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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image

The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?

If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right"

Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.

If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis

I never said you should group Brandon Sanderson with the nazis because I don't know him and I'm not interested in fantasy authors anyway. That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.

The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?

There is no similarity there. Let me know if you ever find a self-professed libertarian group that wants to forcibly split children from their families to indoctrinate them into a new Year Zero totalizing ideology, so I can start repudiating them.

Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.

That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides. Guevara had gay men sent to camps to work the gay out of them; that seems like a much more central example of political ideology and power than waffling about gay marriage.

That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.

What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?

That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides.

The fact that you have seen it applied or not is not very relevant. You can write an abstract of Marx writings without ever mentionning race or homosexuality and you wouldn't miss much. The same cannot be said about far right leaders or thinkers. On guevara, you are probably right, I don't know. Anyway as I stated before those things cannot be taken in isolation. Just because you are homophobic does not mean you are far right. For example, I don't think the distinction between gender and sex makes any sense (at least not as it is applied in liberal ideology). Some people would call me transphobic. But as I'm not racist and homophobic, I don't think I would qualify as far right by any reasonable standard.

What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?

As it is an article about the far right, I'd say its purpose is to inform people about what is called far right by most people in our society. I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...

I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...

I think it's difficult to give a coherent answer. The right/left dichotomy is an imprecise arrangement at the best of times, and the right side is harder to define than the left side, especially if we're defining the right as anything other than "not leftist". The article in question seems like an absolute dumpster fire written for partisan purposes, focusing narrowly on certain social topics. Compare it to the page for far-left politics, which exclusively mentions economic topics, and doesn't even pretend to explain anything about the ideology-space, while trying to flatter their image where it can. If you dig into the talk page, you can even see editors acknowledging that "far right" is a propaganda term in use by leftist academics, while there is no comparable "wiki appropriate" propaganda source for "far left".

Far left do focus on economy because that is what far left is about. Das Kapital speaks a lot about economy, Mein Kampf not so much. It's precisely the nature of the far left ideologies to think that everything is about making the rich richer.