I certainly think that not expecting it to happen is loony, as is declaring a protest illegitimate or unsuccessful because it happened.
Not gonna try to find the line, but I’ve sure as shit met some people way over it. One memorable shithead was talking about the evils of bankers, being all couch-potato-tough-guy, and offhandedly said something like, “After the revolution, they go up against the wall, them and their whole fuckin families.” I confronted him on this–you really talking about shooting kids in the head?–and he doubled down, because he apparently thought bankers were like alligators and the baby ones grow up to be big ones.
That was some 25 odd years ago. Dickhead made an impression.
I do not think in terms of a left-right continuum, especially when you head to the fringes.
Policies and proposals that are beyond the pale for me are the ones that say there is no room for thinking, that you MUST ratify the following statements in their original language OR you are evil and bad and in alignment with the Enemy etc.
If you genuinely believe that none of those things will ever, ever happen under any circumstance because corruption and racism are too solidly entrenched in the current system, I can at least understand where the desire for abolition comes from.
Mentioning communism is a cliche but for certainly it is too far for me.
I actually don’t worry too much about whether a policy is left or right, I’m way more concerned about a move the extreme no matter what flavour. It never ends well.
The politically correct Left turns me off, as does thought control in general, even as I know that most “great institutions”,–religions, governments, even liberal ones, the military, and its various branches (air, land, sea, et al), universities, medicine–they all have their “think right” and “think wrong” aspects, as in “don’t go there”, if you want to be accepted as legit by your peers in your profession. Things sort of have to be that way for quality control purposes.
For all that, I’m a New Deal liberal at the core, am basically middle of the road and moderate, in thought and temperament, though I can flare up now and again, and go on tears. This is in the nature of being human, and a free thinking one. Nor am of the belief that introverts such as myself are better than extraverts. Introverts, and freethinkers generally, are not always right, and without the “soldiers” of the bourgeoisie who hold up and onto their values, who would fix our teeth, take our pulse in the hospital, design the homes bridges, stoves and air conditioners?
Equating the moderate centrists who currently call themselves liberals with the left is what’s loony, to me.
Nothing comes to mind. There are things I disagree with (e.g. I don’t think all male->female trans should be eligible to compete in women’s sports), but I don’t consider their position to be “loony”.
Frankly, when the expression “loony left” comes up, it’s almost always BS.
For example, I saw a British commentator, on the David Pakman show, talk about how many in America are turning away from the Democrats because of the extreme views of the “loony left”. And his example of such a view was the belief that there are 55 genders.
But who has said that? Certainly not anyone prominent on the left, as I’ve never heard mention of this, let alone promotion of it.
It seems pretty clear to me that the vast majority of people outraged about views like this have never heard anyone actually say such a thing.
Slate Magazine, quoting Facebook policy
https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/facebook-custom-gender-options-here-are-all-56-custom-options.htm
- Agender
- Androgyne
- Androgynous
- Bigender
- Cis
- Cisgender
- Cis Female
- Cis Male
- Cis Man
- Cis Woman
- Cisgender Female
- Cisgender Male
- Cisgender Man
- Cisgender Woman
- Female to Male
- FTM
- Gender Fluid
- Gender Nonconforming
- Gender Questioning
- Gender Variant
- Genderqueer
- Intersex
- Male to Female
- MTF
- Neither
- Neutrois
- Non-binary
- Other
- Pangender
- Trans
- Trans*
- Trans Female
- Trans* Female
- Trans Male
- Trans* Male
- Trans Man
- Trans* Man
- Trans Person
- Trans* Person
- Trans Woman
- Trans* Woman
- Transfeminine
- Transgender
- Transgender Female
- Transgender Male
- Transgender Man
- Transgender Person
- Transgender Woman
- Transmasculine
- Transsexual
- Transsexual Female
- Transsexual Male
- Transsexual Man
- Transsexual Person
- Transsexual Woman
- Two-Spirit
Also, the government of England:
The first of those is Facebook allowing a person to choose to label themselves in lots of ways, many of which are clearly synonyms / overlap. So what?
That’s not claiming there are n genders. We may as well complain about users being allowed to choose from 250 emoticons (or whatever the number is) that they can put next to their name.
Regarding the Telegraph article, assuming it’s true (and I wouldn’t), it also seems like allowing people to call themselves lots of things, rather than claiming that all those things are discrete genders. It’s rather like the list of races on certain forms, where allowing someone to tick “Mixed - Black Carribbean” does not entail claiming that this is a discrete race.
Also, how are the actions of a Tory government the loony left?
The rich are small in number. IMHO the solution is to convince the people who are electing legislators that cause the problems to vote differently and elect different legislators. Destroying the property of those voters (or scaring them into thinking that they might be next) is not a helpful way of accomplishing those goals.
Sure, there are plenty of people that believe that, but IMHO they’re wrong to hold that belief. All it takes is voting the right people into office and the wrong ones out of office. The trickiest part will be getting rid of the police unions, but even that can be done if enough people vote for it. Violent protests that involve destruction of property that largely belongs to middle class business owners is not the way to convince those people to vote in such a way as to help solve the problem.
I disagree. At some point the things we consider basic stuff that everyone agrees with was considered extreme. The slavery abolitionists of the 19th century were extremists. Harriet Tubman was an extremist. Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi were extremists. They were peaceful extremists, but they were still extremists for the time and place that they lived. Sometimes extremism is the correct position. Occasionally violence is called for, although in the present day United States I don’t see the need. In the places and times where violence is called for, that violence should be goal directed, not just random smashing and destruction of whatever happens to be around. AFAIK that sort of random destruction has never helped anyones cause.
Well that’s true enough I guess though I can only live in world as it exists now it is useful to review the past through your lens as well.
Hard to tell for sure what things we do now will be looked at in horror in a hundred years time. There’ll definitely be something.
Of course even accepting the above point it is still true that at the ends of the political spectrum lie the totalitarian monsters as well.
Probably eating meat and blithely dumping carbon into the atmosphere.
While I consider myself a Lefty, I do hate the way Israel/Palestine conflict is often viewed by many I’ve met on the left. It’s understandable to be horrified by Israel’s heavy-handed militaristic approach - but I don’t then feel compelled to see the Palestinians as automatically virtuous freedom-fighters. And I can’t see how a peaceful solution could ever be found where there’s an insistence on ‘pick your side’.
I heard a news story this very morning that people are pushing for replacing the word “inmate” with the term “incarcerated persons” because the former is considered dehumanizing… that kind of stuff, I truly cannot fathom the point of wasting any time or energy even thinking about it.
Quite a few liberals are invested (philosophically, not financially) in public education to a degree that I’m uncomfortable with. I see parenting advice columns entreating upon wealthy liberals to enroll their kids in public education (instead of left-leaning private education that could be affordable to them) because of some unidentifiable good – and I’m not seeing it. I’m left of Bernie Sanders on most issues, but no child of mine would have ever seen the inside of a government school. Not in Blue State Illinois, where I used to live, definitely not here in Red State Missouri. Preach to me all you want about the value of public education, it is not for every family, not for every liberal family, and definitely not for me.
I think they are pretty safe bets, but perhaps “real” meat will be more specific. On the carbon issue I think there will be astonishment that less progress was made on clean nuclear and that sensible western countries actually turned from it in the early 21st century.
To me, the “loony left” policies that are too much for me are the ones that are being advocated solely because of ideological considerations, and without much regard for how they’ll actually be implemented and paid for. Too many things like UBI sound great in theory and would resolve a lot of issues, but the really heavy lifting in actually implementing and paying for them is conveniently glossed over.
For example, UBI proponents often say $1000/month is a good starting point. That’s $12k per person per year. Problem is, the ENTIRE current Federal budget of the US only divides out to about $14.4k per person, and that’s the whole enchilada- military, USDA, INS, FBI, social security, and so on.
It’s going to be an unreasonably heavy lift to convince people with money that they should voluntarily cough up dramatically higher taxes just so other people can have cash they didn’t work for. It just won’t fly in the US in any foreseeable future.
I thought UBI was to supplement low income, not a payment to every person.
We’re effectively doing that now with things like earned income credit that amount to a negative tax rate for the lowest incomes.