On 10/24/2025 at 7:32 PM, MigL said:

I would think this is obvious, as any belief system can be likened to a religion.

Also, a lot of of weird things can be made into belief systems. While cults are probably the most obvious examples, there are a lot of movements (anti-vaccination, diets, various pyramid schemes and so on) which build a whole belief system based on little to no data, a lot of assumptions and, inevitably, some sort of grift.

(The number of podcasters selling their protein powder is too darn high!).

6 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Wtf is a shitton?

Slang, mainly American, usually written as "shit ton," meaning "very large amount." In the US, those of slightly more dainty speech will say "crap ton" instead.

11 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Slang, mainly American, usually written as "shit ton," meaning "very large amount." In the US, those of slightly more dainty speech will say "crap ton" instead.

My native language is Polish, I might sometimes make mistakes in English - which I did here by writing "shitton" instead of "shit ton".

3 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

My native language is Polish, I might sometimes make mistakes in English - which I did here by writing "shitton" instead of "shit ton".

I would imagine that, to British eyes, shitton would look more like the name of a town..."It's an hour by train from Reading to Shitton." 😄

41 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I would imagine that, to British eyes, shitton would look more like the name of a town..."It's an hour by train from Reading to Shitton." 😄

Well we do have Shitterton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitterton.

This is a village in Dorset. It's not on a railway line though. Curiously, the name does actually derive from Old English scite, which has now evolved into shite (chiefly in the North I think) and shit, being allegedly due to a stream that was used as a privy, according to the Wiki article at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Piddle

I note that the stream which passes near the village of Shitterton flows into the River Piddle.

Anyway, original Marxism doesn't seem much like a religion, even if its Leninist or Maoist offshoots did take on some quasi-religious features. Really seems more a philosophy of class struggle and societal modes of production.

29 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Well we do have Shitterton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitterton.

This is a village in Dorset. It's not on a railway line though. Curiously, the name does actually derive from Old English scite, which has now evolved into shite (chiefly in the North I think) and shit, being allegedly due to a stream that was used as a privy, according to the Wiki article at least.

This is better:

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

I would imagine that, to British eyes, shitton would look more like the name of a town..."It's an hour by train from Reading to Shitton." 😄

Round trip was it? 😉

4 minutes ago, TheVat said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Piddle

I note that the stream which passes near the village of Shitterton flows into the River Piddle.

Anyway, original Marxism doesn't seem much like a religion, even if its Leninist or Maoist offshoots did take on some quasi-religious features. Really seems more a philosophy of class struggle and societal modes of production.

Lenin's 'Left wing Socialism: an Infantile Disorder' is quite an illuminating read for those interested. He definitely saw the Bolshevik model as very distinct from more orthodox schools of socialist, and even Marxist thought.

Largely forgotten now I guess, but it was highly influential in its time and led to quite a reshuffling of the West European left. (Birth of the CPGB among others)

Edited October 30Oct 30 by sethoflagos
Sp

2 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

Round trip was it? 😉

Lenin's 'Left wing Socialism: an Infantile Disorder' is quite an illuminating read for those interested. He definitely saw the Bolshevik model as very distinct from more orthodox schools of socialist, and even Marxist thought.

Largely forgotten now I guess, but it was highly influential in its time and led to quite a reshuffling of the West European left. (Birth of the CPGB among others)

The dominant form of Marxism in early 1900s was Orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky, this tendency became discredited in 1914 when socialist parties subscribing to it supported the entry of their countries into ww1, this included the Mensheviks whom Lenin later portrayed as traitors to the working class.

It supported parliamentary democracy and believed that societies must first go through capitalism in order to be ready for socialism, among other things.

I haven't read any works of Lenin besides 40 pages of "What is to be done?", these are dense polemical works that aren't easy readings by any standard.

Edited October 30Oct 30 by Otto Kretschmer

1 hour ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

My native language is Polish, I might sometimes make mistakes in English - which I did here by writing "shitton" instead of "shit ton".

My daughter was trying to teach me how to pronounce Wroclaw at the weekend (my son and family live in Warsaw - my daughter visits often)

1 minute ago, sethoflagos said:

My daughter was trying to teach me how to pronounce Wroclaw at the weekend (my son and family live in Warsaw - my daughter visits often)

She should try this:

Just now, Otto Kretschmer said:

She should try this:

😂

Apparently, Wroclaw ~ vrot swaff

Is that close enough?

Just now, sethoflagos said:

😂

Apparently, Wroclaw ~ vrot swaff

Is that close enough?

Yes, except "t" and "s" aren't separate consonants but a single one, like ts in English "cats" pronounced very fast as a single sound.

Perhaps you can try one from my wife's language - mkpumkpu.

It means a person of restricted height. But get it slightly wrong, and you're calling them a hunchback (same spelling!)

1 minute ago, sethoflagos said:

Perhaps you can try one from my wife's language - mkpumkpu.

It means a person of restricted height. But get it slightly wrong, and you're calling them a hunchback (same spelling!)

Easy. Not a challenge at all. Slavic langauges (not just Polish) have a ton of consonant clusters

Edited October 30Oct 30 by Otto Kretschmer

16 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Easy. Not a challenge at all. Slavic langauges (not just Polish) have a ton of consonant clusters

They're not consonant clusters though! the 'm's are vowels (like the 'n' of Ngorogoro); and the 'kp' is a single doubly-articulated (lips and pharynx) sound that doesn't exist in any European language.

10 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

They're not consonant clusters though! the 'm's are vowels (like the 'n' of Ngorogoro); and the 'kp' is a single doubly-articulated (lips and pharynx) sound that doesn't exist in any European language.

Ok, you won. I cannot pronoune that weird sound.

Getting back on topic, no, I don't see Marxism as inherently religious in any meaningful way. Being profoundly atheist since the age of 7 ('They're all telling me lies!!'), I find it refreshingly free of the spooks, miraculous transformations, and immaculate conceptions that are the typical hallmarks of religion.

As for dialectical materialism, the clue is in the name: it's a materialist philosophy, not a spiritual one.

8 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Getting back on topic, no, I don't see Marxism as inherently religious in any meaningful way. Being profoundly atheist since the age of 7 ('They're all telling me lies!!'), I find it refreshingly free of the spooks, miraculous transformations, and immaculate conceptions that are the typical hallmarks of religion.

As for dialectical materialism, the clue is in the name: it's a materialist philosophy, not a spiritual one.

A curious fact - dialecical materialism had its dark sides too, the most famous one being Lysenkoism which banned genetics, even rejecting chromosomes as "bourgeois constructs". Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics only narrowly avoided getting banned under Stalin because Igor Kurchatov told Beria that if the USSR bans them, it may forget about building the atomic bomb. Stalin told Beria "leave them (i.e. the physicists) alone, we can shoot them later".

Edited October 31Oct 31 by Otto Kretschmer

3 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

A curious fact - dialecical materialism had its dark sides too, the most famous one being Lysenkoism which banned genetics, even rejecting chromosomes as "bourgeois constructs". Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics only narrowly avoided getting banned under Stalin because Igor Kurchatov told Beria that if the USSR bans them, it may forget about building the atomic bomb. Stalin told Beria "leave them (i.e. the physicists) alone, we can shoot them later".

One single mutation does not a new species create.

If only Lysenko had interpreted genetic evolution as the qualitative outcome of the total genetic diversity of the collective, rather than the triumph of an individual over the collective, how different the world would have been.

27 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

One single mutation does not a new species create.

If only Lysenko had interpreted genetic evolution as the qualitative outcome of the total genetic diversity of the collective, rather than the triumph of an individual over the collective, how different the world would have been.

Nikolai Vavilov (a world class botanist and agronomist) would not be executed for sure.

2 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Nikolai Vavilov (a world class botanist and agronomist) would not be executed for sure.

Yes indeed.

And all because of a misapplication of Engel's 2nd Law.

For me Marx is simply the method of critiquing things from a specific point of view. Whether one agrees or not with the underlying assumptions will pretty much predict if one is a supporter or opponent of the ideology, I think

11 minutes ago, npts2020 said:

For me Marx is simply the method of critiquing things from a specific point of view. Whether one agrees or not with the underlying assumptions will pretty much predict if one is a supporter or opponent of the ideology, I think

Marxist analysis of capitalism is really a separate thing from Marxist philosophy, Marxist economics is a development of the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo while the philosophical part is based on Hegel + Feuerbach. There is a think called Analytic Marxism which takes the Marxist analysis of capitalism but combines it with analytic philosophy in place of dialectical materialism.

On 10/31/2025 at 6:33 PM, Otto Kretschmer said:

Marxist analysis of capitalism is really a separate thing from Marxist philosophy, Marxist economics is a development of the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo while the philosophical part is based on Hegel + Feuerbach. There is a think called Analytic Marxism which takes the Marxist analysis of capitalism but combines it with analytic philosophy in place of dialectical materialism.

How can it be (bolded mine), that's like saying Jesus ignored the money lender's bc money has nothing to do with our lives, or that Mohamed didn't include it in Shariah laws.

Dialectic materialism is an excuse, not a reason.