Instal baehr

In my experience this sub has usually been open minded and thoughtful. We should make a collective effort to keep it that way. Nietzsche cautions that “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” We should keep that in mind and strive to be intellectually virtuous in how we engage with each other and with essentialism.
In “Cultivating Good Minds” by Jason Baehr an intellectual virtue is described as a trait that enables one to learn better, think better and understand. Intellectual virtues are like moral virtues but have different goals. For intellectual virtues, the goal is learning and understanding; for moral virtues the goal is living well.
There are several intellectual virtues but three virtues in particular that I appreciate and I have worked on are:
Intellectual carefulness
Intellectual carefulness helps one pursue truth and understanding while avoiding mistakes along the way. In practice this could mean being skeptical of assumptions and questioning whether a source is reliable instead of spreading misinformation or making assumptions about what someone means.
Intellectual thoroughness
An intellectually thorough person will ask questions to fully understand exactly how something works, or what something means or says; they will search out arguments against their own beliefs to see how they stand. They will not settle for a shallow understanding.
Open-mindedness
Willingness to change your mind and truly see things from another perspective versus Unable or unwilling to see things from another perspective; failing to consider that your perspective could be wrong.
These virtues may appear obvious but it would be a mistake to confuse their apparentness with their ubiquity. They are habits that must be learned and like any habit they are only as strong as they are practiced. They are especially crucial in the context of social media technologies loaded with filter bubbles and pernicious echo chambers. Everyone, regardless of their worldview, can benefit by considering the foundation of their mindset and taking steps to strengthen it with these healthy habits of the mind. BUT considering this a Marxist sub dedicated to critically examining identity politics, there’s a strong case that the more woke minded and steeped-in-cancel-culture segment of the left would benefit from these virtues significantly.
Identity politics seems to be the ideological result of this postmodern, technologically overencumbered age that explicitly lacks intellectual virtues; we no longer engage with content, the content engages with us, building on our biases and preferences. You gaze into the abyss but now the abyss does more than gaze back, it ensnares you in hyperstition, caters to you; it has no stopping cues and knows no reason. In this new relativist technosociety it is more convenient and appealing to latch on to an identity oriented worldview that further seeps into the rest of our beliefs. The only sensible remedy appears to be a Cartesian wipe and a clean installation of foundational intellectual virtues.
Bertrand Russell wrote about the benefits of virtuous contemplation against the tyranny of instinctive self interest. This tyranny still rules today but in the guise of liberal identitarian screeching and conservative idiocy fighting for a right not to publicly wear a mask during a pandemic or protesting for a “liberation” for the right to go back to work.
These sentiments are no longer left or right but wholly under the sky of a private world—the world of naked self interest in which “the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes.” This grifter outlook has only been bolstered by consumer culture under late stage capitalism whereby nearly every aspect of society has been effectively marketized and other values and ways of looking at the world have been crowded out.
All of this appears to show that capitalism accelerates us away from a holistic understanding of the way the world works towards becoming atomized individuals motivated primarily by self interested consumption and self serving identitarian narratives.
“Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will.”
Russell’s warning is prescient when applied to today’s liberals, who have been paralysed by a self serving ideology between an “insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will,” providing no meaningful alternative to capitalism. Maybe intellectual virtues won’t change that but I would expect they could only help.

Here, have some Ted Talks.

1. Roger Thurow: The Hungry Farmer - My Moment of Great Disruptionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQLBlRzEQGw Thurow, author of The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, explains the profound "disease of the soul" that hunger represents, and how empowering smallholder farmers can bring long-term sustainable health and hope to the people of Africa.
   
2. Mark Bittman: What's Wrong with What We Eathttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YkNkscBEp0 Bittman, a food writer for The New York Times, examines how individual actions--namely food choices--contribute to both the detriment of the climate and long-term chronic health diseases. He suggests that we eat meat in moderation because agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas pollution than transportation.
   
3. Anna Lappe: Marketing Food to Childrenhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bop3D7-dDM Lappe, author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, questions whether multibillion dollar corporations should be marketing unhealthy foods to impressionable children, especially considering the numerous food-related health issues that are increasingly common among young people.
   
4. Ellen Gustafson: Obesity + Hunger = 1 Global Food Issuehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7CtKDNf2RI According to Food Tank co-founder Gustafson, the American food system has changed dramatically in the past 30 years; agriculture has been consolidated, new and cheap processed food have gained popularity, and U.S. agricultural aid abroad has decreased. These factors are major contributors to the current problem of one billion hungry and one billion overweight people on the planet.
   
5. Tristram Stuart: The Global Food Waste Scandalhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWC_zDdF74s Stuart laments how supermarkets, cafeterias, bakers, farmers, and other food producers are "literally hemorrhaging" food waste--the majority of which is fit for human consumption, but has been discarded because it is not aesthetically pleasing. He offers a radical solution: "freeganism," a movement in which food that would normally be thrown away is eaten instead
   
6. Brian Halweil: From New York to Africa: Why Food Is Saving the Worldhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL4goR5cKaE Halweil, publisher of Edible Manhattan, was on track to become a doctor until he realized that repairing the global food system could help to conserve people's health and wellbeing more. Halweil believes that the local food movement is a truly powerful medicine.
   
7. Fred Kaufman The Measure of All Thingshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GAFuvblRMQ Kaufman, from the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, heralds the rise of a "Great Greenwash." He further questions whether Wal-Mart and other corporations participating in the Sustainability Index are living up to their claims.
   
8. LaDonna Redman Food + Justice = Democracyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydZfSuz-Hu8 Redman, founder of the Campaign for Food Justice Now and long-time food activist, examines how the root causes of violence and public health concerns experienced by her community are strongly connected to the local food system, and are best addressed by making changes in that system.
   
9. Jose Andres: Creativity in Cooking Can Solve Our Biggest Challengeshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0QS9euiewo Chef Andres highlights the power of cooking. He demonstrates how we can tackle obesity and hunger using our inherent creativity. He urges everyone to turn simple ideas into big solutions--something we've been doing for centuries. Creativity and cooking are what he claims can give us hope for feeding the world.
   
10. Jamie Oliver's TED Prize Wish: Teach Every Child About Foodhttp://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html Celebrity chef Oliver has waged a revolution to combat the biggest killer in the U.S., diet-related disease, through food and cooking education. Using stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, WV, he shows how the power of information can defeat food ignorance and obesity.
    
11. Dan Barber: How I Fell in Love with a Fishhttp://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html Barber tells a humorous love story starting with every chef's predicament: with the worldwide decline in fish populations, how are we going to keep fish on our menus? He is skeptical of the current trajectory of fish farms, and asks whether they are truly sustainable. But there is a solution - Barber tells of one farm in Spain utilizing a revolutionary, yet basic idea: ecological relationships.
    
12. Carolyn Steel: How Food Shapes Our Citieshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLWRclarri0 Meat consumption and urbanism are rising hand-in-hand. Steel, an architect, explains how we got here by tracing how human settlements have fed themselves through time and, thus, shaped our cities. But in today's cities, our relationship with food is misshapen--it is disconnected. Steel suggests an alternative to urban design in which we use food as a tool to reconnect and interconnect.
    

Here, have some more Ted Talks.

1. Ann Cooper: Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Childrenhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f96L6BkeO9Y Cooper, the "renegade lunch lady," wants us to get angry about what kids eat at school. She wants kids to eat healthy, sustainable food; but first, we all need to care why this should happen. In this talk, she tries to rally us around changing the financing, facilities, human resources, marketing, and food in the school lunchroom.
   
2. Ron Finley: A Guerrilla Gardener in South Central L.A.http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central Los Angeles -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, and along the curbs in order to offer an alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys." He explains how his community is desperate for nutritional food, and why he thinks urban gardening is the solution.
   
3. Tama Matsuoka Wong: How I Did Less and Ate Better, Thanks to Weedshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8xWaNp_lbI Wong describes the path she took to discover that weeds are not only nutrient-rich, environmentally sustainable foods, but can also be quite delicious. She abandoned her career as a corporate attorney to become a professional forager, eventually founding MeadowsandMore, an initiative that teaches people to take advantage of the food resources right in their backyards.
   
4. Stephen Ritz: Green Bronx Machine: Growing Our Way Into a New Economyhttp://foodtank.org/resources/587/Videos/TEDx_Manhattan_2012:_Stephen_Ritz:_Green_Bronx_Machine:_Growing_Our_Way_Into_A_New_Economy Most of Ritz's students live at or below the poverty line, and/or live with disabilities. But through his Green Bronx Machine project, he has turned their lives around. By teaching them the business of installing edible walls and green roofs, he has empowered his students to make a real difference in their own lives, in their communities, and beyond.
   
5. Angela Morelli: The Global Water Footprint of Humanityhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8YHa1W_neI Morelli, Italian information designer and World Economic Forum's 2012 Young Global Leader nomineehttp://www.weforum.org/young-global-leaders/angela-morelli, helps consumers visualize the enormous expenditures of water that occur daily in the food system using graphic design. In this talk, she explains the concept of the "water footprint"--something that is hugely affected by simple diet choices.
   
6. Birke Baehr: What's Wrong With Our Food Systemhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Id9caYw-Y Baehr, at just 11 years old at the time of this talk, presents the most glaring problems in our food system with the directness that, truly, only a child could do. He gives hope that future generations will really lead the charge in changing the food system: "Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead."
   
7. Graham Hill: Why I'm a Weekday Vegetarianhttp://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html Despite his "hippie" upbringing, Treehugger.comhttp://Treehugger.com founder Hill is not a vegetarian. In this short talk, he explains his choice to become a weekday vegetarian, instead, and outlines the many benefits of choosing this lifestyle.
   
8. Joel Salatin: Thinking About Soilhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cph1Vv8Zzbg Salatin, the "lunatic farmer," decries the modern farming practices that destroy necessary insects, create chemically engineered plants, and breed sick livestock, resulting in a "dead food system" based on a "mechanistic view of life." He calls for a return to organic, natural farming and processing practices.
   
9. Roger Doiron: A Subversive Plothttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezuz_-eZTMI Gardening is a subversive activity. Food is a form of energy, but it's also a form of power." This sums up Doiron's persuasive argument as to why everyone should undertake the project of a home garden, and control their own access to fresh, hyper-locally grown produce.
   
10. Britta Riley: A Garden in My Apartmenthttp://www.ted.com/talks/britta_riley_a_garden_in_my_apartment.html Riley struck out to plant a garden in her tiny New York City apartment, and ended up developing an environmentally sustainable window garden - that yielded delicious results. Riley describes her method as "R&DIY - Research and Develop It Yourself."
    
11. Arthur Potts Dawson: A Vision for Sustainable Restaurantshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ89At9Xxws Dawson has designed two environmentally sustainable London restaurants, Acorn House and Water House, that work toward eliminating waste entirely and using only clean energy. He explains how, by pursuing more projects such as these, the restaurant industry, "pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world," can be reformed.
    
12. Ken Cook: Turning the Farm Bill into the Food Billhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6T37m4r3yo Cook, President of the Environmental Working Group, explains how farm subsidies are being placed into the very wrong hands; specifically, those of farmers producing corn only for fuel. His talk is a call to change the federal incentive system that is directly threatening the food on our plates.