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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   23848 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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I've had a recent rebirth of interest in studying Islam. This happened to overlap with the time of year that is 9/11. Now, I was mainly reading ancient thinkers and I didn't think that 9/11 would become relevant to my efforts.

Alas, I was also listening to podcasts on the side. From Talking with Teachers (at 39:50):

(Dr. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali) I think like one of the first mistakes that Muslims after 9/11 made was to embrace the narrative itself, right? You know, that it was Muslims, right, who did it. Now, I think it would have been okay if Muslims said, you know, that, listen, you know, yeah, it's a possibility.

We accept that Muslims may have been part of it, you know, but to embrace the whole idea that this was done by Muslims because of Muslim backwardness and things like that, you know, and yeah, there's a certain level of backwardness involved with that. But at the same time, what it did was it gave the empire, I guess you would say, an excuse to do everything that it did afterwards, you know, and so, but I think that Muslims have pushed back a bit more and said, hey, listen, you know, you know, there are different perspectives here, even a lot of non-Muslims [inaudible] sceptical of this narrative, right? And even if we accept something like that, you know, yeah, maybe Muslims were in those airplanes, you know, but the idea that Muslims, that the airplanes made the building fall down, it's like, well, you know, I mean, so now all these things are coming out now, and so it's humbly allowed to see that even a lot of non-Muslims who are actually questioning the narrative and they're not falling for a lot of the negative propaganda.

After parsing this as charitably and carefully as I could, it does not seem to me that he is directly claiming either that Muslims weren't on the plane, or that the plane didn't cause the building to fall. I believe that his basic claim is that one way to avoid the single-minded conclusion that Muslims are evil is to note that "Islamic terrorism" is not the only story that people have alleged here.

Ironically, this was spoken by the host, and not the guest Imam Farhan Siddiqi, who as far as I can tell appears to be the same Imam of the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque who claimed that he didn't condemn Hamas because he he had seen no proof of Hamas atrocities. He then said (in this video, not the podcast):

(Imam Farhan Siddiqi) Many of us were sitting here, remember, after 9/11. The stops that we received at the airport, members of this community, unfortunately, who were jailed unjustly, some of them still sitting in jail. Funds were frozen. Laptops, computers taken. Raids were happening. This [ie. October 7] is not the first time we were called terrorists. And why was it then? Because we didn't agree with the narrative. And we said that Muslims are just.

I'm beginning to wonder if the basic drive behind these startlingly alien statements is a kind of negative pluralism: take or promote any other perspectives than the allegedly thought-stopping truth of violence committed in the name of Islam. Why? Because those perspectives exist (People believe them! It's not just Muslims!), and because the central story that Muslims are just must be upheld.

Personally, I do not think that the tactics these two have chosen to deal with controversies will work in the long term, though in times of widespread distrust, it may appear to be effective.

This post doesn't really have a point. I've found that podcasts are the greatest gift that the internet has given us. I listen to people who I never would read. Reading them makes me feel dirty. But when there's a voice, they're people, even if they're bad people, or people who I tentatively want to see burn in hell for at least a few seconds and maybe even a little longer. I had no expectation that either of these two would make me do a double take when I started listening. I was there to learn about a community which I know little about, and to seek knowledge, as the Muslims say.

This episode began by talking about their experiences of studying Islam in majority-Arabic areas and continued with the experience of leading a flock. The discussion of different perspectives of faith, of avoiding partisanship in matters of faith, and of being tolerant of what people need in order to continue in their faith, even with doubts, was genuinely humanistic and worthwhile. It was what I came for, and I can't deny that to a certain extent I sought knowledge and I found it.

After the rather "wait, what" 9/11 part, the conversation continues to talk about how (apparently) Muslim clergy (I'm assuming this is in America) is mostly left-leaning, that MLFA and CAIR are left-leaning, that the host and guest are among the few right leaning in their circles. They talk about racism and discrimination towards whites, and appear to criticize Muslims who think that racism happens to everyone except whites. They talk about how some in the America First movement are talking about Zionists and mass immigration, but they don't necessarily care for the Palestinians either, as both are seen as foreign concerns. They talk about libertarianism and the virtues of Austrian economics (highly praised). At one point a story is told about how people confided in Siddiqi that they voted for Trump, and his response was "vote whoever." Dr. Abdullah reflects on pushback he got for promoting vaccine freedom during the pandemic.

I don't think they're making it up. There's a lot to ponder here about the possibilities and perils of Muslim integration in the West.

I'm beginning to wonder if the basic drive behind these startlingly alien statements is a kind of negative pluralism: take or promote any other perspectives than the allegedly thought-stopping truth of violence committed in the name of Islam. Why? Because those perspectives exist (People believe them! It's not just Muslims!), and because the central story that Muslims are just must be upheld.

It's just garden variety tribal defensiveness, of the sort other groups with even less justification to deny their people are responsible use.

Muslims were more defensive and conciliatory in the wake of 9/11 and it didn't change that some people still suspect that there's something particular about Islam (in fact, it may have gotten worse) and it justified many things Muslims don't like both on the foreign policy and immigration fronts so why bother? Blacks don't ever go "Yeah, crime is on our heads alone. We need to be the ones work on it" and politically they've probably been better served by just forming an ever deeper phalanx of scapegoats and rationalizations.

Now that the left wing is totally on board with the alternate theories and has applied the "blaming culture==racist" paradigm and the Muslim population is just a fact of life, it all seems a bit embarrassing to have gone so far for so little. Just blame the West/American foreign policy/white supremacy like everyone else. Whitey clearly buys that shit.

The important thing is that it doesn't stop at terrorism, which most would be willing to write off. Muslims have been wrestling with the West and being seen as backwards across the board for centuries (I know some apologists who complain bitterly that the complaints about Mohammed bedding a pre-teen Aisha were unknown before modernity, implying modern liberal Westerners are the weird ones, which...well. How they raise their children, manage relations with women, etc. are all under suspicion under strong liberalism. Granting that there's something illiberal and backwards about Islam opens the door to correction on a broad number of matters from the West and that's just unacceptable because liberals don't know how to stop at a reasonable concession. They just take more and and more and more. As Americans, they see that.

They've seen what happened to Christianity. You cede that your religion should be subject to review by kaffir and next thing you know the the degenerate gays are dancing in your cathedrals and your daughters are being transed. Why wouldn't they? They saw you trying to be more British than the British, apologizing for the faith. You've ceded the moral authority to them.

No, nip it in the bud. We have our own ideas about justice and that's all there is to it. Some people did something, as a certain Congresswoman said, but we're not going to cede the whole moral core of the faith by saying it's Muslims as such

the left wing is totally on board with the alternate theories and has applied the "blaming culture==racist" paradigm

Sometimes it seems to me that the social currency of DSA types is just, well, unabashed shamelessness. It certainly explains the number of self-identified "working class" fail sons that had daddy buy their first house or live rent-free, or hyper-progressive businesses that haven't paid their taxes.

If that's really true, it seems like all you'd need to subvert it is a critical mass willing to play along by its own rules. Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that "in living memory, Slavs have been the primary victims of capitalism", and raise etymological concerns every time someone else uses the word "slave". Those facts are, arguably, not even wrong. If they kick you out, raise discrimination claims under the Civil Rights Act. There is certainly an element of the crab bucket to it, too. On the other hand, I'd recommend against it because of what could happen if you were successful: what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims of history at the hands of Jews and other European powers?

To tie it back to Islamism, I haven't listened to OP's podcast, but my broader concerns there are that many on the left (not even always Muslim believers themselves!) lack the self-awareness expected of "the rest of us". I'm expected to appreciate the historical nuance and implications, but to them, history always begins at a very convenient choice of time. Byzantium Constantinople Istanbul has always been Muslim land (see also Jerusalem). The only slave trade worth mentioning is the Western Atlantic one. It's only "genocide" when it's done by perceived-as-white people; pay no attention to the last century in, to name a few, Armenia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Kashmir, South Sudan (in some cases, literal skin-color-based murderism), or religious minorities within the Middle East like Druze or Lebanese Christians. I'll pretty reasonably acknowledge that bad things have been done by Christians and in the name of Christendom, but it feels very much like a one-way street.

To be clear, this isn't an "all Muslims" thing. There are plenty of quite reasonable minds here. Whom amongst us doesn't have weird teachings in corners of our religious texts that we are at least a bit uncomfortable with? It's more a question of what you choose to do with it and where we go from here. The Reformation was, to put it bluntly, not the best time to live in Europe, but the Westphalian peace and the Enlightenment seem important results from that which aren't as universally-assumed as they ought to be.

I’m not sure how many of those failsons or tax-evaders are out there, but it’s almost certainly fewer than you think.

Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that…

This is a stupid plan with several obvious failure points. Where are you getting these Slavs? How are you training them to promote your party line? Do you pay them? Why should you expect the target organizations to listen to a bunch of obvious plants?

what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims

Oh, come on. I can think of half a dozen load-bearing differences, and I bet you can too. How about “revanchism” or “self-abasement” or “overthrowing a fucking government”?

Your models are cartoonish.

I'll concede it's a bit of an overzealous, maybe even facile model. But I'm not sure I have a much better model for most extremist ideologies (except maybe the Quakers, if they count as such) that doesn't devolve into totalizing revanchism regardless of initial direction: it's a common thread among literal Nazis, through Pol Pot, all the way to the Hutus, Lost Cause stans, and both side in Israel/Palestine. It's really easy as humans to blame all sorts of things on our outgroups; I won't claim to be immune to that one.

But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom". Genocide is bad, but maybe we can poll watchers of The Young Turks how they feel about Armenians. Blasphemy laws are bad, but don't you dare draw The Prophet. Black lives matter, except the ones in Africa killed by (often-Muslim) militants. The most reliable metric for "Omni cause" support seems to be more along the lines of voting blocs than moral principles, and I have real misgivings that the political standards that are IMHO not-even-unreasonably applied to Christianity are largely brushed off for everyone else that will vote for them at present. That part gives me pause.

But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom".

It makes sense when you realize that progressivism is an intensely provincial movement despite their pretensions at worldliness. The principle is they look at those groups power and position in America and project it on the world. and into the world it's how you get BLM protests in places like Switzerland. It's just vomiting American issues. They have a really hard time caring about anything they can't map onto American culture war lines.

But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom".

This is true of all ideologies, including classical liberalism, where the who is "people who can handle it and get along" and the whom is "people who can't". Abel on the who side, Cain on the whom. (There's an attitude I get from that story that Abel is the first liberal and Cain the first socialist- it's very difficult to explain, more of a 'whose heart is where and why' thing.)

The reason I prefer this is that "people who can handle it" are incredibly productive in ways "people who can't" just aren't. Which is also the claim progressives make about their grouping, and given that we (and especially they) live in conditions that are to a degree post-reality (where raw productivity isn't as much of a factor), there actually is some observable truth to progressive statements, which is why progressives are that way.

Of course, I disagree with progressives because they take the post-reality state (that liberalism has given them) for granted and use that as license to re-impose all the evils that were destroyed (by liberalism). But I also understand it's easy to tolerate that which is not an injury to you, and I'm not injured by iniquity, weirdness, or moralfaggotry so long as it doesn't get itself on me beyond its otherwise productive value (which I feel inherently puts me above rules imposed to control those things, and my claim to that is "look upon all the things that were designed and implemented by people who share my values"- perhaps because they all migrated to the only place that wasn't actively trying to murder those people, but still, a win's a win).

We have our own ideas about justice and that's all there is to it.

This post made me more firmly opposed to Muslim immigration. Sorry, but they're free to have their own ideas about justice in any of the 50 Muslim nations. Here they have to tolerate Piss Mohammad and getting tickets if they park illegally when they hear the call to prayer.

If not, remigration/expulsion are the kind, moderate options.

Leftists will skinsuit the religion; traditional Muslims will be attacked as backwards right-wingers. Its unlikely they will get deported. What I'm not sure about is if verbal attacks on "Islam" will be phrased exactly the same way as against Christianity ("Islam" having a residual connotation of being a victim). I am pretty sure the Cathedral can coordinate a phase change once necessary. This probably will be near the end of our lifetime, if even within our lifetime.

They already are in the sense that all nationally elected Muslim politicians are gay marriage supporting progressives. The "Muslim" elite amongst the progressives are just using their religion for oppression stack points. The lower level less so, but it's the same with Black Americans many have the same social beliefs as white conservatives but the national elite needs to be Democrat party line compatible.

This post made me more firmly opposed to Muslim immigration.

Your prerogative. I just don't think they believe you. Where's the great groundswell of support for the banning of Muslims? Even Europe, which has much more serious problems, probably won't.

So what's the point of catering to people like you anymore? You lost, as they see it. If 9/11 and the rise of ISIS or the grooming gangs didn't cause a ban or rethink nothing will.

Here they have to tolerate Piss Mohammad and getting tickets if they park illegally when they hear the call to prayer.

If any part of my post is sympathetic to the case it makes about how people think it's that we all know it won't stop at this. Plenty or even most American Muslims tolerate this (I grant there's just a seemingly impossible to filter minority that become deranged and use violence that punches way above its weight) but "live and let live" is a lie. The minimal secular state is a lie.

Liberalism doesn't really compromise, it just pauses to reload. On many matters American Muslims are just conservative religious people circa a couple of decades ago and that is theoretically acceptable within the secular framework of the country, but will constantly be put under pressure by liberal hegemony.

What exactly has the constant compromising bought Christians? Have evangelicals stopped being the boogeymen? Did the liberal state take the win on gay marriage and leave it at that? Or is it demanding the right to trans and indoctrinate your kids as well? And what's the response to complaints? That it's just like gay marriage, which you were on the wrong side of history for. This argument actually works on people.

Muslims might be willing to accept some sort of millet system or one where each faith has its own way but with neutral strictures to protect freedom but clearly that's not what's being debated.

The debate is one side saying Muslims are incompatible with the country, and the other side saying they're compatible so long as they cede moral sovereignty and start down the long road of becoming Unitarians or some other faith colored appendage of globohomo that's gonna die anyway (the churches with the lowest apostasy rates are not the ones that just go along to get along). Hell, it's arguably already begun with Mamdani and co. You can see why people don't want to give inches away rhetorically.

Where's the great groundswell of support for the banning of Muslims? Even Europe, which has much more serious problems, probably won't.

You may have heard of this guy named Donald Trump. His anti-immigration ire is only marginally focused on Muslims right now, but your rhetoric would make my "Ginsberg t-shirt and coffee mug" mother want to limit and deport.

Liberalism doesn't really compromise, it just pauses to reload.

Liberalism is the compromise. If you don't care for it, the alternative is Deus Vult and blood eagles and the red ruin of your culture.

You may have heard of this guy named Donald Trump. His anti-immigration ire is only marginally focused on Muslims right now

Yes, because he said he would do it and then ran into a series of legal speed bumps precisely because he said he would do it and then settled for a much less ambitious policy. Even his attempts to target Somalis specifically yielded very little, because many of them already had citizenship.

And Muslim immigration continues, and will continue after Trump. And Muslims are now politically relevant in Democratic primaries and will continue to be so.

The high watermark for this sort of thing was 2016 and even then it didn't get particularly far.

In Europe it's even worse.

but your rhetoric would make my "Ginsberg t-shirt and coffee mug" mother want to limit and deport.

Okay? My goal wasn't to evangelize for Islam.

You can put my post on a flyer if you want but I just don't think it'll help you. IME progressives are incredibly stubborn about this. People will sit with an exmuslim who grew up in the faith and they'll listen to them tell them things like this and they'll decide they know better, when they don't even know anything about Christianity. Limits on white/mansplaining go completely out the window and you get subject to Tafsir Al Kaffir about what the religion obviously meant when the Qur'an or scholars said X or how this or that American policy or material conditions are why people are being killed for making the wrong cartoon.

Much smarter, more eloquent people like Sam Harris have been trying their entire career and achieved nothing.

Did the liberal state take the win on gay marriage and leave it at that? Or is it demanding the right to trans and indoctrinate your kids as well? And what's the response to complaints? (…) Muslims might be willing to accept some sort of millet system or one where each faith has its own way but with neutral strictures to protect freedom but clearly that's not what's being debated.

I think education is and always will be the crux here. The progressive view trends towards the idea that religious freedom is a right to be exercised by legal adults making an informed, personal decision as to which religion seems true to them after being exposed to the full spectrum of options, such that attempts by parents to raise young children within a particular religion scan as prima facie sinister attempts to box in their thinking before they're old enough to make up their minds for themselves as they're entitled to. The conservative view, meanwhile, is rooted in a deep feeling that the right of parents to raise their children within their hereditary belief system is sacrosanct, and any attempt by the state to mitigate this amounts to a sinister totalitarian plot to brainwash kids and break apart communities. One is individualistic, the other is communitarian.

These are idealized views, of course: religious conservatives would struggle to defend against the charge that they're just upset at somebody brainwashing their children other than themselves rather than anything more principled, while progressives don't cover themselves with glory with regards to "okay, but are you actually giving young minds an unbiased range of options or are you just weighing the scales in a different direction". And misc. interference patterns arise from the ol'Oppression Olympics, such as progressives sweating bullets when asked to criticize sharia schools as their principles should normally dictate. But nevertheless, I think that's the basic dichotomy at work, the scissor-statement nature of "the state should stop parents from indoctrinating children into their religion" as a proposition.

The religious conservative view is not that parents have a right to propagate their worldview. It is that we are right and you are wrong, and children are highly impressionable and need paternalist guidance.

I mean, sure. But there are, in my experience, religious conservatives who, to the extent that they tolerate other faiths, think it is in order for children of those faiths to be educated as their parents see fit, even if those parents are wrong - while it is in some deeper sense not in order for the state to indoctrinate them into anything. They regard it as much more degenerate for the state to teach e.g. Jewish children to be woke communists than for their Jewish parents to teach them to be Jewish, even if they think Judaism is a profoundly blasphemous heresy. Part of this may be strategic thinking about what equilibrium most favors their own religion, but I've always gotten the sense that there's a deeper instinct at play, a sincere belief about the natural law and disgust at the state muscling in on what should be the prerogative of the family. Maybe that doesn't apply to you, but it's a thing, and I suspect it's a fairly widely-shared gut-instinct.

Yeah, as a religious and relatively conservative person, I would say that the natural role of a parent is to take care of their child and a child to be instructed by their parent. Thus, while the parent (or rarely the child) can do something bad enough to warrant severing that bond, severing the parental bond is itself an act of violence and should only be done in extreme circumstances.

Thus I wouldn't want to take kids from "woke communist parents" or whatever - even if I was absolutely convinced that they were wrong, taking kids away from their parents is a good way to convince them you are wrong. Whereas I think that a good parent-child relationship and familial relationship serves as a model and a stepping-off point for other relations in society. Turning someone towards religious truth (or social or political truth, to the extent that there is such a thing) is, I think, more difficult if their first relationship (with their parents) is disordered. Thus, while a sufficiently disordered relationship may be cause for separation, disordering a sufficiently ordered relationship may itself make a person's relationship with society (and God) more difficult.

Hopefully that makes some sense.

But what do you think they think of woke communist parents indoctrinating their children to be woke communists?

You're definitely correct about everything except that the Muslims are also going to go gay and trans just like Christians did.

Take a look at the cratering birth rates in Muslim countries. Look at the absolute softness of their military forces. The selection process of modernity hasn't even fully hit them yet. Can Abdul from Riyadh resist internet porn and video games? Doubtful.

Well Western Muslims likely could there's already gay affirming Mosques in the West. Non Western Christians don't hang rainbow flags in their churches either.

Don’t Islamic countries actually have very high rates, comparatively, of online Vice- gaming, porn, gambling, etc?

You're thinking like a Puritan. The point isn't to eliminate sin, it's moral hegemony.

Abdul from Riyadh can both watch porn and still be all for the murder of any gay person who got uppity and tried to challenge the faith.

Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order. (A lot of Muslims love to sin while vociferously resisting pork since it's an outgroup marker, for another example)

The real problem is whether Mohammed bin Salman feels the same. The state can only keep it's people fat on oil-created do nothing jobs for so long.

Lots of western Mohammedans eat regular bacon, and don’t check what the content of their sausage is, and eat whatever a bbq joint specializes in… while still refusing a pork chop. I’ve even met some who will drink vodka like a fish and then refuse beer or wine because Islam.

Right, homosexuality was a lot less stigmatized when everyone agreed it was a distasteful personal Vice.

I’ve even met some who will drink vodka like a fish and then refuse beer or wine because Islam.

You know, I can understand trying to rules-lawyer with the notion that the Qur'an only refers to fermented grapes when it says khamr is haram (most schools read the prescription as being against "intoxicants", period, but I think a minority did try that) but being fine with vodka but not beer is very odd.

Wish I knew what exegetical maneuvers justified that.

When I got to college I preferred vodka too, but that was because I came to alcohol late and just hadn't acquired the taste for beer and decided I'd rather get fucked up as fast as possible. But I was past justifying it religiously.

I suspect that ‘exegetical’ was not these people’s reason.

Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order.

...Then what are honor killings about?

Oof, fair. It's about your daughter/sister/relative being a whore and harming the family's collective honor, and needing to correct this (presumably because she refused to be corrected the easy way).

Geographic and class bias but, ime in West Africa, killing your daughter for being a slut wasn't something commonly contemplated but the idea that the gays and their flags were not to be tolerated and the President could just handle them harshly enough to drive them out or at least underground was much more common. It was bad for the President to be torturing locals but those people...eh.

Meanwhile, heterosexual sex tourism was apparently ineradicable.

I'm more thinking that the only groups that have successfully resisted modernity are the ones that have extremely strict systems set up to defend against it like the Amish and Hasidic Jews. Even groups like Mormons are getting steamrolled. I think Muslims will get steamrolled too. They might still maintain their "otherness", but they'll abandon their true belief and become feminized just like other groups have.

The Amish and the Hasidim have(often badly dysfunctional; these are not paradaisical cultures) worldviews alternative to modernity. The Mormons are fundamentally modern people. That's the difference.

And Islam comes with a complete premodern worldview and value system, complete with legal code straight out of the eighth century.

And Islam comes with a complete premodern worldview and value system, complete with legal code straight out of the eighth century.

So did pre-enlightment Christianity and Judaism. Canon Law and Jewish law aren't that different from Sharia.

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