I find it ironic how most modern classical liberals are atheistic, and therefore by principle shouldn't confer special status to religion among the set of all ideologies, and yet when it comes to Islam they give it just such a deference. Religion is apparently a sacrosanct viewpoint when it belongs to the sacred ethnic outsider.
Yep, most people who call themselves classical liberals today are really neoliberals, so many that I often dispense with the distinction and simply refer to all of them as liberals.
I once admired Pluckrose but recently I've found her arguments tedious. She's always fence-sitting as if fence-sitting were in itself a moral virtue. She's always taking what she considers to be the middle way, a compromise. She would be happy to declare that the man with his feet frozen in a block of ice and his head resting on a burning barbecue was ideally situated because his average body temperature was normal.
The truth is that if there were a billion Nazis, and Nazis had been around for a thousand years, and there had been multiple different Nazi empires, and Nazis today controlled a significant proportion of the world's most important natural resources, then to some extent you would have to treat Nazism this way.
Muslim immigration should be cut all the way down to zero because it's just not worth the hassle, but in dealing with the Muslim world, it's better to promote the white lie that real Islam is moderate, because there are plenty of Muslims who want that to be true too, and it's best for everyone if they have the upper hand. It's worth noting that functional Muslim countries have spent decades begging western countries to do more to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi movements.
Maybe, but classical liberals don't even support blanket bans on muslim immigration, much less the deportation of all muslims from the West. (I support the deportation of all people of muslim ancestry from the West.)
Probably yes, unfortunately. But I would also support deporting muslims who are already here because keeping out muslims is even more important than upholding the Constitution.
If it’s fair game to violate the US Constitution, though, then what does that say about the rule of law?
As a side note, though, I view groups with a lot of bad apples similarly in a sense. I support profiling and whatnot, but I also support dignity and human rights to the extent reasonably possible for their more noble and virtuous members (in the case of Islam, this would apply to law-abiding and reformist Muslims, the kind who want to change their religion for the better). I mean, even for pedophiles, I support re-legalizing child sex dolls for the virtuous ones. So, Yeah, I do think that we should let liberal and reform-minded Muslims move into the West.
I've never before seen this argument for promoting the white lie. Makes sense. But this lie and the cover ups also enrage the vulnerable European public.
Shouldn't having an honest debate about Islam and its doctrines be vital to the idea that the real Islam is moderate, though? I mean, you can't effectively reform Islam without honestly confronting its problematic doctrines, now can you?
Agreed that the West should support moderate and reformist Muslims to the hilt, though, whether in the West itself or in Muslim countries.
Probably, but this is really an internal matter. No-one knows which combination of 'actually original Islam is civilized' and 'original Islam isn't civilized, but we should make it civilized' will do best in what contexts. Best to let people in the Islamic world figure it out, and help them where possible.
I think you make some good points here. But weren’t you just celebrating the cultural superiority of Afghanistan a few weeks ago? Hanania said you should move there (demonstrated preference). Are you moving?
Hanania responded to my post? (I have him blocked)
Again, I didn’t say that Afghan culture was great. I said it was not really any better or worse than normie liberalism. If I had to leave America, I would be indifferent between moving to Afghanistan and Iceland.
Yes. America has an active conservative movement which makes it the best country in the world to live in. If I had to leave America, I would go to Costa Rica or Colombia or some other Latin American country where the government is too weak to harass people who live in rural areas and keep to themselves. If I were forced to flee those countries I would go live in Eastern Europe. If I had to flee there, I would be indifferent between an Islamic country and a Western European Left-Liberal country.
I guess I could be indifferent for a while if the living standards weren’t too different. But if they weren’t, it would probably reflect integration into the global economy.
A high IQ person with an internet connection is going to have a much high standard of living in Afghanistan than the average Afghan. Albeit not as high as if they lived in a developed country.
“Classical Liberals also like to say that the vast majority of Muslims reject the views and actions of the extremists. But that’s simply not true. Polling consistently shows that huge percentages of Muslims support the most horrific forms of injustice imaginable.”
Sam Harris and Bill Maher don’t say such things. They always point out how radical Muslim opinion is.
I should also mention that America is separated by oceans from major Muslim population centers and is much more selective with migration. The average Pakistani American is richer than the average White American. No Pakistani grooming gangs in the US. Muslim Americans are often moderate like Zaid Jilani and Shadi Hamid.
No question there are serious problems with Muslim migration that people don’t want to address.
Helping others see the world clearly is better achieved by just stating the truth. Too often people equate differences of opinion with lying. It’s very acrimonious.
In order to see the world clearly you need to be able to tell who is deliberately lying, who is lying to themselves because they don’t want to face uncomfortable facts, and who is genuinely mistaken. It sounds like you are opposed to trying to understand other people’s intentions.
I can’t x-ray other people’s brains and neither can you. How much can be achieved with nothing more to go on other than what people say they believe? Do you imagine you can detect when someone is “lying” to himself? How does this work if he is party to the lie? Empirically speaking, what’s the difference between lying to oneself and sincere belief? (Answer: there is none, which suggests lying to oneself is nothing but a silly metaphor.)
You can watch people's facial expressions. You can listen to their tone of voice. You can listen to their words and watch their actions. Those things give you a lot of information about what they're thinking.
The dogma that "you can't read people's minds" is an absurd superstition.
> If Classical Liberal civic nationalism means anything at all, it means excluding Hans. When we exclude Hans, we’re not judging him on an accident of birth, we’re judging him on the content of his character.
Just a style suggestion: I was able to infer from context that ‘Hans’ is supposed to be a typical German name, but ‘Han’ is also the name of the world’s largest ethnic group, so I was a bit confused for a moment.
While I’m happy enough to say thar any policy that causes mass rape is a bad policy, and that immigration should be restricted for the good of the extant population - which on its own puts me firmly on the right - I’m fairly dubious that any intelligent alien monitoring Earth would see Islam as being a world conquering ideology, not in the last 200 years. On the other hand the various western humanist ideologies are indeed world conquering, by hook or by crook.
These ideologies that promote mass migration are downstream of the needs of western capitalist economics. It’s not WWII that generated a disquiet about ethnic states, that came much later as western populations started to see lower fertility. Capitalism produces whatever ideology it needs to move surplus populations around the world, in the 19C those surpluses were from Europe, now they are not.
The last 200 years have been a hiatus in Islamic aggression only because the West became technologically far superior to the Islamic world.
Left-Liberal ideology comes from a mix of universalist ideas and Christian ethics, not from Capitalism. If it had really been all about acquiring more workers, it would have worked just as well to go the eugenicist route and develop an industrial process for mass producing native babies - as the fascist regimes were in the process of doing.
Well done on the ad hominem. That’s really proven the point you were trying to make. I think you may want to read up on the word ignorant. It means to lack knowledge.
Caring about events older than 200 years is a long time to hold a grudge particularly for Americans who didn’t exist while Islam was a threat; even for Europeans it’s a bit odd to talk about Islamic aggression from the 7th C when the west effectively dominated the world for 200 years.
> Left-Liberal ideology comes from a mix of universalist ideas and Christian ethics, not from Capitalism.
Left-Liberal ideology is clearly derived from capitalism. In the 19C the left were the capitalists, the libertarians, the king slayers. The right at the time were British and European conservatives, generally trying to preserve feudalism.
But everything is downstream of what capitalism needs anyway, corporations are ok with DEI classes because DEI doesn’t substantially affect their bottom line, but they are hardly going to teach socialism during work hours.
When immigration stopped in the US in 1924 it was because capitalists became afraid of importing leftism, when we all became fanatically in favour of closed borders during covid it was because granny bourgeois might get a sniffle. Otherwise a few dead Europeans is a negative externality, needed to keep the wages suppressed and profits enlarged.
It’s interesting that someone posting from deepest Idaho, or wherever, are still scared of “totalitarian Islam”. Islamic countries have barely any state capacity when run by the Islamists, and only some when not - and most of those latter countries are allied with the US. It would be great if the US hatred of Islamists led to not supporting Saudi Arabia, or the head choppers taking over Syria, but we are where we are. And where we are is opposing Islamists verbally while supporting them militarily.
Also why are Americans clutching the pearls about this? Muslim immigration into the US is no threat whatsoever - pew reports Muslims in the US are to the left of evangelicals and the number isn’t substantial anyway.
There is a threat to Europe, from non assimilation of some, but by no means all, muslims. What handicaps Europe doing anything about this isn’t Islamic ideology, but capitalist and American ideology, the relatively recent ideology of open borders which was never European policy, and never a European belief.
In the interest of arguing against yourself to steel man your positions, you might want to start by looking up The First Barbary War (regarding "Americans didn't exist while Islam was a threat").
I’m fully aware of the Barbary wars and slavery. I sang a song about Britain’s not being slaves in my youth.
If you think that those wars were an existential threat to America or even Europe then I can only suggest that you buy better history books, or perhaps Google better.
None of that goes against any of the substantive points made here
Yes it does. You said that Americans didn't exist when Islam was a threat. The first foreign war that Americans ever fought was against Islam. So you've got just very basic facts wrong. I chose that just as an example, the easiest to pick out of your arguments. You are intent on framing the problem of Islam as American hatred. 🙄
I’m not a fan of Muslim migration to Western societies and I believe we should be extremely selective. Under no circumstance should any Muslim with a double digit IQ be allowed to migrate to any first world democracy. Perhaps it was fine for Germany to have working class Turkish migrants in the 50s - and Turkey is far more secular than other Muslim countries - but it’s enough.
There’s plenty to criticize in Islam yes. This idea that Sam Harris is an “Islamophobe” or that Islam is a race is ridiculous. That said I find the comparisons of Islam to neo-Nazism to be wrong. The UAE is a Muslim country and its green on your countries list. I don’t think you would put any country with neo-Nazism as its ideology as green on your list.
Islam is an Abrahamic religion. It is expansionist and missionary like Christianity and legalistic like Judaism. This is a toxic combination that leads to people wanting to spread Islamic law all over the place.
I find it ironic how most modern classical liberals are atheistic, and therefore by principle shouldn't confer special status to religion among the set of all ideologies, and yet when it comes to Islam they give it just such a deference. Religion is apparently a sacrosanct viewpoint when it belongs to the sacred ethnic outsider.
I’ll take an actual classical liberal over a national socialist any day.
True, but actual classical liberals are rare. The Students for Liberty / Reason mag types have lost the plot.
Yep, most people who call themselves classical liberals today are really neoliberals, so many that I often dispense with the distinction and simply refer to all of them as liberals.
brilliant, absolutely brilliant essay
I once admired Pluckrose but recently I've found her arguments tedious. She's always fence-sitting as if fence-sitting were in itself a moral virtue. She's always taking what she considers to be the middle way, a compromise. She would be happy to declare that the man with his feet frozen in a block of ice and his head resting on a burning barbecue was ideally situated because his average body temperature was normal.
Kinda like Bari Weiss. Better prose but still dogmatic libs.
The truth is that if there were a billion Nazis, and Nazis had been around for a thousand years, and there had been multiple different Nazi empires, and Nazis today controlled a significant proportion of the world's most important natural resources, then to some extent you would have to treat Nazism this way.
Muslim immigration should be cut all the way down to zero because it's just not worth the hassle, but in dealing with the Muslim world, it's better to promote the white lie that real Islam is moderate, because there are plenty of Muslims who want that to be true too, and it's best for everyone if they have the upper hand. It's worth noting that functional Muslim countries have spent decades begging western countries to do more to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi movements.
Maybe, but classical liberals don't even support blanket bans on muslim immigration, much less the deportation of all muslims from the West. (I support the deportation of all people of muslim ancestry from the West.)
A blanket ban on Muslim immigration would violate the First Amendment's establishment clause, no?
Absolutely not. First amendment rights don’t apply to foreigners who are outside our borders.
Based!
But they would prevent the US from deporting the Muslims who are already here, no?
Probably yes, unfortunately. But I would also support deporting muslims who are already here because keeping out muslims is even more important than upholding the Constitution.
If it’s fair game to violate the US Constitution, though, then what does that say about the rule of law?
As a side note, though, I view groups with a lot of bad apples similarly in a sense. I support profiling and whatnot, but I also support dignity and human rights to the extent reasonably possible for their more noble and virtuous members (in the case of Islam, this would apply to law-abiding and reformist Muslims, the kind who want to change their religion for the better). I mean, even for pedophiles, I support re-legalizing child sex dolls for the virtuous ones. So, Yeah, I do think that we should let liberal and reform-minded Muslims move into the West.
I've never before seen this argument for promoting the white lie. Makes sense. But this lie and the cover ups also enrage the vulnerable European public.
Shouldn't having an honest debate about Islam and its doctrines be vital to the idea that the real Islam is moderate, though? I mean, you can't effectively reform Islam without honestly confronting its problematic doctrines, now can you?
Agreed that the West should support moderate and reformist Muslims to the hilt, though, whether in the West itself or in Muslim countries.
Probably, but this is really an internal matter. No-one knows which combination of 'actually original Islam is civilized' and 'original Islam isn't civilized, but we should make it civilized' will do best in what contexts. Best to let people in the Islamic world figure it out, and help them where possible.
I think you make some good points here. But weren’t you just celebrating the cultural superiority of Afghanistan a few weeks ago? Hanania said you should move there (demonstrated preference). Are you moving?
Hanania responded to my post? (I have him blocked)
Again, I didn’t say that Afghan culture was great. I said it was not really any better or worse than normie liberalism. If I had to leave America, I would be indifferent between moving to Afghanistan and Iceland.
Indifferent? Really?
Yes. America has an active conservative movement which makes it the best country in the world to live in. If I had to leave America, I would go to Costa Rica or Colombia or some other Latin American country where the government is too weak to harass people who live in rural areas and keep to themselves. If I were forced to flee those countries I would go live in Eastern Europe. If I had to flee there, I would be indifferent between an Islamic country and a Western European Left-Liberal country.
I guess I could be indifferent for a while if the living standards weren’t too different. But if they weren’t, it would probably reflect integration into the global economy.
A high IQ person with an internet connection is going to have a much high standard of living in Afghanistan than the average Afghan. Albeit not as high as if they lived in a developed country.
“Classical Liberals also like to say that the vast majority of Muslims reject the views and actions of the extremists. But that’s simply not true. Polling consistently shows that huge percentages of Muslims support the most horrific forms of injustice imaginable.”
Sam Harris and Bill Maher don’t say such things. They always point out how radical Muslim opinion is.
I should also mention that America is separated by oceans from major Muslim population centers and is much more selective with migration. The average Pakistani American is richer than the average White American. No Pakistani grooming gangs in the US. Muslim Americans are often moderate like Zaid Jilani and Shadi Hamid.
No question there are serious problems with Muslim migration that people don’t want to address.
Sam Harris is a lot better than Pluckrose / SFL / reason magazine on this issue. I’ve never heard Sam Harris describe himself as a Classical Liberal.
Off-topic, but how exactly are you able to put links directly into the text of an article?
Accusing people of lying when they’re more likely just mistaken is a bad approach to winning adherents.
Saying true things is a good way to see the world clearly.
Helping others see the world clearly is better achieved by just stating the truth. Too often people equate differences of opinion with lying. It’s very acrimonious.
In order to see the world clearly you need to be able to tell who is deliberately lying, who is lying to themselves because they don’t want to face uncomfortable facts, and who is genuinely mistaken. It sounds like you are opposed to trying to understand other people’s intentions.
I can’t x-ray other people’s brains and neither can you. How much can be achieved with nothing more to go on other than what people say they believe? Do you imagine you can detect when someone is “lying” to himself? How does this work if he is party to the lie? Empirically speaking, what’s the difference between lying to oneself and sincere belief? (Answer: there is none, which suggests lying to oneself is nothing but a silly metaphor.)
You're wrong on the facts here.
You can watch people's facial expressions. You can listen to their tone of voice. You can listen to their words and watch their actions. Those things give you a lot of information about what they're thinking.
The dogma that "you can't read people's minds" is an absurd superstition.
Ok, yes, it may be that some folks appear to be lying. But is it the case that most of these folks are lying? That it’s all a ruse/power play?
Yup.
> If Classical Liberal civic nationalism means anything at all, it means excluding Hans. When we exclude Hans, we’re not judging him on an accident of birth, we’re judging him on the content of his character.
Just a style suggestion: I was able to infer from context that ‘Hans’ is supposed to be a typical German name, but ‘Han’ is also the name of the world’s largest ethnic group, so I was a bit confused for a moment.
While I’m happy enough to say thar any policy that causes mass rape is a bad policy, and that immigration should be restricted for the good of the extant population - which on its own puts me firmly on the right - I’m fairly dubious that any intelligent alien monitoring Earth would see Islam as being a world conquering ideology, not in the last 200 years. On the other hand the various western humanist ideologies are indeed world conquering, by hook or by crook.
These ideologies that promote mass migration are downstream of the needs of western capitalist economics. It’s not WWII that generated a disquiet about ethnic states, that came much later as western populations started to see lower fertility. Capitalism produces whatever ideology it needs to move surplus populations around the world, in the 19C those surpluses were from Europe, now they are not.
You are an ignorant fool.
The last 200 years have been a hiatus in Islamic aggression only because the West became technologically far superior to the Islamic world.
Left-Liberal ideology comes from a mix of universalist ideas and Christian ethics, not from Capitalism. If it had really been all about acquiring more workers, it would have worked just as well to go the eugenicist route and develop an industrial process for mass producing native babies - as the fascist regimes were in the process of doing.
Hi Simon.
Well done on the ad hominem. That’s really proven the point you were trying to make. I think you may want to read up on the word ignorant. It means to lack knowledge.
Caring about events older than 200 years is a long time to hold a grudge particularly for Americans who didn’t exist while Islam was a threat; even for Europeans it’s a bit odd to talk about Islamic aggression from the 7th C when the west effectively dominated the world for 200 years.
> Left-Liberal ideology comes from a mix of universalist ideas and Christian ethics, not from Capitalism.
Left-Liberal ideology is clearly derived from capitalism. In the 19C the left were the capitalists, the libertarians, the king slayers. The right at the time were British and European conservatives, generally trying to preserve feudalism.
But everything is downstream of what capitalism needs anyway, corporations are ok with DEI classes because DEI doesn’t substantially affect their bottom line, but they are hardly going to teach socialism during work hours.
When immigration stopped in the US in 1924 it was because capitalists became afraid of importing leftism, when we all became fanatically in favour of closed borders during covid it was because granny bourgeois might get a sniffle. Otherwise a few dead Europeans is a negative externality, needed to keep the wages suppressed and profits enlarged.
It’s interesting that someone posting from deepest Idaho, or wherever, are still scared of “totalitarian Islam”. Islamic countries have barely any state capacity when run by the Islamists, and only some when not - and most of those latter countries are allied with the US. It would be great if the US hatred of Islamists led to not supporting Saudi Arabia, or the head choppers taking over Syria, but we are where we are. And where we are is opposing Islamists verbally while supporting them militarily.
Also why are Americans clutching the pearls about this? Muslim immigration into the US is no threat whatsoever - pew reports Muslims in the US are to the left of evangelicals and the number isn’t substantial anyway.
There is a threat to Europe, from non assimilation of some, but by no means all, muslims. What handicaps Europe doing anything about this isn’t Islamic ideology, but capitalist and American ideology, the relatively recent ideology of open borders which was never European policy, and never a European belief.
In the interest of arguing against yourself to steel man your positions, you might want to start by looking up The First Barbary War (regarding "Americans didn't exist while Islam was a threat").
Also Americans existed before the United States of America existed. Ameircans have existed since 1608.
I’m fully aware of the Barbary wars and slavery. I sang a song about Britain’s not being slaves in my youth.
If you think that those wars were an existential threat to America or even Europe then I can only suggest that you buy better history books, or perhaps Google better.
None of that goes against any of the substantive points made here
Yes it does. You said that Americans didn't exist when Islam was a threat. The first foreign war that Americans ever fought was against Islam. So you've got just very basic facts wrong. I chose that just as an example, the easiest to pick out of your arguments. You are intent on framing the problem of Islam as American hatred. 🙄
I’m not a fan of Muslim migration to Western societies and I believe we should be extremely selective. Under no circumstance should any Muslim with a double digit IQ be allowed to migrate to any first world democracy. Perhaps it was fine for Germany to have working class Turkish migrants in the 50s - and Turkey is far more secular than other Muslim countries - but it’s enough.
There’s plenty to criticize in Islam yes. This idea that Sam Harris is an “Islamophobe” or that Islam is a race is ridiculous. That said I find the comparisons of Islam to neo-Nazism to be wrong. The UAE is a Muslim country and its green on your countries list. I don’t think you would put any country with neo-Nazism as its ideology as green on your list.
Islam is an Abrahamic religion. It is expansionist and missionary like Christianity and legalistic like Judaism. This is a toxic combination that leads to people wanting to spread Islamic law all over the place.
I would put a country with neo-Nazism as its ideology as green on my list if it attained a similar level of wealth and stability as the UAE.