What do you mean by the Marxist conception? Marx himself sometimes uses the term middle class.

Here's a few examples.

The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1:

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself.

Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 4:

Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.

There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.

From Friedrich Engels's 6th of January 1892 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

On 12 January 1971, the federal government indicted Philip Berrigan and other East Coast antiwar activists on felony charges of plotting to impede the Vietnam War through violent action. The activists' agenda supposedly included blowing up underground heating pipes in Washington to shut down government buildings, kidnapping presidential adviser Henry Kissinger to ransom him for concessions on the war and raiding draft boards to destroy records and slow down the draft.

The Justice Department prosecutors chose to hold the conspiracy trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a conservative area where a randomly chosen jury would be heavily against the defendants. However, before the jury was selected at what came to be known as the Harrisburg-7 trial, a group of left-leaning social scientists supporting the defendants interviewed a large number of registered voters in the area to try to figure out how to get a sympathetic jury there. They discovered, among other things that college-educated people were more likely than others to be conservative and to trust the government. Thus, in court, during the three weeks that it took to examine 465 potential jurors and pick a panel of 12, lawyers for the defense quietly favored skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar workers without a lot of formal educations—nonprofessionals, although the sociologists and lawyers apparently never used that term.

The lawyers were uneasy doing this, however, because it went against their intuition. The notion of closed-minded hard hats and open-minded intellectuals is widespread and is reinforced by mass-media characters like loading-dock worker Archie Bunker and his college-student son-in-law, "pinko" Mike. In fact, All in the Family made its television debut the very day of the Harrisburg indictments, 12 January 1971; by the time the trial and jury selection started, it had been on the air for a year.

Ignoring these false stereotypes paid off. The government put on a month-long, $2 million extravaganza featuring 64 witnesses, including 21 FBI agents and 9 police officers. The defense called no one to the witness stand. After seven days of deliberation, the jury was not able to reach a unanimous decision, and the judge declared a mistrial; but with 10 of the 12 carefully selected jurors arguing for a not-guilty verdict, the government dropped the case.²

Blue-collar skeptics? Loyal intellectuals? Was the Harrisburg survey a regional fluke? Look at what the nationwide polls showed at the time. On 15 February 1970 the New York Times reported the results of a Gallup poll on the war in Vietnam.³ Gallup had found that the number of people in sharp disagreement with the government over the war had increased but still constituted a minority. While this increase in opposition was important news, what were particularly interesting were the data on the opinions of subgroups of the population. These numbers announced with striking clarity that those with the most schooling were the most reluctant to criticize the government's stand in Vietnam. There was a simple correlation (although only in part a cause-and-effect relationship): The further people had gone before leaving school, the less likely they were to break with the government over the war. (See note 3 for the results of the poll.)

2. New York Times, 13 January 1971, p. 1. Jay Schulman, Phillip Shaver, Robert Colman, Barbara Emrich, Richard Christie, "Recipe for a Jury," Psychology Today. May 1973, pp.37-44, 77-84; reprinted in Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Saul M. Kassin, Cynthia E. Willis, editors, In the Jury Box, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, Calif. (1987), pp. 13-47. Jack Nelson, Ronald J. Ostrow, The FBI and the Berrigans, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York (1972). William O'Rourke, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York (1972).

3. New York Times, 15 February 1970, sec. 1, p. 4; or George Horace Gallup, The Gallup Poll, vol. 3, Random House, New York (1972), pp. 2237-2238. The question was worded as follows "Some U.S. senators are saying that we should withdraw all our troops from Vietnam immediately. Would you favor or oppose this?"

                        Favor   Oppose  No opinion

National average        35      55      10

By age group
21-29 years             39      57       4
31-49 years             36      56       8
50 and over             33      53      14

By extent of education
College                 29      64       7
High school             34      58       8
Grade school            44      41      15

From Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives by Jeff Schmidt, Chapter 1 "Timid Professionals"

Bold emphasis is mine.

Don’t know, don’t really care to listen

Why'd you bother writing this comment then?

As far as quickly resorting to calling him a "historically illiterate ideologically confused liberal" you're just showing that you're jumping to a conclusion quickly. Leonard is a historian of India and is currently writing a book on the history of Indian Marxism.

try to give any sort of lecture on literally anything on the Soviet Union that isn’t backed up with easily available primary source materials

He's a guest on a podcast having a discussion. Not exactly an easy setting for inserting footnotes. If you want to look at his sources you could probably find his argument more elaborated in writings he's published.

I wouldn't say that I agree with him per se, but this is a situation where I think a more thoughtful refutation is warranted.

Okay, so having seen Spencer Leonard, who by profession is a historian of India, speak a few times I think this is his general idea (don't take this as me necessarily agreeing with it):

The left has been trapped in focusing on national liberation movements since the aftermath of Russian Revolution. Basically, after the failure of the global socialist revolution that they were hoping to bring about, the answer that Lenin et al. arrived at to the question of "Where do we go from here?" was supporting national liberation movements, which were on the upswing at the time.

Since then, this doctrine has becone dogma to the point of undermining the ability of doing organizing at centers of capitalism without critical reflection on what strategy for the left would actually be effective at reaching the goal of the proletariat carrying out world socialist revolution. Instead of organizing the proletariat in the US, the American left has resorted to supporting decolonization in ineffective ways, even if it's taking a reactionary form without it actually bringing proletarian revolution any closer and the seeming victories are undermined at best. The 50 Year Counterrevolution after the Civil Rights Era is one example of an undermined victory that This Is Revolution talks about quite a bit. Another example might be Vietnam, where some argue the US didn't lose given the global position, economic structure, etc. of Vietnam today (iirc Chomsky is one of the people that takes this position).

With respect to what Stalinism is, I've also heard this definition also from Chris Cutrone (another polemicist in the Platypus Affiliated Society and its former president). Basically, they identify the core of Stalinism as portraying defeats in the revolution as victories. For example, saying "It's great that we have this strong NKVD!" when this is actually a defeat since needing such a powerful secret police undermines the democratic character of proletarian revolution. (Now, this is certainly a more coherent definition of Stalinism than we normally see, although personally I'd say they need to make sure to bring up this definition whenever they use the term Stalinism with a more general audience because not doing so leads to confusion.)

The article mainly provides a survey of views regarding the national question, primarily of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

The author doesn't actually go in-depth about the history of Ukraine, and doesn't evaluate the nature of Ukraine's position. Mentions of Ukraine are limited to the first two paragraphs of the article. They don't bother drawing parallels with the historical examples in the body of the article to make a convincing argument for how the past reflects the present.

If you'd like to see some discussion of vaccine shortcomings outside of antivax quackery, @hostilearchitecture has discussed it a few times recently:

https://hexbear.net/post/222486/comment/2833606

https://hexbear.net/post/224961

With respect to John Campbell, I haven't kept up with him so I can't say much about whether what he's been saying more recently is quackery vs. honest mistakes in misunderstanding and misreading things vs. actual discussion of problems that otherwise are unfortunately mostly covered by right-wing antivax outfits.

some dudes youtube channel I never heard of

So you're glancing at a Wikipedia article to jump to conclusions. I'm pretty sure OP is asking for information beyond what conclusions you can find by reading his Wikipedia article, otherwise OP wouldn't have bothered to make a post. Basically: how does what other people who are knowledgeable about vaccines square (or not square) with what what Campbell says?

i don’t give a shit he has a phd in nursing education and deliberately misleads people by calling himself “doctor” when he knows exaaaaactly what people will take from that while talking exclusively about medical topics

Having a medical education PhD probably makes him more qualified to discuss about public health than someone with something like an MD in family medicine, if we're going to split hairs over credentials. This isn't like some PhD in mechanical engineering speaking authoritatively about macrobiology without any investigation or background.

How much of the stuff he's said about things like Ivermectin is explainable due to misreading info and flawed preprints (a genuine mistake, and possible to conclude within the bounds of what's said about him on Wikipedia), or is he systematically ignoring information and skipping investigation (quackery)? He could still have become a quack, but you're really jumping the gun here with what you wrote.

Ah, I see. I thought you were speaking generally rather than about the meme. My mistake.

Regarding my example, it was just the easiest for me to pull up for a quick counterexample to what I thought you were saying because I'd recently seen the footage of this particular incident. (For what it's worth, I've also seen stuff about the butterfly mines in Donetsk.)

It's interesting how users on this website will sometimes make categorical statements that are easily disproven (in large part because of how the statements are categorical).

Here's an example of US news media using "an actual photo of their enemy": "Russian soldiers shot two unarmed civilians as they walked away after an encounter in the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv." - CNN

Is Russia today engaged in capitalist imperialism? The answer is contradictory. In the first place, the answer is a plain no. Callinicos wants to call only the ‘top six’ countries imperialist; it is then wholly artificial for him to include Russia among them. More fundamentally, the Russian economy is primarily agricultural and extractive, with significant secondary line in arms exports; and there is not - yet - a fully-autonomous banking sector. On the contrary, Russian ‘foreign direct investments’ consist of individual oligarchs pulling cash out of the Russian domestic economy and putting it into prestige objects like Chelsea FC or real estate. It is not investment of capital: that is, money put to work as investments, which return a profit through the application of capital and labour in combination. If the US wins this proxy war, Russia will more or less rapidly become a semi-colony.

On the other side, Russia might become capitalist-imperialist - if it devises financial mechanisms independent of Swift, etc, and wins this war. Japan in 1894 was not an imperialist power, but victory over China in the war of 1894-95 made it into one, with the annexation of Taiwan. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904 could have reduced Japan to the status of a semi-colony of Russia; Japanese victory produced, instead, annexation of Korea and clear Japanese entry into the ranks of the great powers. Going further back, but similarly, Germany in 1870 was not an imperialist power. Prussian victory over France in that year provided the conditions for both German unification and an imperialist expansion.

1870

1870 is a better guide to our political tasks than either 1914 or 1940. As Mason asserts and Callinicos accepts, the workers’ movement cannot possibly use this war to challenge for power, as the 1912 Second International Congress at Basel urged and as Lenin and Zinoviev urged in 1914. We do not have a powerful mass movement, built up over decades, which could pose an international alternative.

Equally, however, this is not 1940. The Russian regime is authoritarian, but not fascist. There have not been mass arrests of oppositionists, as in spring 1933 in Germany, but merely harassment and repression of protests. There continue to be multi-party elections - violently skewed in favour of United Russia, true, but Republicans and Tories aspire to skew elections in the US and Britain in their favour too. Our own states increasingly demand police permission for demonstrations, and so on. Russia plays footsy with far-right nationalists - but so does the ‘west’ - and not only in Ukraine. To advocate a people’s front with ‘liberal’ imperialism - as Callinicos rightly says Mason does - for fear of Russian ‘fascism’, is to repeat the betrayals of the Eustonites and other ‘left’ backers of the invasion of Iraq.

In 1870 Germany was not yet an imperialist power. The war appeared to be a war launched by French emperor Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III). French victory would have prevented German unification and secured the subordination of the Germanies as semi-colonies. The left had small and divided forces. But Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel - leaders of an organisation less than 10,000 strong who by chance held parliamentary seats - raised their voices against the Prussian regime and its war plans. Their principled commitment - ‘Not a penny, not a man for this system’ - allowed German social democracy to build a voice of unambiguous opposition to the regime under which they lived, which was able to grow on a mass scale because it offered a voice of unequivocal opposition.

Today, again, the left has small and divided forces. But we can raise our voices against our own state’s wars: and by doing so take a stand which in the long term can rally forces for unequivocal opposition to the warmongering imperialist regime under which we live.

"Neither 1914 nor 1940" by Mike Macnair

Correct, specifically this is from an article Marx published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. It was later reprinted posthumously in 1895 by Engels as part of the work The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. It was published in English in the 1920s. This passage is from Part II, entitled "From June 1848 to June 13, 1849"

Here's a link to an English translation of The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm

Also check out this very well done Soviet-themed Evangelion AMV "Красная Селёдка"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6IQqPMsIfX4

It uses the famous theme Georgy Sviridov composed for the 1965 Soviet film "Time, Forward!"

Hmm, it seems to have been struggling with depicting Marx & Engels.

Maybe this one will work better (and hopefully be worth getting closer to your limit):

1960s Soviet poster depicting Shinji Ikari as a Soviet tankist

How about:

Marx and Engels in a psychedelic rock album cover

You're welcome! Just keep in mind some of the stuff I wrote in my comment might not be in that essay I linked and could instead be elsewhere in his work. I was trying to summarize the most relevant points I remembered from memory.

Some if it is correlative with genetics, apparently. They did a twin study.

Not all of the studies took that approach.

If you look at the section of the article on genetics it described a twin study that asked subjects for outlooks on specific topics, so they have done studies controlling for correllation related to upbringing.

That might be why some of the studies asked about specific outlooks instead of doing what you just described.

A twin study in 2005 examined the attitudes regarding 28 different political issues such as capitalism, unions, X-rated movies, abortion, school prayer, divorce, property taxes, and the draft. Twins were asked if they agreed or disagreed or were uncertain about each issue. Genetic factors accounted for 53% of the variance of an overall score. However, self-identification as Republican and Democrat had a much lower heritability of 14%. It is worthwhile to note that identical twins correlated in opinion at a rate of 0.66 while fraternal twins correlated in opinion by 0.44. This likely occurs because identical twins share 100% of their DNA while fraternal twins share on average only 50% of their DNA.[43][44]