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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24412 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.

To quote Sam Harris: "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas."

Obviously every religion has its fringe elements of crazy extremists, so I won't condemn them for that. But in Islam, even the mainstream central religion just seems bad in a way I don't see in other religions.

It starts with Mohammed himself. This isn't some ancient figure who's life is shrouded in mystery, he's pretty well documented. He was a warlord who led his tribe to conquer the Arabian peninsula, by a combination of cunning tactics, charisma, and ruthlessness. He frequently executed captives and allowed his men to take sex slaves. This was brutal even by the standards of his time, so he made up his own religion to justify it.

He was also illiterate. In Islam, this is considered a miracle, for how could an illiterate man produce a book like the Quran? Except... when you read it, it's just not a very good book. It's mostly vague references to the bible, with a lot of aimless repition. It's almost like a family guy joke: "hey, remember that time when Jonah got swallowed by a whale? Huh? Wasn't that a good story?" It doesn't have any of the interesting insights or metaphors that other famous holy books have. In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing screed I'd expect from a charismatic, but illiterate leader. This is why the Quran is usually not actually read, but simply chanted, mindlessly, five times a day, as a form of brainwashing.

In older times, Europeans called Muslims "Mohammedans". That's now considered outdated, but I think they were onto something there. The real, central core of Islam is a cult of personality, centered on that one man. That's why so many of them name their kids after him, that's why there's so many fanatics who kill anyone who even draws a picture of him, and that's why the entire religion still seems weirdly stuck in the past, in a way that even the much older religions like Hindu or Buddhism are not. The modern Muslim-American clergy who are trying to whitewash or modernise are having to struggly, mightily, against the core problems.

Except... when you read it, it's just not a very good book. It's mostly vague references to the bible, with a lot of aimless repition

This is actually generous. A lot of it doesn't even refer to the Bible. It refers to Syriac apocryphal tales and legends.

Dhul Qarnayn is based on the Alexander Legend, the Sleepers of Ephesus are in there for some reason as fact instead of legend, the stories of Mary are from known apocryphal texts like the Protoevangelium of James, the story of Adam in the Garden it uses dates is from the Cave of Treasures and dates back to the 5th century iirc.

The best bit of marketing Islam ever pulled was convincing even its critics that it merely copied the Bible. If only.

The best thing it has going for it is that most Muslims never read the original sources. Or the Qur'an itself for that matter. In Senegal people send one kid to a cram school to memorize it and never bother with actual scholarship.

It doesn't have any of the interesting insights or metaphors that other famous holy books have

I was stunned the first time I read Ecclesiastes. It was unbelievable to me that Jews had such an open wrestling with the existential dilemma in their Bible.

To be fair to Mohammed, he's just hamstrung by the format: the Qur'an is the direct speech of God so there's no existential dilemma. There's no chance for iterative development since it's a single book/oral tradition and not a core library. The Gospel authors got to draw on both the Bible and Greek bioi, Mohammed's people had no Scripture.

For a first draft Scripture I suppose it's impressive. The Arabs had one shot to avoid being subsumed by larger cultures and he pulled it off.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing screed I'd expect from a charismatic, but illiterate leader.

What makes you say that?

O believers! Do not enter the homes of the Prophet without permission ˹and if invited˺ for a meal, do not ˹come too early and˺ linger until the meal is ready. But if you are invited, then enter ˹on time˺. Once you have eaten, then go on your way, and do not stay for casual talk. Such behaviour is truly annoying to the Prophet, yet he is too shy to ask you to leave. But Allah is never shy of the truth. And when you ˹believers˺ ask his wives for something, ask them from behind a barrier. This is purer for your hearts and theirs. And it is not right for you to annoy the Messenger of Allah, nor ever marry his wives after him. This would certainly be a major offence in the sight of Allah.

Dhul Qarnayn is based on the Alexander Legend, the Sleepers of Ephesus are in there for some reason as fact instead of legend, the stories of Mary are from known apocryphal texts like the Protoevangelium of James, the story of Adam in the Garden it uses dates is from the Cave of Treasures and dates back to the 5th century iirc.

The best bit of marketing Islam ever pulled was convincing even its critics that it merely copied the Bible. If only.

The best thing it has going for it is that most Muslims never read the original sources. Or the Qur'an itself for that matter.

I feel like this presents less of a problem then you think for Islam most religions have these kind of things in their sacred texts and it tends not to move believers. The flood being in the epic of Gilgamesh for example. If you are a believer you just don't believe these stories precede yours and are rather corruptions of the truth. Muslims don't care about the Catholic canon and if you believe in Islam then one of Mohamed's key prophetic missions was to define which Abrahamic/Christian stories were true and which aren't.

From a historical perspective though it's a very interesting soup of heterodox Christianity and Judaism that Islam grew out of.

LOL that passage is hilarious. I hadn't even seen that one. I had to look it up to check if it's real, because that just seems so... on the nose. It's the sort of thing I would have written as a parody to make fun of it.

Also thanks for the info about the Syriac tales. I'm obviously not a religious scholar, so there's a lot I don't know. I did grow up enjoying stories from "the Arabian Nights" as a kid, and other pop culture stuff set in that region, so I think I can fairly claim to not be Islamophobic. It just took me a while to realize that all the stuff I enjoyed from there came in spite of Islam, not because of it.

I apostatized because of basic bitch New Atheist critiques of religion in general and the whole thing became very embarrassing when I realized there were much funnier reasons to reject Islam.

I feel like I'd also apply this criticism to Mormons: the origin story is, to put it kindly, a bit hokey. That said, the organization as a whole seems to produce members that are, at least when I've crossed paths with them, consistently reasonable people. Clearly it's at least possible for an organized group to transcend the "quality" of its founding documents, even though I think they still believe them earnestly.

Mormons do not believe the same things as Joseph Smith.

As very much an outsider, would you be willing to elaborate? Do you mean the ways, as the musical put it, "That the current President of the church, Thomas Monson [not the current President anymore], speaks directly to God", or something else?

The early mormon church believed in a kind of communal ownership(to fund its scams), polygamy, had a racial dynamic the quorum and president try to downplay, claimed its scriptures were actually the ancient egyptian for mormon stories, etc. Early mormonism was much weirder than today's version.

to fund its scams

What scams? Joseph Smith lost friends, faced life threatening scenarios, mortgaged his farm, and saw little profit that one would expect form a supposed conman. I would think that for a scammer, the opportunity cost to undergo such afflictions would not be justified.

Polygamy

It was a temporary practice that was limited to approved individuals and consensual. Joseph Smith's plural marriages were never consummated.

had a racial dynamic the quorum and president try to downplay

Pray tell? I assume you are refering to the priesthood ban imposed against individuals of African descent. Joseph Smith has ordained black people to the priesthood prior to its imposition, and Brigham Young has stated that it shall be temporary and a day will come when it is lifted. The rationale behind it is not known to the general public, but the most compelling theory in my view is that this is akin to Jesus commanding his disciples to prioritize their ministry to the Pharisees before expanding to other demographics. Since the lifting of the ban in 1978, missionary work has skyrocketed in Africa to an extent that French is on track to become the most widely spoken language in the Church in about 10 years or so. That kind of success would have not been possible under a colonized or pre-colonial Africa, and it was not financially viable prior to the pivotal Church finance reforms that were undertaken in the 1970s, and church converts in Africa and Latin America were typically destitute. A racial dynamic fails to explain why such restrictions didn't apply to e.g. Polynesians of an equally dark skintone.

claimed its scriptures were actually the ancient egyptian for mormon stories

The scriptures were written in a script referred to as Reformed Egyptian by scholars, which are simply characters derived from the ancient Egyptian writing system, which have been altered and condensed. Corroborated examples of this phenomenon include Demotic, Meroitic, the writing in Papyrus Amherst 63 and the Elephantine Papyri, or most notably Coptic.

It remains LDS dogma that the accounts of pre-Colombian white-looking Christians in America in the Book of Mormon are a historically accurate account of events that happened somewhere in the Americas (LDS archaeologists think that Central America is the best candidate, and Google AI suggests that Joseph Smith came to this conclusion himself as soon as he bothered to read up on pre-Colombian America) in the 1st millenium AD, and that Joseph Smith translated the book from the plates. One minor change is that the LDS Church is now willing to be explicit that the English-language Book of Mormon was an inspired translation made with the aid of seer stones, rather than the result of careful academic study of the inscriptions on the plates, but this isn't a change in dogma - just putting a stop to a bad practice of the early Church endorsing children's picture books which showed Joseph Smith working by candlelight with the plates and a notebook.

There appears to be an active programme of LDS-funded archaeology looking for evidence of Nephite and Lamanite settlements in Central America, which (depending on how serious and well-funded it is) implies that true believing Mormons actually believe this stuff.

I don't think Mormonism needs a historically accurate Book of Mormon - in the same way that Christianity doesn't need a historically accurate Old Testament. The power of mainstream Christianity comes from the Cross and Resurrection, and the distinctive power of Mormonism comes from the restored Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods conferred on Joseph Smith by angels claiming to be John the Baptist and various Biblical apostles respectively. Whether the prequel material is historically accurate or divinely-inspired myth doesn't affect the end result.

It would not be particularly surprising (although I wouldn't bet on it at evens) that after another 100 years of archaeologists not finding the Nephites and Lamanites that LDS Church abandons the literal truth of the Book of Mormon via progressive revelation.

Mormonism doesn't actually need the plates - given that they now openly admit that Joseph Smith didn't rely on the Egyptian text on the plates to prepare his translation, they could pivot to "the Book of Mormon is a modern divinely inspired account of (real or mythological) events in pre-Colombian America that God gave to Joseph Smith through the medium of the seer stones". But I would eat my hat with a seer stone in it if the LDS authorities ever accepted that.

white-looking

White is not used as a physical descriptor anywhere in the Book of Mormon.

after another 100 years of archaeologists not finding the Nephites and Lamanites

At most 3% of ancient Mayan civillization has been unearthed by archeologists to date. There have been roughly 200 alleged anachronisms in the Book of Mormon since its publication in 1830, with 70% having been corroborated today. Anthropologist John Sorenson wrote a book named Mormon's Codex which explores the authentic Mesoamerican correspondences in detail.

There have been 11 witnesses of the golden plates who have maintained their accounts to be true even after personal rifts have led to some of them no longer affirming Joseph Smith's legitimacy as a prophet, believing that he has lost his divine providence.

The Mesoamerican model is in fact the one that is nearly universally accepted by serious scholars for several reasons.

The Book of Mormon described Captain Moroni using his "coat" as the "Title of Liberty" rather than a document, ring, necklace, or tattoo that would indicate his title. Title and status being denoted one's cloak/cape that they wore is unique to Mesoamerican cultures to my knowledge. When Cortes first arrived in Tenochtitlan and met emissaries on one of the causeways to the city, one of the first things he was given was a cloak denoting his status as a diplomat, in recognition of him being the King of Spain.

Teancum assassinated Amalickiah on New Year's Eve. The Mayans expect the head of state, as the representative of his subjects to the gods, to resist and battle the underworld deities, as they were believed to be at their strongest at the turn of a calendar year. The Lamanites awake to their protector being deceased, and enter a state of profuse panic due to the cosmological significance,

The huge uptick in brutal warfare towards the closing chapters of the BoM is in line with the late Mayan preclassic period where Teotihuacan sought to establish influence and dominance over the entire Mayan region (who were at their strongest at around 450AD, roughly when the Book of Mormon ends). Hagoth's expedition, which abruptly interrupts the narrative in Moroni's writings, is likely describing Teotihuacan, indicating the Nephites turning to Teotihuacan.

There have been 11 witnesses of the golden plates who have maintained their accounts to be true

And none of those accounts establish a causal link between the inscriptions on the plates and the English urtext of the Book of Mormon revealed to Joseph Smith through the use of the seer stones. That is what I mean by Mormonism not needing the plates.

Title and status being denoted one's cloak/cape that they wore is unique to Mesoamerican cultures to my knowledge.

My understanding is that cloaks were used as status symbols in Masonry during Smith's time.

More comments

Care to elaborate?

Mormons have a central authority that can quickly creatively reinterpret the doctrine when threatened by the American government. Splinter groups that rejected the new interpretations are small and practically powerless. Conversely, Muslims have no single recognized leader since the death of Ali and live in multiple countries.

A country less scrupulous about the whole "freedom of religion" thing could insist on recognizing a single, "traditional" form of Islam in its borders and demand it had a legible leadership hierarchy it could bully into submission (pun intended). The US, with its dozens or hundreds of bottom-up Christian denominations, doesn't have the institutional knowledge to do this, and was lucky Mormons were so centralized.

I would agree that the Mormon origin story is, like you said, "hokey." Or even just straight-up BS. That one book review on ACX pretty thoroughly eviscerated it, IMO.

That said, I like Mormons. They seem like genuinely nice people, with some good moral values, even though I disagree with them on a lot of things. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of my favorite sci-fi authors are Mormon.

I can't say the same for Islam. I feel like the so-called "Islamic golden age" was mostly just leftover Greek knowledge mixing with Persian culture and the silk road at a time when Islam hadn't yet fully dug in its claws.

That said, I like Mormons. They seem like genuinely nice people, with some good moral values, even though I disagree with them on a lot of things. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of my favorite sci-fi authors are Mormon.

Likeable and actually useful members of society. Like the Amish but less strange.

Although I've joked I want to become 2005 Amish (cell phones and internet but no smartphones or modern social media). If someone starts that society sign me up.

You can just live that lifestyle at the cost of personal friction

Although I've joked I want to become 2005 Amish (cell phones and internet but no smartphones or modern social media). If someone starts that society sign me up.

You could become a drug dealer, they still use flip phones and avoid advertising on social media...

If only that were true (perhaps it's true for successful ones). For the kind who get assigned a public defender when they get caught and charged, it is certainly not true. They love long text conversations full of "code" that wouldn't fool a 6th grader, and they never delete text chains. They are also very active on social media since it's not like they have anything better to do.

Would you call them Joshepites, like you would Mohammadeans?

Pre-Script, when I searched Mohammed to see if that was first or last name, before I even got there, I read this:

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Muhammad Muhammad - Wikipedia Learn about the life, career, miracles, views, and legacy of Muhammad, the founder of Islam and the messenger of God. Explore the sources, perspectives, and controversies of his biography based on the Quran and historical records.

Learn about the career of Muhammad. Genuine miracles, guaranteed. Oh by the way, he's messenger of God. What the fuck is the blurb, this summary, and where does it come from?

/images/17896195321742878.webp

No, because 'Josephite' is already term in recognized but fairly uncommon religious use in the Christian tradition.

Mormon is, technically, the name of an angel who appears in the LDS tradition but not other ones; it would be the equivalent of referring to Catholics as 'Raphaelans' because protestants don't believe in that particular archangel, and actual LDS do not prefer it. 'Mormon' is already the equivalent of calling mussulman 'mohammedans'.

Technically-technically, Mormon was an editor and prophet, not an angel. The angel was his son "Moroni".

In the end, a lot of the ‘alternative blame stories’ for 9/11 don’t really make a lot of sense. Even blaming the Saudi Arabian state, which is kind of the ‘safe edgy’ of 9/11 theories, isn’t really fair. The Saudi monarchy was in some ways substantially more anti-Islamist, than, say, the (Republic of) Irish political leadership was anti-PIRA, although both were broadly opposed to terrorism. There were just a lot of rich individual Saudis who had access to plenty of oil money and political and religious institutions that heavily sympathized with Islamist aims, and the pact between the House of Saud and the clergy after the siege of Mecca made it very difficult to root out bin Laden allies and sympathizers from state institutions, so everybody kind of ignored it. The CIA also knew this. It is not hugely surprising that some Saudi diplomats, security officials, embassy employees etc might be involved.

The worst that the ‘Saudi state’ as a whole can be credibly accused of is tolerating religious extremists for understandable reasons and not undertaking a religious purge that would have risked the entire legitimacy of the state and made enemies of millions of its own people.

and the pact between the House of Saud and the clergy after the siege of Mecca made it very difficult to root out bin Laden allies and sympathizers from state institutions, so everybody kind of ignored it

As MBS showed it is quite easy. Sometimes cutting the Gordian knot or heads is the good way to do something.

He did it after the War or Terror began and likely had US backing.

I am sure that the saudi monarch at the time would have gotten Reagan on board with - I need to summary execute shitton of clerics and relatives that are too crazy, will you deploy couple of thousand of marines for peacekeeping while my forces subdue the backlash. Reagan needed KSA for the final breakage of the USSR at the time.

Islamists we’re on the US side of the Cold War

As the Rambo 3 misquote goes:

This movie is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan

(real quote from Rambo 3's end card is that it's "dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan", which well, has more plausible deniability now despite likely meaning the same thing in the people who wrote it's mind)

They were too busy shipping Islamists to Afghanistan back then.

MBS had to do an emergency crash purge to root out a conspiracy against him. That was after his father made fundamental changes to what was in effect the Saudi Constitution. It seems like he’s a smart guy, and he pulled it off. But none of that was easy or safe, and there were a lot of scenarios where the whole thing could have turned into one of the more lurid Call of Duty sequels.

It was easy but a lot of people had also died out, younger middle class Saudis had become more liberal, or spent more time in Dubai, globalization had become more entrenched, the time was comparatively ripe. It would have been extraordinarily brave to not do what they did after 1979 and I don’t think one can really fault them for it.

An interesting counterfactual I sometimes wonder is if Reza Shah, or more likely a replacement monarch, could’ve made a similar Pahlavi-Political Islam pact in Iran to what we saw in Saudi Arabia.

Possibly but Pahlavi had other problems besides political Islam and a much more developed society. He had Islamists， Communists and Liberals all against him. He was also very out of touch and high handed. Simply not banning independent parties in the parliament or letting protests peter out instead of shooting at them might have both worked. Look at what the king of Morocco did during the Arab spring sack the prime minister create a superficially changed constitution legalize some parties and let all the revolutionary energy peter out while you keep the power. That's what he should have done. Oh and not do stuff like champagne toasts on TV in a Muslim country and through parties to rival Versailles

I'm not sure Khomeini would have taken any pact deal he was as much of a revolutionary as the Communists in how he wanted to transform society.

I suspect he could have but, especially being closer to Russia geographically, he saw the Islamists as a nuisance and the communists as the real threat, rather than the other way around. He was wrong, but so were a lot of people, including the communists. While being nominally Muslim he also spent a great deal of time and money hyping up the pre-Islamic glory days of the Persians past. To be fair, Sisi has gone all in on Ancient Egypt hype over the last decade, but secular Egyptian military dictators from previous eras were more careful before the brotherhood was fully crushed.

As a general, you are always preparing for the last war, and as an autocrat, you are always preparing for the last revolution. In Pahlavi’s case, that was the revolutions of 1917 (or maybe 1871, really) to the middle of the 20th century, not a religious insurgency.

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.

More comments

The simplest explaination is that the speakers agree with Osama Bin Laden's overall worldview but think that his tactics aren't very productive (obviously they can't admit this outright).

Like, imagine yourself in the mindset of an open-minded devout young Muslim man and read Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Your response is probably something like, "well I am not about to fly a plane into a building, but he makes some good points." He's worried about the same things you are: Israel, secularization, sexual debauchery, consumerism, the plight of the Ummah. When you think about it, the tragedy of 9/11 isn't really Islam's fault, because America started it.

imagine yourself in the mindset of an open-minded devout young Muslim man and read Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Your response is probably something like, "well I am not about to fly a plane into a building, but he makes some good points."

Wasn't that a trend with young leftist women on Tiktok at one point? Which, I know, is meaningless, but still.

He's worried about the same things you are: Israel, secularization, sexual debauchery, consumerism, the plight of the Ummah.

Cool motive; still murder!

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