Otto Kretschmer

Telling.

There are really two separate parts of Marxism: The economic part which is the analysis of capitalism in Das Kapital, based on a shitton of empirial data The philosophical part. Marx took Hegel's dialectics (which Hegel had invented mostly on the basis of Plato and Kant) and replaced God and the Spirit with materialism and class struggle.

Is A brief history of time a good pop sci book in your opinion? It was written in 1988 if I recall correctly, understanding of some things in physics might have changed since then.

So what's your opinion about Hawking's book mentioned by me?

The subject matter seems quite different though.

Is A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking still a good book? It's from late 1980s, I bought a Polish version in 2018 but never read it, I plan to read it after finishing three books on Soviet history.

I don't doubt that, I was fascinated by Marxism for about six months but I drifted away and stuck on being a generic, non sectarian leftist.

IMHO the most successful politics is pragmatic and done with ideology as a broad guiding principle and not absolute truth.

But with Marxism the number of similarities with Christianiy is just astonishing - in Marxism Leninism and Marxism Leninism Maoism there was a thing called "criticism and self criticism sessions" during which people would confess their own doctrinal errors in public, so basically a religious confession.

I mostly wanted my new username to align with one from another forum where I am currently active (it is: "Emperor Taizong of Tang") but it seems that the admin of SFN is very rarely online and moderators cannot change someone's surname.

Do I really need to explain this? In 2021 I was registering on an alt history forum (as a history fan) and couldn't figure out what surname to choose, I choose this one since I had read about him on a list of top scoring submarine aces of all time. I actually wanted to change it a few days ago and wrote to @swansont about that but he was unable to change it (only an admin can change username)

This is not 100% limited to Marxism IMHO - Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" was an expression of similar mentality (and one of the greatest pieces of ideological hubris in history on top of that)

The Marxist idea of history being teleological, i.e. progressing towards a specific, predetermined goal seems to me to be a secularized version of Christian eschatology with the World Revolution being the equivalent of the Day of Judgement and Communism (stateless, classless society) being the equivalent of Paradise/Kingdom of Heaven. The similarities are especailly uncanny with Marxists Leninists - they have their own prophets (Marx and Engels), the Apostle (Lenin), the infallible Pope (Stalin/Mao), the Judas iskariote (Trotsky, Deng Xiaoping), priesthood (the vanguard party) etc. Maoists even had a thing called "struggle sessions" which were public lynchings of individuals accused of doctrinal errors that mirrored religious persecution. Online debates among Marxists Leninists often boil down to who can correctly interpret the "holy texts", most arguments are unfalsifable and structurally resemble theological disputes. AFAIK Marx took his idea of dialectics from Hegel who was a devout Christian and it's possible that Christianity influenced him even without him being aware of it.

You know, what's funny is that this kind of weird tribalism doesn't just impact serious stuff but mundane as well - the Playstation vs Xbox wars with neverending discussions about specs, framerates, loading times ("my console went from cold boot to dashboard in 8.7s, yours at 9.2s was still showing the logo!"), sounds ("my console makes a sophisticated 'beep' sound while yours only makes an aggressive and ugly 'bloop'!"), controller layout, layout of stuff after unboxing, quoting words of retired or deceased CEOs ("the CEO of X said this in 2004 while the boss of your console maker said somthing really stupid which shows he doesn't care about gaming!") are just comical. PS: Why was the forum down for so long?

An example of mine from three days ago. I was debating the Great Terror on some Marxist Leninist subreddit. I'd pointed out that the NKVD literally had numerical quotas of how many people they need to shot and imprison and someone replied that the quotas were maximum quotas to which I replied that they were not by saying: The result - a permaban with no explanation. It's pretty clear to me that we're dealing with a secular religion here.

Criticizing a public figure at the centre of a major political controversy is nothing to be ashamed of, even if said person is deceased. IMHO it actually needs to be done.

Big five agreeableness doesn't mean "outwardly agreeing with someone", it covers stuff like altruism, empathy, cooperativeness, trust, modesty and also straightforwardness with people scoring low on straightforwardness being more likely to project a false image of themselves for personal gain while high scorers are more authentic. My educated guess about your experience is that people who are crooks might subconsciously or even consciously try to hide their vicious nature by portraying themselves in the best light possible and they actually overcorrect. Here in Poland several years ago we got a dude whose family (wife and kids, one kid survived miraculously IIRC) burned alive, he was crying on tv and wrote poetry about his family. Guess what? He was the killer. He set his house on fire to get money from insurance.

Yes and there is a scale measuring this - the modesty facet of agreableness in the big five personality model. If we assume a scale from 0 to 100 with Gaussian distribution and average score in the population being 50, teleevangelists as a group would likely score significantly below the population norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Teleevangelists and cult members are either clinical narcissists or at least people with an above average concentration of narcissistic traits. You just won't have the motivation for so much self promotion if you don't have an unusually high opinion of yourself. Narcissists also love money since it validates their need to feel superior to others.

Uh... knowledge perhaps?

Such positions are also typically simpler and more emotionally satisfying Whan i learned about modern flat earthers, I thought for quite some time that it's satire. I couldn't grasp that someone can seriously believe that lol.

Bump.

Or you're a Schrodinger's cat...

That? I meant that ideological fanaticism is more about group identity than factual accuracy and that such a way of thinking might have evolved in humans as a strategy to maintain group cohesion in hunter gatherer groups living in dangerous environment.