Dirty muslim paedos

I don't ever think Scottish Protestants were ever really marginalised and prejudiced against in the first place though (feel free to correct me on this if I'm wrong, I'm not really a Scottish history buff), so that's really what makes groups turn inwards and grow much more closely knit than before. Without that external pressure forcing a situation, I would say more liberal philosophies win out. At least in the UK, there is still quite a strong anti-muslim prejudice (maybe it will die off with the baby boomers, who knows), and I think that encourages UK muslim to grow tighter and be more accepting of philosophies that paint them into a position of moral and ideological strength.

I guess I'm not sure, according to Nawaz above he says his parents' muslim generation was actually practising a less socially conservative islamist form of Islam than what you see today, and people of his fathers' generation thought the more hardline people were weird. This runs slightly contrary to your theory, as if people were wowed by western values socially conservative Islam should have declined rather than grew (though certainly the 80s and 90s were more intolerant decades than today).

As I mentioned previously, this does mean taking on face value that him, as a former muslim extremist who now runs a think tank to counter extremism, is a reliable source. But, if people like him are considered to have a strong anti-muslim bias, then really I wouldn't be sure who to trust. It's also pretty apparent from the video he's very much not an idiot.

EDIT: For those of you don't know, a UK MP was pretty much forced to resign due to backlack for saying that the UK does have a problem with Pakistani muslim rape gangs following the latest gang I mentioned in the OP. Annnddd... Maajid Nawaz did comment on it, here.

I think you're right in that strategies that combat extremism are likely of use and should be rolled out to other demographics of people too, as should any specific approach that could work among several different sets of people. I don't know if this then makes such approaches more general in your eyes or not, and so renders them not really a targeted approach in the first place.

Having said all of these, I think the rise of islamist thinking is more of a unique and exceptional circumstance than most, because it's about a certain religious mindset taking hold of a minority of people - and I don't think there's really anything like it anywhere else in society right now (unless you can think of something?). I think that makes it necessitate more of a bespoke approach, because I think it already is quite a different circumstance to anything else.

 

So you both think that Islamic extremism is on the rise.

Is it though? I tried looking for some numbers, but all I could find were surveys showing that "concern about Islamic extremism" is on the rise, which is basically irrelevant. People are concerned about a rise in violent crime too, even though violent crime has been steadily decreasing for years. So people becoming concerned doesn't really signify much. Also, from what I've read, the increase in concern about extremism is occurring in Muslim-majority countries too, which rather implies that the people in those countries don't like extremism either, otherwise they wouldn't be becoming concerned about it.

As for the generational difference, again, I'd like to see some numbers on this. What proportion of second-generation immigrant Muslims are more hardcore than their parents, -vs- the proportion that are less hardcore? And what about the third generation? I suspect it will take a few generations for any trend to become clear. I will note that in my own largely atheist family, one of my cousins suddenly became an evangelical Christian out of the blue and now believes that the world was created 6000 years ago and that we should reshape society around Biblical values. So I doubt you'd ever be able to eradicate the equivalent phenomenon in the Muslim community either. The existence of my cousin doesn't signify a rise in Christian extremism though.

Finally, even if Muslim extremism really is on the rise, I still think that the best way to combat it is with acceptance, niceness, and Avengers movies, since that has worked for everything else up until now.

 

No I don't think this at all, though of course I can't speak for DE.

I think the number of violent extremists and people who would organise into rape gangs is disproportionate in the islamist-leaning muslim population (which makes up a good proportion of the overall muslim population) compared to the average of the UK population, but it's probably holding steady rather than growing. However holding steady is also not a good thing, it should be diminishing, like you are hoping it will do naturally by displaying our western liberalism.

I also think islamist thinking is prevalent in a significant number of muslims (based on accounts such as Nawaz's), and while this can often be innocuous (as mentioned with other religions or even atheists, I bet a lot get a kick out of their opinion being right), with this religion - which perhaps tends most strongly towards social conservatism - this can lead down roads to jihadism and misogyny against non-muslims (in turn leading to these paedophile gangs). I mean I'm not a (total) reactionist idiot, I don't look at 12 separate instances of paedophilia rings spanning decades and say this is a new and rising problem. It's an existing problem, and it needs to be handled.

To put a finer point on why I think muslims subscribe to islamism in a good number, and why leading by example won't work against this mindset, it's because racially (and note I did say racially, I think brown muslims are largely prejudiced against due to the colour of their skin - still - rather than their religion) they're still on the back foot - even when society is trying to tell them, "Well western liberalism has made everything is equal now. Didn't you guys, who are still routinely being prejudiced against, get the memo?" So western liberalism literally does nothing for them, and so naturally a socially conservative religion that paints them in a position of patriarchal power, and tells them that the westerners are wrong and they are right, is going to be appealing.

Taking this into account, your argument here is to combat them with more liberalism? Ideally I want a society which is the most liberal it can be, but I don't think that cuts it here.

You know as well as I do that bugger all people are doing that research because it's not currently interesting (or at least it's only just becoming interesting, and so will likely now be researched a bit, but that will now take a few years to publish minimum). I mean on the Web of Knowledge (a database of academic articles I have access too as a student) I searched "muslim extremism generation" and "Islam extremism generation" and what comes up is "Women and Jihad: Combating Violent Extremism and Developing New Approaches to Conflict Resolution in the Greater Middle East" and "Considerations over Factors Empowering Radicalization in the European Union". I guess maybe purely statistical numbers on all this are out there, by I always have a hard time not finding them untrustworthy, but if you have some you want to throw at me I'm all ears.

Taking a cursory glance at the latter, the abstract tells me, "EU born immigrants ( hence not belonging to first generation immigrants) are particularly exposed and vulnerable to the influence of vengeful purposes against Western societies. Some terrorist plots discovered in EU confirm this trend. Interestingly, effective actions carried out for counterradicalization purposes are the chance for promoting equal opportunities, social integration and educational policies further than (sic) preventing terrorist organization proliferation." (If you google the paper title you should be able to read the abstract yourself, if you didn't know, which you probably did).

I guess I could read the whole thing to serve my conformational bias, but the abstract is clearly leaning that way already. Besides, even if it does confirm my confirmational bias, it's just one article - it's not enough for me as a researcher to base anything on, it's an underdeveloped and under-researched topic. Though, I'm happy to plumb that article to more than likely serve my argument if you want me to.

The point is, I don't think seemingly credible anecdotal evidence should be completely discounted offhand when the academic research isn't to scratch. Social science evidence is always a little sketchy, and methodology can be called into question, so unless there's a good meta-analysis paper out there (which only happens with a good body of research on the topic at hand in the first place) I'm not too trusting. Nawaz does seem to know what he's talking about, DE's video paints a very good picture of that.

To be honest, I would have agreed with you before I read around a little and made this thread. When I say that, I'm not trying to say, "OMG Smuel, you're so naive, come up here and view real world problems like I do because my newfound opinions are correct," what I'm trying to say is that I realise my opinions can develop for the better or the worse, and what I was really trying to figure out was if I'm turning to a more racist (or at least, right-leaning) dark side. My trouble is, in stating views that I would have at once stated myself, you're not doing much to sway me back to that line of thinking as I'm not seeing much that is substantiative in leading by example (and I guess you probably aren't to invested in what I think anyway, but it is nice to hash this out rationally, rather than anywhere else on the internet).

I guess what convinced me is when I found out it happened 12 separate times with muslims assembling into these gangs. As a person of a scientific nature, that is now evidence I cannot empirically refute, and it is indicative of a specific problem, as it's not happening like this in any other religious or any other racial minority. Nawaz said of 2011 statistics that a 3% Pakistani minority muslim population (of 4% muslim population total) was accounting for 28% of child sex rings in the UK at the time. I've not fact checked him, but obviously 12 separate instances really does seem to corroborate that, and even if it's not quite the dire situation he's painting it doesn't mean to say it isn't a bit of a bad situation.

At some point over the last week, I've stopped being so ideologically liberal and started trying to be a little more pragmatic - or at least that's what I'm telling myself is what has happened, maybe I've been an undercover racist all along.

EDIT: Here's Nawaz's radio bit in full on the muslim rape gang problem - link.

 

Unfortunately I'm only an armchair scientist, not a real one, so I can't see the actual research, but I don't doubt any of the numbers you've mentioned.

I think you'll always have some disproportionality among subgroups of the population, because people aren't 100% homogenous. Though I think the prevalence of these sexual abuse gangs is technically more of a difference in culture than a difference in religion. I know that in many ways that's a pointless distinction because the two are heavily intertwined in this case, but it's important to be seen to be making the distinction because of the identity issues we discussed previously.

I also don't find it surprising that second-generation immigrants would be more open to radicalisation than their parents, since by definition the parents - the actual immigrants - were fleeing a bad situation and are likely to see western society as a safe haven. Whereas their children, who grew up here, find that they're still outsiders in some ways and struggle to find an identity. This is a story I've personally heard from many other second-generation immigrants, none of whom were Muslims. As you say, if Islam provides a particularly strong and compelling identity framework then a lot of the second generation who grew up exposed to it will find it appealing. That's why I said it would take a few more generations for the trends to become clear.

Having said all this, I still think that leading by example is the way to combat it. All the problems you've mentioned arise from sub-groups being too isolated, so the way to address that is to make them less isolated. The way to do that is to treat the sub-groups as if they weren't isolated. Any kind of heavy-handed "program" is going to have the opposite effect because it just draws attention to the differences.

We want little Ahmed playing tag with other children, and discussing whether Batman could really beat Superman, and seeing a Muslim Mayor of London and Muslim footballers on TV and everyone treating that as all completely normal. Then when an extremist takes him aside and says "Hey Ahmed, don't forget that non-Muslims are all evil and should be killed" the concept won't match any of his lived experience and he can easily reject it.

And while that may not help us address the terrorism or sex abuse that's happening today, I think an approach of "This affects all of us, let's work together to stop the bad apples" is more effective than "Hmm... there seem to be more bad apples in this barrel, let's discuss what's wrong with the barrel." Because then the barrel gets defensive instead of co-operating.

It's ideological Liberalism all the way down.

 

I guess this is hard to say, I was going to point the Kurds using women fighters to combat ISIS, but obviously all of them are muslim - so I suppose that points to the cultural difference rather than a religious one. However in places like Saudi Arabia where they have a theocracy (and who actively try and export their brand of Salafi Islam), so much of their culture is dictated by their branch of Islam that there isn't a point of difference between the two really. One thing I really really don't think we should be doing is continuing to sell arms to those fuckheads.

I guess a moot point is moot, or at least it's hard to extrapolate a good angle from either way.

I think what I'm still struggling with is the idea that leading by example with social liberalism and having a bespoke soft-handed approach to dealing with problematic areas of any part of society necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. Can't we try and combat potentially dangerous ideologies on the ground, and also demonstrate the glories of our western liberalism at the same time? Or do you think that any kind of interference, even if it's primarily education or awareness campaign based, just isn't very liberal - and we should adopt a more or less laissez-faire attitude to individual groups' social problems?

I'm also not too sure education and awareness campaigns do necessarily put people on the defensive, as Nawaz said you wouldn't do a homophobia or anti-racism awareness campaign and expect the outcome of that to be more gay and race haters, so why do people think an awareness campaign about potential Islamic extremism would do the same? As mentioned, anti-racism campaigns are assuredly targeted too, I don't think those people feel too put out about it.

I think at it's core, true liberalism can be very laissez-faire. I suppose in that respect I'm probably not entirely liberal, just mostly liberal.

EDIT: I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that we're disagreeing about these things if you're ideologically and classically liberal. I've thought at several points about doing a separate thread on social liberalism and where people stand on it, but I never got round to it. As I'm sure you're riveted to hear my take on social liberalism, here it goes.

I think the goal of social liberalism for me is the maximisation of personal freedoms and happiness, so long as those granted freedoms don't impinge on the happiness of others. For a completely clear cut example, say Bob wants to kill his neighbour Alan because Alan looked at him funny and trimmed part of his hedge. In a completely free lawless society, Bob could kill Alan, but as that wouldn't make Alan very happy or free (with Alan being dead) that shouldn't happen.

Towards this end things I'd be entirely fine with legalising are things like prostitution (currently legal in the UK, but not really), euthanasia, any kind of LBGT rights, and most drugs (drugs are a bit of a balancing act, as if they produce enough health problems to be a burden on the healthcare system it's not fiscally responsible to legalise them, and if they're highly addictive so much so that they encourage neglect of dependents or criminal behaviour - thereby decreasing other people's happiness - they also shouldn't be legal. However things like cannabis and MDMA I would say are fine - particularly if you regulate sales of them to sensible doses/potencies). Coupled into this, I think it's important to maintain good standards of social welfare (healthcare, access to education and higher education, etc.) to ensure everyone has more or less equal opportunities - which I think are another way of enhancing personal freedom.

With the justice system, for petty crime again I don't think it's fiscally responsible to keep offenders in prison - particularly when they can have dependents and so you can damage the happiness and opportunities of their dependents by removing a provider - however for repeat petty crime offences a prison sentence would then be necessary. Additionally, people who are only sent to prison for a few years, at least when I originally have looked into it tend to have high rates of re-offending - it's not effective rehabilitation.

For severe crimes, like rape and murder, I'd be fine fairly draconian sentences and I don't think people in prison should be given the vote either - if you fail to comply with society's rules, when it's a very fortunate position to live in an extremely liberal and tolerant society where you're opportunities in life have been maximised, I think you forfeit the right to share in that society's benefits. When you have served your time, you're free to enjoy society once again. This isn't to say I think prisons themselves should be draconian, just efficient, with a view that once people leave them they don't find themselves disadvantaged.

For extremely severe crimes (serial murder, serial rape, etc.) I'd be fine with capital punishment, people like that in my opinion have proven themselves to be entirely at odds with society and so I don't think society should pay the financial burden of keeping them in prison for life (though I realise capital punishment, where it does exist currently, is extremely ineffective and likely more costly to the state than life imprisonment. I think it's only an appropriate punishment if it could undercut the fiscal burden of life imprisonment, I don't have an interest in capital punishment on moral grounds).

So back to the topic at hand. From my perspective these groups of muslim rape gangs are strongly interfering with other people's personal freedoms and happiness by raping them (I'd say the psychological trauma is an extreme setback when considering the opportunities these people have going forward in their lives). As such, as I want everyone to have that same level of access to personal freedom and happiness I think it's now time to interfere because the presence of these gangs is actively getting in the way of that for other people, in the same way I would be fine interfering with any group trying to do the something similar. I also don't think education and awareness campaigns really gets in the way of muslim people's freedom and or happiness, and even if it does make them slightly unhappy the reverse side of that balance sheet is the major unhappiness and ruination of opportunity those raped girls are going to suffer.

There's my range of unpopular opinions for the day.

 

I'm sure everyone would like to read my point-by-point analysis of each of the subjects you've raised there, but just to show I'm not beholden to the whims of the forum I'm going to deny you all the pleasure. Take that!

I have two points in response to the main topic. One is that much of western culture was originally dictated by Christianity, but a laissez-faire attitude has managed to extricate us from that. I'd say it's a mark of the success of the system that you now take "separation of church and state" for granted, but remember that it took hundreds of years of incremental progress to get us to this point. I'm pretty sure that modern Islamic states are no more religious than medieval Christian ones were. And in fact some Muslim majority countries were already headed in a secular direction too, until recent events upset them (I'm thinking of Iran in this case). So basically, the trend does seem to be that with increased education and prosperity, religious influence tends to recede. I have no reason to believe that Islam is somehow a special case here.

My second point is that education and awareness programs can certainly be soft-handed and inoffensive, but only if they're couched a certain way. Which of these anti-racism messages do you think would be more successful: 1. "Hey, we should treat all races the same, m'kay?", or 2. "Racism is a growing problem among white people. If you know of any whites who are having secret meetings about being racist, report them to the police, who promise to be totally fair and treat the pigmentally-challenged just the same as normal people who aren't prone to racism."

My understanding is that extremist recruiting grounds are among those who are disaffected and see themselves as excluded from mainstream society. So in order to combat the spread of extremism, you don't actually have to target the extremists at all. If you ensure that young people grow up feeling included and can see good prospects for their future, the extremists will run out of recruits.

Also, I'd just like to note that I don't actually see myself as an ideological Liberal. For example, I was initially in favour of invading Iraq to remove Saddam. But given the way events have subsequently played out, I'm no longer convinced that invasion to remove dictators is a good idea. It turns out that laissez-faire might be better in this case too. My point is that I'm not liberal about these things because of some previous commitment to be laissez-faire about everything, I'm liberal because in these cases being laissez-faire has been shown to be the most effective way of getting to the world I want to live in. Which is the one where everyone is nice to me and I get to watch Avengers movies.

 

I was mainly providing the opinions just to give context to why I was thinking what I do think, and I think the mixture of tough ideas on justice, not wanting to see any particular segment of society suffer at the hands of another and thus the victims be afforded less opportunities, and want things to be generally fair and liberal, forge opinions like this. It can be a bit exacerbating to have to deal with people who are saying something, and the seem to be unbending to what you think is your logical reasoning, and you have no idea what is making them think like that.

I'm not so sure on this. Most islamic countries as you know have religious courts and rule of Islamic law. While our western legal system is assuredly based on Christian moral values, I don't think it's ever been quite as dogmatic to the letter of the bible or as ruthlessly severe as Sharia law in Islamic countries (killing apostates is just one example of this), and I would state that this indicates a greater degree of religious adherence than medieval Europe (but obviously this is conjecture, if you have any direct comparisons to indicate more one way or the other I'd be interested).

I'm also not too sure how countries like Saudi Arabia even begin to move to being remotely liberal by western standards. I guess as mentioned muslim regions can be more liberal (women Kurdish fighters), so maybe you're correct, but I definitely on the fence how true this is.

I feel like a good element to an education campaign would be highlighting the merits of tolerance and liberalism while comparing and contrasting it to the outcomes of adopting ideologies that are less tolerant. It seems like good sense to target these sorts of campaigns to places where people feel more put out, rather than to middle class areas where it's already more self-evident, and so these campaigns naturally become targeted.

Maybe that's the difference, I'm fine with actively pushing liberalism and tolerance on people as an alternative to how they're already being brought up to think, because certainly in some communities intolerant ideologies are already being pushed on them that make them feel more powerful and in control of their lives - so why not offer a counter view with similar gusto? If people are never shown a different more tolerant path in there day to day lives, they can't naturally become more liberal as nothing that surrounds them presents that idea and as such it's hard to conceptualise in a vacuum.

Even if the benefits of western social liberalism will be eventually self evident to everyone (I think we will get there eventually regardless of interference as you say), I don't think there's anything wrong with interfering and helping that along - particularly if it stands a chance of deterring particularly unpleasant crimes in the process, crimes which damage the opportunities of the victims that more social liberalism is supposed to be presenting people with in the first place.

Avengers movies suck. Any sane human knows the gold standard of comic book movies was the Dark Knight trilogy (yes, even the Dark Knight Rises). If anything Avengers movies, in their soulless mediocrity, present a solid basis for a person of any race or creed to pursue a campaign of violent and aggressive misanthropy.

Though Thor: Ragnarok looks pretty good.

 

We used to have all kinds of crazy stuff in our legal system. There was trial by ordeal, where an accused person would have to walk over red hot metal and then have the extent of their injuries measured, or trial by combat, where two people would fight to the death. The idea in both cases is that God would side with the righteous person and either protect them from injury or see that they were victorious. Priests were usually the ones to make the judgement. Also, capital punishment was used excessively. Personally I don't think that treason, i.e. saying something bad about the monarch, is particularly worse than blasphemy, i.e. saying something bad about God, but we used to be happy to execute people for either. All in all, I don't see Sharia law as being any more extreme than what happened in Europe up until a few hundred years ago.

The point of my story about Ahmed playing with other children is so that he sees the different more tolerant path in his every day life. He grows up seeing the same possible future for himself as for those other children. That's how to expose young people to the ideas of liberalism and have them understand it on a visceral level. The things you've suggested for your education campaign - highlighting the merits of tolerance and making comparisons to life under less liberal systems - sounds like the subject of a history or politics lesson. It also seems like it would be educational for everyone to know, so maybe it could just be part of the national curriculum somehow. It's not a bad idea for us privileged westerners to be reminded of how good we actually have it either.

Perhaps you meant that the education should be directed at older people though. I don't really see how to do that without it seeming patronising, and having the opposite of the intended effect. We may just have to write off that generation, so to speak.

Also, Thor is like the lamest superhero character ever. But maybe you have to be a spoiled brat in order to relate to him. Zing!

 

Well in that case you have me convinced, medieval Europe does sound worse.

Yeah possibly incorporation into the national curriculum is a better way to do it, especially if people did happen to get snarky about a more targeted education campaign - though such education is needed in some places more than others. I suppose that's what you've been saying all along.

I suppose the biggest issue is education on this level requires a lot of money, whereas targeted education costs less. Well ideologically a general campaign is always better, pragmatically sometimes it's going to need to rolled out more specifically.

As you say, I think they need to be written off in terms of hoping to change their established values. I think it doesn't hurt to invest more police resources into problem areas, maybe not so much that they have an increased visible presence but that more man power is in the short term delegated to places where we're seeing these issues, but again I suppose that's not a solution unique to under-privileged muslim communities - just to under-privileged communities in general.

Again though, there's a money issue here. If in doubt, always blame the UK's problems on Tory austerity.

I don't love Thor per se, just the idea of a gladitorial Thor/Hulk tag team co-starring Jeff Goldblum. Certainly seems better than Captain America and Iron Man becoming obsessed with a vagazzled dainty glove with Michael Bay-esque destruction occurring everywhere.

 

It looks like we're at a point where we basically agree that rape gangs are bad, Muslims are human, and liberalism is great in theory.

However, I do have to take issue with your other opinions. A Thor/Hulk pairing is good? I guess it's at least appropriate, given that they're both boring and one-dimensional. I mean, Hulk's super power is that he gets angry and hits things. That's the same super power as about 10% of the population. Big whoop. Thor's power is the same, only he doesn't need to get angry first. That's even less interesting. At least Cap and Ironman aren't stupidly overpowered and have some kind of character development.

 

Quite.

You say he just "hits things", but what you're forgetting is he hits things real hard. Like imagine how hard all the other super heroes hit things, the Hulk is hitting them, like, a lot harder. Pretty interesting stuff if you ask me!

There's also that, as of Thor: Ragnarok, the Hulk has been the Hulk as opposed to Bruce Banner for two years now, and he loves the brutal gladiatorial life. Will Thor be able to convince him to be Banner again?? Will the Hulk help Thor escape the gladiatorial nightmare he finds himself in?!?!?!?! Who knows, but what we do know is it will inspire slash fiction the likes of which this world has never seen!!!!!!!

Well in Thor: Ragnarok, they take Mjölnir away from Thor and make him use a neck bracelet that removes most of his powers, so he has to use his wits to survive. If that isn't epic, edifying, completely unique and supreme-genius writing right there - taking a character out of comfort zone for him to realise newfound inner and emotional strengths - I don't know what is!!!!!

What did Captain America do? "Ugh I'm sad because my old pal Bucky is now a Manchurian Candidate-esque robot armed Soviet sleeper agent who's trying to kill me [as if we haven't all heard that before], and the people who I've been working for all along turn out to be the bad guys because a half-assed dig at the Patriot Act in what sweaty comic book nerds consider resonant and topical cinema these days." It's like Cap, get a life!!

 

There once was a film called Thor: Ragnarok
About which Jojo said "It's not a crock!"
"It features the Hulk!
And Thor doesn't sulk!
And Cap and Ironman can both suck my cock!"

 

Exactly.

 

Hmm... you can't spell "Jojobobo" without "Bob".

https://interpersonal.stackexchange...ingly-xenophobic-towards-muslims-what-do-i-do

 

Hey I don't hate muslims, I even have a muslim friend.

Damnit, that's way too obvious a lie, everyone knows I don't have any friends.