What is the regressive left?

Yeah this is a big problem I have with these types of people. They just got o the opposite extreme. Take the Isreal/Pallistein situation. As a reaction those on the left who are in anyway pro palistien they overlook any problems on the Isreal side.

Take Sam Harris as an example. The articles I've seen from him criticising people like Greenwald are full of bad Orientalist tropes, like the idea that 'bad' and 'backward' are synonymous, and that everything wrong with a society is the result of its "backwardness". Or talk of "tribalism". They're the kind of thing that serious scholars of these topics are long fed-up of refuting.

Then he goes on to attack Greenwald for the article he wrote after Charlie Hebdo, somehow managing to understand Greenwald's ardently and provocatively pro-free speech article as an anti-free speech one.

Harris has made heaps of blatantly reactionary statements, and openly aligned himself with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, yet he calls others 'regressive'!

What did sam Harris say that was actually wrong though ?

. I'm more basing my view on what i see people write about on newpsaper websites and users on here.

Nice try, he's supporting Hilary Clinton. He's said he'd reluctantly support people like that because for all their faults they can at least recognize that their is a hostile threat to western civilisation threatening them.

ishygddt

Ok then. So it is the mirror image of what they claim to dislike in the regressive left. They will reluctantly support people as regressive as Cruz because they align with them on a small political area. Regressive left side with dodgy groups and leaders because they are anti-west. Sam Harris sides with dodgy groups and leaders inside the west because they are anti the forces Sam Harris thinks are a threat to western civilisation. I'm not actually inherently against doing this taking sides with dodgy people. Sometimes that line of thinking can be the least worse option. They are hypocrites though. They will not allow leftist like Noam Chomsky to say supportive things about Hugo Chavez and his government in Venezuela. He does not apply the same standards to himself that he applies others to.

Quite often they are synonymous. For instance, in africa many people think that mental illness is caused by evil spirits and that blood sacrifices are often the cure.

Greenwald made the mistake of labelling charlie hebdo racist

when theyre very clearly not-just anti religion in all its forms. It is plain to see that we cannot have a free society when people think that drawing a picture of a god is blasphemy worthy of death- and repeatedly follow through on that threat.

Nice try, he's supporting Hilary Clinton.

He's said he'd reluctantly support people like that because for all their faults they can at least recognize that their is a hostile threat to western civilisation threatening them.

I see this term bandied around a lot, but what does it actually mean? How is the regressive left different from the "normal" left, the progressive left, the classical left, etc?

One example does not prove "quite often". There are many terrible things which are very much modern, Islamism arguably among them.

No, he didn't. Harris chose to describe it in such simplistic terms because it fitted the stereotype of "regressive leftists" that he has in part created to attack.

Did you read Greenwald's article? He was criticising the bizarre tendency of various commentators who were saying that there was essentially no difference between supporting freedom of speech and supporting the speech itself; that one could only truly support Charlie Hebdo's right to free speech if one supports and celebrates the actual content of what they print as well. As Greenwald pointed out, if a magazine had been attacked for printing virulently antisemitic cartoons, there would not have been a widespread call to celebrate and reprint them.

I said nothing about who he formally endorsed or supported.

i) Thank you for proving my point about tired orientalist tropes. The discredited "clash of civilisations" garbage is another of Harris' favourites. His portrayal of evil and atrocity is simplistic, even cartoonish, often because he blatantly has no familiarity with scholarly opinion on topics he thinks himself qualified to make considerably sweeping statements about.

ii) Harris, in situations like this, attributes all kinds of wide-reaching implict or merely enabling arguments to the statements of "regressive leftists", but insists his own statements must be taken as narrowly as he wants.

Iraq wasn't essentially in chaos. Iraq wasn't killing American civilians and bombing and firing missiles its cities.

Isn't that exactly what we did in the war?

That was my exact point, and look how that turned out.

But the war was stopped? Largely due to public pressure. The problem is that it should never have been started in the first place!

read my post just before, don't think you've got the context I said it in

Honestly I don't get why Israel doesn't just waltz in and utterly crush Hamas. Sure there will be outrage, but you'd be killing a huge problem at the price of causing a bunch of smaller ones.

Hamas are not located in one convenient hobbit hole, they are part of the general population, that would be like saying: "I don't get why Germany doesn't just waltz into the UK and kill UKIP"

Plus when they organise politically, they often use human shields.

We certainly don't want Israel bombing more schools, UN refuges or centres for the disabled.

Furthermore, just waltzing in and bombing doesn't solve anything.

I call myself a progressive, but my nuanced view, in your guys' mind, may label me a regressive - I don't really care if I can put forward the better arguments.

It does destroy it as a political entity with control over things, however. If you seize Hama's means of production you can make it weaker than it currently is.

Also, don't put words in my mouth, I don't know you and I am not an ideologue like you seem to assume.

What do you mean. I read it, and so what??

That's a different thing, which would be do-able, but Israel does control much of that already.

I think controlling the Palestinian border is really significant, as any entity without the means of travel or trade is incredibly weak already.

I wasn't meaning you personally about the regressive left comment - i'm talking about the thread starter.

I actually don't know anyone on the left who tells people to "check their privilege you white male" - I only know people on the right who mimic people on the left as saying that, so it makes me quite sceptical that this "regressive left" is just a new way to demonise the progressive left.

It's kind of like where they took feminism and couldn't really disagree with the principle of equality, so instead they demonised the people who wanted this as being anti-men.