Remember Lenin's 1920 essay, Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder? Nicholas Kozloff describes a similar disorder: What he calls the "authoritarian left" is so convinced that the enemy of my enemy is my friend — the "enemy" being western capitalism — that writers like Alex Cockburn and Robert Dreyfuss find nice things to say about Muammar Gadaffi and Bachar Al-Asad, and even Noam Chomsky refrains from critical analysis of the crazed Bolivarian Hugo Chávez. That means they're having trouble distinguishing "left" from "right."
The authoritarian left goes awry: From the Arab Spring to Latin America - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the un-appropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend. — John Maynard Keynes