Many years ago I had a roommate who was an actual Marxist (this was in Berkeley CA) and who had a kind of a job or volunteer position with a local radical politician trying to influence local politics. They would do things like go to city council meetings and march around the room singing songs. Dumb shit like that.

One day I'm reading in my room and the lights flicker and I hear a yalp from the living room. I go out to investigate and I can smell the magic smoke (not weed, electrical) and the roomie is standing there with a screwdriver and a spooked look on her face.

It transpires that she wanted to move a certain bookshelf to a certain spot and have it flush against the wall, but it was blocked by a little external electrical outlet. It was an old house, you see, (old for the West Coast that is) and when it was electrified they didn't both to run the wires through the walls. Instead they ran little conduits along the baseboards and mounted external socket blocks so we could plug in lamps, etc. One of these external electric sockets boxes was in the way of the bookshelf.

You can see where this is going?

She got a screwdriver and tried to remove the electric socket box without turning off the circuit. The flickering lights were when she shorted the circuit with the screwdriver and made the magic smoke come out.

Fortunately she wasn't hurt, just startled.

Now this person was in her fifties! How the hell to you get to be fifty years old and not know how electricity works!? And yet she felt confident that she knew how cities and countries should be run.

I think there are at least two points here:

1.) We have already made the world more complicated than the average person can understand. Computers are like pouring fuel on that fire, but it's been burning for a while now.

2.) People can be really stupid and ignorant and yet feel like they know what's going on and what to do about it.

I think the obvious though perhaps unpleasant conclusion is that we should look to radical simplification in all areas, and treat complexity as something that should be budgeted, treated as an expense and necessary evil.

> Now this person was in her fifties! How the hell to you get to be fifty years old and not know how electricity works!?

Shtty American education system? Which so gimps anything that is non-profitable and makes anything that is worth studying so expensive that people live without access to knowledge?

The US is the only country where it is needed to put 'dont microwave your cat' on Microwaves and other dumb sht.

So no.

The 'dumb sh't is not that actual Marxist is doing. Trying to change that situation in which education costs an arm and a leg and people have to struggle.

The dumb sht is people like you talking as if her being a Marxist was a bad thing all the way at the start of your 'arguments', giving an example from something which should be a damning condemnation of your system and the mentality that you espouse. Because those are what keep you still mired in knee-deep sh*t - reaching all the way to a point where you have an entire population segment that believes the earth is flat and plans on taking your country 200 years back.

But hey. Suit yourself. Its natural selection.

I seem to have touched a nerve there. Sorry about that.

I'm not going to defend the US education system, it's been BS ever since I was forced to attend as a child and it hasn't gotten better from what I hear.

This person wasn't dumb because she wanted to make things better. The actual strategies employed were dumb, just ego-aggrandizement, and ineffective.

In re: Marx and Marxists I don't actually know much about it, but I also don't think much of economics in general.

I pointed out her political affiliation not to pick on Marxists per se but to illustrate that this person had strident beliefs about social/economic/political organization despite not understanding that one must turn off the circuit breaker before re-wiring the house.

Have a good day friend.