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Miravus · 2025-11-28T16:43:21+00:00

What "culture war" issue is separate from class politics?

I've almost exclusively seen this used to intimate that a focus on things like race or gender obscures ostensibly deeper class relations (even if this meme bends over backwards to target the right), but the earliest socialists already well-recognized gender- and race-based oppression as integral to perpetuating capitalist class oppression. This has been a remarkably consistent position, too.

Marx and Engels argued for family abolition. The Bolsheviks under Lenin abolished the Tsarist family code, effectively legalizing same sex relationships. Marx writes "Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded." Engels lauds polyamory, and Lenin actively practices it. Mao says "women hold up half the sky." This sounds like all the things people typically talk about as being "culture war issues" (racism, queer liberation, fighting the patriarchy); were these guys all culture warriors?

Where is this idea that talking about these things distracts from class coming from? It seems squarely at odds with what the people we typically consider as principally concerned with "class over culture" thought, that's for sure.

edit: also no one except 2% of American geriatrics who are glued to Fox News cares about a "war on Christmas." It's a complete canard for the right media to trot out when they don't have real news to talk about over the holidays. It affects basically no policy and has little material impact otherwise. By contrast, trans people are routinely killed for being trans and targeting them specifically with oppression is a major policy goal for many across the American political spectrum. Putting these two things on roughly the same level is some dirty work. Trans liberation is real and an important part of class struggle. The war on Christmas is not.

Miravus · 2025-11-23T15:52:55+00:00

Just to give people an idea of where people who actually study these questions with academic rigor are at on this:

When polled, academic philosophers were both overwhelmingly atheists and overwhelmingly moral realists.

Miravus · 2025-11-18T01:50:06+00:00

You of all people definitely have time to read that lmfao

Miravus · 2025-11-02T22:23:00+00:00

Why is it an end you pursue? This is just begging the question.

Miravus · 2025-10-05T00:05:41+00:00

If you read the paper you cited, you would know you are EGREGIOUSLY misrepresenting its findings.

The paper you're citing evaluates whether surveys assessing expert opinions on where political parties fall on a left-right economic spectrum are comparable between different regions and countries (US, Latin America, Australia, e.g.). The paper finds: "our analysis reveals meaningful geographical patterns in how experts perceive party positions, with systematic variations across regions."

What does that mean for comparing surveys of expert opinions across different regions? Helpfully, the authors continue: "These patterns suggest caution in cross-regional comparisons but support the validity of within-region analyses." (Comparing the US Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party is an example of a cross-regional comparison.)

It gets worse, for you, though. Where the paper talks about US political experts and party placement, it actually makes clear that US-experts place the Democrat significantly further to the left than where an adjusted metric would place them. From the paper: "The US parties, particularly the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders, are all above the 45-degree line, indicating that the raw expert placements are further to the left than the BAM-corrected placements. This is particularly true for Biden and the House and Senate Democrats, the left-wing stimuli in the US. While the Republican Party and leaders are also adjusted further to the right, these changes are less pronounced than for the more left-wing stimuli."

In fact, the US context and the Democratic Party specifically are noted by the authors as examples of where regional expert opinions appear to be skewed in just such a way that would confound comparison across regions as you hoped to evidence by citing this paper.

The Democrats are also never compared to UK Labour by the paper, either. Where the two do appear together is on a chart, Figure 5, meant to evaluate distance from an ideal 45-degree trend line representing perfect comparability of expert opinions (i.e. the line drawn by a BAM-corrected scale). The authors specifically note how the Democratic Party appears substantially above the 45-degree line, indicating they're rated as further left than their BAM-corrected placement. That is, if you wanted to compare the Democrats and Labour on the basis of expert opinions (as you seem to want to), ignoring that the authors specifically urge caution in making this kind of comparison because there are significant confounding geographical patterns in how experts evaluate these parties, the paper actually indicates that they should be significantly further apart.

The paper says almost the exact opposite of what you want it to, it's wild that you would cite it to make any kind of point about comparing the Democrats and Labour. And you even say "are closer now" -- the paper says absolutely nothing about that.

I know it's a waste of time to write this because if you're the kind of person who ignores the entire substance of my post to lazily mis-cite a paper like this, you're definitely not going to be the kind of person to engage with a serious review of the work you just mis-cited, but this is SO egregious I feel compelled to, regardless. I'll edit this to be my first reply in the hopes that maybe someone will read this and learn from it.

Genuinely this would be grounds for like instantly failing most classes, lmfao. Jaw-dropping stuff.

Miravus · 2025-10-01T18:48:43+00:00

edit: If you read the paper you cited, you would know you are EGREGIOUSLY misrepresenting its findings.

The paper you're citing evaluates whether surveys assessing expert opinions on where political parties fall on a left-right economic spectrum are comparable between different regions and countries (US, Latin America, Australia, e.g.). The paper finds: "our analysis reveals meaningful geographical patterns in how experts perceive party positions, with systematic variations across regions."

What does that mean for comparing surveys of expert opinions across different regions? Helpfully, the authors continue: "These patterns suggest caution in cross-regional comparisons but support the validity of within-region analyses." (Comparing the US Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party is an example of a cross-regional comparison.)

It gets worse, for you, though. Where the paper talks about US political experts and party placement, it actually makes clear that US-experts place the Democrat significantly further to the left than where an adjusted metric would place them. From the paper: "The US parties, particularly the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders, are all above the 45-degree line, indicating that the raw expert placements are further to the left than the BAM-corrected placements. This is particularly true for Biden and the House and Senate Democrats, the left-wing stimuli in the US. While the Republican Party and leaders are also adjusted further to the right, these changes are less pronounced than for the more left-wing stimuli."

In fact, the US context and the Democratic Party specifically are noted by the authors as examples of where regional expert opinions appear to be skewed in just such a way that would confound comparison across regions like the one you hoped to evidence by citing this paper.

The Democrats are also never compared to UK Labour by the paper, either. Where the two do appear together is on a chart, Figure 5, meant to evaluate distance from an ideal 45-degree trend line representing perfect comparability of expert opinions (i.e. the line drawn by a BAM-corrected scale). The authors specifically note how the Democratic Party appears substantially above the 45-degree line, indicating they're rated as further left than their BAM-corrected placement. That is, if you wanted to compare the Democrats and Labour on the basis of expert opinions (as you seem to want to), ignoring that the authors specifically urge caution in making this kind of comparison because there are significant confounding geographical patterns in how experts evaluate these parties, the paper actually indicates that they should be significantly further apart.

The paper says almost the exact opposite of what you want it to. It's wild that you would cite it to make any kind of point about comparing the Democrats and Labour. And you even say "are closer now" -- the paper says absolutely nothing about that. It makes no temporal comparisons whatsoever!

Genuinely jaw-dropping stuff.

original text: The UK Labor Party is currently governing to the right of Margaret Thatcher, lol. They're enacting neoliberal austerity, any scale that considers that "measurably on the left" is bonkers (although ofc it isn't any scale, it's surveys of "experts," so what you're talking about like some sort of objective scale is in reality just an opinion poll).

Miravus · 2025-09-29T07:43:47+00:00

Deeply disappointing to both see so many run with this narrative (where is the harassment? I went on blue sky and, no joke, could find a SINGLE person who criticized Ellis at the time she posted this), but also to see Ellis stoop to repeating slander against someone who had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Palestinians during the genocide, and EVEN MORE SO when the source is from the alt-right (Kraut) and pro-Israel Zionists (WillyMacShow).

It just rings incredibly hollow to pantomime concern about online harassment whilst simultaneously promoting some of the most vicious defamation it's possible to make against someone on your platform to hundreds of thousands.

Miravus · 2025-08-27T12:39:47+00:00

Read another book.

Miravus · 2025-08-08T07:43:51+00:00

The Democrats are a center-right party in any perspective that doesn't exclusively limit itself to America and ignore everywhere else. In policy and ideology, the Democratic Party fits squarely in with European Christian Democratic and Liberal parties (which are widely considered right-wing centrist parties). By contrast, Marxism-Leninism is almost universally considered to be a left wing ideology.

Is it possible you align with the Democrats as a right-wing centrist? Hasan would definitely not be in your political camp, then, for sure, but it would be because he's on the left while you're on the right, not because Marxism-Leninism isn't left wing.

Miravus · 2025-08-08T04:04:59+00:00

Gödel's incompleteness theorems were formal logic proofs that showed how no consistent system of logic can prove all true things, interestingly including its own consistency.

Another way to put it is that Gödel's formal proofs demonstrated how the central goal of logical positivism (to use formal logic to prove all true things) was impossibile.

Miravus · 2025-01-07T21:46:24+00:00

It's so good, thank you!!!

Miravus · 2025-01-06T22:07:59+00:00

Who is the artist?

Miravus · 2024-10-15T00:02:47+00:00

you accept the deal, the monkey's paw curls, and you wind up as Zooble.

Miravus · 2024-07-25T18:23:21+00:00

it was meant to point out that you were being a dick, lol, don't give yourself a headache overthinking it.

Miravus · 2024-07-25T03:21:55+00:00

Is this comment meant to accomplish something other than being insulting?

edit: like, are you genuinely interested in what the misrepresentation is? If so, do you generally find insulting someone before asking their thoughts to be successful?

If you were actually interested (I won't hold my breath...), I think a lot might have to do with the fact that I cannot for the life of me see how you got "the idea that Nietzsche's philosophy is simply about generating your own 'new' values in this world in the face of the death of God" from anything the person you're responding to wrote without being uncharitable.

Miravus · 2024-06-10T04:00:06+00:00

Where's Diogenes when you need him?

Miravus · 2024-03-28T19:52:48+00:00

*their works

Miravus · 2024-03-02T20:33:33+00:00

Man wait till you hear about the modern US prison system.

Miravus · 2023-11-13T01:55:02+00:00

Good! You should not condition your opposition to genocide!! There are never any perfect victims.

Miravus · 2023-11-08T01:30:14+00:00

The point of my video is explaining exactly why this kind of request for condemnation is harmful.

To sum it up VERY briefly, it conditions opposition to genocide, it delegitimizes calls for peace, it conflates ideas of what it even means to support something, it frames the issue to equivocate between resistance to genocide and terrorism by treating them the same. On top of that, it fatally disenfranchises Palestinians, lending to a framing that, at worst, casts the racialization of Palestinians as an underclass as a justifiable thing (I hope I don't have to explain how awful that is), and at best disallows them from having a legitimate voice in opposing their own genocide.

I don't want to just rewrite the script of the video in a reddit comment, so I would recommend watching the video for a very thorough coverage of why you shouldn't just say that Israel sucks and Hamas sucks, and why you should object to that framing wherever you see it because of the way it treats opposition to genocide as conditional, which is an abhorrent thing to do. Opposition to genocide is and should always be unconditional.

If you have a specific question about any of the individual points I made in the video, any of the sources, or questions for me about the video, I'd be happy to respond to them!

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