this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I guess the closing footnote of the blog post summarizes it well:
Trying to place people as left/right in an international forum like this is a complete waste of time. I'm writing from a Polish instance, where communist symbols are banned and the political left/right dimension looks completely different from my Scandinavian home country. In my traditionally left-leaning home country I'm a leftist. By the minds of many Americans I'm a stupid centrist because I'm not ideologically pure enough - Social Democracy is just capitalism with a human face etc. And don't get me started on the Russians and the Chinese.
For some people, if you reject Leninism you're right wing.
It goes deeper: sometimes being Leninist is not enough.
I used to be part of a socialist party, split into many "tendencies" (sub-parties? Dunno how to translate it). The way that we often referred to the largest tendency? "The right-wing of the party".
Only the purest are good enough for the People's Front of Judea.
In a few cases it is a matter of purity = orthodoxy, indeed. In some it's simply stupidity: failure to realise that those things rely on a point of reference. And in some it was simply "it's understood in the context anyway, so... meh".
Still kind of amusing for outsiders.