I am not “far left”, but i have several IRL friends who are. And i totally agree with @MrDibble . I certainly believe that @Der_Trihs ran across people on some chat site who espouse those beliefs. The world is full of people. But i don’t believe they represent “the left”, even the extreme left, and i don’t Believe any of them are politically relevant.
And if @Wesley_Clark finds himself at parties where people are arguing those positions, i think he needs to find new friends. Because I’m pretty tolerant. I have friends on the far left, and i have friends who are center right, and i have friends who are evangelical Christians and evangelical atheists. But that’s just beyond the pale.
If they don’t represent the “extreme” left, IE being so far left that even us Leftie people shake our head and say “that’s too far left”, what on earth DO they represent?
You’re right, they aren’t politically relevant. That’s because the Mainstream Left and even the Progressive Left toss ideas like that out the window. And good on them. That’s one of the biggest points in the Left’s favor over the Right.
Pretending that these ideas don’t exist or that they don’t come from the same sort of logic that leads to Liberalism doesn’t make us stronger, it makes us blind, and more likely to pull a MAGA and let the lunatics start running the asylum.
Well my mother is a full blown MAGAt now, and my father even more so, which is quite amazing considering just ten years ago they were horrified that half their kids were (normal) Republicans because they raised us to be progressive, tolerant, compassionate people.
I have come to the belief that, if we cut out the 10% of the extreme left and the 10% of the extreme right of our population, things would be much better in this nation.
If you cut off the most extreme 10% of the left, you cut out someone like me who believes in a 1% wealth tax.
You cut out the most extreme 10% of the right, you’re cutting out people who want to literally cut off 10% of the population. Not just that the cop who killed George Floyd was right, but that those who battered Rodney King were right.
Pretending those ideas somehow represent the left give them more credibility than they deserve, and, imho, gives them more strength, not less. And it discredits the actual, relevant left. Are they cancerous outgrowths of leftist ideals? Some of them are, sure. Are they a reason to swing right? No, they aren’t.
I don’t think many of the extremist (and yeah I’ll say it: mythical*) positions described in this thread, represent anything. It’s like trying to put a belief in bigfoot on the political spectrum.
Someone advocating for genocide of all Ukrainians…that’s not a left-wing position, or even “extreme left”.
* I’m calling BS at this point. The list of things “leftists” have supposedly said gets ever more ridiculous and there’s never a cite. We’re waiting on the first shred of evidence.
Sure, if you search the entire internet you might be able to find someone, somewhere saying a given crazy thing, but I don’t believe that’s the original source – I think it’s a list of strawmen / disinformation from RW social media.
Their one issue where they broke from the political left was abortion (they are devout Catholics).
Social media came along and about ten years ago they were in groups that obsessed about “protecting the unborn”. Then they got on the Trump train because that was the path to overturning Roe. Then they became convinced that the whole priest sex abuse thing was a hoax perpetrated by an amorphous enemies of the church group. Then because Trump was the savior, the racist, misogynist, homophobic stuff just became necessary to justify supporting someone so odious.
Another factor was that they became small time landlords in retirement (has 3-5 rental units) and became obsessed with defending property rights vs renters rights.
My father who was a lifelong enthusiastic Union supporter turned on them as soon as he went from worker to investor/consumer. Suddenly unions were leeches driving up costs for consumers and bleeding investors dry. For example he believes that nurses and other medical unions are the driving factor behind rising medical costs, even though he lives in a state where there are almost no unionized medical workers.
Believing in a 1% wealth tax is a long way away from believing that landlords should be lined up and shot or that all “rent seeking behavior” should be illegal. It hardly makes you an extremist.
I doubt that 10% of people are extreme enough to want these things done, but I also doubt that 10% of people believe that the Rodney King beating or George Floyd killing were justified.
(For the record, I’m gonna assume for the moment that this “cutting out” is a theoretical exercise we’re doing and not a call to mass murder.)
There’s also the fact that there are far fewer people on the “extreme left” and therefore it will cover a much wider range of views, from the nutjob ones set out in the OP to just thinking that UHC and affordable college tuition are good things.
Cut out 10% of the current US extreme right and you’ve basically just removed the actual Nazis and assorted apologists as well as a good chunk of Newsmax and OANN viewers. And you’ll take out a lot more politicians that you will on the extreme left.
What does it mean to “represent the left”? They aren’t representative of what most leftists believe, but then, the KKK is not representative of what most right wing people believe.
No, what would discredit the actual, relevant left is if the actual, relevant left did what the actual, relevant right did, and embrace the loonies. Calling them out and getting rid of them - the way the Left currently does which I have praised it for - is how the Left stays legitimate.
…did anyone say that they were? Other than Octoputz, of course.
I told you, Brihana Joy Gray is a prime example of someone with these loony beliefs who was even allowed a sniff of influence in democratic circles (first as Bernie’s press secretary during his campaign and then writing for The Hill).
You’re right that she doesn’t come out and openly say ‘Ukranian children should be genocided’; she just thinks no one should do anything about it, and we should deny it happens, and if called out the appropriate response is to ask “Well what about what the United States is doing?”.
She’s not a straw man or an internet random. Thankfully, she is someone that both the mainstream and progressive left have now rejected (although she does have plenty of Tankie supporters who tell her that she was only fired because The Hill is an establishment newspaper enslaved by the evil Zionists).
Cite?
ETA: you’re saying more than 10% of Americans think that killing George Floyd was the right thing to do? Not that it was an accident or that Chauvin lacked intent, that killing Floyd was right? That seems incredible to me.
I don’t know if you’ll find 10% saying “Heck yeah, kill more George Floyds!”. I feel like it’s trivial to find 10% defending it by saying “Hey, he should have listened better and cops gotta cop and what about if he was on PCP? Too bad so sad but the actions were justified in this circumstance and shit happens when you’re a criminal.”
So I guess it depends on how you want to define “justified”
I’ll give you that some of her remarks have been extreme (though see my next response), but none of them have come within a million miles of the list of things that, supposedly “media, academia and city and state governments” have espoused. Where’s the first shred of evidence for those claims?
(I know you were not the one making those claims, I’m just explaining why I’m calling BS)
I’m struggling to find examples of these claims. Even the thing that she got fired for is nowhere near as bad as saying we should deny genocide. Do you have a cite for that?
You doubt that 10% of right wingers believe that George Floyd was 100% responsible for his death?
Our town voted 58% Biden and I can guarantee that more that 10% of the entire population believes this, not just 10% of the 40% who voted for Trump.
Now we do have a disproportionate number of police and police families in town (it’s a very Irish suburb of Boston) but still, I don’t know what world you’re living in where you don’t encounter the “comply or die” crowd on a regular basis.
Considering we have an elected member of the House who came out and openly said he supports ethnically cleansing the US of white liberals, I think even this loony leftie is lagging behind the times.
