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Narciss posted:Hindus and Buddhists never overran a third of the known world in violent conquest after founding their religion. They may form violent sects and butcher Muslims in their own country, but I'm having trouble thinking of holy wars that took place on anywhere near the same scale as the Islamic conquests. The closest I can think of are the crusaders in the pagan slavic/baltic states. That's because the Christians were too busy having religious wars against each other. Some eight million Europeans, mostly in the devastated German states, perished during the Thirty Years War. And since everyone is bringing up the Crusades, my favorite by far was the Fourth Crusade. The primary difference is that the Christian nations never really united; while the Islamic conquests were basically one big united empire early on owing to their origin as a conquering state, Christendom was divided pretty much constantly after the fall of the Roman Empire, and was simply too weak to accomplish any real religious conquest (at least, until they crossed the Atlantic and violently conquered territories that eventually dwarfed the Muslim empires at their greatest points). Of course, that's all long-distant history, as Islam has seen its share of fragmentation over the centuries too. Wanderer posted:Looking up the sociopolitical context of the modern Middle East and how it feeds into its current tendency to produce zealot-infested holy warriors has been on my "one of these days" list for a while, so I'm interested in this thread. I don't know if there's a single book that covers it, but you can get a good idea just by looking at the history of any Middle Eastern country. However, you want to look further back than the Cold War and Israel - most of the real issues date back to the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was starting to collapse and Western powers still considered it their God-given right to decide the fate of every square inch of land that wasn't populated by white people or defended by somebody capable of standing up to a Great Power. Pretty much the entire Middle East was under British or French control by the early 1920s, although some had fallen to Western ambitions much earlier - Iran, for instance, was essentially divided between Britain and Russia by 1907. The foundation of Israel was a thing, but all of Israel's neighbors at the time had only been independent nations for a couple years themselves, having been under the yoke of European empires for the past thirty-plus years.
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Jul 5, 2015 03:43
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GyverMac posted:I am honestly wondering about something here. I can name only 3 countries where the muslims are the majority and in wich there are currently no big episodes of violence linked to religous extremists. Thats Oman, Malaysia and Brunei. I'm sure theres more? Correlation != causation. Is there a single Muslim-majority country with a government more than a hundred years old? Entire continents were ruined by Western imperialism.
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Jul 5, 2015 15:35
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Liberal_L33t posted:As far as those in the Arab world and beyond who openly sympathize with ISIS, I am not willing to extend them much sympathy on account of them being "misinformed" somehow. ISIS reminds the entire world of their brutal ideology in every single video they release. Anyone who decides to extend them support even if exposed exclusively to propaganda released by ISIS itself is pretty much a monster. Yes, yes, you don't need to remind us that you're an entitled white American who is incapable of empathy. Brutality, by itself, does not render a movement monstrous, or else most of the revolutionary movements and fights against (or for) oppression in history would be monstrous. People who sign up for ISIS don't do so because they're inhumane monsters who love brutality, they do it because they feel that the goal is important enough to be worth any brutality that might be needed to successfully carry it out - and considering how successful ISIS has been, it's not surprising that people who might agree with their ultimate goals are signing up despite the brutality. quote:That being said - it is true that ISIS is rejected by such a vast majority of Muslim around the world and overt support for them is a small fringe. The problem is that most of this population is still Islamist, politically speaking Really? I wonder what kind of common element would cause the Islamic State In Syria to be composed almost entirely of "Islamists"? I guess clearly it's just an ingrained Islamic predeposition toward violence and slaughter, there could be no other possible reason why Christians and Jews and Hindus aren't joining the Islamic State In Syria I'm significant numbers! quote:- and it should be clear by now that Islamism inevitably leads to ISIS-style medieval carnage. That's why it shouldn't be allowed to gain a foothold anywhere and establishing a "free and open democracy" isn't worth it if that leads immediately to a takeover by extreme Islamists. I am quite sympathetic to the much-despised arab liberals who are willing to collaborate with fascists to keep Islamist politicians from creating any more Irans or Saudi Arabias. If that means abrogating the god-given democratic rights of a bunch of daughter-murdering illiterate hicks, it is genuinely a shame, but very much worth the cost. (of course, none of this calculus applies to Assad, given that he's a long-time ally of Iran and a tacit supporter of ISIS). Aaaand there we go! Would you also say it was worth the cost for the Weimar government's "free and open democracy" to collaborate with fascists to abrogate the god-given democratic rights of idealistic idiot socialists? The moment you decide fascist brutality is justifiable to suppress the democratic rights of some group you don't like, democracy is dead and brutality is the order of the day...especially if you're doing it because you're a racist who thinks that a particular minority is too uncivilized and stupid to be allowed to have a say in government. Liberal_L33t posted:Radical Islamism is much more a reaction against the spread of modernist philosophies in the middle east than it is any kind of movement against economic imperialism. In fact, the record of Islamists in opposing western economic exploitation is non-existent, because they only care about opposing secularism and individualism. This idea that the genesis of modern Islamic terrorists is a result of bad old western-style nation states being established and disrupting the wonderful, harmonious balance of Islamic scholarship that never oppressed anybody is a bunch of communitarian horseshit. The reason that Islamist movements didn't significantly oppose Western economic exploitation in the first half of the 20th century was because they were weak and insignificant then, both in terms of membership and in armament. Nobody* was selling arms to anti-government groups back then, and many of the iconic insurgent arms today didn't even exist back then. Also, much more importantly, most of those countries were heavily secularizing at the time, and Islamist groups were political nobodies until various Western-supported dictators started brutally oppressing any opposition to Western Azran posted:2) Can anyone help me enummerate the number of countries where female citizens are FORCED to wear skin-covering attire? I know there are places where it's either a preferrence or the equivalent of being a weeaboo, but towards Muslim Arab attire. Does it have to be entire countries? If not, it applies to some parts of Israel as well. Areas dominated by Haredi Jews will flip their poo poo if they think a woman isn't dressed modestly enough, right down to stone throwing and other violence. And god forbid a man and a woman walk next to each other in public, ignoring the gender-segregated sidewalks in some of these communities. God loving forbid. Despite the popular perception, Muslim countries aren't the only ones where women can be literally pelted with stones by religious people furious that they dare to wear a skirt in public.
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Jul 6, 2015 15:24
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rudatron posted:This is the question that really interests me. Why is this the case? It's not as if the US hasn't attempted, with some fervor, to to take on islamism. Sure, bring up Mossadegh, but it's not as if the west hasn't tried to undermine the islamic republic. Most likely because these religion-focused groups grow from a nonpolitical core that can be organized around, can be recruited from, and is difficult to completely ban because of its strong nonpolitical role in society. If all opposition political parties are banned, political speech and gatherings are banned, and prominent political opposition figures and groups are brutally persecuted and jailed or murdered, most political groups will wither and die as their leadership is shattered or driven into hiding and their recruiting abilities are heavily curtailed, and the populace can usually be convinced to tolerate that. On the other hand, public gatherings are a major part of many religious observances, often at private buildings owned by religious figures, and while modern religious observance is pretty decentralized, the various religious organizations and community worship groups still keep in touch with each other and feel a common kinship. Unless religious observance is completely banned - an unpopular policy, and a very difficult one to enforce - political religious groups are able to evade the worst of the oppression by integrating into innocent-looking religious congregations, and this allows them to more easily maintain communication, cohesion, and give them a large and easy-to-access recruiting base. Groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood can recruit from Muslim gathering places and Muslim community leaders, a convenience that socialists and democrats can't hope for in a fascist society. Even in the most powerful dictatorships, it's proven to be very difficult to completely extinguish a religion from a country, and too much repression will only encourage more of the faithful to arms. Also, the religious political position is typically pretty simplistic and intuitive: "bad things like Western exploitation, corruption, a bad economy, oppression by a secular dictatorship, and every other bad thing ever all happen because society/people/the government aren't religious and virtuous enough. If we throw out those evil corrupt secularists and collaborators and replace them with a sufficiently religious government, everything will get better! There won't be any corruption because only virtuous religious people will be in government, and we'll follow our religion's original precepts in every aspect of law and government, so everything will work better and unfamiliar foreign influences will be gone and we'll be divinely blessed and everything will be better!" quote:Which leads me to: Even fascism is usually pitched as a "reform" ideology. They're not a post-apocalyptic anarchic biker gang, raping and murdering and slaughtering Brutality is a hallmark of amateur or poorly disciplined armed forces, and they usually brag about it and show off because they think they're the good guys punishing the enemies of the people, particuparpy when the conflict is of a revolutionary or ethnic-war character. They display it to show everyone how heroic and devoted they are to punishing and slaughtering the people they've decided are responsible for or associated with practically everything wrong with the world. Liberal_L33t posted:As soon as the fascists of the Union chose to suppress the democratic rights of people from the southern states during Reconstruction after the civil war, democracy in the U.S. was dead forever and brutality was the order of the day. What a racist that Lincoln was. I mean, wasn't it their democratic right to vote for a local government that recognized their wishes and enforced their cultural laws? Yeah, what a fascist jerk Lincoln was, preventing white supremacist militias from depriving blacks of the right to vote. Truly, democracy was not restored in the South until White League armies were free to invade government buildings by force, throw out the democratically-elected governments, effectively block minorities' right to vote, and rig as many elections as they could get their hands on.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:34
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ToxicAcne posted:You have some good points but that Afghanistan stuff is bullshit. Although the wealthy elite in Kabul wee fairly secular, the vast majority of people lived in very tribalistic rural areas and hated modernization (usually with good reason). There's a reason why the resistance to the Soviet invasion was very strong. Uhhhh, because they were being invaded by a foreign country intent on propping up a brutal, violent dictatorship that banned religion and killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of people in a campaign of iron-fisted repression?
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Jul 7, 2015 16:22
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ToxicAcne posted:The elites supported the Communists (mind boggling I know). Mind boggling indeed! I'm quite surprised to hear that the wealthy elites were in favor of the waiving of poor people's debts, severe restrictions on lending, and the summary confiscation of land (without compensation) from anyone deemed to have "too much" land! And that's without even going into the numerous state-owned industries and the fact that even the wealthy weren't exempt from the waves of assassinations, imprisonments, exiles, and executions that accompanied the setting-up of a Leninist people's state which actively attempted to win the sympathies of the common people by attacking the "bourgeois" classes. I mean, I'm sure the new elites under the communist regime quite enjoyed it, but that's not exactly a useful metric. Jarmak posted:Holy poo poo ignorant Afghanistan chat, part of the reason the central government was as repressive as it is was because trying to violently force modernization on the rural areas because the fundamentalists in the rural areas were violently resisting modernization and secularization. The Soviets invaded because the central government was losing/lost that fight. Who cares? I'm suggesting that they fought so fiercely against the Soviets not because they're uncivilized savages who intrinsically hate modernization, but rather because a foreign country was invading their country in order to prop up a brutal, iron-fisted dictatorship that imprisoned or murdered everyone who disagreed with it, and that this foreign army was itself quite brutal and prone to actively attacking civilians. How modern or secular the country was at the time, and how modern or secular the dictator was, are both totally irrelevant. Would you also say that the British Empire was an ultimate force of good in the world because of its tendency to force modernization on peoples it tended to regard as ignorant, uncivilized savages, and that the silly colonized peoples should have just given in and let the British impose Western rule on them? Is the reason the Afghanis fought so hard in three separate wars against the British solely because they hate secular and modern life so much?
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Jul 7, 2015 21:45
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Jarmak posted:I know what you're saying and you're completely wrong, every side in that conflict was iron fisted and brutal and rural Afghanis view the central government as foreign invaders just as much as the Soviets. That's the point, Afghanistan doesn't have a national identity, the rural areas are completely tribal. Who cares? That's totally irrelevant to my point, which is that Afghani fighters fought so hard against the Soviets because they were foreign invaders trying to impose a brutal dictatorship that most of the country had risen up against, not because they're primitive savages who hate civilization. Smudgie Buggler posted:You're an imbecile and you have no idea what you're talking about. Rural Afghani tribes had been intermittently engaged in civil war against secular modernising forces based in Kabul since pretty much the mid-20s. Chief among their complaints, aside from the establishment of a national military which necessarily diminished the power of local warlords, was Amanullah Khan's attempt to take a leaf out of Ataturk's book and suggest that maybe it's no longer OK to be cutting off thieves' right hands and demanding women cover up or get beaten in the street. If Afghani forces are only capable of fighting effectively when it's against a secular Westernized group that is attempting to generously civilize the tribal savages out of the goodness of their white man's burden, then how come Amanullah Khan was able to win Afghanistan's freedom from British influence in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, just as the Afghanis had driven off the British nearly a century before in the First Anglo-Afghan War? Yes, there was plenty of resistance to him, and he was eventually overthrown, but it's not like the Khan dynasty was all flowers and sunshine! For example, Amanullah's father Abdur Rahman Khan, who created the the national Afghani military and suppressed the tribes' power, was a military despot who engaged in tactics such as forced relocation of tribes and ethnicities perceived to be troublesome, and references to his tactics in dealing with rebellions make mention of "towers of human heads" and "thousands sold into slavery". Truly it is a mark of the Afghani tribes' hatred for civilization that they hated such a secular and enlightened ruler, who only maintained power through brutal military suppression of repeated rebellions sparked by the harshness of his rule. The cause of Amanullah's overthrow was not that he and his reforms were less popular than other Afghani rulers of the time, it's that he pissed off the military with a number of measures like cutting their pay, firing most of the top officers, and so on. He was hardly the only Afghani ruler to try to modernize Afghanistan, either; most Afghani rulers of that period worked toward modernization, except for his deeply religious uncle, who he threw out of office in a military coup after a week on the throne. The difference is that when the inevitable uprising occurred against his attempts to centralize power in the government and force the entire population of the country to change their lifestyles at gunpoint, the military didn't like him enough to back him against the rebellions. Turmoil in Afghani government was by no means uncommon at the time, anyway. Amanullah Khan rose to power in a military coup against his predecessor, whose predecessor was assassinated in mysterious circumstances, whose predecessor was the brutal "Iron Emir" I mentioned previously. Amanullah's successor lasted nine months before being overthrown and hung by someone else who was assassinated four years later.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:13
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Calm down. Nobody's saying Afghanis are savages. All you've done is knock down the false dichotomy I've bolded above. You're tilting at windmills, and nobody's taking the position you're getting flustered about. All anybody's saying is that your view of civil strife in Afghanistan throughout the 20th Century being solely (or even chiefly in all cases, because we're not talking about one big monolithic conflict here) because of a desire of the popular classes to extricate themselves from foreign rule (or rule perceived to be foreign-influenced) is simplistic and not at all the whole truth. You are ignoring the massive and well documented reaction religious institutions had to the threat to their psychological and political hegemony over the uneducated masses posed by efforts - indigenous and foreign - to modernise a pre-industrial society. I'm not making some huge sweeping statement about the entire history of Afghani civil strife, though? I was initially responding to ToxicAcme, who did indeed refer specifically and solely to the Soviet invasion, and who stated that the main reason Afghans fought so hard against the Soviet invaders specifically was just because they were tribal and hated modernization. That's why whenever I mentioned a conflict I went out of my way to say which conflict I was talking about and use specific details about those conflicts and time periods, unlike the array of people intent on making sweeping general statements about over a century and a half of warfare which stretched over several ruling dynasties and included at least four separate wars against Great Powers.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:13
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Jarmak posted:Yes, I think everyone understand what you're trying to say, your characterization of the conflict is completely wrong, even limited to specifically the Soviet conflict (which separating from the civil war that instigated that conflict is so analytically rear end backward that I can't think of an appropriate analog). Yes, yes, feel free to tell me more about how the strawman you've constructed, which has virtually nothing in common with anything I'm actually saying, is wrong. That's very interesting.
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Jul 8, 2015 20:24
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Overall, I'm mostly reacting to the contention that it's perfectly okay to "modernize" native populations by any amount of force and that the only reason they could possibly want to resist it is because they hate civilization. It reminds me way too much of the rhetoric used by colonialists, racists, and 20th century dictators. Was it okay for Canada to forcibly modernize the natives by taking away their kids and educating them in special schools designed to eradicate their culture and force them to assimilate completely into white Canadian culture? Should Stalin get a pass for his brutality because the Soviets rapidly modernized Russian society and crushed organized religion? Equal rights for women is a good thing, but rapid forced modernization efforts that fail to respect the targets' culture tend to go well beyond just giving everyone equal rights and typically end up stomping all over the target's culture for the sheer sake of it. On top of that, these efforts typically tend to introduce the "civilizer's" cultural biases that may indeed go against human rights themselves. For example, although the British administrations in India and the Middle East typically banned violently misogynistic practices, they also imposed harsh bans on homosexuality with severe punishments, many of which have survived unchanged to the modern day.
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Jul 8, 2015 21:34
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Smudgie Buggler posted:How dare misogyny be stomped over. Hey, if someone wants to go forcibly impose equal rights and nothing else, that's just fine with me. But for some strange reason, whenever anyone - foreign or domestic - gets it into their head that they have the right to reshape an entire society and culture any way they please, they inevitably bundle in a whole bunch of bad poo poo with the good things they do. The British Raj banned the practice of burning widows to death, but it also imposed explicitly racist policies and purposely perpetuated the caste system in order to take advantage of it, imprisoned and tortured or killed tens of thousands of protestors, made homosexuality a "crime against nature" punishable with life in prison, and allowed famine to kill tens of millions of people even as British authorities protested that anyone too poor to eat simply did not deserve to live (an attitude exemplified by the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877). Stalin rapidly industrialized and modernized the Soviet Union at a practically unprecedented speed and practically banned religion, but he also engaged in major population transfers of minorities, imprisoned and executed massive numbers of people for basically any reason and sometimes no reason at all, and of course we can't forget the major famines he caused. For some reason, there aren't really any instances of someone successfully forcibly imposing human rights reforms on a society without pairing it with all-new human rights violations or slaughtering massive numbers of innocent people. Some would probably suggest that it's just a No True Scotsman problem and that a true human rights reformer could accomplish it just fine, but it is the nature of humans to be imperfect, and since there is no perfect human rights reformer, I'm inclined to think that the whole approach is fundamentally flawed. Relying on a single dictator (even a domestic one) to impose justice and human rights from the barrel of a gun without the consent of the governed seems to inevitably involve flagrant injustice and massive human rights violations. The goals may be partially noble (although always mixed with plenty of horrible) but the results always seem to turn out horrific.
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Jul 9, 2015 16:52
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Crowsbeak posted:I was wondering but could anyone give a good summary on how besides just the obvious oil money wahabism became such a potent force. Did not the failure of secular forces itself help bring this on? Secular forces either got poo poo on hard by the West, turned into brutal, incredibly unpopular military dictatorships which persecuted the religious hard enough to spark a revolution, or some mix of the two. Iran is a good example of both, for instance - due to oil concerns and its strategic location, it was subject to repeated Western interventions and invasions throughout the 20th century, one of which was intended expressly to dismantle the democratic institutions in Iran and force it to remain an absolute monarchy...until eventually a popular revolution removed the secular pro-America Shah and replaced it with the current Islamic anti-America government. Oops! Same goes for other countries. Let's not forget that ISIS rose from "just another jihadist group" to "a major success that is considered a threat by the entire world" during their participation in the Syrian Civil War against a secular military dictator known for his brutal state security apparatus and who had very recently been involved in massacring peaceful protesters. Hell, half the reason ISIS has been so successful is that Assad is so horrible that the West can't bear to support him, even though letting him fall almost certainly means handing Syria to ISIS.
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Jul 13, 2015 14:52
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Smoothrich posted:Boy that doesn't sound like the first half of the 20th century at all It sure doesn't. Especially in the case of Imperial Japan. The Germany example doesn't really stand up if you know anything more than the thirty second pop history take on Weimar Germany, but why pick at the details of that? Far easier to point out that by 1941, Japan had been the big dog in East Asia for fifty years or more.
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Jul 18, 2015 14:01
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Sethex posted:You're right that the left is not mute, i was wrong to use that word. But at times it feels that way when mainstream politicians claim the causes of the erratic religiously charged violence is not a result of religion. They're right, though? It's not like Syria and Iraq were bastions of peacefulness and understanding before religious fundamentalists rose up to fill power vacuums. quote:You may try an casually dismiss people like Trezzor as a one off but within the left are factions that hurl claims of racism an bigotry at pretty much anything mocking the sacred in a non-white people religion: And they'd be absolutely one hundred percent correct in those claims. Would it be "suppressing free speech" to criticize a cartoon featuring a greasy-looking man with an enormous nose wearing a kipah and jealously guarding a pile of gold coins while crowing about how he rules the world? Charlie Hebdo doesn't have much room to fly the "defender of free speech" flag anyway, given that they previously fired a cartoonist for a vaguely discriminatory comment against a minority religion that wasn't Islam.
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Jul 30, 2015 14:43
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Sethex posted:Swedish towns giving in to Islamists by introducing separate swimmings hours for men and women, says Iraqi-born women's rights activist Sara Mohammad: Some ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Israel have gender-segregated buses and sidewalks, among (many) other things. It's not, by any means, just an "Islamist" thing. Sexism in the name of conservative hyper-fundamentalism is not unique to any specific religion.
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Aug 7, 2015 16:02
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Sethex posted:Obviously this isn't me throwing out an "all refugees are fundie idiots" but the obvious is routinely lost on a lot of the Islamist apologists in this thread, so the obvious must be stated. People forced and shoved into an intensely overcrowded shelter with limited freedoms holding 50% more people than it's designed to are prone to fights over stupid poo poo? Stop the presses and summon the scientists, no one's ever discovered that before!
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Sep 12, 2015 13:14
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Sethex posted:Pretending that 9/11 didn't result in a demonstrable erosion of civil liberties an give birth to a surveillance state only serves to demonstrate how bad you are at seeing obvious causal chains because it offends your immature notions of multiculturalism. "Demonstrable erosion of civil liberties" has been the status quo in the US for decades, and the surveillance state predates 9/11 by fifty years or more. Effectronica posted:I don't think that there's anyone in this thread, and far, far fewer people outside of it than those who provide the basis for clobber statistics, who would actually suggest that Muslims be banned from using the ordinary court system. Even spectacular racists are unlikely to do so, I think. In fact, intimating that there's somebody who believes that seems vaguely insulting. What happens if people start being persecuted by the local community if they try to take their case to secular courts? That's a problem not just in radical Muslim communities in the West, but also ultra-Orthodox Jewish and radical Christian groups, where taking complaints to secular authorities is often considered to be not only a violation of religious law but also a dangerous betrayal of the group to secular authorities. Is the system going to be able to protect them?
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Sep 14, 2015 21:45
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Miltank posted:I prefer the state telling her that she simply cannot wear the veil. Sure. What happens if she doesn't want to abide by that ban? Then either she's forced to withdraw from all society except for her local religious community and avoid places where she might be challenged for wearing the veil, which plays right into the hands of sexists trying to keep women out of society...or she goes out into the world, gets arrested for wearing a veil, and either she gets sent home with a strict order to not come outside again until she stops wearing a particular style of clothing, or she gets a piece of clothing forcibly removed by a complete stranger. Boy, that isn't sexist at all! The question AA is trying to pose to you is simple: "what happens to the people who refuse to abide by the ban?" The presence of the ban essentially forces them out of secular society.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:47
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rudatron posted:Why does this poo poo always turn into arguments over the burqa/niqab? People do arbitration because it allows them to work things out based on a set of rules they've voluntarily and mutually agreed upon, even if those rules differ from law. There's no requirement that arbitration be conducted according to local law, although it's typically done that way because most arbitration is forced arbitration, and forced arbitration runs the risk of being smacked down by a judge if it seems like it's exploiting people too hard. As long as two people have agreed on the way a divorce or disagreement or whatever will be resolved, and no crimes were committed in the course of coming to that agreement, the state doesn't care how they resolved it; it'll happily honor the result. If a divorcing couple shows up with a fully-worked-out divorce agreement which accounts for all of their possessions and other considerations, and both promise to abide by it, then the state will happily rubber-stamp it and push it through and it doesn't much care whether the agreement was worked out by respectful one-on-one discussion or a religious arbitrator working from religious principles or even just flipping a coin a bunch of times. If two people willingly agree to have a non-state-affiliated court judge a civil case using religious law rather than secular law, then the state simply has no reason to get involved as long as they both willingly agree to abide by that judgement, and there's no obvious exploitation going on (for example, bribes). Criminal law is a different matter, obviously, but in matters of civil law the state doesn't care whether you have the case judged by a rabbi or even Judge Judy, as long as you agree not to run crying to the state if it doesn't go your way.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:17
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Liberal_L33t posted:This is part of the point - such an arrangement is not sustainable in the long term, and the point of failure is more likely to be on the religious side (women choosing/being allowed to temporarily forgo the face-concealing veil) than on the secular side (the law being ignored or not enforced). If the community's insane standards of 'modesty' contribute to keeping a woman from even being able to leave the house, said woman is more incentivized to make a clean break with those standards and settle for "only" wearing clothing that covers every inch of skin outside the face. Two problems with that. First of all, it's not unsustainable. Highly religious people tend to concentrate in specific places, so there are tons of tight-knit religious communities where outsiders are unwelcome and nobody ever calls the police, so it doesn't mean she can never go outside, it just means she can't leave the tight-knit highly religious community. She's still able to go visit her neighbors and attend religious services and maybe even visit establishments that are deeply part of the community like that religious restaurant the next block over. There are places - even in the US - where people call the unofficial community religious vigilante group instead of the police. She's just unable to go to secular stores, restaurants, schools, or anything else secular. It just contributes to the insularity of the community and prevents her from getting even a glimpse of secular life and society. Second, and far more importantly: what if she wants to wear it? I know you're all about denying women agency, but as unbelievable as it might be, there are cases of women willingly choosing to wear a niqab, of their own free will, without any compulsion or oppression from the men around them. In that case, it's not "the community" that's keeping them cooped up inside, it's secular society, which has made it clear that she is not welcome and expressly excluded her from all of society based on her choice of dress. This forces women into the insular, tight-knit religious communities I described in the previous paragraph, which can only lead to them being further radicalized. Smudgie Buggler posted:But isn't that an unironically valid point? It's not exactly unheard of for people with malicious intentions to disguise themselves to evade detection. I mean, don't you think there are good reasons to make someone wearing a balaclava or a full-face bike helmet take it off before being allowed through airport security? If yes (I assume yes), why should those reasons not apply to religious face coverings? Why? They're going through a metal detector, a see-through-clothes machine, a full-body frisking, and then since they're obviously Muslim they'll be randomly selected to be brought off into a side room and interrogated by several TSA officers for forty-five minutes, while their papers are closely scrutinized and their luggage is thoroughly inspected by hand, eye, and X-ray. And then they'll probably be full-body frisked again, just for the hell of it. I wouldn't be surprised if TSA demanded the removal of a niqab anyway since the screening process includes absolutely no trace of respect and dignity for human beings, but I don't see how, after an hour of relentless security screening, anyone's going to expect to find a previously-undiscovered bomb behind that mask.
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Sep 16, 2015 15:27
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Sethex posted:The rationale isn't that people want everyone to dress the same, it is that the women who must dress like this are confined to a social structural of severe gender inequality. An the cost those women pay and the young girls who grow up with the niqab normalized is far greater than a women who wants to suit up like a ninja. What about the women who willingly dress like that, because they want to, with no coercion whatsoever? If you want to combat abuse of women, then combat it directly, don't just randomly ban elements of cultures you consider to be sexist and then pretend that helps anything.
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Sep 16, 2015 16:51
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Sethex posted:What? A women who no longer wears a niqab an isn't able to is going to have a really hard time imposing that on her offspring, second the niqab significantly reduces the capacity of the individual to take in new ideas. So in a sense it does combat the cause. What, is it made out of special brain-blocking fabric or something?
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Sep 16, 2015 19:12
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Sethex posted:To spell it out to the unimaginative person that you are, if you are interacting with people less and treated as an 'other' by everyone, you are going to encounter less ideas, hindering your personal growth as an individual. What about Western converts to Islam who want to wear the niqab? Liberal_L33t posted:In the context of a modern western nation, the state is virtually always a lesser threat to individual liberties than intrusive communities. If I had been born on a Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound (the nearest American analogue to the kind of hyper-conservative communities springing up in Europe) I would be a lot less worried about CIA wiretapping or whatever than my sociopathic pedophile neighbors and family members. Yeah, everyone knows that the state isn't a threat to minorities - the real threat to those minorities is their own friends and family! Especially in modern Western nations like Canada and New Zealand! Liberal_L33t posted:If there were, say, a woman who worked at the local pre-school and made a point of wearing tee-shirt with "THE RIGHTFUL PLACE OF ALL WOMEN IS AS MALE PROPERTY", or "KILL HOMOSEXUALS" or something equivalent, I would be feel pretty justified in saying those exact words, minus the 'bitch' part. Do you believe that such shirts should be illegal to wear in public? Cat Mattress posted:The crux of the issue is that you have liberal-minded Muslim women who want not to wear the veil, but are forced to do so, and they want the veil to be banned so that they can get the force of the state on their side; and you have fundie women who want to wear the veil. Forcing somebody to wear a specific garment is already illegal - just as forcing somebody to remove a garment is already illegal! The state is already on the side of women who are forced by violence or oppression to wear any garment against their consent, regardless of what culture that garment happens to be associated with.
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Sep 17, 2015 21:39
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