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This reminds me of my tenure on the Atheism+ forums, back before my redpilling/blackpilling (I don't know what to call it, since I didn't really change my beliefs, I just realized the people I thought were on my side, aren't).
A+, as you know, was woker than woke before "woke" became a thing. And one of my "WTF?" moments when I realized these people are fucking crazy is when they went hard on defending... Muslims. Not against general racism and bigotry, but against criticisms that the "New Atheists" had no problem applying to every other religion.
At one point, the forum got trolled hard by a poster from one of the hater-forums who monitored them, a set of people running an account that adopted the persona of a gay man who proceeded to post long effort-posts about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia, and how seeing the latter "triggered" him, as a gay man, despite the fact that he was an atheist.
The mods on the A+ forum proceeded to take him very seriously and started modding comments that were too "Islamophobic."
He also declared that the term "homosexual" was homophobic. The mods proceeded to mod anyone who used the word homosexual.
I was one of the few people who pushed back and kept getting in arguments with him, until he eventually DMed me and let me know what the game was. I already suspected something of the sort, because to any sane person his arguments were so transparently nonsensical. But the mods and the other SJWs on the forum ate it up.
As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.
This does happen to an extent. Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.
But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies. I have a lot of other uncharitable and blackpilling thoughts I've been tossing around and trying to decide how much of it is Chinese Cardiology and selection bias.
I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."
It's one of those times that far-group and out-group are useful distinctions.
For the New Atheists, Christianity was the out-group. They lived/live in majority Christian countries. Christianity was the dominant religious and cultural force, and that was their enemy. Cool secular scientific rational materialism was being oppressed and kept down by the Bible-bashers.
Islam? That's the far-group. They weren't living under Islamic religious rules in Muslim-majority countries. So they could patronise Muslims and get the extra benefit of pats on the head for not being mean to all religions, just to the nasty ones like Christianity.
I also think the New Atheists/Atheism+ just didn't understand the reasons why people believe. If you're a believer, it's because you're stupid and/or hypocritical. You can't really mean the things you say you believe. So if you're anyway smart, you're going to be influenced by Western secularism and become more liberal, on the way to dumping religion completely. That people can sincerely hold and believe traditional tenets is one of those "does not compute" moments for them.
Hence why Dawkins etc. clamoured for arrest the Pope but never bothered calling for arresting the Grand Imam. Muslims just were not a threat to them or their way of life or their influence or power (such as it was).
Nah, that’s not it. Harris and Dawkins took tons of shit from A+ and the rest for being ‘islamophobic’. They know full well that Islam is far worse than Christianity (or Jainism, to take Harris’ favourite comparison), they just aren’t ready to compromise on liberalism (eg, free speech and immigration restrictions on muslims). They hope that liberalism will work like it has worked so many times before, even as it faces a more formidable enemy. An enemy whose primary weapon, death for apostates and critics, is designed to counter liberalism’s weapon, free speech. Sadly, I think the compromise is necessary. The risk is just not worth it.
But liberals have compromised repeatedly against freedom of speech. And Sam Harris have endorsed an ends justifies the means ideology. But is Sam Harris even a liberal or a neocon? That this question isn't asked, tells us what kind of ideology the tribe of people calling themselves liberals are comprised off. Plenty of far leftists and neocons there.
There is something more going on than principles here.
What is going on is that liberals have much less will to power and are more quoka like when it comes to standing up against groups associated with the left and the narrative tm. This also applies to those who might make an exception for one particular demographic.
This has to do with the history of the left, and how it has sided with said nationalisms, and political tribalism. It also has to do with the phenomenon of "running from the far right". The attempt to not be a far righter and have positions that are associated with the far right ends up with people endorsing unreasonable and unfair positions, since they are unwilling to actually admit that maybe those they consider as far right extremists are right on SOME things.
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Given that liberalism successfully defeated both national socialism and communism, all in the span of just 100 years or so, I don't see why Islam is supposed to be such a big threat to it. National socialism and communism even had the advantages of being mainly preached by white-looking people in economically advanced and militarily powerful countries, as opposed to mainly being preached by foreign-looking people in weak countries. Also, unlike with communism, there is very little danger of influential politicians and intellectuals in the West converting to Islam. At most they might be sympathetic to Islam.
And if you think specifically about secular liberalism, well, one can argue that secular liberalism didn't even just outcompete national socialism and communism in the span of 100 years, it also, while it was doing all that, basically ended Christianity as a political force in the West after first using it as an ally of convenience against national socialism and communism. Secular liberalism should not be underestimated. It has some powerful advantages against other ideologies.
I think liberalism would win anyway, but I’d rather not have The Eastern Front, Civil War Edition , if all it takes to avoid it is closing the border and telling imams they can’t teach death for apostasy anymore. As you say, islam is so weak that expansion by the sword is not even an option for it, unlike nazism and communism. So the wolf is not really at the door-door, we can just tell him to fuck off. It would be a huge own-goal to import a problem that’s so easily avoided. Let liberalism and islam duke it out in their countries, and they can have their algerian civil wars instead of us.
I'm not into that but to be fair, I am realizing now that the version of liberalism that defeated the Nazis and communists was quite a bit less liberal than the version that I want. For example, communists were actually persecuted back in the first half of the 20th century in the West.
It was not "liberalism" that "persecuted" communists. Liberals were often fellow travelers.
The society that defeated the nazis was not ideologically liberal but had a mixture of liberal and non liberal beliefs. Like in fact most of the people called far right extremists and hated by liberals today.
Contrarily, most people who complain more about the far right today have insufficiently conservative views and are also insufficiently pro groups associated with the right.
It is not fair for liberals who are quite more far to the left and antinativist, to claim that they are part of the same tradition to people who are actually part of a different tradition. Modern liberalism is part of the new left and it represents a break from the past. It is continuous from some extremists that existed in that period too, but not the general society. It is much more far to the left and antiwhite than what Eisenhower or Churchil argued for. Of course neither figure was successful in the domestic culture war on the long term.
I don't agree with focusing on intolerance to far left communists in the first half of 20th century as the problem of liberalism.
As society and elite institutions became more liberal and left wing this did not result in less authoritarianism.
snip
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-new-book-burners
Moreover, seems that this discussion is full of people who are forgetting the neocons.
Are coups, CIA involvement, and politicians like Zelensky who ban political parties and don't oppose new elections part of liberalism? Is the American miliary industrial complex, AIPAC, thinktanks, the lobyists who fund them and politicians like Nikki Haley who also is ex director of Boeing part of liberalism? Because they seem to be pushing for constantly more authoritarianism. What about the highly influential ADL and the mainstream liberal parties that are also promoting more censorship?
Is Greenwald and Snowden, and Manning and Assange, part of liberalism, or the enemies?
If we define liberalism more narrowly, then liberals should be less arrogant about their current victory. A question arises if they even qualify. And if we define it more broadly, then it isn't the principled pro freedom, pro rights, against racism ideology that it is claimed to be.
Is modern South Africa a success of liberalism, or a failure? Unlike the academics who see no evil, hear no evil and can't see left wing extremism, we should examine this.
What about those who support mass migration and are against islamophobia, and are antinative racists and support hate speech laws to enforce this ideology? Do people who defend rhetoric like "kill the boer" such as ADL qualify as liberals?
To conclude, there is a confusion about what liberalism means from liberals and is hard to separate it with far leftism and even warmongers, neocons, the American establishment and the desires of partisans for say the uniparty, or Democrats in particular.
What you advocate will likely end with the muslims who claim they will take over the west, and other groups who do this, to succeed. And no it won't be an elimination of tribalism and a freer society.
Has the last decade lead to "liberal" societies becoming freer or less free under this trajectory of the tribe of liberals gaining more influence?
They became less free and more in the direction of discriminatory hateful antinativist authoritarian states which are indeed lead by people who are incapable of standing up to fanaticism if promoted by the ethnic groups they sympathize with. And this element is key for liberalism's willingness for prioritizing "rights" is applied in a wildly inconsistent manner.
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Yes, the Nazis allowed quarter-jewish people to marry Germans while many white Americans were not allowed to marry quarter-black Americans.
It's not really free speech, freedom of religion, or due process that defeated the nazis but overwhelming fire-power and millions of slavic bodies.
Modern secular liberalism does not seem capable of sustaining birthrates, so all the muslims have to do is come in and wait for the old liberals to die out for a victory by default.
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Near-group and far-group was part of it, but a larger part, IMO, was that Muslims code as POC (notwithstanding the tiny number of white converts) and thus can only be the oppressed, never the oppressors.
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