Political Compartmentalization/Failure

It's probably more helpful to study the actual policies of communist countries.

And sure, at greater length than "they starved people to death and persecuted Christians", surveying a fairly broad range of regimes as opposed to just the worst ones like the Khmer Rouge or the USSR at its absolute worst moments. But my point is, if you have lofty Marxist theories that something like two dozen dedicated Marxist states with zero internal opposition never attempted to put into practice, there's little use describing Marxism as being the sum of said theorizing. Political religions, like theological ones, are the sum of what their followers make of such. You could just as well try to boil down "Protestantism" in its entirety to the tracts and manifestos of Calvin and Zwingli, or the confessions produced by 16th and 17th century state churches, as opposed to the lived religion of a billion worshipers around the world today, who are members of diverse denominations and who by and large have never read such.

This is what de Carvalho said though. He explicitly included Bukovsky and Solzhenitsyn in his reading list. He included Voegelin, whom I've read and who looks at communism through a critical lens. He also recommended reading 'good books on the history of communist regimes written from a non-apologetic point of view.' His point was that you had to understand the theory, the application, and the results to fully understand the phenomenon of communism, but that virtually no one on the right or the left had done this. They were just arguing with one another in the sense that fencers fight one another - by rehearsing rote arguments and counterarguments which had become divorced from realities, from the principles that actually informed what they were essentially miming.

This country is quickly becoming Brazil. Trump is a textbook caudillo (which is why MAGA is not WASP at all but that's another story), gig economy/hustle culture instead of careerism, machoism. Northwest European culture has never been at an all-time low like it is now.

Brazil I feel is a template for what much of the West or even at this rate parts of the Middle East and Asia will become. At first a slave state in which slavery collapsed. Then, the resulting disjointedness and lack of social cohesion drove the country to just atrophy over time into a big dysfunctional lump.

Even when I was a moderate leftist I realised how utterly moronic Communism is.

Yes, thinking you've understood the world fully at a glance and are just the person to fix it is a common outlook among teenagers. Thankfully we soon outgrow such things, hopefully.

It's not a question of knowing everything, but of knowing as far from nothing as possible.

So it's a sliding scale and you become more authoritative over time. I disagree with the extreme you started with, which was "meet this maximally high bar before you can speak authoritatively at all.

Carvalho was complaining about nobody in the public square who was debating these topics in a democracy reaching this bar, which is a problem.

As an example, they have learned that Chardonnay is oaky, rich and heavy. This is a pedagogical lie. Many of Chardonnays are not - depending on slope exposure, latitude, altitude, climate, and élevage, the style can be rapier-thin, fresh, and highly acidic or dense, stony and closed in its youth, and many iterations in between.

So the problem wasn't not studying for years, it was being taught something technically false. I don't think you need multiple years to get a thorough understanding of wine. Like...you just corrected that misconception in a sentence.

Anyone with familiarity with wine (or really almost any topic that interfaces with the 'real world') quickly figures out that the more you learn about it the more you realize you don't know. That understanding is a fractal thing, you can just keep diving deeper, and there will always be a specialist in an aspect of the subject who will have a deeper grasp of that niche than you do. I corrected one common misconception among beginners. There are dozens of huge glaring ones I could list that a beginner student learns, only to be corrected on them and gain a more nuanced understanding further down the road. If I tried to explain them all, I would literally be typing out the curriculum for an intermediate wine class.

When it comes time for the trial to interface with reality, with the material world, a good lawyer does not do that. He brings in an expert to testify, because he recognizes the very fact that I pointed out - that sparring over the surface-level interpretations of very complex subject matter is not illuminating to anyone, and that to bring good information into the courtroom you need an interpreter of sorts who had put a lot of time and energy into discovering as much about the field in question as possible.

Well, in a debate, both sides will be citing sources from experts. I think you could learn as much from a few decent debates as a jury could learn from a trial.

The whole question that Carvalho was facing is that there are no experts in the public square to cite on the issue. That the collapse of rigorous formal education into doctrinaire camps meant that even self-styled experts were frauds who lacked the necessary familiarity with the source material to be cited reputably.

Carvalho was complaining about nobody in the public square who was debating these topics in a democracy reaching this bar, which is a problem.

Maybe no one read every single one of those books, but there would likely be enough overlap between different experts who each read a few of them that you could cite said experts and get a broad enough picture. We don't really need someone to have read everything on two different topics to have someone who understands both, we just need an expert in each narrow domain with some overlap, and then others can cite them. A generalist doesn't need to be a specialist on every part of communism, just read a few specialists who each read like 25% of the total source material.

It's recursive, too, so if there are 8 primary sources, you can have 4 secondary sources who each read 2 primary sources, then 2 tertiary sources who each read two of those, and then at the top someone just need someone to read two tertiary sources. In reality there would need to be more overlap, but you get the idea.

Thinking we cant fix anything and gaslighting both sides to.thinknwe are their buddies is a trait amongst valueless scum of many ages.

Communism in name only Rex...Communism in practice is just a higher grade of tyranny...Actually there is no such thing as communism in practice...Never has been..."Study" any pseudo communist system and it's simply A. telling B. what to do, with varying tiers of authority, power, corruption and brutality...Exactly the same as democracy, theocracy or any ocracy one cares to suffix a prefix with.

Not that one needs to study very hard.

Put two strangers in a room together and one will eventually dominate the other, whether it be passively or more aggressively.