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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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Remember the moslem vs LGBT controversy earlier this year in Michigan? Now it's Canada's turn:

Rallies and marches were held across Canada on Wednesday with the goal of eliminating Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) curriculum and gender inclusive policies from schools.

In Calgary, where local media reports that the anti-trans protesters outnumbered the counter-protesters, a disturbing scene unfolded. The protest’s organizer, Mahmoud Mourra, stood on a low concrete wall, cycling through people, including children, who he encouraged to speak to the crowd.

As one young boy waits to come up to the microphone, Mourra says, “Those guys, they want to tell my son or my daughter for she can be he and now they come with the new term she can be it, a cat or a dog.” Mourra, who was charged by Calgary Police with anti-2SLGBTQ+ hate motivated criminal harassment from online incidents in June, then characterizes the 2SLGBTQ+ community and their allies as "unacceptable, confusing, mentally ill."

Most of these protests were carried out by moslems and after relentless attacks from the Canadian establishment, one of the largest moslem organisations of Canada put out a statement on Twitter - clearly not backing off. This tussle reopens the wounds from earlier this year. Many white liberals were often the first to defend moslem immigrants/refugees and now many are feeling betrayed ("we stood for you, but you won't stand for us"). The right here in Europe has long been using liberal talking points to try to coax white centrists to oppose moslem immigration, but a key feature of both the Michigan brouhaha and this current controversy is that there is no longer such a strong streak of opportunism. Indeed, one gets the sense that many Christian conservatives are elated to have found allies in the fight against LGBT+ ideology.

I think this raises a key dilemma for liberals. If culture is much "stickier" than they assumed, would having a liberal immigration regime necessarily be a good idea? Conversely, might we see a more relaxed stance from the right which has traditionally been very hostile against 3rd world migration, particularly from the Islamic world? We've been told for decades that Hispanic immigrants are very "conservative and family-oriented" but this has mostly been exposed as a hoax. The 2nd gen typically assimilate quite rapidly into liberal culture. The same may not be true to the same extent for moslems.

Finally, for many moslems, voting for the left-liberal parties was often a "necessary evil". In Germany, the Turks are notorious for overwhelmingly backing the social democrats while they vote for Erdogan in supermajorities. On economic policy, they are rational but on social issues they are voting against their own views. What these small tussles may signal is that moslems perhaps feel secure enough not to blindly follow the left out of fear of a nativist backlash from the right. They swallowed the social programming as a necessary evil but this is clearly starting to wane. Clearly, the white left and the brown moslems had a very effective electoral alliance for many decades and I am not one to declare it dead this soon. However, I doubt we will ever get back to business as usual. Something is rupturing here.

I think this raises a key dilemma for liberals. If culture is much "stickier" than they assumed, would having a liberal immigration regime necessarily be a good idea?

I doubt US or Canadian liberals will ask this question, at least when the people in question are brown(you periodically see Canadian progressives handwringing about Dutch calvinist immigration in inconsequential ways). Instead they’ll double down on needing gender unicorns in kindergarten classrooms.

The OP has been deleted, but I’m really curious about how it led to such a response. Where’d gender come into it?

It was a post about much based Muslim immigrants to Canada/US maybe causing liberals to reevaluate their attitude to 3rd world immigration. Actually kind of high effort even if naive.

@ZorbaTHut Have we considered preventing users from deleting top-level posts? I don't remember it being a problem in the past, but it's getting kind of annoying.

I have considered bringing it up, however there was only one recent case where I suspected foul play. Most top level comment deletions are for good or "ok" reasons.

As a moderator I can see deleted comments. Duplicates are the most common reason, followed probably by wrong location posts (responding to the top level or the wrong comment).

If we see anyone abusing top level comment deletions we will take action. But I think it would be best to leave the functionality available for the common use case of mistake posts.

Removing the account name I'd say, in case they weren't wanting it linked to them. (And if it is already in archive.org or someone's scrape, then too late anyway)

It is getting tiresome but I'm going to advocate this restriction only apply to posts with answers if possible.

People make TLPs by mistake, and they shouldn't need the admins to delete them.

If it’s technically possible I’m going to second this, at least as applies to the CWR.

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