Arctic Dementor

Specifically, these unrepentant men took the law into their own hands, and they knew they would get got for that. They knew the police would never help them, and the criminal justice system would never punish those who had wronged them, but as soon as they enacted revenge, they knew the police would make them a priority. A harrowed prosecutor explained that there are not enough prosecutors, but if you question the state's monopoly on violence like that, they are going to prosecute you, and then they are going to prosecute the guy who beat up your grandma to steal her purse, in that order.

It was all rather bizarre. The problem isn't the violence, the problem is state capacity to enact violence, but the prosecutor didn't think that rape and murder are the kind of violence that threaten the state monopoly on violence. The kind of violence that threatens the state's monopoly on violence is violence against the state's organs, and violence where citizens take justice into their own hands.

While hand-wringing "oh isn't it terrible that all these people are enacting violence in revenege, taking the law into their own hands", the actual message was: "the French state is breaking down and in denial about it". The straussing wasn't subtle, they just couldn't say it outright. They could walk right up to the line and say "Rule of law is breaking down, and even though this is the only way to get a semblance of justice, punishment, or deterrence, this is wrong. *wink*"

The most bizarre part was this prosecutor who more or less said "the system works" after he jailed a man for getting his revenge, because the French criminal justice system had, after all, also put the man who committed the original crime in jail. It was clear from his demeanour and the rest of the reporting that the system does not actually work, and the only reason there was a speeds trial was the optics of putting only the man who sought revenge in jail.

Not only does the system not work, vigilante justice was the reason why the system finally did something.

It makes sense from the point of view of the state. If you can't punish everybody, and if people can break the law with impunity, at least you have to prioritise the people who loudly proclaim that you can break the law with impunity, and the people who only committed a crime because they assumed they can do so with impunity. Otherwise, the rule of law would break down even quicker.

I saw some post about Rotherham on my dash. Somebody in the notes was gesturing at something about race or culture, and at this moment I regretted deleting my big, long "everybody is wrong about Rotherham" draft. Especially Elon Musk. You see, even if you think South Asians are genetically predisposed to raping, or if you think Pakistani Muslim men are culturally taught to think raping a white teenage girl is not a big deal, even then there's something to explain.

You see, this is the first major point of where I disagree with Elon Musk, and it puts me in an awkward position. There are still people out there who think the correct response to Rotherham is to keep it under wraps, even after it has become common knowledge in 2014. Rotherham was a matter of public record, something you knew about if you lived there or knew locals, then an open secret, until finally, through the reporting of Andrew Norfolk, it became common knowledge. Still, after 2014, there were people in journalism and media who continued to insist that the correct way to handle Rotherham is to hush it up. It was a lot of virtue signalling, if you ask me, but not exclusively. Many people seemed to honestly believe that "if you ignore it, it might go away" was still a viable strategy, after everything. So if you talk about Rotherham at all, some people will lump you with Elon Musk and Farage and Tommy Robinson and Julie Bindel, and these people are the same people who hushed up Rotherham in the first place.

If, on the other hand, you try to really work out how and where Elon Musk is wrong, you run the risk of being rounded down to "you got to hand it to them" in the eyes of some people, and you run the risk of explaining your opinions and the basics facts with great nuance to somebody whose opinion boils down to "The only way to not be racist would have been to keep the rapes out of the public eye and deal with the problem quietly".

Fundamentally, you cannot explain Rotherham only or mostly or primarily with genetics or "woke" or "South-Asian culture". Sure, you can talk to actual South Asian women, and they will tell you something along the lines of "Are you insane? That's how you get raped on the street in Delhi" or "If you do that, they will whip you and drive you out of the city."

Sure, you can make up a HBD just-so story. Sure, you can talk about pre-woke political correctness and racial politics, the same kind of political correctness that caused the Duke lacrosse scandal, and the same kind of racial electoral politics that had been going on in the USA for the last 150 years, where local politicians intentionally pandered to, or felt forced to pander to, specific ethnic interest groups.

I'm granting this all for the sake of argument. Maybe there is a political-correctness incentive not to notice that South Asian men are rapists. Maybe there are political considerations so that local politicians feel pressure to placate ethnic minorities. But even if there was this massive genetic or cultural factor, it wouldn't explain the institutional failure that let problem grow and grow.

It must have started somewhere, and it went unpunished for long enough that an institutional culture had emerged and solidified around understanding the pattern and intentionally looking the other way.

You may argue that this isn't how it works, and political correctness explains it all, just like political correctness explains the Duke Lacrosse case. But the alleged events of the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax case happened in 2006, and about a year later, it had all fallen apart. It was a scandal. The prosecutor was disbarred.

A case that was in some ways the opposite and in some ways the same happened earlier thus year in Berlin (Germany), and it immediately became a scandal: A 16 year old girl was raped by a 17 year old Muslim boy at some type of after-school youth centre, and the people running the tried to keep it under wraps because it would confirm stereotypes. The thing is it was a scandal. There wasn't a culture of turning a blind eye to rape. A couple of people who ran this space tried to hush it up, and somebody else reported the rape and exposed them as the self-serving arseholes they are, self-serving arseholes who make flimsy excuses for letting rape happen on their watch, in their spaces, self-serving arseholes who cover up rape to cover up their own failure to do their jobs and then paint it as political correctness.

Both of these aren't examples of a thing that is like Rotherham. Both of these are examples of the system working, slowly, and in the end, the politically correct idiots have egg on their face.

If anything, the Duke Lacrosse case was an example of racial electoral politics, because the white prosecutor tried to fabricate a rape case for political reasons.

Even if you have a problem with institutionally entrenched political correctness, it usually doesn't take decades until somebody points out that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to cases of actual sexual abuse.

If there is a pattern of sexual abuse/rape/sexual exploitation, and if there is a pattern of ignoring sexual abuse/rape/sexual exploitation, then you are dealing with institutional failure, powerful people putting their thumb on the scale, or both.

For things to get this way, you need to have systemic or systematic problems in more than one place: Police, mayor's office, city council, journalists, social services. For things to get this bad, the problem has to grow into a recognisable phenomenon, something that is delineated clearly enough so multiple parties can look at it and coordinate around it without writing a memo that puts into words "Here's the thing we are all pretending not to notice". For things to get as bad as Rotherham, you need people on the other side to recognise the dysfunction and to organise inside the gaps in the system. It's not enough for a rape to go unpunished, not enough for it to be swept under the rug. It has to be swept under the rug so often and so reliably that the people on the other side, the people doing the raping, know that they will go unpunished, and start acting accordingly.

Political correctness alone does not create this stable vortex of reliable institutional failure. Rotherham has more in common with Jimmy Saville, Jeffrey Epstein, and Lavrentiy Beria, than with individual men who got away with it on their own, or any case of women covering up an individual rape because it would confirm the stereotype.

In the case in Germany, were the people who tried to cover it up the police? The police are who you report things to. If someone who isn't the police tries to cover it up, someone else notices, and they go to the police. If the police try to cover it up, then it doesn't matter who notices (and a great many people noticed in all these cases).

Political correctness / the desire to "not send the wrong message" creates a reliable vortex of institutional failures when that culture permeates the law enforcement. And it is culture, I think. It's a set of beliefs and priorities and biases and sacred values. The institutional culture of the pro-immigration people is to very strongly weight "not sending the wrong message" over prosecuting crimes that might send the wrong message. I don't think they consciously make this decision, I think it permeates their culture to the point where they don't notice it.

You ever see Children of Men? 2006 movie about the world collapsing after children have just stopped being born, and the world falls apart as it confronts its own inevitable death. And then it wastes everything interesting about that premise to be a movie about "Britain is too mean to refugees." In the world of the movie, the events of the far-right anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints are happening, except that the film itself and all the Serious Respectable Critics are going "this is good, actually." This movie faced universal acclaim. Part of it was due to some admittedly phenomenal camera work! But a lot of it was due to the Fiercely Political message. That's not an official policy, but it sure as hell is a culture. It's pretty goddamn influential culture, at least indicative of what a lot of respectable people think.

You see far-right people talking about how pro-immigration people are willing to let their cultures be destroyed and their people killed under an endless tide of The Browns, an obviously vile and absurd thing to say about someone... and then here's Britain, at the bottom of every bad-faith slippery slope.

Right wing online media tried to draw parallels to Rotherham. You may still think it's a microcosm of Rotherham, and you still think Rotherham is about political correctness. Maybe degraded state capacity is downstream from political correctness, or downstream from immigration in your view.

In my view, the way you get a Rotherham isn't only through political correctness. This kind of thing happens because you ignore a problem until it becomes too big to ignore, and then the incentives are pulling and pushing people to also ignore the problem, or to exploit the fact that the problem is being ignored. The first step can't be just because of political correctness. Political correctness only starts becoming a factor once it grows to the group-on-group level, once you need an ideology that connects all the people who want to continue to ignore the problem. Somehow this needs to grow from a tragedy and into a statistic before the incentives align.

There is more than one way for prostitution rackets and child trafficking rings to slowly grow. But if a child pornography ring slowly grows and then after years, it is exposed, or if the mafia gets into sex trafficking, that's not the same as Rotherham. In some sense, that's just normal, and the police can just do their jobs. If they manage to arrest the people behind such a big operation, nobody will point fingers and ask why it didn't happen sooner.

It seems like right now, the criminal justice system in France is at a point where they have to triage and choose between prosecuting cases of assault, vigilantism, child abuse, and organised crime. Never mind property crimes.

Have you read the Jay Report? It describes pressure to avoid the Wrong Racial Message as a component of failure to communicate and coordinate. Multiple people have to pass a thing up and back down the chain for it to be acted upon. At every intermediate step there's a strong bias to not do that because the officers involved are interpreting everything favorably. At first it doesn't even have to be a knowing desire to cover up, just a powerful bias to think accusations must be false because only evil people would think that. They'd have to investigate multiple cab companies, who wouldn't cooperate, and would it be worth it for an accusation that's probably racism? They were encouraged to work with and through the community instead of imposing outer-community power on them. There's always a haze of not wanting to believe it, because only an evil person would believe it. By the time it's undeniable, it's too late to back out now.

It's clear that you and I have some differences where we just have to agree to disagree, but I think you know my position fairly well, and I understand yours. We agree that Rotherham predates the modern "woke" kind of political correctness, and we agree that political correctness played some role, and I am sure we also agree that the criminal justice systems (police, courts, prosecutors) in the UK, France, certain US states, and Germany (but Berlin in particular) are overloaded to the point that they need to triage.

I think we also agree, at least on some level, that the problem with Rotherham is in part due to the influence of first-generation immigrants on elections. Ethnic voting blocs/voting patterns are not the same thing as political correctness. In the UK in particular, certain ethnic groups can swing elections for MP in some constituencies. Maybe you file this with "political correctness" or "woke" when the greens stand anti-LGBT Muslims in an election, but I think it's not the same thing. I can provide sources about the UK electoral system and links to news reports, but I'll assume you agree, unless you challenge me on that point. I mean, you can argue with me if you think Gaza swung the last US presidential election, but I think the systems are different enough so the dynamics of one cannot be applied 1:1 to the other.

We mainly disagree on what came first, and the chain of causality.

I don't disagree that there are many instances where individual cases of domestic violence – not really part of organised crime, I mean – or child abuse are excused by courts or social services because "That's their way, they do things differently, and we need to respect it". There is obviously a two-tier system in our own very minds, as seen in #swedengate or discourse about "seduction" in France. If it's happening with Swedes, we have no trouble looking at their customs and values and judging them, but when it's happening with "brown people", then we can't possibly understand what is going on in their strange and oriental culture. I think it was Yasmine Mohammed, the Canadian woman forced to marry an Al-Qaeda operative, who wrote about such cases, but finding sources is not important right now, unless you challenge me on this one. I assume we agree on that also.

I think this type of paternalistic/cultural relativist dysfunction is not sufficient to produce something like Rotherham. Also, consider when cases of child abuse or domestic violence are investigated, and somebody at social services or a court decides that is happened but this is actually fine. At least these cases are in the system. This is not exactly the same as a cover-up. It's something else altogether.

FWIW, I understand your point about Children of Men, even though I know that movie critics would look at your point and say you didn't understand the movie. I think your point has merit, and the obvious defensive move is second-order reading comprehension. I'll get back to that.

The only place where I think we cannot agree to disagree is the current situation in Germany. As I understand it, the right has enjoyed a slow but steady cultural victory when it comes to crimes perpetrated by immigrants and refugees. Between 2015 and 2022, German media and police reports went from carefully eliding the ethnic affiliation of criminal suspects to always reporting on it. I have seen a report by journalists who compared the situation in 2014 and 2022, and they pointed out that crimes where the perpetrators are refugees make it into the news disproportionally often. This isn't the first time this has been remarked on. You can argue that the kind of crimes committed by refugees are more often newsworthy, but the point remains that crimes by non-EU immigrants and refugees are reported more often, even in state media, even in left-wing newspapers, even when controlling for different rates of crime. Even when the journalists themselves are "woke", the standards of journalistic practice have shifted, because "three people stabbed on the street by mentally ill person of unremarkable ethnicity (trust me bro, nothing to see here)" created such backlash from readers every time that it became untenable not to report ethnicity.

My Google-fu fails me, but I can find old pieces from earlier in the 2010s that compare the American practice of mentioning race first in the description of a person in a journalistic context with the journalistic standards in Germany at the time.

In this one case, a handful of people in social services tried to cover up a crime, but the incentives of everybody else (police, courts, city council, journalists) were aligned to make the problem public. Completely unironically: This is the system working.

The case in Berlin that has been trotted out on social media across Europe, and it sure is evidence of something, but it's not that.

You see far-right people talking about how pro-immigration people are willing to let their cultures be destroyed and their people killed under an endless tide of The Browns, an obviously vile and absurd thing to say about someone… and then here's Britain, at the bottom of every bad-faith slippery slope.

In the world of the movie, the events of the far-right anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints are happening, except that the film itself and all the Serious Respectable Critics are going "this is good, actually."

I'm with you on this one. Every other month, there's a thing where an edgy party official makes a remark about the "Great Replacement" or something like that, something like "Maybe it's a good thing that they are destroying our culture" or "Maybe it's a good thing that they vote differently" or "The great replacement isn't happening, but also it would be good for the economy if" or "White people are genetically different, because they are capable of racism". If you look at the EU parliament and left-wing parties across the EU, you will find a politically correct asshole every week who says something completely barbarous in a way that confirms what the righties have always been saying, in a way that eggs them on, as some kind of inverse dog-whistle.

Of course you can find something outrageous every week if you want to get outraged as a leftist. You can find a remark by somebody who does the math about killing the poor and lowering VAT, or on raising the age of pension entry to 80, or something like that.

The place where I disagree is where you see this downstream from political correctness. If you look at the US, you can see cities where public order breaks down somewhat, but only locally, so that the state cannot maintain its monopoly on violence. Portland and Seattle come to mind, and I know you think they count in favour of political correctness. The difference is in Portland and in Seattle, it wasn't exactly swept under the rug. You can see it reported on the news, and the local politicians tell you it's a good thing. In France, the main driver of this seems to be degraded state capacity.

In Rotherham, the main driver of this seemed to be police not being interested in policing "those people", being unable to police "those people" because they were opaque and ungovernable, and not being interested in investigating rapes of women and girls who "had it coming", and the problem grew and grew.

I don't think you've shown why political correctness could not have been what started this. The Rotherham gangs began before the start of modern Wokeness, but not before "political correctness." Not before the idea that the worst thing in the world for someone to be is a racist/sexist. The gangs became entrenched because the police were uninterested in policing "those people" and they were uninterested because it would be un-PC to believe such a large group of people with the same ethnicity would collaborate on such heinous crimes.

You see this happen a lot when you get into as many pointless arguments with people on all sides of the political spectrum as I do. The converse of "this accusation against a person is more severe so it must be more believable" is "this accusation that implicates a group of people is more severe so only a very bad person would believe it." How many times has someone tried to bad-faith summarize your position as being more accusatory and implicating more things, so they could say that you're wrong because only a bad person would believe that claim? That's not a calculated tactic. They think that only a bad person could believe a claim that implicates a group they like. You see the same thing with progressives going "I can't believe in heredity because if I did I would have to kill black people for eugenics" and that's been going on since the 1960s.

the right wing intellectual class does exist, but its vocabulary has not been forced into the mainstream by narcissistic wokescolds trying to make themselves relevant, so you don't see it unless you go looking for it. have you? you criticize the idea of someone willingly engaging with ideas they may not agree with and doing the sisyphean work of trying to understand what the hell they're on about, when was the last time you gave ANY right wing literature the same fair shake?

Three generations of feminism have made women consider natural biological differences between the sexes to be an oppressive conspiracy needing fixing.

(The Cold War wasn't supposed to just end like that… so obviously it didn't. It's still going, it just has to be, or otherwise what was it all for?)

(For that matter, I'm thinking of people of my parents' generation for whom the recent Iran conflict is entirely been about the hostage crisis. That's why we have to remove them, you see, because they took our people hostage — didn't you watch the whole thing happen on the TV news?! How could you have missed that?

And he's another fucking Baptist too!!!!

What makes them nuts is being indoctrinated from their earliest days to believe in literal biblical interpretation and young earth and so on. They believe it because they're deluded or have deluded themselves into it.

So many times that I've seen these guys talk, they always have to use some... MASSIVELY extra-Biblical concept: a concept that is decidedly not in the Bible or even talked about by anyone more theologically informed than them, to try and say the Earth is 6000 years old, and yet looks to be billions of years old.

The two big ones are "God created the Earth 6000 years ago but put in embedded age and history (aka fake age and history) to make it LOOK billions of years old" and "Time ran faster for a period of those 6000 years before a certain point then it slowed down to as we know it is".

Group psychology. It’s always group psychology. People love their in groups and having an outgroup enemy. They’ll assemble mythologies that flatter their identity as part of their group.

Uh, do any Protestants actually use wine in communion?

Uh, yes? I'm an unchurched atheist and even I know that. Pretty much all Anglicans and Episcopalians; both major Lutheran synods; on a congregation-by-congregation basis for Presbyterians. (Some do have grape juice as a secondary option specifically for recovering alcoholics, though) And that's just in the US, which is where the whole grape juice communion thing got started back in the late 19th century, from the combination of the temperance movement with advances in pasteurization.

I always figured that half the reason the evangelicals stuck to grape juice was just being cheap tbh.

You see, if you just juice grapes, and try to store it as is without processing, preservatives, concentrating, etc., then yeast on the grape skins and in the atmosphere will naturally ferment it pretty quickly. You have to pasteurize it in a way that kills off those yeasts before you seal it. Before that technology was developed, some of those religious groups — Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, etc. — tried using things like boiling raisins, reconstituted grape juice concentrate, etc. to have "unfermented wine" for their communion.

Then dentist and ordained Wesleyan Methodist minister Thomas Bramwell Welch, using the newly-bred Concord grape, figured out how to pasteurize the juice in 1869 in Vineland, New Jersey. He then marketed it to local churches as "Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine" — which his son Charles E Welch eventually turned into Welch's Grape Juice Company.

Yes, that Welch's. Jelly, fruit snacks, dried fruit, etc. It all began with New Jersey Methodists trying to square the need for communion wine with their strict Prohibitionist views. Yet another example of the role played by strong religious views in the history of American food brands.

Whenever I see political discourse about gender equality in professional sports or trans athletes, I think about this. It's like being a pacifist talking about women in the military.

Yea sooo anyway!!

But if you aim your gun at someone, tell them to stop, and they don't, you have a right to defend yourself, your family, and your property. You are not obligated to let someone walk off with your stuff, but you are obligated to give them a chance to stop and if they're not a threat to your life (for instance, if they're already leaving the premises) you aren't really within your rights to shoot to kill.

Rule 2

Shoot to maim and they're armed they then have the chance to attempt to return the favor, your job is to neutralize the threat and center mass is the biggest target meaning you have the best chance to hit it.

Warning shots could also get you arrested so those are also a bad idea,