My history teacher is a communist

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Ok so this isn’t really relevant to anything but I thought it was funny (and ridiculous).

My high school history class just today started a new unit on the Cold War and lo and behold, turns out my history teacher is very sympathetic to Soviet communism. When we were going through the introductory materials she felt the need to add “Be warned, this is a biased American source that is trying to get you to think communism is bad” purely because it mentioned the existence of the gulags (keeping in mind she had just spent 2 months ranting about how evil the Nazi concentration camps were) and when we got to Vladimir Lenin she called him a “benevolent leader”.

From that point on my class stopped taking her seriously and we spent the next forty minutes arguing about the benefits (or lack thereof) of communism. It devolved to the point where she started arguing with me personally, knowing I’m a Christian, that Jesus was a communist and I’m a hypocrite for opposing it (insert eye roll here). I asked her then what she thought about the 20 million or so Orthodox Christians who were martyred under Soviet communism and she changed the topic.

We’re also doing a mock debate of capitalism vs communism next lesson and after this whole debacle she very pointedly assigned me to the communist side. Honestly I’m not even annoyed anymore it’s so stupid it’s funny.
 
I had a philosophy professor like that in high school. However, unlike in your case, we ended up becoming good friends. We still speak regularly and he has given me advice in several non-religious areas of my life.
 
I generally like my teacher and for the most part we get along fine, but this was a bit of a sore spot apparently 😉
 
Maybe 😛.

Our friendship developed after numerous in-class arguments between us. He had a habit of being dismissive towards and misrepresentative of Catholicism, and being the big-headed high schooler that I was I wouldn’t take it without raising my hand and saying, “Well, actually, proceeds to show my friends and classmates what a big theology nerd I am.”
 
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Salibi said:
being the big-headed high schooler that I was I wouldn’t take it without raising my hand and saying, “Well, actually , proceeds to show my friends and classmates what a big theology nerd I am .”
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Oh man I’m guilty of this 😅 nobody in my class cares one whit about Catholicism or theology of any kind but I can’t keep my mouth shut sometimes. Something to work on 😂
 
Your classmates may appreciate you whittling away class time, like mine did!
 
My friends certainly think it’s entertaining xD They think it’s funny when teachers get annoyed at me. One time I quoted Thomas Aquinas in my physics class when for some reason we were discussing philosophy instead of physics and my teacher (a very militant atheist, fan of Richard Dawkins and co.) was not impressed. Ah well I had a laugh and so did everyone else.
 
Salibi said:
Your classmates may appreciate you whittling away class time, like mine did!
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In senior school we had a teacher who loved snakes. It was a game to distract him from lessons by asking stuff like ‘why do horned vipers have horns?’…and off he would go. Looking back, I’m quite sure he knew perfectly well what we were up to, but played along just to have a break from lessons himself!
 
Good grief…have you no ambition? 😉.

Do accept my apologies, brother. For some reason (old age, I guess) I’ve called you ‘Sister’ before…and got away with it. So it’s all your fault 🤣
 
Well - there is another, unfortunately, quite rare look on communism, but that is more authentic to the one Marx had. Market Socialism as a Distinct Socioeconomic Formation | New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry is article that stresses that only technological developments can lead us to the socialism and the changes in production means also change the social-economic relations. And this article also says that Marx predicted crude form of socialism and capitalism when those social-economic relationships are introduced by the rude force without waiting for technologies to be ripe for the social-economic transformation to happen automatically. This is exactly what happened in USSR. Czarist Russia was feudal state and it had to go through capitalism at first according to Marx and it was only due misrepresentation of Marx by Lenin and Stalin that one could imagine Russia to become socialist state.

Today the big changes are happening - artificial intelligence, robotics. You name - everything about Andrew Yang is preaching. And my guess is that Industry 4.0, AI and robotics and program synthesis (automatic computer programming) are exactly those technologies that can lead us to the change of social-economic relations, to the postcapitalism. Those changes can be already under way - emergence of gig economy, declining wage share Wage share - Wikipedia, low inflation at the end of the economic cycle and during the historically incredible money printing (increase of the balance sheets of the central banks) - all this points that AI and robots are taking jobs. Historically - man competed man and there was winner man. Today man competes with robot…

Juergen Schmidhuber's home page - Universal Artificial Intelligence - New AI - Deep Learning - Recurrent Neural Networks - Computer Vision - Object Detection - Image segmentation - Goedel Machine - Theory of everything - Algorithmic theory of everything - Computable universe - Zuse's thesis - Universal learning algorithms - Universal search - Kolmogorov Complexity - Algorithmic information - Super Omega - Speed Prior - Independent component analysis - ICA - Financial forecasting - Evolution - Reinforcement learning - POMDPs - Reinforcement learning economy - Hierarchical learning - Metalearning - Learning to learn - Self-Improvement - Genetic programming - Attentive vision - Active exploration - Theory of beauty - Theory of creativity - Theory of Humor - Facial Attractiveness - Low-complexity Art - Lego Art is example of bold scientist, one of the current genius of AI. How AI looks practically? Well - it can take form of cognitive architecture - there are lot of them but one example if the open source cognitive architecture https://opencog.org/ that is behind the Sophia humanoid robot. It is just an example, I know that project, it uses language with small expressivity and the in-house made technology for its graph database, so, this is old and bad project. But it is good practical example, who such technologies practically looks.
 
As I said - socialism and communism as the postcapitalism due to technological advancements - it is truly Marxian, but it is very rare look on the things. The mainstream economists are sometimes mention the economic changes due to AI and robotics, they can even speak about postcapitalism, but they are not considering the emergence of socialism. And the current socialists (democratic socialists, Sander and all sorts of current communists in Europe, France and UK have some of them) are also ignoring this view - they think that socialism can be introduced by more or less democratic means even today without the additional investments for the technological development.

My understanding is - we still need some investment in technologies, in AI and robotics and then we will be ready for the social-economic changes to happen naturally and the socialism to emerge necessarily. Maybe Europes New Green and Digital Deal will be the final step in this direction.

Aritificial General Intelligence is such disruptive technology and Google DeepMind and Musk’s OpenAI are explicitly pursuing ir. See Microsoft Invests In and Partners with OpenAI to Support Us Building Beneficial AGI . I think that communism should emerge after this. What other ways can there be?
 
You’re a minor. Your job is to be respectful, listen, read, and learn. When did these sorts of antics become acceptable?
 
gracepoole said:
You’re a minor. Your job is to be respectful, listen, read, and learn. When did these sorts of antics become acceptable?
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I’d say someone pushing communism in an educational setting and who targets a Christian for interrogation on Jesus isn’t really worthy of respect or being listened to.

By the way, OP, 20 million Christians weren’t martyred. Stalin, for instance, killed at most 7 million people, far below Hitler or Mao. And the Gulags at their height held less than we Americans do in our prisons.
 
gracepoole said:
You’re a minor. Your job is to be respectful, listen, read, and learn. When did these sorts of antics become acceptable?
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I completely agree. Your history teacher isn’t wrong to point out biases in source material, in fact knowledge of what biases a source has is one of the most important things you can learn. Not just for history but also for present day politics and media, or just about any subject.

Of course she’s assigned you the communist side. She’s not trying to indoctrinate you, she’s trying to get you to learn and be able to present a side of a debate you don’t agree with. This is also a valuable life skill to have; being able to understand different viewpoints and what/who supports them.
 
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