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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Quran damaged at school recorded as ‘hate incident’ by police

The home secretary has expressed concern after the police recorded a “hate incident” at a school where four pupils allegedly caused “slight damage” to a copy of the Quran.

West Yorkshire police became involved at Kettlethorpe High School, Wakefield, after a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game. It was damaged, allegedly after being dropped in a busy corridor.Four pupils were suspended for a week and the police intervened as false rumours spread that it had been set alight.

Inspector Andy Thornton addressed concerned parents at the local mosque and told them the damage was being treated as a “hate incident”.

Tudor Griffiths, the headmaster, said there had been “no malicious intent” but the pupils’ actions were “unacceptable”. Wakefield council said the Quran had suffered “slight damage”.

You can also watch this hostage apology video from the mother, apologizing, earnestly explaining Islamic dogma while wearing a hijab like she's some Dhimmi. I don't know how to put my contempt for that entire situation into words.

This to me seems like more confirmation of by now an ancient belief of mine: being an alleged victim group that's willing to kill people is worth more than the sum of its parts. If everyone just admitted that the fear here was that Muslims would riot, hurt the family or just generally misbehave there would be no doubt that what happened was deeply ominous and the police - and everyone - would have to pick a side.

However, because there's the patina of victimhood, actions that should be deeply worrisome instead get to be written off as defending against racism. A Swedish man being able to reliably trigger violence by burning a book is somehow not a worrying signal from the minority group, it's about Swedish "far right" types. We wasted a lot of time debating whether Charlie Hebdo was "Islamophobic" , as if it had anything to do with the price of tea in China.

The desire to cast all ethnic groups as oppressors and victims prevents basic analysis here.

The standard argument I've seen against hate speech law is that we can't punish what's in people's minds. But maybe we can add: you can't trust people to treat minorities and their differences sensibly. As in: we're apparently doomed to conflate "racism" against "gooks" for owning all of the grocery stories with being worried about groups that can be reliably triggered into illiberalism and, even worse, outgroup violence by not-even violations of medieval norms (this isn't the first time that straight lies have been used to enflame this issue)

And nobody can do anything with this information. Cause it's racist.

And yes, I think it possible the police acted quickly (and out of proportion) to forestall the sort of drama we've seen elsewhere when Islamic norms are violated. Hell, it might have even been to the boy's benefit for people to hear that the police are on it so they don't seek self-help (until everyone lets it go). But, if that's your local maximum, you're far too close to Pakistan for my liking.

Astafgorilla! this is beyond parody.

Although you could have made that exact same statement about every nudge that got the UK to where it is now and be just as accurate. But that phrase has lost all meaning by now.

Reading through the responses in the common UK subreddit it seems to be unanimous condemnation/shock at this chain of events. Usually, there is some ambiguity that allows the wokes to argue for the Muslims, but that doesn't seem to be evident for this specific case. Nonetheless, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything positive change to arise from this.

The UK really backed themselves into a corner with their Muslim issue, it seems to me they are going to end up like the US where they have to permanently deal with a group of people that hates their guts and causes much mischief but there is absolutely nothing that they can do about it, and given birth rate trends, the Muslims will eventually within a generation or two reach a sizeable enough mass that you can't just beat them into submission like the UK could (totally should) do right now. The silver lining is that many of these problems arise because the non-Muslims have to actually mix and mingle with the Muslims, if they end up becoming like Blacks in the US, they will eventually segregate to the point that both groups are out of sight out of mind for both groups. I am sure quite a few parents updated their priors about Muslims in the UK proceeding this event. Going to take a few more.


This is doubly funny for me, someone who lives in a Muslim country that refused to let in any Syrian refugees and cracks down on any instance of radicalism (within its borders) with the might of the sun. All the west had to do was to deal with radicalism with extreme prejudice and point towards the Muslim Gulf states that do the exact same thing for plausible deniability. But no one said mind viruses can't kill their hosts.

the Muslims will eventually within a generation or two reach a sizeable enough mass that you can't just beat them into submission like the UK could (totally should) do right now

Muslims birthrates are getting lower everywhere but in Britain ? I understand their minority is mostly derived from some very rural part of Pakistan, that's thought of as 'country bumpkins' even in Pakistan, but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

One thing I absolutely do not understand is, why Britain hasn't banned their first cousin marriage practices, which they do serially, which resulted in a 3% minority being 10 fold overrepresented in the category of severely disabled people. I was told that first cousin marriage, practiced serially is almost the same thing as brother-sister incest.

Optics of warehousing vast amounts of disabled people aside, this is probably harming them as a group in a major way, as inbreeding depresses IQ substantially. (~10 pts was found in inbred Muslim children in India vs their non-inbred Muslim neighbors)

but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

Yes, this was the counsel of hope that was endlessly given over the years. Basically a "hang tight" to all of the immigration skeptics. It was all supposed to work out (and, cynically, if it doesn't you can't exactly unscramble the eggs).

I don't know if there was ever good reason for believing this, or Europeans just looked across the pond at the integration of Irishmen and Hindu-Americans and assumed it would be the same for them with Muslims.

It's been a few years since I've checked on the issue, but iirc there was an issue in polling of younger Muslims being too or perhaps even more radical than their parents.

There was notable enough illiberalism in polling that public figures originally pushing for limitations on "Islamophobia" had to admit it didn't go as smoothly as expected

It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs. Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong. We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2m by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.

For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

...

It should come as no surprise that Muslim liberals are in despair. They knew all of this long ago. And unlike the political elite and the liberal media, they recognise that British Muslim opinion is hardening against them. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has had to seek police protection because of her liberal views, argues that the optimistic belief that time and social contact will naturally lead to the integration of Muslims is mistaken: “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”

Almost the platonic ideal of "act like all minorities are the same then get mugged by reality"

Astafgorilla

Huh? What does this mean?

I don’t think England is big enough to self-segregate. America ended up like this thanks to huge tracts of land and ludicrous mobility. And, you know, the historical starting conditions of a population legally bound to one region…

Its a mockery of the phrase "أَسْتَغْفِرُ اللّٰهَ" usually transliterated as "Astagfirullah" meaning " I seek forgiveness from Allah". Muslims usually say that when they see/hear/experience/think of something bad.


As for segregation can't we model the UK as a US state? There are US states with stark segregation where you can go from peaceful neighborhood to shitstorm by crossing the street.

Edit: Didn't think about population density.

Ah, makes sense.

And yeah, I guess that’s a fair size comparison. Though I think those small-distance American segregations pale in comparison to the difference between, say, a Midwestern and Deep South state.

This is part of the reason I’ve basically decided to admit I’m a bigot up front so I can have intellectual honesty.

After the DOE came out saying lab leak seems correct (or possible or likely etc) I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians (which I think was mostly just reclassify normal violence as hate violence; also widely done by blacks and not the people who were talking about lab leak early on). Then I came across official lefties spreading that message and understood why it was being parroted further into the internet as the official tribe “narrative”.

This is a I would say worse than your example - with Muslims I do think it’s direspectful to purposely damage another groups sacred objects and the group of kids actually did something wrong; though blown massively out of proportion. In the lab leak case there’s nothing wrong with doing scientific analysis (I guess only my view) trying to figure out why a deadly pandemic occurred. But “violence” is nonetheless the cited reason why it can’t be talked about (or that might be a euphemism for Trump talked about it and he can’t be right).

And to a third degree labeling something “racism” or “violent” that a group is talking about can then cause “violence” on the group labeled “racists”. We’ve had violence against conservatives by crazy people who now associated those people with being actual Nazis.

At this point I’m not sure how humans can even talk about anything since any discussion could make a group look bad and then be justification by some crazy person to do violence against them.

The whole 'Anti Asian Hate' rhetoric has always felt like a weird attempt to bandwagon racial animosity/'Me Too' the whole BLM thing.

In the vast majority of Western nations, especially the developed post-colonial ones, Asians have the best average life outcomes in terms of education, income, crime, lifespan etc.

As an aside: Early during Covid there was a narrative for a couple of weeks of east Asian business owners experiencing racism from the majority population in them not visiting their businesses out of fear of covid. Plenty of people repeated this on twitter, opinion columns were written and even state officials made mild comments in that same direction.

Then a news paper did a small investigation where they went around and asked Asian restaurant owners what their experience was and it turned out that yes they were suffering economic hardships but not because the native Swedes didn't come, because they still did, but because their co-ethnics didn't, because they consumed a lot of Chinese media...

It wasn't the Asians trying to start this and noone had even really bothered to ask them what was going on before they ran with the xenophobia narrative.

Where can I read this article?

I don't mean this to challenge. merely to ask. do you remember that exact newspaper? I'd love to have that saved for posterity when arguing about this in person in the future.

I believe it was SvD but it could have been DN as well, I can't find the article though after googling a little. The whole issue quickly became moot when the country locked down a month later.

The one article I found that explicitly mentioned the number of customers was in Expressen though and it's behind a paywall so can't tell you what it's says beyond the headline. I don't read Expressen though so I doubt I remember it from there.

Also, it seems I had forgotten that the Chinese ambassador was trying to stir up shit as usual, but that's its own issue.

I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians

Discussing the possibility that covid leaked from a very specific facility hosted in China: Racist

Insisting that covid happened because Chinese people eat weird shit: Not Racist, apparently?

The reality is that the mechanism went the other way. Discussing the possibility of a lab leak needed to be tabooed for the sake of certain political ambitions. Calling it racist is just the go-to for doing that.

To steelman the distinction, I believe would be something like this:

Accusations that COVID was created in a lab by the Chinese is racist because it means to imply that Chinese people were either lazy, incompetent or malicious enough to create a lethal bioweapon that has caused many deaths, and so are to blame for these deaths.*

Accusations that COVID emerged because Chinese people eat weird shit is not racist because we are expected to understand that different cultures have different traditions and that framing their customs as being weird is the racist part so the non racist option is to give them plausible deniability because hey, it's weird to eat [pineapple on pizza or whatever else people from X culture eats] too.

Not saying I agree with the above, but I just feel the need to point it out in case anyone really didn't already understand the reasoning behind it. I do agree that your framing does make the distinction seem a bit ridiculous.

*Incidentally, now that tensions between the US and China are rising, federal opinions are starting to like the sound of this theory more and more.

The reality is that the mechanism went the other way. Discussing the possibility of a lab leak needed to be tabooed for the sake of certain political ambitions

It might honestly come down to "Trump said it first". Which is scary.

Actually strongly agree pushing Chinaman ate the head of a bat and started COVID doesn’t seem worse for them than a US funded lab had bad safety protocols.

So yes saying latter led to Asian violence makes no sense to me.

Clearly there are groups out there terrified of deserving the blame for violence. Or, I suppose, trying to use that fear as a rhetorical bludgeon. Alright.

Why does that suggest admitting bigotry?

When in this case the lefts accusing the “lab leak” early conspiracy people of being bad people and the reason they didn’t take it seriously….and yada yada yada inciting violence against asias. So they are basically just using bigotry as a bludgeon. Bigot, the “bad man”, etc seems to be a favored rhetorical tool. I basically just want to disarm that tool and say ok I’m the bad guy but here’s my arguments for the opinion.

a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game.

Notice how they don't mention why he was told to bring in a Quran after losing a video game. The book falling out of a bag on its own is nothing big and certainly not deserving of the extreme response it got, but an extreme response it did get which makes me suspect that the child was told to bring the Quran to school by his "friends" so they could do something nefarious to it, and they were caught before they could begin their act. This could be what the mother was (quite rightly) apologising for, not the book suffering light damage.

Could just be bullying if they knew he was autistic. Are you implying his friends were Muslim, too?

The book falling out of a bag on its own is nothing big and certainly not deserving of the extreme response it got, but an extreme response it did get which makes me suspect that the child was told to bring the Quran to school by his "friends" so they could do something nefarious to it, and they were caught before they could begin their act.

This religious community's calling card is an extreme response to nothing. And pure speculation, belied by the article :

A boy had taken the Quran to school last week and given it to another pupil who read out passages on the tennis court, according to Akef Akbar, a councillor who is working with the school. He said the book was later taken inside, where it fell on the floor before being put in a pupil’s bag.

In any event, it would be nothing to apologize for, burning the coran is a public service at this point.

When he made up his religion, muhammad took care not to declare artifacts holy, so no one could do to him what he did to the little statues of the old gods of mecca. Thankfully, his flock has not followed his lead in this matter, so anticlericals have a clean attack angle. It should be burning on public television constantly, giving muslims a chance to return to the True Islam.

The local imam said that anyone who resorted to threats “is not truly following the teaching of Islam”. He added that Muslims would not tolerate disrespect of the Quran.

No threats, just the violence I guess. OK

One could argue that all religions’ calling cards are extreme responses to nothing…

Even the Jains?

Do you think not eating onions or garlic, because they must have some rudimentary consciousness, because they live through multiple seasons, is not an extreme response to nothing? Not to mention all the other insane behaviors designed to prevent the accumulation of negative karma.

I’m actually not familiar with the spiritual doctrine of the Jains. I’d imagine they, too, have built elaborate castles of abstraction on no worldly evidence.

Having a blended political/violent approach is a pretty well-established way to accomplish political goals (although I doubt Muslims are doing it deliberately here).

Many terrorist groups have a political arm. The IRA had the Sinn Fein, etc.. The implication is always "give us what we want or our less civilized brethren might do something unfortunate". It seems to be pretty effective as it allows different people to respond to different parts of the message. You don't burn the Quran because it's intolerant. I don't burn it because I don't want to be beheaded.

although I doubt Muslims are doing it deliberately here

Both sides didn't come together and make a plan but the more peaceful illiberals ARE aware of the value of the violent element. IIRC this was basically obliquely stated in exactly the way you described by at least one activist during the row over LGBT education that got a teacher suspended.

TBH, how could they not be? It takes a particularly dim actor to not understand that violence colors the entire taboo here, especially when a lot of these discussions take place in the wake of threats or even violent action.

And, imo, anyone who comes out during such times to argue for "tolerance" while ignoring or downplaying the actual basis of this tolerance is at best a useful idiot, and at worst someone who is consciously providing a velvet covering for the steel fist.

I mean, there’s a reason why American red tribers are the only people who don’t care about violating Islamic taboos, even as plenty of others are happy to say offensive things about almost anyone else.

I'm not a red triber, at least not by my own estimates and I have gone out of my way to offend Islam.

I haven’t really had the opportunity, but I’d endorse doing so.

The disparity between how those that harm books American leftists favour vs those they oppose defend themselves is noteworthy.

When a supporter of the BLM movement engaged in a tradition (sci-hub mirror) that goes at least decades back, of destroying books he perceived to be too right-wing, his justification was that he was merely following protocol.

Here, the perpetrators at least feint regret.