I think its awesome that Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize today. Surely her insistence on womens rights within Islam is an ongoing hazard to her oppressors. But the Bill Maher/Ben Affleck kerfuffle earlier in the week led me to discover this woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who may be the individual most dangerous to Islamic oppression in the entire world. They havent managed to shoot her yet, but thats not for lack of trying, and they did kill Theo van Gogh who directed a film she wrote, pinning their threat that she was next on the knife in his chest. But western liberals (your cuddly Kristofs) have by and large joined violent Islamists in scorning her, which is why I was unfamiliar with her work. In this sense Maher and Harris are exactly right in decrying a double standard in liberal values. Even the reaction to Malalas prize I see as muted. The prevailing theory is that the Liberal High Command is afraid of further war and wishes to adopt a neo-isolationist policy more associated with the far-right libertarians such as the Paul family. Strange bedfellows galore. Yet what I see is well beyond that. While Hirsi Ali wishes for Islam to promptly recapitulate the Enlightenment and Reformation that led Jewish and Christian societies to laugh off and dismiss the horrors of the Old Testament (or its followers to simply become ex-Muslims), I see Western liberalism as not only going soft on that very Enlightenment, but practically abandoning it. Reading through Sam Harris this week I was essentially unable to use the Enlightenment tools of reason, science, and empiricism to refute any position he held. And I sense this same frustration from liberals who wish to be the reality-based party, but find themselves in situations where reality is quite unhappy. There are a couple core reasons for their concern I see. Firstly it has been the academic liberal practice over the last 40 years (led by Stephen Jay Gould) to contest not only unpleasant _prescriptive_ measures (e.g. eugenics), but to contest unpleasant _descriptive_ studies of the world as well (e.g. demographic analysis of standardized test scores). I dont think that works, you are skating way out onto thin ice when you attempt to suppress empirical data just because you are terrified what people will conclude should be done as a result of it. And we have come to a point where science is beginning to yield objective, empirical answers to questions of causation that wont always be consistent with the preferred liberal view of the world. The second is that liberalism in practice has dwindled down to meaning comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Morality to the politically correct means being tolerant of, if not actively defending, essentially any practice done by anyone other than white males. All misbehavior by members of other groups is just exceptional fringe activity or as a result of the present and historical misdeeds of white men (and Barack Obama must count as white here). Having a black muslim woman so clearly refuting that position is not something the social justice warrior can embrace because it lacks this simple certainty. White guilt will have none of it; we are instead to retire to our monastery and self-flagellate away our sins, everything is surely our fault. If they finally kill her? Shame perhaps, but thats a matter internal to that culture we should stay out of. Tolerance über alles isnt going to make it. The Enlightenment is most of what we like about our present society and we are not going to consent to giving it up just because it excludes over a billion people stuck in an era before it. We cant #bringbackourgirls and simultaneously apologize for their abductors. We cant obscurant away a belief system that promises the eternal services of 72 virgins to the suicide terrorist. And we cant secure a Chamberlain peace in our time by fully disengaging from a region were throwing billions of dollars a day at in oil bills. This isnt so easy a time to be a Western liberal, but its nice they havent killed Ayaan yet. See if you can keep your own knee from jerking and objectively understand this situation. youtu.be/6JTCMwdrpt4?list=PLxs8H3HOOR6NB_h7rk3Nz5HQz8jQahrim
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 22:14:47 +0000
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