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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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A lot of these are genuinely shameful, and I'm not about to argue that the following one should actually be illegal, but this:

A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.

strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume @dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim. The linked article describing Steele's behavior as "polite questions" is ridiculous. In the first place, this was clearly a stunt, not some good-faith attempt to have an unprompted theological discussion with a stranger, as that blurb implies.

But more importantly, it was a mean-spirited and counter-productive stunt. If you're actually concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse in Muslim households, a woman currently engaged in an outreach effort whose whole purpose is to acknowledge and deal with the problem - and a volunteer, mind you, not a professional NGO grifter! - is the last person you should antagonize for the sake of drawing attention to yourself. If you've got balls, ask a Muslim preacher. At a push, ask a random woman in a niqab. But for fuck's sake, when someone actually tries to do something about the exact thing you're complaining about, don't put her on the spot in public in such a way that she must either obfuscate and come across as a hypocrite, or own up to an actively anti-Muslim stance. (Never mind that the latter might put her at genuine personal risk: it would instantly destroy her credibility with the very abused women from fundamentalist households that she's trying to coax into trusting her!)

So - Steele's stunt was stupid, cruel, and cowardly behavior. In a common-sense world the appropriate response would be a slap across the face that no one sensible would think of prosecuting as physical assault, but of course, in the age of TikTok ragebait, giving him "minority punches preacher who was just asking questions" as his claim to fame would just be giving him what he was after by other means. Is suing him in a court of law an appropriate substitute? No. But I sympathize enormously with the desire to punish this kind of heel behavior in some way and wipe that smug grin off the guy's face. As it stands, he wasn't charged with anything, just briefly detained, and I think that's probably a fitting level of inconvenience for the offense, societally speaking, though I wish it didn't have go through the justice system.

The fact that you think asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence — even as a "stunt" — warrants assault does not incline me to give much credence to your attitudes towards censorship. Frankly, the more I learn about your worldview, the more infuriating and alien I find it.

A doctor knowingly lying to the concerned parents of a trans-identifying child about the efficacy of "gender-affirming care" in preventing suicide? A-ok. Asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence? Grounds for assault.

I object to the characterization of what I advocated as "assault" - perhaps my reaching for the image of a slap was needlessly confusing. I refer to a slap of the old-fashioned kind that women could once give to men who behaved like cads - not as an act of violence intended to cause physical harm, but as the strongest available signal of public disapproval. Feel free to substitute your preferred kind of public finger-pointing to shame people who behave in horrid but non-illegal ways. Personally, so long as it is understood that the purpose of such a slap is not actually to knock anyone down, I rather wish we brought it back; I mean it very differently from the "punch Nazis" meme, for which I now realize it could easily have been confused. But that's a whole other conversation and not relevant here, so again, perhaps I shouldn't have gone there.

I also object, and more strongly, with continuing to characterize what Steele said as "asking someone a question", as if he had just asked for directions to the post office. He did not "ask the woman a question" in the sense of genuinely seeking information from her. What he did was either intended as a gotcha, or as intimidation - in other words it was bullying. Moreover, as I said, had she been incautious in her answer, it may have goaded her into a response that jeopardized her volunteer work, or even put her safety at risk - which Steele knew perfectly well. Now again. I do not believe that what Steele did should be a crime, any more than I think high school bullies should be clapped in irons unless they get too physical. But it was, to my way of thinking, incontestably bad behavior, and over-criminalization of bullying is not the same thing as criminalizing the earnest expression of political or religious opinions, let alone the criminalization of "asking polite questions".

A gotcha is not bullying.

Not in a private discussion. Where you disrupt a stranger's activities in public and put a gotcha to them to engineer a viral moment, yes, it is bullying.

I agree, but that leads us to the next question: do Muslims deserve to be bullied? That is, is the humiliation/ostracization of Muslims in Western societies an effective means towards generally desirable outcomes? (For the record, I think so, but preferably in a more limited sense.)

That may well be the case. But as I said upthread, I would have had no issue if Steele had been going after a Muslim preacher. What I find outrageous about this anecdote is that he picked, as his target, a woman doing volunteer work to fight Muslim domestic abuse - which is to say, a woman doing what she can in the direction of liberalization! Did she still identify as a Muslim? Possibly. If so, does this reflect genuine faith, or simply very reasonable fear of the social consequences of becoming an apostate? Unknowable. But either way, such a woman should be an ally, not an enemy, to someone earnestly trying to deal with Muslim-associated customs' negative impact on society.

This is the same kind of transparent nonsense as that stupid "sealion" comic, isn't it.

What "viral moment"? He wasn't filming anything. He politely asked one of his fellow citizens a rhetorical, non-personal question in a public place.

He wasn't filming anything.

…Wasn't he (knowingly) being filmed? I thought he must be from the moment I read the summary; I can't really make sense of his behavior and incentives otherwise. Perhaps I'm too Internet-brained. Where's the still that illustrates the article from, if it's not a screenshot from a video?

Immediately after he asked the woman the question, he left, and she tattled on him to the police. The police confronted him, and one of the officers was wearing a bodycam, which is where the still came from.

Huh. I stand corrected. I remain puzzled by his behavior, unless there was some sort of crowd serving as the audience in the moment.

strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim

That's insane. "Offensive to the point of derangement" means insulting and harassing people, not "being mean-spirited" or "not actually being concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse", if this was the actual standard, you'd probably have to arrest the entirety of the BBC, possible the whole of the UK government.

I'm reminded of the highly insulting but hilarious British satirical puppet series "Spitting Image."

Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior. He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head. I think that's plenty offensive enough to make the man a deeply unsympathetic victim of unjust laws, even if the laws are unjust. It's not about what he believes, it's about his actions.

And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse, i.e. the exact societal problem his stupid little stunt was intended to highlight. At the point when point-scoring for point-scoring's sake comes at the direct expense of actual furthering of the goals that points are nominally being scored for, I think you can start to talk about derangement.

I think your comment says more about the Muslim community than anything.

Well, yes. Just because I am very progressive for this website on a number of issues does not mean I am an automaton repeating the maximally woke point of view on every issue, and the dangers of Islamism, and illiberal customs perpetuated by Muslim communities more broadly, are among the things I take very seriously that the current progressive bloc is very bad at seeing for the massive problems they really are.

Well, the point is that free speech is important because it can be ugly while telling important truths. I agree the speaker in this context was not polite but he shined a light on the evils of Islam.

Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior.

For a given (very expansive) definition of "hostile", sure. The problem is that no one, and I mean absolutely no one, is under any obligation to be non-"hostile" to others. This sort of behavior is completely normal. Media, including public media, do it all the goddamn time.

He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head.

And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse,

The only people who are being offensive or deranged in this situation are the ones that would target the woman. Under no circumstances is the person asking the question describable as such.

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