this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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I'm helping to build an instance, and we had a debate recently on whether Platonism is left-winged or right-winged. It's an ancient philosophy, mind you. Created by Plato. One small side said it was right-winged, one small side said it was left-winged, and the majority said it couldn't be either. Someone remarked "what do you mean it's neither? Marx cited him!" Admittedly it's frustrating when you're researching these things so you can give it a respectful comparative review and someone says "you can't judge people of ancient times based on your left-right mode of measurement" in a world where something like whether Obama can do a public prank April Fool's Day is a "political" issue (remember when he said he was building Iron Man as an April Fool's joke and everyone on the right claimed it was unprofessional while the left enjoyed his sense of humor). That's somehow more worthy to put under the microscope than Plato, the world's first "public" philosopher (after Socrates and Thales who weren't of specific opinions and Ptahhotep who was more of a superior advocating an approach that worked for him)?

In my eyes at this point, as well as the eyes of the groups I help out in, everything is equally politicized as a default; that is, "politicization" is what the individual makes of it at a given moment. But I know that isn't how the world operates. Marx himself was known to write about an enormous number of topics, from faraway cultures to appropriate punishments for oddly specific crimes. How does the inherent potential of everything that exists to be politicized square with the idea that certain things are also inherently seen as non-left-or-right based on the circumstances that they hold in their own setting?

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[โ€“] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

At this point, in English, there are two definitions of left and right. The old definition comes from the French legislature, where the left wing of the hall held commoners, usually pushing for reforms, and the right held the gentry, usually pushing to prevent reforms because it would weaken their position. The modern definition is just polarized partisanship. Labor (UK) and Democrats (US) are called 'the Left.' Conservatives/Reform (UK) and Republican (US) are 'the Right.' The two definitions bear little to no relation to each other anymore.

For either definition, it could be said that something is 'outside' until it takes on a local coding of left or right depending on whether the concept is reformist or conservative for the old definition, or embraced by A or B political party. e.g. Masking in the face of a respiratory disease was neither left nor right coded in 2019. Then it became coded left/right by political pundits in 2020.