
I tend to trust experts in their field because, well, imagine the alternatives.
I think so! At least those are things you can actually dig into and get the know the bodies of evidence, but it does seem like accepting them on authority is the default. I also don’t have much knowledge about many areas of science I still accept as true, but at least with both vaccines and climate I am familiar with the basic evidence, e.g. I know how the COVID mRNA vaccine generates the protein cap that your body then attacks and trains to help recognize COVID, or with climate the way carbon emissions heat the Earth through the greenhouse effect.
🧐🍗I believe my wife loves me, even though she’s unable or unwilling to articulate why. There’s a song she likes where the chorus goes “I don’t know why I love you, I just do”, a sentiment she finds romantic and I find vaguely terrifying.
I would submit that our culture is severely deluded in thinking that conscious reasoning is behind most of our actions and reactions to things. If you like a thing, and have reasons why, those are generally rationalizations to explain why, after the fact, not actually how you got there.
Your’s, too?
Actually, I have some data points. My wife grew up in a family of women: two sisters, a mother, and a bum dad who disappeared when she was a kid. Once, early in our relationship, my wife asked for help moving a heavy box. I walked over, picked it up, and moved it for her. She just sort of stood there with her mouth open and then said, “how did you do that??” I said, “man 🤷♂️”. She said, “that’s so hot.”
But, yeah. I often feel like I got the better part of the deal.
I deliberately make it a point not to, when I can.
No investigation, no right to speak.
I have mixed feelings:
And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.
That’s a fair point, but that doesn’t apply to everything. Believing something strongly is more about the factual basis of things, rather than direct desires for improvements. Like, I wouldn’t say I have a strong belief that I want a bagel right now, I just want the bagel, but I can say I have a strong belief that bagels are a type of bread.
okay fair enough. But placing “want” aside, I also think people should be able to say there shouldn’t be yellow smoke even if they aren’t experts.
Sure, but I maintain that we are talking about different scenarios.
never expected Mao Zedong to be cited as someone’s inspiration to take an empirical approach to beliefs, lol
You’ve been on Lemmy for over a year and you’re surprised?
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, so I see Mao more favorably than not. He made mistakes, but was also a critical figure in establishing socialism in China, and is beloved in China because of it. That being said, Mao did not invent the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge nor the necessity of unifying theory with practice, that’s a core part of Marxism from the beginning. Mao just had a poetic and direct way of writing that is immensely quotable in ways Marx, Lenin, etc. don’t often compare.
It’s just wild to me that people are invested in Marx’s “scientific” application of Hegel’s dialectic, esp. considering how badly Marx’s theories have failed (even before his death, Marx found “primitive communism” in anthropological accounts he was reading, which invalidates the “evolutionary” way he and Hegel thought about history as linear), and even worse, how little relevance Hegel and German idealism in general has maintained … Of course Mao didn’t invent these ideas, but they’re not even great ideas to begin with, Marx is a terrible philosopher tbh. He was much better for his sociology and analysis of capitalism than his ability to predict the arc of humanity.
Mao is poetic in ways Marx and Lenin are not, though - I agree with that.
Either way, I am not a Marxist-Leninist, and as far as I can tell Marxist-Leninism is a misnomer since it seems to betray both Leninism and Marxism 🤷♀️ It’s a bit of irony, really, that Stalin would name his state ideology “Marxist-Leninism”, esp. as he lost in the power struggle to Stalin.
I’m always open to being wrong about this, but my past experiences with Marxist-Leninists have generally not been productive, and I have yet to understand why people are MLs today other than as a kind of pragmatic alignment against Western imperialist powers, though even then I don’t understand the ML love of contemporary Russia, since Russia does not even promise itself to be socialist the way China, Cuba, or North Korea do. I’d love to hear your thoughts, though!
It’s a bit of irony, really, that Stalin would name his state ideology “Marxist-Leninism”, esp. as he lost in the power struggle to Stalin.
Assuming you meant that Lenin lost to Stalin, he lost power by suffering several grave ailments—including three strokes—for several years and then dying. He became physically & mentally unequipped to lead.
Marxist-Leninism is a misnomer since it seems to betray both Leninism and Marxism
This is a common belief among Western leftists, including most Western Marxists[1][2].
As some of us say—tongue in cheek—ultras fear the scroll.I have yet to understand why people are MLs today other than as a kind of pragmatic alignment against Western imperialist powers
That’s not the whole of it by any means, but imperialism vs anti-imperialism has been the primary contradiction of the last 150+ years of capitalism, and likely will continue to be in the coming decades.
V. I. Lenin, 1916: Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalismI don’t understand the ML love of contemporary Russia
That’s because we don’t “love” contemporary Russia, nor do we think that it’s in any way socialist:
https://lemmy.ml/comment/16985906This is… shockingly misinformed. To a frankly massive degree.
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Tribal societies, called “primitive communism,” were not at all what Marx was describing post-socialist communism to be. Tribal production was largely based on hunting and gathering, and tiny, communal ownership, rather than collectivized production built on a globally interconnected system.
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Historical materialism does not pitch history as “linear.” It’s an advancement on idealist notions of dialectics as humanity advancing, unknown to themselves, a grand “Spirit.” Dialectical materialism flipped dialectics on its head, it’s matter that drives thought, not a metaphysical ideal that drives movement.
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Hegel and German idealism have faded because they are idealist, and thus wrong. See point 2. You’re confusing Marxism as idealist, and erasing materialism by referring to it as “scientific” dialectics.
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Marxism-Leninism betrays neither Marx nor Lenin. You just kind of left this hanging without explaining why, so I’d like clarification. Stalin’s contributions are largely limited to the political economy of the Soviet Union, such as the policy of Socialism in One Country. Not sure what you mean when you say Stalin lost in the power struggle with Stalin, I assume that’s a typo.
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Marxist-Leninists have no love for the Russian Federation. MLs recognize that due to the RF’s lack of the immense financial capital and potential subjects to imperialize that the west already has, despite being a nationalist capitalist nation it’s forced to oppose western imperialism, and engage in trade with actual socialist countries like the PRC. Russia has every reason to want to imperialize the global south, but simply lacks the means to do so.
Marx’s theories have not failed. Crucially, what I’m picking up on is a surface-level understanding of Marxism coupled with false-conclusions resulting from a lack of depth in understanding. To be frank, I’m a Marxist-Leninist because Marxism-Leninism is successful as a tool to bring about socialism, and a useful tool in identifying the main contradictions in existing society. If you have more specific critiques, we can get into them, but as it stands there’s nothing for me to really counter, and I don’t want to just stand on a soapbox and tell you to “read more theory,” that’s almost always unproductive.
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the dynamics of aviation safety, especially for this year falldown where we witness several airplane crashes that resulting more fatalities.
let say before 2024, the track record was good enough. like I didn’t read or notified much about air crashes at that time. there are several air crashes, but only few I can consider fatal or serious incident.
but now, this year alone: we have American Eagle, Air India, the Bangladeshi military jet, and today the small Russian flight. not to mention several serious incidents and also small fatal plane crashes. not to counting several major air accidents/incidents in 2024 too.
I believe there’s something going wrong here in aviation industry, resulting the overall safety deficiency. but again, my beliefs here is still kinda unproven. I read online discussions about this, but what I read, peoples on that industry can only says “we try our best”.
Aviation functions entirely on our belief in aviation. We believe planes can fly and land safely so they do.
As more planes crash, the belief in its ability wanes, the worse it gets, repeat.
Please don’t lose faith.
I heard this is an expert interview so I know it’s true.
You seem to be slightly confused, that’s how Orkish aviation works. Western FreedomPlanes™ generate lift by harnessing the power of the line that must always go up. For example, the U.S. Dollar’s line has started to go down, which has caused many U.S. airplanes to crash.
My house flew away because so many people had faith in the housing bubble
I strongly believe that I can get trans girls pregnant despite the fact I have no evidence in the affirmative but I am still conducting research with great fervour
Keep trying. For science.
There is no power on this earth that could stop me
😳
My door is always open to new study participants!
Everything will be ok.
admittedly I’m not too keen to reevaluate that particular belief, it has value even when false
