No one’s talking about removing choice. But not all choices are equally valid. And many choices are coerced due to religious patriarchal structures which are not actually true choices
You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit, and which women might partake in voluntarily as it’s a part of them practicing their faith. There’s not really a lot of oppression that comes about as a result of wearing the headdress alone as like, a kind of stylistic or ritual choice, it’s most everything else that goes along with it, that entails the oppression.
It’s more complex than lib vs non lib, or, freedom vs non freedom. Freedom can’t be the highest value, there, there has to be something more at the core there. Freedom is usually just a proxy for whatever other value you’re implicitly substituting. One person says, I need the freedom to have my guns, for self protection. Another person, they say they want the ability to be free from a society in which gun ownership is seen as necessary for self-defense, or is common. You hear boo boo platitudes like “my freedom ends where yours begins” and shit like that as an attempt to cope with it, but it’s totally meaningless. There has to be a core value there.
In this case, the core value is basically just the belief that islam is a false religion, and is bigoted and oppressive. Possibly correct for many muslims, perhaps the majority, but still, would be a generalization, and would still be based on a very specific reading of the text, just like it is with christianity, or extremist violent folk buddhism that people in the west don’t usually get exposed to, or, hinduism, which is where the basis for their caste system comes from.
The idiocy, I think, so far as I see it, is that they decry the religion itself, because they see it as all being the same, rather than decrying this or that specific practice as being bigoted. Not even the hijab necessarily, but like, the patriarchal aspects. Much harder to decry these on the basis of the religions themselves if you’re not versed in the religions themselves, too, which is a pretty hard sticking point.
In any case, it’s sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah’s witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites. But then they don’t realize it also entails liberation theology, rastafarianism, the ethiopian church, or even just small unaffiliated churches, and shit like that. Smaller in number than the oppressive megachurches, and still exist within an overarching system in which religion is kind of oppressive, but still, I think, retains some value as a cultural or ritualistic practice, and retains it’s link to history and tradition, which, despite, you know, the common post-historical liberal cries, you know, the idea that the west is post-enlightenment, we have no need for tradition, yadda yadda, is still something that people find really appealing. We still see that with people wanting to return to some idealized version of the 50’s that never existed where everyone was able to afford a suburban home and 2.5 kids, without understanding that those things were not available for everyone, weren’t sustainable, your wife was on opioids, you worked a 9-5 in a steel mill, your kids went either unsupervised or helicopter parented every day, and the indoors were full of smoke while the outside was full of leaded gasoline fumes. The appeal to tradition, to belonging as part of an in-group, is extremely powerful, even if it doesn’t tangibly exist for someone in physical reality. It’s escapism, but it’s escapism through which someone travels with it back into the real world, a changed person.
That’s all to say. Uhh. Yeah, islamophobia is bad, probably. The middle east is still pretty fucked up. So is the west, which is mostly not much better, despite the cries in opposition. Our freedom loving leader, their despotic dictator, etc. I’m sure liberating all that oil from iraq and killing a million people helped that one out plenty, helped them be more progressive, helped civilize them, right? I’m sure the like. US foreign intervention and fucking with the arab spring really helped everything out. I think it’s libya or syria that still hasn’t recovered, right? Don’t know. This video goes out to the brave mujahideen fighters, is what I’m saying.
Nothing speaks for women rights like banning and harassing women who want to wear a peace of clothing.
If you actually talked with hijabi women you would know that most of them choose to wear hijab and are very much not opressed. But the white liberal understands solidarity through white supremacy where he knows what is better for everyone else.
Imagine saying “support Jews ans their rights but fuck the kosha rules. No one should be kept from eating pork.”
If you really want to support Muslims and their rights, then talk with them and don’t let white supremacist propaganda shape your idea of what you want to support.
There isn’t much analogy with kosher practices. Do you know the explicit religious purpose of the hijab? It’s to maintain one’s modesty so as not to tempt men. Fuck that. Men are responsible for their own behavior. The religious purpose of the hijab is straightforward victim-blaming sexism. I won’t support a conservative, backward, oppressive practice just because it’s done by a member of a persecuted religious minority. That’s not white supremacism, that’s a basic commitment to progressive values.
I’m not saying we should ban it. In a free society people should be able to wear what they want. But we absolutely should not support it either.
Do you support high heels? Makeup? The stereotype of women wearing dresses usually, that social standard, that gender norm? It’s not as though lots of things in western society aren’t basically on the same level, or don’t basically stem out of the same set of things, set of religious oppression. The problem isn’t the opposition to those things, it’s the double standard, it’s seeing the muslim version of oppression as being unique because it’s unfamiliar and alien.
If your argument is that dresses are the same level of subjugation as hijabs, you’re either trolling or are completely ignorant. It’s not really even comparable in this day. There is basically no pressure for women to only wear dresses anymore. And it’s also not something that’s imposed by a religious rule. It was more of a general patriarchal society issue, which we also have issues with.
I was gonna write a longass comment in response to this but I’m kinda burnt on that because it’s 11:54 and nobody ever tends to read them, so I’m just gonna link one I previously left that’s pretty much on the same topic. Tl;dr, uhhh, I dunno. Just read the post, I’m just gonna end up saying the same shit at the same length if I try to summarize it.
You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit
No one is trying to take anyone’s freedom. But that freedom includes participating in coercive, sexist, patriarchal practices designed around oppression, which is all that religion is. It doesn’t make it a feel good or wholesome story. Religion is inherently bigoted because it enforces obedience through manipulation
In any case, it’s sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah’s witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites
No, ALL christianity is shitty. It’s inherently shitty because its entire purpose is to subjugate through threat of eternal damnation (let alone literal threats and violence). There is literally no other purpose. And this isn’t specific to christianity. It’s inherent to all religions
Yeah, I can’t change your mind on any of that then, it’s already made up. Just don’t complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don’t really tend to be very religious either, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not willing to pretend that I’m above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it’s specter.
I’m also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don’t think that’s a role that you could fill with a “secular alternative” to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it’s meaningless in reality, there’s a security there.
The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there’s not just one Bible. There’s different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it’s fundamental literal form. There’s different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I’m not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won’t do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone’s manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that’s basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I’m not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.
.
Liberal value = giving women the choice to decide whether or not they want to wear religious dress.
Anti-liberal value = removing that choice from them.
It’s pretty straightforward. Freedom of choice has always been the liberal way.
No one’s talking about removing choice. But not all choices are equally valid. And many choices are coerced due to religious patriarchal structures which are not actually true choices
You could also frame it as liberals being on the side of religious freedom, though, which might include this shit, and which women might partake in voluntarily as it’s a part of them practicing their faith. There’s not really a lot of oppression that comes about as a result of wearing the headdress alone as like, a kind of stylistic or ritual choice, it’s most everything else that goes along with it, that entails the oppression.
It’s more complex than lib vs non lib, or, freedom vs non freedom. Freedom can’t be the highest value, there, there has to be something more at the core there. Freedom is usually just a proxy for whatever other value you’re implicitly substituting. One person says, I need the freedom to have my guns, for self protection. Another person, they say they want the ability to be free from a society in which gun ownership is seen as necessary for self-defense, or is common. You hear boo boo platitudes like “my freedom ends where yours begins” and shit like that as an attempt to cope with it, but it’s totally meaningless. There has to be a core value there.
In this case, the core value is basically just the belief that islam is a false religion, and is bigoted and oppressive. Possibly correct for many muslims, perhaps the majority, but still, would be a generalization, and would still be based on a very specific reading of the text, just like it is with christianity, or extremist violent folk buddhism that people in the west don’t usually get exposed to, or, hinduism, which is where the basis for their caste system comes from.
The idiocy, I think, so far as I see it, is that they decry the religion itself, because they see it as all being the same, rather than decrying this or that specific practice as being bigoted. Not even the hijab necessarily, but like, the patriarchal aspects. Much harder to decry these on the basis of the religions themselves if you’re not versed in the religions themselves, too, which is a pretty hard sticking point.
In any case, it’s sort of like, people decrying christianity at large as being shitty when realistically they just mean like, evangelicals, or catholics, or mormons, or jehovah’s witnesses, or maybe in some odd cases, quakers and mennonites. But then they don’t realize it also entails liberation theology, rastafarianism, the ethiopian church, or even just small unaffiliated churches, and shit like that. Smaller in number than the oppressive megachurches, and still exist within an overarching system in which religion is kind of oppressive, but still, I think, retains some value as a cultural or ritualistic practice, and retains it’s link to history and tradition, which, despite, you know, the common post-historical liberal cries, you know, the idea that the west is post-enlightenment, we have no need for tradition, yadda yadda, is still something that people find really appealing. We still see that with people wanting to return to some idealized version of the 50’s that never existed where everyone was able to afford a suburban home and 2.5 kids, without understanding that those things were not available for everyone, weren’t sustainable, your wife was on opioids, you worked a 9-5 in a steel mill, your kids went either unsupervised or helicopter parented every day, and the indoors were full of smoke while the outside was full of leaded gasoline fumes. The appeal to tradition, to belonging as part of an in-group, is extremely powerful, even if it doesn’t tangibly exist for someone in physical reality. It’s escapism, but it’s escapism through which someone travels with it back into the real world, a changed person.
That’s all to say. Uhh. Yeah, islamophobia is bad, probably. The middle east is still pretty fucked up. So is the west, which is mostly not much better, despite the cries in opposition. Our freedom loving leader, their despotic dictator, etc. I’m sure liberating all that oil from iraq and killing a million people helped that one out plenty, helped them be more progressive, helped civilize them, right? I’m sure the like. US foreign intervention and fucking with the arab spring really helped everything out. I think it’s libya or syria that still hasn’t recovered, right? Don’t know. This video goes out to the brave mujahideen fighters, is what I’m saying.
Yeah. Accept Muslims and support their rights. But fuck the hijab. No one should wear that sexist trash.
Nothing speaks for women rights like banning and harassing women who want to wear a peace of clothing.
If you actually talked with hijabi women you would know that most of them choose to wear hijab and are very much not opressed. But the white liberal understands solidarity through white supremacy where he knows what is better for everyone else.
Imagine saying “support Jews ans their rights but fuck the kosha rules. No one should be kept from eating pork.”
If you really want to support Muslims and their rights, then talk with them and don’t let white supremacist propaganda shape your idea of what you want to support.
There isn’t much analogy with kosher practices. Do you know the explicit religious purpose of the hijab? It’s to maintain one’s modesty so as not to tempt men. Fuck that. Men are responsible for their own behavior. The religious purpose of the hijab is straightforward victim-blaming sexism. I won’t support a conservative, backward, oppressive practice just because it’s done by a member of a persecuted religious minority. That’s not white supremacism, that’s a basic commitment to progressive values.
I’m not saying we should ban it. In a free society people should be able to wear what they want. But we absolutely should not support it either.
You don’t have to support it. You just have to shut the fuck up about what other people choose to wear.
Do you support high heels? Makeup? The stereotype of women wearing dresses usually, that social standard, that gender norm? It’s not as though lots of things in western society aren’t basically on the same level, or don’t basically stem out of the same set of things, set of religious oppression. The problem isn’t the opposition to those things, it’s the double standard, it’s seeing the muslim version of oppression as being unique because it’s unfamiliar and alien.
If your argument is that dresses are the same level of subjugation as hijabs, you’re either trolling or are completely ignorant. It’s not really even comparable in this day. There is basically no pressure for women to only wear dresses anymore. And it’s also not something that’s imposed by a religious rule. It was more of a general patriarchal society issue, which we also have issues with.
I was gonna write a longass comment in response to this but I’m kinda burnt on that because it’s 11:54 and nobody ever tends to read them, so I’m just gonna link one I previously left that’s pretty much on the same topic. Tl;dr, uhhh, I dunno. Just read the post, I’m just gonna end up saying the same shit at the same length if I try to summarize it.
I read that
No one is trying to take anyone’s freedom. But that freedom includes participating in coercive, sexist, patriarchal practices designed around oppression, which is all that religion is. It doesn’t make it a feel good or wholesome story. Religion is inherently bigoted because it enforces obedience through manipulation
No, ALL christianity is shitty. It’s inherently shitty because its entire purpose is to subjugate through threat of eternal damnation (let alone literal threats and violence). There is literally no other purpose. And this isn’t specific to christianity. It’s inherent to all religions
Yeah, I can’t change your mind on any of that then, it’s already made up. Just don’t complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don’t really tend to be very religious either, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not willing to pretend that I’m above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it’s specter.
I’m also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don’t think that’s a role that you could fill with a “secular alternative” to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it’s meaningless in reality, there’s a security there.
The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there’s not just one Bible. There’s different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it’s fundamental literal form. There’s different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I’m not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won’t do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone’s manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that’s basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I’m not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.
I did not know Jewish men are allowed to eat pork.