Thread by @EricRWeinstein

I reached some kind of an unexpected impasse with many people I admire now condescending to me. And it’s pissing me off.

Gad et. al.: You’ve chosen a bad tactic. “Hijab is a symbol of oppression.” is too simplistic. Are you winning hearts and minds with this? No. You’re losing.

Many of you have picked bad terms for a set of arguments:

Ethnonationalism
Identity Politics
Free Speech Absolutism
Political Correctness
Rationality v Bullshit
Tribalism

Okay. Why aren’t they winning? Because they‘re meretricious framings, way too simplistic and thus losers.

I‘m on the same side of many if not all of these points with you but with a massive disagreement in tactics. If you frame one issue like FGM too simplistically you‘re going to get hit with the obvious point about male circumscision. Against tribalism? You chase away all cultures.

This saddles many of us w/ a set of “convenience products” that don’t really work. Very simple bumper sticker ideas that are incredibly powerful rhetorically...right up until they backfire due to:

A) Exceptions invalidating the rule
B) Inconsistency in application

So they lose.

Hijab is a simple symbol of oppression? What about churches that ask us to cover before entering or online Jewish modesty clothing retailers. Don’t like Political Correctness? Then why do you say “The N-word” but joke about other groups. Against “identity politics”? In Tibet too?

If you want the spirit of free speech absolutism you have to admit to some restrictions or you lose free speech due to the egregious corner cases you will encounter. I don’t want to see swastikas, but I have to admit they crop up in cultural non-Nazi contexts. That’s reality.

Normally I’ve bitten my tongue for years. I feel like I got here late to a party and everyone had chosen the terms of engagement. But those don’t work because they are too open to charges of bias when their radical simplicity doesn’t capture the counter examples easily produced.

Snakes are tetrapods yet don’t seem to have 4 limbs. Echidna lay eggs but are clearly mammals. These aren’t nitpicks. They point out that the theories “Tetrapods are defined by having 4 external limbs.” Or “Mammals are furry and give live birth.” are simply *unsalvageably* wrong.

You are an evolutionary guy Gad. So presumably I don’t have to tell you You don’t get to define tetrapods by how many limbs most have and then just claim that there are exceptions! That’s bad theory. Same with Hijab. It *can* be a symbol of oppression. It may *generally* be one!!

But the theory is off. You open yourself up to the obvious line of attack “My friend Aisha just did X,Y,Z and she loves being a Hijabi.” I’m thinking of such a person in my past right now. Counter examples are meaningful for good reason. They aren’t an ‘epsilon’ term in any way.

A proper theory of oppression by Islamic veiling and covering must take into account:

Christian Covering
Jewish Orthodox Modesty-wear
Coercion both explicit and implicit
Brainwashing vs Projection
Niqab vs Headscarves
Etc.

and no one wants to do it. So it gets oversimplified.

So forgive me. I still think we‘re fighting the same BS with veiling & covering as control & subjugation, but we are *tactically* divided, as we are on almost all the terms of art in this. You‘re going to continue to get hounded over the corner cases because of oversimplifying.

And please don’t condesend to me. The great danger with Islam today isn’t the Hijab. Or any of a host or thorny issues. It’s that forms of Islam together with North Korea are among the few potent remaining totalizing forces left in the 🌎. It’s *totalizing* that must be fought.

I would be against World totalitarian Judaism if it existed. But it does not. I was against imperial totalitarian communism, but I don’t see much left. If there were totalitarian Prius owners I’d be opposed to them. I’d much rather fight totalizing beliefs than all these proxies.

My problems with Islam all stem from its desire to provide way way too many answers and entertain too few questions from outside. Honor killings, FGM, religious message killings, etc are coming from a totalizing cultural and belief system.

If you want to fight that with me, I’m in. But it requires more subtlety. And for such a simple point, this is getting needlessly tedious. I think I’ve been clear enough that I don’t need to come back to this. Happy to read what you want to say of course.

All best,
Eric