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Calling it a "cheap rhetorical trick" is itself a cheap rhetorical trick to try to dodge a hypocrisy killshot. The alliance between Western feminist progressives and Islamic fundamentalists was always completely psychotic under any ideological framework other than "they just hate the West and don't believe any of their own bullshit". Rubbing their noses in it and taking the opportunity to diminish the extent that anyone takes progressive feminists seriously is points fairly scored.
It isn't, it's calling a spade a spade.
I'm confident it's a cheap rhetorical trick, because if the form of the argument were used against you, you would call it out as a low grade gotcha. "If you care about X, and Y is bad for X, then you should in all cases oppose Y and support any action whatsoever that harms Y" is obvious nonsense of the highest order. Just substitute "children" for X and imagine all of the policy positions that would result.
Uncharitable at best. Failure to model your opponents at worst. I think there's definitely an aspect of hypocrisy here but characterizing the situation as psychotic is not true. There are mechanisistic reasons we see this play out. It does have its own internal logic.
Ahh. So it is just arguments as soldiers then.
Gonna have to bow out here, I don't see any further exchange between us on this topic being productive.
Which are?
I mean, I can think of a few off the top of my head - Muslims are fargroup, ingroup enemies matter more and I can hurt them more so I pick the battles I think I can win?
I don't live anywhere near brown people so I consider them a nonfactor to my immediate safety compared to white people, who are competition within the same class?
I think demographics are destiny and Muslims vote as a political bloc, I don't want to do anything that would weaken my political side?
The iconic weapon of Islamic fundamentalists are AK-47s that fire bigger bullets, and getting shot by one or blown up by an IED carries more risk than catching one from the bog standard American right-wing nutjob AR-15 derivative chambered in 5.56?
I don't think you're talking about any of those, but those seem like pretty logical reasons to me. The one thing that pretty much can't be argued is that Islamic fundamentalism is better for women than western conservatism - and if you do, please bring receipts, I'm interested to see the outcomes on a chart somewhere. It'd be really funny to find out if there's some negative correlation to be found on a chart between heart disease and hijabs.
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It's nonsense because you're going with absolutes. The widespread inability to explicitly think in terms of trade-offs and hierarchies of values is a common leftwinger/Sith mistake. What we instead see is progressive feminists almost entirely ignoring the plight of women under Islam (or British girls being mass raped in the UK) because they have no real ability to engage with the nuances of something having both good and bad qualities under a leftist intellectual framework, which pushes hard in a Manichean black/white, good/evil, oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Muslims are [oppressed category], and so dwelling on their failings is haram.
Compare that to libertarian or conservatives, who are much more comfortable talking about tradeoffs. You can't trick them into banning swimming pools because ~50 kids drown per year and THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
The underlying internal logic is "we just hate daddy, I mean the West/America/capitalism/white people". The higher level pretend logic is "Muslims are an oppressed group and we have no ability to consider, much less address, crippling and dangerous flaws in oppressed groups". The highest level is just stop thinking about it, omg
Nope. Older waves of feminism won so hard that even most conservatives genuinely think Islam's treatment of women is fucked up. Then they see progressive feminists going apeshit over white men being mildly less than perfect doormats, while refusing to even talk about Islam. Progfems get more upset about white Christians because of the Handmaid's Tale (a made-up story literally inspired by Iran) than the 10k girls raped in the UK.
This is pretty fucked up. And beyond that it is a massive, ruinous hypocrisy, and until it's addressed, it's entirely fair to dismiss surface claims and motivations from people doing it. Anyone can escape that trap just by saying that Islam is wrong about women.
Which won't happen, for the same reason those people can't bring themselves to say itt's OK to be white.
Set aside what could and should Western "progressive feminists" do about plight of women under Islam.
Would you also ask, for example, first world labor union organizers:
"Why you care about such trifle as lunch breaks and pay raises for already spoiled first world workers? Do you know that millions of workers in Africa are actual slaves? Why you do not fight against slavery in Africa?"
The same for every first world problem - the problem is much worse in third world, do you want everyone to be effective altruist concentrating all their efforts on the most dowtrodden people of the world?
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Feminism is an instrumental criticism of fundamentalist Islam for American political conservatives. It is rightly seen as an instrumental criticism by people who disagree with American conservatism, but wrongly seen as 'not worth worrying about' by them. Women actually do have few rights under Islam.
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No, it's more like an attempt by you to satisfy yourself emotionally. To score points fairly you would have to distinguish between feminists who support fundamentalist Islam and feminists who do not, and you show no signs of wanting to do that even though I am sure you understand the distinction.
Yes, it's very emotionally satisfying to be proven correct.
Oh, I'm sorry, I must have missed that. Can you please point to the prominent progressive feminists who have been more critical of fundamentalist Islam than, say, the made-up, Iran-inspired Christian fundamentalists in the Handmaid's Tale?
Can you point to any who are showing any degree of hope for the current hostilities improving conditions for women in Iran? Or even a single progressive feminist who would rather see [women in Iran become more free plus Trump gets to count a win] than [thousands of women in Iran are massacred by their government, but Trump takes an L]?
Or if you don't like either of those framings, how would you care to distinguish those two groups? I am willing to be convinced that the latter exists. Make your case.
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So as long as I see feminists being fellow travellers for Hamas and for Iran, for Pakistani grooming gangs and Moroccan pickpockets, for shooters at the Bataclan and truck drivers at Christmas markets - it is a distinction without a difference. I have never heard a mea culpa from a feminist, about the Southport stabbings at a Taylor Swift concert. Even when girls are being killed and raped, they don't care because their overgrown mothering instinct sees brown people as babies who don't know what they're doing.
It's frankly insulting that you think that wordcel games like even matter in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
It's always 'but think on how it will affect the poor, innocent Muslims'. Norm Macdonald parodied this attitude thirty years ago, and your posture is exactly the thing he skewered. I don't know if you know this, but 'moderate' Islam is a spook. 'fundamentalist' Islam is just Islam, a liberal cope. We know it from the Muslims themselves that there is only one correct interpretation of the Quran and the Sunnah. The fact that feminists uncritically swallow lies about this is proof that no one should take them seriously.
Generally feminism is a class-interest movement for urban, educated, professional women in the west. That's why they don't tend to care very much about things like sexual assault in the military, third world oppression, grooming gangs, etc., but care a lot about college campuses or US men's only spaces.
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There is no world leadership of feminism, no feminist constitution. You are talking about feminism as if it is a monolith. This is simply not an accurate view of reality.
That's true, but it's not like it's impossible to broadly survey the alignment and publicly held ideological stances of feminists in general and to notice that the average feminist holds views that would put them into the center-left at least, if not further to the left. Notably, in modern times this part of the political spectrum is strongly correlated with stances on migration that directly imply that the West, particularly Europe, will become much more Muslim towards the end of the century. How e.g. 35% Muslim France is going to be compatible with the ostensibly central ideological tenets typically held by feminists is, to put it mildly, an open question.
Blaming specific negative consequences of (Muslim) migration like the rape gangs on feminists directly is unfair, in that I agree, but it's quite clear that the average feminist is pretty much all-aboard with the political program that brought those rape gangs here, is in fact quite likely to advocate for accelerating that program, and has no plausible, pragmatic & politically viable plan to ensure that it's not going to get worse as the prominence of Islam increases as the direct consequence of that program. For that, I think it is fair to blame feminists.
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Men and women are different.
Different people have different interests [and different motivating factors], and vice versa.
Thus, the null hypothesis is that people who share the same biological conditions are going to act the same way. (Feminists already make this assumption when it comes to men having different interests, and they are correct.)
The extent to which this is true, whose interests happen to dominate, and if those interests should be dominant vary due to local conditions. There are some cultures where men and women have learned to get along, there are some that define themselves by actively refusing to, and there are some where the overriding concerns are more pedestrian, like "where's my next meal coming from?". Women in the 1st tend not to be feminist because they've figured out gynosupremacy is legitimately destructive, and women in the 3rd tend not to be feminist because failing to deal means you starve.
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And yet, feminists all remain on the same page; you would be hard-pressed to find any self-described "feminist" who is as critical of fundamentalist Islam as of the West. For that matter, I stuggle to think of any willing to publicly criticize Islam at all, and would expect them to be summarily excommunicated from the broader movement, even if it has no "Moma" with the formal authority to do so. Yes, crushedoranges actually does have an accurate view of reality.
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