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There’s a lot of very common ones that people don’t even think about. Mano a mano (often ‘mano y mano’ when anglophones say it), simpatico, and mi casa es su casa.

There’s two approaches, you can try to slowly break down to them why those things are fallacies, or you can skip to the point and say that they’re being manipulated by the rich to hate people who do no material harm to them, when we should be unified against the ruling class who create the scarcity they’re reacting to in the first place.

Since the former is hard and the latter is easy, I’ll just contribute some ideas for the former here:

1. You’re not putting your culture last by skipping pork in the cafeteria. I don’t know what country you’re in, but generally speaking, meat consumption in modern society is incredibly high compared to any point in history. There is no culture on earth older than 100 years that valued eating pork every day for lunch except for very wealthy people. The amount of labor, land, and animal exploitation necessary to make an average person’s diet consist of so much meat consumption just wasn’t really a possibility until the 20th century in specific parts of the global north. On an individual health level, you could honestly benefit from taking the opportunity to change your diet too.
2. Letting girls wear religious vestments doesn’t allow their families to abuse them any more or less. For starters, Westerners generally have an erroneous view that no Muslim woman wants to wear any kind of Hijab. That’s simply false; they aren’t just religious attire, they’re also fashionable items of clothing that are just as much of a means of self expression as a dress or piece of jewellery. But even in the case of girls who don’t consent to wearing their hijabs and are forced to do it by their families, why should one expect that the family (hell even the girl herself) would suddenly be fine with the state stepping in to force a different kind of dress code? You’re going to cause more friction this way.
3. There also is a phenomenon where Westerners understand immigration, and benefits for immigrants backwards. Especially in countries with falling birth rates, immigration helps bring in more workers who can strengthen an economy^[1], making it more productive, and in many cases bringing in talented people that will be productive and make life better for subsequent generations. Too often liberals paint immigration as something that should be virtuously accepted, like it’s a self-sacrifice to take in more workers. If anything, this is backwards; the self-interested thing for capitalists to do is to take in more immigrants and exploit them more, while for workers it benefits us all if immigrants are entitled to living wages, security, and the same rights as everyone else. Ideally, these conditions would be available in all the world, but that’s not the reality of imperialism.
4. Follow-up from the last one (and this is a useful thing to understand when talking with reactionaries and liberals regardless of the topic), but also taxes don’t work that way. The government spending money on benefits for immigrants means more money is being created, which goes into the industries providing the benefits e.g. healthcare, agriculture, etc. This economic activity is just generally good and necessary for a capitalist economy. Without giving people benefits, capitalist economies spiral into deflation because capitalists find ways to produce more stuff while paying workers less to produce it, which means workers can’t buy as much stuff, but capitalists are in deeper debt (having invested more to produce stuff with less labor input) and end up crashing the market. If you’re talking with someone conservative who reads a little (rare but possible), the standard counterargument to this Keynesian/MMT thesis is that government driven economic growth in capitalism also isn’t a sustainable model because, when it was implemented in many countries following the Great Depression, it eventually led to stagflation in the 1960s which only recovered in the neoliberal era. I think the simple counter-counterargument here is that neoliberalism only delayed a problem that capitalism inevitably will be consumed by, no matter what brand, and that it’s extremely contradictory for workers to support neoliberalism as a means of extending capitalism’s lifespan. These contradictions can only be resolved with socialism.

Too broke after giving it all to Luigi sorry

Yeah he didn’t kill a Nazi because the real killer is still out there. Tyler is an innocent man.

where’s your civility hat

I think you meant to say “Worth it to challenge him in the marketplace of ideas” in reference to the marvelous gentleman who was talking about trans and gang crime statistics before being rudely interrupted.

it’s a good movie

have you seen dog day afternoon? John Cazale, Al Pacino, etc etc. Heroic.

Pick your poison. The more old guard types have corporal punishment, nouveau riche (if they don’t just do the same corporal punishment as the old money people) have emotional abuse and stress their kids out in a million ways to mold them into clones of themselves.

Actually, MAGA (and to a lesser extent blue MAGA) perfectly embodies American values and it’s the 100% predictable endpoint of 250 years of settler colonial, white supremacist capitalism. It couldn’t be any other way and that’s exactly why it’s coming to its decisive end.

The fact that we’re in a multitude of crises should be, from a distant perspective, reassuring. The worst case scenario would be the opposite: for business as usual to continue while everyone is ground into fine dust by capital. Think about how liberals and fascists like to conceive of history as a neverending, hopeless cycle that is only alleviated by individual heroic figures, doomed to go back into suffering: in this worldview, which is inherently pessimistic, change can never happen. What sets us apart is believing that, even if it comes violently, real change can happen and the world can be radically different. The fact that the machine is currently seizing up means the future is possible. Our challenge is that we’re living through it, but it had to happen; the capitalist world always had its end baked into it by its very structure. The variable part is what follows.

I did all those steps except at 6 I found friends that like the ideas but don’t read much. Still get to have lots of discussions about theory and they tell me about local events and stuff, so it all worked out! Great success!

I had a college professor who taught us that you only retain about 1/5 of the things you read, 2/5 of the things you write, 3/5 of the things you discuss, then 4/5 of the things you teach another person. So one of the best things you can do to retain information is to actively discuss it with others, teach the parts of it that you’re confident/fresh on to others in an org, and write down as much of it as possible.

Last but not least, put theories to practice, if you can. I’m currently not organized because I don’t know any org in the area I currently live, but as Marx put it, philosophers tried to understand the world, but the point is to change it.

I like how Vijay Prashad re-formulates it: “Those who try to change the world understand it better”

To this end, here’s a good case for using Obsidian to extend your brain and do much better structural note taking and comrade @2Password2Remember@hexbear.net’s post on How to Read a Book

If you’re having trouble with reading without getting distracted, there’s browser extensions that you can schedule to block all the distracting sites at certain times on certain days. This really helps you keep to a certain schedule for being productive, it’s something I would start with (Leech Block NG on firefox is pretty good for example)

As for how to retain it better, I always like to watch lectures and interviews with the authors if they’re alive, or for older works there’s usually discussions or companion lectures like David Harvey’s Reading Marx’s Capital.

E1: Something that helped me particularly was getting a solid grasp on the specific assumptions and methodology of Dialectical Materialism, studying it as if I was learning to do math. Mao’s On Contradiction and Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism are pretty short works that explain the framework very well, so it should let you cross-reference any difficult idea you find in other texts by trying to build it up from first principles.

E2: Completely tangential, but I recently started playing The Talos Principle 2 and (this might sound completely consumerbrained, I know) it is legitimately a pretty good way of engaging with a lot of different philosophies, but it focuses on Dialectical Materialism and does a good job of explaining how it relates to the others. If you have a decent gaming PC it might help retain some more of the concepts if you played it.

Of all creatures I’ve met, you are the kindest.

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They’re writing a thesis about treating damage to lungs from smoking. They’re actually really good at this.

One of my software engineering professors referenced the original C&H comic when explaining load testing, then he told us “well the nice thing about load testing software is that you can break it and just rebuild it exactly.” It’s nice we don’t have to do all the linear algebra and other crazy math to know how much load a server can take.