Argumentation
February 11, 2015, 8:43 am
I strive to treat people I disagree with as intelligent persons of goodwill. I don't always succeed. It helps that many, even the majority, of my friends and family disagree with me politically.
A reader sent me Evil Greedy Stupid Sheep: 4 Modern Ways to Win An Argument. The only quibble I have is the word "modern". I am pretty sure that if we had better historical sources we would find people accusing Ramses or Sargon of being evil and in the pay of grain merchants.
I would add a fifth category to this I would call "out-group". I don't have to listen to you because you are from group X. There is a famous quote from WWII from a man I believe was in the British Foreign Office, who, when asked about stories of Nazi atrocities, said that they needn't take seriously a bunch of "wailing Jews."
As I grew up, I thought we might actually be getting beyond this. You know - the sixties and tolerance and racial understanding and all that. But it turns out that tolerance does not mean the end of out-groups, it simply means that the out groups are changing. "Check you privilege" is the common campus shorthand nowadays for "shut up white male." Males, whites, the religious, the well off -- these are the new out-groups whose origins are used to automatically invalidate anything they say.
coyoteblog.com
Nimrod • 6 days ago
You left out the part where two "in groups" get into a conflict over who's the bigger victim. For example a gay activist criticizes Islam for its sharia belief in executing anyone who commits homosexual acts, after which the activist is called "racist" (even though Islam isn't a race).
I guess the gay guy should "check his privilege"? Or is it the Muslim? Or should they only check their privilege if they're white male and gay or Muslim?
Is it just me or am I right to be confused?
coyoteblog.com
Gay activists have met their match with Muslim barbers
So a lesbian walks into a Muslim barbershop, and asks for a “businessmen’s haircut”.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it really happened, and now a government agency called the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario will hear her complaint.
Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo.
Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives.
But that’s what multiculturalism and unlimited immigration from illiberal countries means. A central pillar of many immigrant cultures is the second-class citizenship of women and gays.
So if we now believe in multiculturalism, and that our Canadian culture of tolerance isn’t any better than the Shariah culture of sex crimes and gender apartheid, who are we to complain when Omar Mahrouk takes us up on our promise that he can continue to practise his culture — lesbian haircuts be damned?
He’s not the one who passed the Multiculturalism Act, and invited in hundreds of thousands of immigrants with medieval attitudes towards women and gays and Jews, etc. We did.
Mahrouk’s view is illiberal. But in Canada we believe in property rights and freedom of association — and in this case, freedom of religion, too.
But McGregor ran to the Human Rights Tribunal and demanded that Mahrouk give her a haircut.
In the past, human rights commissions have been a great ally to gay activists. Because, traditionally, gay activists have complained against Christians. And white Christians are the one ethnic identity group that human rights commissions don’t value, and that multiculturalism doesn’t include.
In recent years, Canadian human rights commissions have weighed a complaint about a women’s-only health club that refused a pre-operative transsexual male who wanted to change in the locker rooms.
They’ve ordered bed and breakfasts owned by Christian families to take in gay couples. They’ve censored pastors and priests who have criticized gay marriage. Gays win, because it’s a test of who is most outraged and offended.
But in the case of the Muslim barbers, the gay activists have met their match. If the test is who can be the most offended or most politically correct, a lesbian’s just not going to cut it.
Oh, McGregor is politically correct. But just not politically correct enough. It’s like poker.
A white, Christian male has the lowest hand — it’s like he’s got just one high card, maybe an ace. So almost everyone trumps him.
A white woman is just a bit higher — like a pair of twos. Enough to beat a white man, but not much more.
A gay man is like having two pairs in poker.
A gay woman — a lesbian like McGregor — is like having three of a kind.
A black lesbian is a full house — pretty tough to beat.
Unless she’s also in a wheelchair, which means she’s pretty much a straight flush.
The only person who could trump that would be a royal flush. If the late Sammy Davis Jr. — who was black, Jewish and half-blind — were to convert to Islam and discover he was 1/64th Aboriginal.
So which is a better hand: A lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim who doesn’t want to give it to her?
I’m betting on Mahrouk. And I predict that Muslim activists — not quiet barbers like Mahrouk, but professional Muslim busybodies — will start using human rights commissions more and more to push their way into places where they have no legal right, but where the human rights commissions are more than happy to engineer things for them, if they complain loud enough.
If I were a gay activist, I’d probably want to declare victory and shut down these human rights commissions right now.
In five years time, it won’t be gay activists forcing themselves into Christian B&Bs. It’ll be Muslim activists vetoing the gay pride parade.
torontosun.com |
