Sunday, February 15, 2026

one of the best ways to identify between a real leftist, a socialist, and a fake left progressive/conservative is to determine if they are arguing using data or using appeals to emotions.

conservatives love to blame everything on "human nature". the idea that food is expensive due to greedy ceos is logically equivalent to the reductio ad human nature fallacy that defines practically all small-c conservative argumentation.

socialists, on the other hand, following marxist concepts of historical materialism and "scientific socialism", want everything to have a cause in economics. they will tend to avoid appeals to emotion and present arguments in empirical data and logical deduction. 

the idea that things are expensive because ceos are greedy would not sit well with any actual socialist; a socialist would want a naturalistic explanation rooted in economic data, whereas a conservative would seek some failing in moral behaviour as the cause of an undesirable outcome. socialists want to tell you why things are how they are using some appeal to science; conservatives think everything is made good by god and want to blame anything that goes wrong on somebody's impropriety or corruption.