Liberalism Lives
Ali Eteraz
At Eteraz.Org you get banned if you're a Muslim and you call another Muslim a non-Muslim. [We have yet to have a non-Muslim call a Muslim a non-Muslim, though I just saw that in the comments here].
You also get banned if you come in saying stuff like Muhammad was a pedophile (empirically wrong); or Allah is a moon god (at best, empirically unverifiable).
Point is, blogs are communities modeled, usually, in the image of the maker.
What that maker is willing to tolerate from his/her commentators (or other frontpagers) is a reflection of the maker.
At my site I would not accept a frontpager saying that Sunnis are superior to Shi'a or that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims. That is my ideological purity (with respect to frontpagers).
Dean has his own. He doesn't want to be taken as the representative of people whom he believes to be illiberal. Accept that.
I find it amusing that people are dissing Dean for not being "tolerant" of their opinions.
Since when did liberalism become about "tolerance"? I thought the entire problem "you guys" (that includes me) had with the ultra left was that we *wanted* to be able to say "this is liberal" and "this is not liberal." We wanted to be able to be intolerant, to not be PC, to not suck up what we really feel for the sake of a fake academic hypocrisy. Dean is sticking to his torch. It's just that this time some of the people who were used to being in agreement with him are getting burnt.
Let me say it again, the liberal tradition isn't about NOT drawing lines in the sand. It is about drawing such lines. What it isn't about is resorting to violence. I don't see any violence here; just a lot of disagreement and people who disagree going their own way.
As such, liberalism lives.
Maybe.
But if so, what does a liberal stand for, and what does a liberal defend?
I can't do it anymore. This has been going on for two years now, this daily confrontation between what I firmly believe and my desire to let people say what they say.
We all have limits. To invoke Godwin's Law, do I HAVE a right to say, "No White Supremacists Allowed?" Or do I just have to let that go because I'm such a liberal?
To me it comes down to whether or not you really want a discussion of things like the difficulties Islam has in a modern, pluralistic democratic society--which all ancient religions struggle with, by the way--or you just want to beat the crap out of anyone who says it has a place.
My litmus test: if you aren't willing to talk to a Muslim and ask them what they think, with a certain set of presumptions including their basic decency as human beings and their basic rationality, because you already know all you need to know, then you aren't honestly interested in any discussion or anything I understand as liberalism (or really common human decency).
Two and a half years ago I threw out Michael Moore apologists. Those people were running around Dean's World attacking the evil that was America's troops and American foreign policy, and attempting to turn every other thread into a jihad against the Bush administration. At some point I decided firmly that enough was damn well enough, and started chucking people out the door.
I was a lot meaner about it then, truth to be told.
And to answer Andrew's questions from another thread: I think that your problem is that you're looking at ghettoized immigrants in the UK who, both by their own choice AND by foolish British government policies, are not assimilating into the wider society as a whole.
Islam isn't what you find in the UK in 2007. It's a religion of over 1,400 years of history, some of it terrible much of it laudable. It is practiced by over a billion people in over a hundred countries speaking hundreds of languages. Gross generalizations about it as being the inimical enemy of freedom are reprehensible.
The rest of you follow the dictates of your conscience.
We don't have to stop being friends either way. That's up to you, too.
Well said. I would add that Dean's actions would not be possible if not for the capacity of private property to enable individual action. Left meets right in the defense of true liberalism.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.