You’re right, it doesn’t. But there are some people on the left who tend to side with anyone who is the enemy of the west/capitalism/United States regardless of other factors. Most of the people I know who are leftist are against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seeing it for what is is as an unprovoked attack in a bid to ensure Russian dominance of the region. But the looney left, assert that Russia felt threatened by big bad NATO and this is a defensive war on their part. i.e. It’s the fault of America/capitalism/imperialism/whatever. But then it’s remarkable how close the looney left is to the looney right elements who are also sympathetic to Russia.
Too Loony Left is suggesting that the FBI dig up Ivana’s grave to check if there’s documents buried there.
Resistance Twitter Is Trading Bonkers Theories About Ivana Trump’s Casket (vice.com)
Something like the Reddit Boston bomber incident, where people were “investigating” the relatives of the supposed suspect, might be a contender. They had the wrong guy!
The misidentification of Tripathi led to questions in the media about whether the so-called “crowd-sourced investigations” should be prevented in the future, citing the harm caused to people such as the relatives of Tripathi, as well as other wrongly-identified suspects who then feared for their safety. Some argued that they are unstoppable because of the nature of the Internet, with the only hope being that awareness of the possible effects of errors such as this would lead to future caution.[11] Reddit issued a public apology for allowing its users to form a subcommunity called FindBostonBombers, wherein they openly speculated upon suspects.[14]
Posting on Facebook, Tripathi’s family described the tremendous amount of attention the misidentification had caused as painful, but they sought to use the negative publicity of the case to assist in their search by raising awareness.[11]
My bold.
How far do you take that as the employer of the person who made the statement that has triggered the public attention? What if your business is being boycotted? Do you let your business go downhill? Do you let other employees go, because there’s not enough work for them all, even though they’ve done nothing to trigger the boycott? Do you go bankrupt?
Help me out here. I’ve no recollection of this event so I went back on Google and read about it.
A white South African is flying to South Africa, which has a major AIDS epidemic, tweets that she hopes she doesn’t get AIDS, then says she’s only joking because she’s white, with the implication that white people don’t get AIDS in South Africa.
Have I summarised it correctly? If not, please tell me how I’ve misinterpreted it. What is the non-racist interpretation that I’m evidently missing, based on your comment?
Err… maybe that she’s in a “statistically less likely to contract HIV” demographic? Stereotypes wouldn’t exist if they weren’t built on a (often infinitesimal) kernel of fact.
Above the level of hunter-gatherers or pre-plow farming?
…“reform” has been on the agenda for decades.
But it really isn’t something that anyone with any political clout will ever take seriously.
There is no plan for reform.
There is no will for reform.
Any calls for real reform are swiftly and brutally denounced.
“Defund” was a call for reform based around a simple premise that AOC puts succinctly here:
Defund was never “loony left.”
And “abolish” isn’t either.
Abolish comes from the premise that the industrial prison complex (that literally exists to profit from incarcerated people) and a system of policing that is made up of nearly 18,000 different police agencies all with their own rules and agendas, simply can’t be reformed. The system is fundamentally broken. Fundamentally corrupt. At every step of the system, from the police to the prosecutors to the judges to the prisons.
America jails more people per capita than anywhere else in the world. Nowhere else comes close. This should be seen as a crisis. But nobody really cares. There are no serious calls for reform on the table that will ever do anything about this. Most Americans are just fine with this.
“Abolish” isn’t loony. In a sane society that examines carefully the evidence, tearing down the establishment and rebuilding it so that it so that it is safe, just and fair would be an entirely sensible thing to do. It correctly identifies the problem.
One would hope that an extreme position like “abolish” would lead to more moderate reform policy proposals. But even things like bail reform are opposed by many in the centre.
I know this is outside of the scope of the thread, but someone has to point out how asymmetrical all this is.
Right now, all of the most popular conservative cable news presenters are heavily pushing the line that the FBI planted evidence during the raid on mar-a-lago, and that the whole thing was a deep state operation sanctioned by a corrupt judge. Senior republican politicians are also pushing this line, along with, obviously, Trump himself. And this led to a lunatic shooting at an FBI building.
Versus…A theory about Ivana’s casket that most of us have never heard of because it was just a couple of tweets by…“a democratic fund-raiser” and a former soap-opera actress. Tweets that I think were likely humor, but even if they weren’t, it’s just a couple of rando’s tweets.
Not good societies.
I guess I’m behind the curve. I thought the current conservative narrative was that the search was carried out by “rogue” FBI agents.
And how do you do that?
By realizing that when the foundation of individual freedom is eroded directly with threats of violence or indirectly with passivity when said foundation is challenged that the long term negative consequences to anyone whose conscience includes the concept of individual freedom is dire the least one can do is to push back, however apparently ineffectually, against said threats. Even when the particular expressions are odious. ACLU History: Taking a Stand for Free Speech in Skokie | American Civil Liberties Union is a classic example.
I find that the loony left is far too loony when out of myopic desire for short term gain they advance illiberal principles. Sort of have to explicitly and directly reference the title.
How old, again, is capitalism? I just want to get a sense of how bold a claim you are making.
Anyway, a propos nothing, I endorse the idea that being anti-intolerance is a pro-tolerance psotition. We need not tolerate intolerance.
Contentious question, depending on how (and how broadly) you define your terms. Some folks trace it all the way back to the origins of trade in early agrarian societies, other equate it with the rise of Renaissance mercantilism/decline of feudalism, others insist it didn’t really exist until the industrial revolution and the eclipse of mercantilism. Pick your poison.
I’ll never get into a debate on it, because nobody ever agrees on even that basic of a ground rule, making the discussions pointless beyond an end point of ‘agree to disagree’ 
.
Okay, I’ve realized that.
Now what?
I listened to the Springsteen ticket podcast on Marketplace Tech. In no way did anyone on the show suggest it was immoral or unethical to charge $5,000 for concert tickets. Instead, they discussed various strategies for pricing and suggested that in different circumstances, we might apply different reasoning to determine whether a particular pricing strategy was appropriate for that situation.
For example, they mentioned that most people would not accept that whoever was willing to pay the most for a kidney transplant should be the one to get it.
In a situation like a Springsteen concert, they suggested that we might not reach quite the same conclusion.
However, they did suggest that the assumption that whoever was willing to pay the most for a ticket was the one who valued it the most would break down once the ticket price was far higher than the average person could even dream of affording, for example, $5,000.
They suggested that Springsteen might consider that a person unable to pay that price might actually value the ticket more than someone able and willing to pay the price, but that there was no systematic method offered to judge who valued it the most in that situation. They also suggested that Springsteen, someone who might have a lot of lower-income fans, might be wary of creating the impression that he preferred rich patrons.
Indeed, for years, Pearl Jam fought against Ticketmaster and scalpers to try to guarantee affordable ticket prices for their fans, but Ticketmaster’s practical monopoly on ticketing eventually defeated them.
It’s an ongoing thing. It’s a process not a singular event. It’s not even necessarily a heroic process where with Herculean efforts one makes a dramatic impact that forever changes the world. It’s just a process where one pushes back against illiberalism especially when illiberalism is cloaked in the language of virtue.
I feel the loony left has weaponized social media and forums quite effectively. Folks fear not just the social ostracism but also financial and physical danger that weaponized social media can enact or incite. Individually, not much can be done unless one has FU money such as Elon Musk. But collectively the looney left can be neutered just by ignoring the fools. Articles in the NY Times and other mainstream publications are wrestling with these various concepts and the intellectual schism between what is commonly referred to as classical liberals vs the ironically authoritarian progressive left.
But how does this translate into action? I can spend four hours every day in a darkened room making sure I’ve got my mind right about illiberalism cloak in virtue, but then what?
The most extreme Leftist position I have heard is probably The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement who believes humans should allow themselves to go extinct to save the environment. (And I know this view is FAR from anyone in the Democratic Party is espousing.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement