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.

I'm looking at Amazon reviews of a piece of computer hardware, and one review is one star, box contained brick, no way to explain to Amazon that this was a fraudulent brick, they thought I had put the brick in.

like for example: you would see perhaps the greatest influx of converts and reverts if they took pedophile priests and televised an event where they did some sort of ritual in latin before hanging them in saint peter’s square

Much of the time, the only motivation that matters is internal motivation.

Much of the time, if you want to cheat at the thing or cut corners, you can, and the results will be...not necessarily as good, depending on your skills, but vastly more efficient.

Much of the time, if you want people to do the thing the real way - you have no choice but to reward them for doing the thing the real way, directly, with status and resources and meaning, instead of looking to some external goal or metric and hoping that this one will somehow be cheat-proof.

To spell out the thought process a bit more sedulously -

People are not going to do the thing unless you teach them to want to do the thing. For its own sake, more or less. In the idealized case, because they care about doing the thing in a sort of pure abstract autistic way; in the more-easily-managed psychological/narcissistic case, because they care about being thing-doers. Either of these is fine, and works, mostly.

How do you get people there? Through education, indoctrination, and cultural suasion. Y'know, all the usual ways of inculcating values in people. [NOTE FOR PEOPLE SKIMMING ALONG: none of these things works reliably or precisely, we haven't invented mind control and you shouldn't act like we have, but they sorta-kinda work in aggregate and they're what we've got.] Which involves doing things like "creating the legible cultural role of the thing-doer" and "paying people to be thing-doers." (That last is what I've been thinking about, in the context of the weirdly parallel monastery economies invented by medieval Europe and classical China, where "paying people to pray" was absolutely a giant load-bearing part of the system.)

Because of course the entire modern worldview is shaped by industrialism, and in a scientific-industrial process you generally do only care about the outputs, and in fact getting more outputs for lower levels of effort is often exactly what you want. And even then, mature high-quality manufacturing has to include QA testing that includes lots of tests that a naive output metric would not capture, because otherwise people will optimize the quality away in the name of efficiency. There is a constant pendulum swing between "optimizing away the quality" and "actually insisting on quality", and at any given moment a given output (or even whole product categories) will find themselves at different points in the cycle.

But of course I agree with the broader point about there being a constant pull towards optimizing away quality. That's the baseline concept, really.

The takeaway here - which I imagine that you, in particular, are likely to find sympathetic - is that there's really no way around the character-forming and culture-forming parts of this dynamic. Which means (a) that you have to throw resources at things that are inefficient, and not listen when people yell about how they could get the same output more efficiently, and (b) that you have to be willing to take explicit cultural stances of the kind that are anathema to contemporary bureaucratic regimes.

If somebody on twitter posts something, and somebody replies "Source?", then it's all "HELP HELP RANDOS IN MY MENTIONS". Twitter users are really status-conscious.

In YouTube comments, it's different. I once saw a YouTube comment that said: "I got a PhD in $TOPIC and the video is wrong." The next comment said: "I am a professor at a university and I teach $TOPIC and the video is correct and that guy is full of shit." – "Liars, both of you. Nobody who has a PhD posts YouTube comments" – "Well, I know I am a full professor, and I believe the other guy has a PhD, I just know he's wrong. One of my students pointed me here and I thought I'd weigh in".

On tumblr though, you have somebody ask "Source?", and then OP gives the source. OP usually doesn't say "I have the credential, shut up", but instead OP gives their reasoning and citations, the exact same way somebody would if their credentials were "I had to write a term paper about this and I skimmed 5 books about this topic". There is no presumption that this is about status. There is no expectation for people to shut up because one of them has a PhD. Nobody is surprised when somebody has done extensive research into some niche topic like the French penal system in the early 19th century.

I think my own expectations of evidence and how people are supposed to behave are forever tainted by the way mainstream journalists used to treat tentative results from psychology and neuroscience, and the fact that you don't actually need a degree in computer science to be a programmer, but you do need theory. Self-taught programmers often mix these up. They say "you don't need a degree", but they imply "you don't need to know about formal languages, database theory, computability, operating systems, or any of that. You can just start and do stuff."

In other fields, the difference between "knowing the theory" and "having a degree" is never hand-waved in the same way, and if it is, you're a crank. In software, cranks are the default.

Also, there’s an expectation here that everyone else here is a grad student, former grad student, or temporarily inconvenienced grad student, so someone asking for a source is more likely to be understood as one aspiring academic asking another for a source, vs a challenge to someone’s authority.

-Cory Doctorow.

People sometimes respond to my criticism of some thing or person X by accusing me of "hate" for X, and I can be confident that is usually false, the emotion I am feeling about X is not hate, because I know what hate feels like from other times when I am feeling it.

Right now, for example, I hate Doctorow. I want him punished. I want him censored. I want him humiliated. I want him hurt.

My first reason for hatred is that Doctorow appears to think the quoted nonsense is a reasonable claim.