Islam and feminism - in seeming opposition - are arguably the two most dominant threats to the modern world. I've discussed the irrational and inchoate basis of feminism previously, and the dangers that feminism holds to the state and society has been discussed on numerous occasions. What really needs to be raised in the contentious threat of Islam.

Those who crusade against liberalism often align themselves with Islam in the mistaken view that they are allied, but I would argue that those who crusade against liberalism still hope for a kind of modernism. The fundamentalist Islamic resurgence we are experiencing today is a clinging to a vestigial past as the developing Muslim world is being forced to confront modernity.

And in seeming contradiction, liberals also come to the defense and aid of Muslims who they perceive as a persecuted group. Accusations that paint Islam as a violent, anti-liberal, anti-modern religion are completely ignored at the expense of whitewashing the religion into something that is compatible with liberal society.

I think there are many problems with liberalism, mainly the fact that it is a self-undermining philosophy that allows opposing groups to flourish in the hopes that they stay a minority (like Muslim Conservatism). But, I don't want to join a blanket crusade against it if it also means sacrificing modernism.

I'm guessing that the majority of people that oppose liberalism outside of the Muslim world do not want to live in Islamist theocracies. I'm also guessing they don't want to live in a hyper-inclusive world of pretty lies that rid our society of an ugly exploration of the truth. There needs to be some middle ground. I think liberalism is a confused perspectivism, and I think many positive aspects of contemporary society can be salvaged. But, please, not at the expense of true progressivism itself.

One of the less important side effects of the tragic earthquake in Haiti is that the word "voodoo" is popping up in the press more than usual. Or is it? Nowadays the Western press seems to spell it "voudou" instead. Steve Sailer suspects that it's intended to keep us masses ignorant of inconvenient facts. I disagree, though. When it comes to guessing the motivations of progressives, I would like to add something to Napoleon's famous maxim - never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by changing fashions.

The reason why journalists and other elite types are starting to use the word "voudou" is to let us know that they read enough newspapers and hang out with enough of the right people to know what the latest trendy spellings are, and also to let us know that they care about other cultures enough to use native spellings instead of Anglicized ones. They used to accomplish this by referring to Peking as "Beijing", but now that everybody does that (except for Chinese restaurants) it no longer sets you apart from the herd, so they need to find some new words to do the job. It's no different than the shifts in fashionable teenage slang, really, and is the exact same reason why they suddenly started referring to health care as "healthcare".

Progressivism really makes much more sense as a method of signaling than as an ideology, doesn't it?

In two seemingly unrelated posts, Sofia wonders if environmental orthodoxy seems to be self-contradictory, while Alex observes that leftist ideology is good for your self-esteem. I think the former flows directly from the latter.

Most ideologies are a way of describing how the world works and how it should be run. They provide their followers the opportunity to gain power and prominence when they succeed in ruling some part of the world. If your faction loses the civil war or the election, though, you pretty much get nothing out of being a member. Progressivism is unique in that its positions are not a worldview but a set of signals. By taking progressive positions on various issues, you let others and yourself know that you're smart, compassionate, classy and so on. Just about any progressive position is much easier to explain in terms of signaling than in terms of philosophy or politics. For example, the support for mass immigration makes you seem compassionate towards peasants from poorer countries and smart and skilled enough that they won't compete for your job. Sure, your own underclass will pay for your compassion, but that's OK - you can then signal compassion for them by supporting education. That might seem contradictory or ineffective, and that might be true if we thought of this as policy goals. When understood as signaling, though, these positions are coherent and effective.

That's why progressivism is so popular and victorious - it helps its followers gain status even when it doesn't achieve crap or makes the world a worse place. Of course it's not quite that simple. Sooner or later even the peasants figure out that caring about Brazilian rainforests is nice - anyone under the age of 30 probably learned about that in school, plus we have big TVs with all those nature channels. Caring about it does you little good when everyone else cares, too, so status-seeking progressives must constantly find new issues to support. Again, this is where mass immigration is the perfect progressive issue - because your own peasants suffer most of the negative consequences, it'll take them a longer time to get around to supporting it compared to some foreign rainforests that won't affect their lives much.

The upside of this constant forward movement is that unlike status-signaling fashion in clothes and cars, progressivism is not a cycle. That's good - otherwise progressives would impose prohibition on us every 20 years...

That's basically why progressivism succeeds, why it must keep progressing, and why it's ultimately not self-contradictory. But isn't this post full of hypocrisy? I mean, given the understanding that progressive views are good for one's status, why am I so reactionary? It's certainly not integrity, honesty or principle.

Back when I was living in the American Southwest, I knew a man who went into politics. He ran for the local school board, won the election, and gave up in disgust after one term. What turned him off was the decision-making process - he said the most important factor in all the decisions was not making sure the kids got a good education or that the teachers were happy, but that the schools would avoid lawsuits.

This struck me as strange for two reasons. One, he was a university professor, so he should have had some clue about how educational institutions are run. Two, school districts don't really need to fear lawsuits, do they? I mean, it's not like the local schools can be actually driven out of business by a lawsuit. The law requires them to exist and educate, so even the most hideously expensive lawsuit's costs will just get passed on to taxpayers one way or another. That's not the disaster it would be for a privately owned business that would have to pay with its own money. Besides, many lawsuits aren't aimed at wringing out money but at forcing schools to change some policy or another. However annoying that might be, it can't be much less annoying than preemptively changing the policy in advance of a potential lawsuit.

I finally was able to make sense of this after thinking about the theory that the main value of education is not learning but signaling that you were smart enough to get into a good school and hard-working enough to finish it.

Lawsuits don't really threaten schools' existence or ability to educate, but they do look embarrassing on the news. If the purpose of your school is to give its students the ability to say that they went to a good school, a string of lawsuits just will not do. Remember that this is America, where government-run schools don't have the status that religious or private ones do - only homeschooling, GED or dropping out are worse for your status than a public school education.

The school board was doing the logical thing in a world which values going to a good school more than it values what you learned there. Looking at the politics of education more broadly, we also see why progressives love education so much. After all, if education is mostly about signaling how smart, hard-working and classy you are, and progressivisim is all about signaling about how smart, good and classy you are, they are a natural match. No wonder educational institutions end up filled with and run by progressives.

Too bad I can't ask the former school board member what he thinks of this hypothesis - he died years ago.

Here's some good news about our world becoming a better place to live, thanks to an NGO founded by Jimmy Carter and presumably staffed with open-minded progressives. So let's give credit where credit is due.

The NYT reports that Nigeria has been free of guinea worm infections for a year. . .

There seems to be occasional transfer into humans of various other forms, and transfer of the human parasite into domesticated animals, but access to filtered water is sufficient to break the human cycle. In several countries where human dracunculiasis was eliminated many decades ago, it hasn't returned, so the simple effort to provide clean water seems sufficient to eradicate it.

Hey, sometimes this stuff actually works!

Stockholm, Sweden - Dalahest, smorgasbord, meatballs, blonde women and IKEA. These are some of the positive things epitomizing what is typically Swedish. But when IKEA recently decided to change the layout of its latest product catalog, it sparked an international outrage among artists, political analysts and liberal lobby groups.

When IKEA made the controversial decision of switching its traditional font Futura with the more modern font Verdana, Sweden's popularity among liberals dropped by over 20 %. Political analysts describe the situation as Sweden abandoning its true progressive roots. Jens Andersen, Danish typographer and liberal, comments:

"IKEA used to represent the concept of equality in Swedish welfare society: everyone has got the indisputable right to buy the same kind of products and live the same kind of lifestyle their neighbors do. Liberals loved Sweden. Now IKEA has traded its ideals for cheap modernist leanings--it's trying to appear tolerant, but it's really full of suspect pretense."

The Swedish government quickly responded to the international criticism by sponsoring what it calls "feminist porn." This caused Sweden's popularity among progressives to decline even further, prompting feminist lobbyists to accuse Sweden of using innocent women in degrading movie projects to hurt the feminist cause of gender equality.

The situation was desperate when Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt today admitted he has begun housing ten illegal immigrants from the third world in his own private home. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who took the international criticism hardest, was last seen in Amsterdam, working on improving Sweden's accountability by dressing out as a transsexual investment banker.