There is a meme free-floating around social media about unpopular opinions one holds. I began to think about what unpopular axioms I hold as truth, and decided to some up with a list that will surely alienate someone about something:
Unpopular Opinions on Marxism:
IF economic and historical assumptions of Marx is not true, then Marxism is not worth defending as it is even as a progressive step. There is no moral reason to support it as it currently exists as a system of thought if one thinks it merely a step in the right direction.
The way most Marxists talk about teleology is eschatological–progress is domain specific even within a totality.
All ideological schools of thought, even non-political ones, are necessarily “vanguardist” in a loose sense, and explicit anti-vanguardism becomes incoherent and actually has a higher tendency to develop into personality cults.
Democracy as a concept is not good or bad, but a formal impulse that itself is actually value and polity neutral. The form of democracy is actually probably not value and polity neutral, but cannot be explored outside of specific historical contexts. Marxists are not seeking then merely “economic democracy” which is an idiotic division of political economy rendered into a slogan.
I don’t think degenerated workers states or state capitalism actually completely describe the failure of actual socialist states to achieve even their own internal goals.
We desperately need serious class studies look at the stratifications within the working class, and not just on race, ethnicity, and gender, but also in field of employment, region, etc.
Marxism as a humanistic ideology desperately needs to take research on anthropology and psychology more seriously.
A Marxist society cannot simply develop on capitalist technology and the stage to impose itself by controlling the state.
Social, political, and economic revolutions are all needed, but they don’t all happen at once. I believe that having the political revolution happen before the economic one is a large part of the problem of Marxist development.
I do not think conflating “communism” and “socialism” is in line with later Marx’s writings, and I do think Marx was actually a stagist fairly explicitly even if I don’t agree with that element of Marx’s own writings.
Most of the hatred of Marxism is honestly earned.
Unpopular Opinions on Politics in General
Carl Schmitt is right about the way states of exception work for political communities and the definition of political world.
I have learned much from anarchism, including that I am not one.
Any moment that wishes to radically change a polity could learn more from Hezbollah than the New Left.
Anti-Americanism alone is the anti-imperialism of fools.
There is no such thing as nationalism of the oppressed. That is like chauvinism of the United Colors of Benetton.
Most critiques of Eurocentrism are themselves Eurocentric.
Liberalism is dying from success.
The problem with most anarchism is negation is rarely ever enough.
Unpopular Opinions in Ethics, Morality, and Politics
Virtue ethics is the mostly defensible meta-ethics. The impulses that cover deontological and consequentialist ethics are actually covered in virtue pluralism.
Morality and ethics are distinct but related categories.
Morality is the conception of the limits of one’s self-conception in relationship to one’s actions.
Ethics is the normative conception monitoring relationships to others.
Morality often drives epistemology and metaphysics (like it did formally in almost all ancient philosophical systems, or they conflate morality and metaphysics and derive epistemology form that), not the other ways around.
There is no one moral way to engage in relationships, marriages, etc. There are, however, tons more immoral ways to engage in them.
One should not completely separate one’s morality from one’s normative politics, but one HAS do separate one’s morality from one’s descriptive politics.
Good and evil aren’t particularly helpful in A LOT–read most–everyday moral questions.
Ethics and morality are contextual even in absolutist cases.
Unpopular Opinions in Education:
Learning Styles don’t exist, those are only learning preferences.
All the psychological research agrees with me, educational research doesn’t but see the next few points for why.
Overuse of technology in education is a cause of executive function decline. All the psychological research agrees with me, educational research doesn’t but see the next few points for why.
Despite recent educational research for administrations, the distinction between skills, content, and behaviors is actually not psychologically meaningful as they are all forms of knowledge and this pretending of a distinction in assessment cuts against most administrators concern for student achievement.
Most education research is methodologically unable to question its assumptions, and its notions of best practices are often statistically questionable. This is why there are all kinds of small level effects found in education research statistically, but achievement has not improved in aggregate for the entire student body much since 1970s and even educational research book I have ever read admits that. Many assumptions in educational research look for implied statistical significance in ideas that have been completely debunked in the fields that they originated in, but since applied research in education is all based in correlations and it is frankly a-scientific, and thus cannot build proper causing models.
Administration and systems are much, much more important than most teachers realize.
The whole “factory model of education” is a myth itself. The models of education even during the Prussian period are influenced by military models and ideas of human capital, and Dewey’s models of education have been influential since they existed. This is actually a myth about both the Enlightenment and economics that pushes as consumer model of education.
Educational choice in schools is only bad because of the way educational funding is structured.
Most educational research is also questionable because it results more than any other field seem to match up to things in recent legislation or administrative decisions and NOT research in humanistic fields.
Economists meta-studies in education are perhaps the worse of the fields in education studies.
Symptomatic Commentary 
As a fellow teacher, your comments on education strike me as spot-on. It’s frustrating sometimes to work in a field so uncritical of itself.
1) Can you suggest something for the layperson to read Re: Hezbollah. When I see books written by journos or ex-military, reviewed by corporate media or NGOs, I’m suspicious, which might have me throwing the baby out with the bath water. But what are you going to to do. You’re better off fasting than eating.industrial/factory food.
2) As i said previously I’ve been in workboots and “unions: since Reagan/Thatcher. I’m in one of the last regions in N.A. where “unions” are barely hanging on, though they’re not the “unions” of the late 70s early 80s anymore than my comb-over is a head of hair, I work in the trades with Poles and Czechs who’ve escaped through mountains to the West, first generation Vietnamese whose parents escaped on rafts. We’re all perfectly aware that working conditions are diminishing quickly. If you mention Marx or Socialism or revolution they roll their eyes like you’ve handed them a a ball-peen hammer when they need a screwdriver and a laptop.