2rafa
1hr ago
What was the actual alcohol content of the alcohol they were drinking? Wasn’t beer back then like 2% abv? Even the Romans themselves diluted their wine until it was 3-5% according to many estimates.
It’s quite possible they were drinking “all day” and yet still much less drunk than a modern drunk (or college student) drinking 80 proof vodka.
2rafa
1hr ago
I think it’s worth separating people like Dase, Kulak and others who have gone on to have the same arguments on slightly nastier and (at least in the latter case) more lucrative platforms from people who have actually ended their underwater basket weaving forum careers altogether (I like to imagine Hlynka is out there somewhere, having a nice time, but he’s probably on Boomer Twitter).
I’m trying to think of the longest I’ve left for over the last decade. A few months here and there, a few times. The thing about Britain is that the Summer always ends, and at some point it’s cold and grey (worse up where you are) and there really isn’t anything better to do on a quiet sunday morning than argue here. Maybe things change with a kid in tow (although there are quite a few parents here already), but I have my doubts.
I don’t know, I disagree that it seems staggeringly high. These are largely poor people who the ruling class basically never sees or cares about living in largely forgotten towns and cities outside of the wealthy southeast (where almost anyone with any influence, power or wealth in this country lives). Promiscuity is very common among the underclass including underclass girls, which is part of why so many were dismissed as prostitutes. I also think the nightlife dynamics are relevant here, even in many of these places where Mirpuris were only 2-4% of the population, they controlled and control large aspects of the nightlife economy including running convenience stores that sold alcohol, almost all taxis and later Ubers (before the Boriswave at least) late night food places etc. It’s not like they were equally represented across professions which also affects access to eg drunk girls.
1.4%? Yeah, a much larger proportion of women have been sexually victimized than that, especially among the poor,, and while a lot of that is domestic, 1.4% for organized or group based grooming abuse seems….possible? Police stats aren’t relevant here - even most middle class women who trust the police don’t report sexual violence. These girls definitely wouldn’t have. Instead you need to look at surveys of sexual victimization that suggest a large number of women are victims of sexual violence during their lifetimes, much of which will happen at a younger age, and which will happen disproportionately to the poor and underclass.
2rafa
2d ago
It was semi-public, and dozens of gangs were publicly tried and are still being tried. There were people (and not just the far right) low key talking about this for many decades. It was a perennial discussion on reactionary forums but also in a lot of social care and police circles; it was brought up in the mainstream conservative press occasionally and sheepishly by opinion columnists, heavily edited. It made the news a few times, just devoid of critical context and scale. It wasn’t a complete secret, it just wasn’t a scandal until in 2014 there was a lot of reporting and a Labour MP around Rotherham started talking about it publicly with parliamentary privilege after a report was published, which was itself because one guy at The Times had doggedly pursued it for several years in a corner of the mainstream press.
it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs.
Again, why? Consider an abused spouse who is forced into sex by her husband many times a week - she might be raped 500 times in a year. That’s one person.
Girls trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery / prostitution are often raped thousands of times per year. But some may only have been raped a handful of times before their parents physically stopped them from going out, they moved away, or they avoided their abusers themselves directly. It wasn’t like they were being chained up most of the time, they were plied with drugs and alcohol.
So the 250,000 would include women who, aged 13 or 14, were invited to a room about a kebab place or a bodega, essentially, given vodka / weed / coke, and then raped while high/drunk/unconscious and who then never went back, as well as cases where girls were trafficked to hundreds of men.
Why is 14,000 new victims per year unbelievable? There are say 8 million people aged 10-18, 4 million of them girls, at any given time. Through the period a much higher total number of girls passed through that age bracket. Through the period 2000-2018 probably 80% on average were indigenous.
The grooming gangs are best described as a cultural practice rather than a traditional form of organized crime, like the mob (which while an ethnic gang or group of gangs operated at least in some cases under a classic hierarchical structure). Obviously they engaged in other criminality in many cases, were tied to drug and human trafficking etc, but this wasn’t a ‘cartel’ or a ‘pimp’ with thousands of trafficked ‘employees’. These were local phenomena, just spread across the country. There was limited top down organization.
The UK is a pretty populous country. 15,000 girls a year out of 4+ million being involved in group based child sexual abuse like this is a tragedy and an outrage, but the numbers are not unbelievable.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think the 250,000 figure is far-fetched at all.
I think most people’s math is wrong. Many victims describe being raped by hundreds of men in relatively small geographic areas. There are communities where a very large proportion of Mirpuri men of all ages, from their mid teens to their sixties and seventies, first and second generation, may have been involved. There is documented evidence of this happening as far back as the 1950s, when there were just a few thousand (at most) Mirpuris in the entire UK. There are communities where documented evidence across enquiries suggests that the majority of girls in some poor estates or especially in care homes were abused. There are countless anecdotal pieces of evidence from hundreds of small towns, cities, villages across the UK - even some where the Pakistani population was less than 2-3% for much of the period, like Telford - where men and women will say “everybody knew” that there were teenage girls involved in this kind of purported prostitution work, people gossiped at schools, the kids all knew some girls who were involved, who recruited others.
Lastly, very very few women have come forward about being victims. Many are now adults, mothers, grandmothers in some cases, with husbands and families who may have no idea about the abuse they’ve suffered. What mother would want to subject her own children to bullying at school calling their mother a [slur] whore or whatever because she spoke publicly about her abuse. Many survivors just want to forget it. I don’t know many northerners closely but I’ve spoken to some - not from any of the infamous places for this - who say everybody knew it was happening when they were kids. And there’s almost no compensation for victims - if you were assaulted by a Weinstein or Al Fayed type, you can come forward and take legal action for millions (of course you can remain anonymous in some cases, but publicity can help there). If you were repeatedly raped by poor immigrant taxi drivers and kebab store owners, you’re not getting anything.
The math, when you consider this happened in pretty much every town and city in England for 40-60 years (in large volumes until 10 years ago, and in some cases still to this day), a country of 70 million people, easily supports a total victim count of 250,000 or indeed much much more.
2rafa
5d ago
They have no route to Iran without American landing vessels, and for a largely conscript army the casualties that would be incurred even if victory was possible would be so high as to existentially threaten the state. If 100,000 young men die in a country of 6 million (when you subtract the Arab and Charedi population who don’t fight) ie 3 million men total, 1.5 million young men, everybody loses people. Plus, there’s no game plan for that quagmire either. A tiny country can’t occupy a hostile major one for long. They can occupy an indifferent one (colonial India) or one where they have a centuries-ahead technological advantage, but no more.
2rafa
5d ago
While I enjoy fiction like the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I don’t think an Israel anywhere else would have survived either. There were two very large waves of migration that have given the state the necessary human mass to survive (especially given the workshy chareidi population, which for lack of good alternatives probably would have migrated in large numbers to any Jewish state with religious freedom) - the Mizrachi migration and the Soviet migration.
The former wouldn’t have happened without Israel being located where it is (I don’t think the Jewish population of the Middle East would remain particularly large, but like the Christian one it would slowly have trickled out over time due to persecution, mostly to the West, maybe some to Latin America and Asia). The latter would never have happened, because an Israel located in eg (West) Germany would have been in the more discrete enemy category for the USSR than Israel and so emigration would be much less likely to be allowed (yes, some Soviet Jews went to the US, but they usually pretended they’d go to Israel first).
I also don’t think, even in their anger, any of the allies or even many Jewish leaders would have agreed it was structurally stable to carve out a corner of densely populated West (and it would have been West) Germany, ethnically cleanse the natives and establish some kind of Jewish ethnostate. Yes, the Ostsiedler were ethnically cleansed, but that was behind the Iron Curtain, in the chaos of the postwar period, and by countries with tens of millions of people in an empire with hundreds of millions of people.
2rafa
5d ago
The Israeli Arab rapprochement isn’t the risk here. Ultimately the Arab world might destroy Israel, sure, but it’s not the primary threat. MBS still doesn’t care, the domestic population was pacified, there were actually surprisingly few violent pro-Palestinian protests in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the UAE obviously remains onside for Israel. The risk is that the Shiites (primarily in Lebanon but to some extent also Yemen and Iraq) and Hamas alone can make Israel unliveable by first world standards.
By the way, I don’t think the evidence has borne out your speculation on Hamas’ plan. Everything I’ve seen suggests they really did believe they’d storm through to the West Bank and ignite a popular uprising among Palestinians and possibly even Israeli Arabs, and at that point Hezbollah would probably have finally joined in with Iranian permission (which they probably didn’t initially have), and that would have been immediately existential for Israel, fighting on three fronts including internally, everyone throwing everything at them. It wasn’t a PR move.
This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies.
There was no suggestion that Khomenei invented Muslim anti-zionism. But the transition from secular Arab Nationalism of the PLO and Nasser to anti-zionism with a more explicitly Islamist character - both inside and beyond Palestine - coincides almost perfectly with an expansionary (Sunni) Islamist identity, spread in grand irony from the gulf, that radically reshapes the Muslim world, as Naipaul so adeptly chronicles. That ideology completely changed Islamic identity in Muslim states more populous and in some cases more important than much of the actual Arab heartland. Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Muslims in India, in the Philippines, in West and East Africa. Regions of increasing strategic importance to the United States. Regions where Muslims care much more about Palestine today than they did in 1955.
It was in that context that the Islamic Revolution tried to take that mantle from the Sunnis.
2rafa
5d ago
Nuking Tehran wouldn’t destroy the regime. Tehran is actually a comparative hotbed of opposition compared to other cities. Power and the IRGC are highly distributed, as are weapons stockpiles, missiles, the conventional military, and the nuclear program. Iran is too big to defeat militarily with anything other than a ground invasion, a spontaneous revolution, or both. Even the Japanese only surrendered because they knew the alternative was full invasion. Israel can never invade Iran.
2rafa
5d ago
Russia and Iran are allies of convenience. Russia also likes a close relationship with the Gulf. Russia also sold out close Iranian allies Armenia. Putin pursued and expropriated some Jewish oligarchs, but also plenty of gentile ones, and there are still plenty of Jews he allows to remain rich, or indeed in other important roles in the state (politicians, propagandists, etc).
2rafa
5d ago
That doesn’t really answer the question. Israel has no good strategic options and didn’t even before October 7th. Hope that eventually something happens in Iran and that Hezbollah doesn’t want to fight and that they can hold off every attack and Hamas never develops rockets that can breach the Iron Dome and that the Houthis don’t get more aggressive with missiles and that they continue to maintain a huge technological / military advantage.
A lot of hope, in other words. October 7th showed how weak Israel was and is to ground invasion, it’s a largely flat country with no strategic depth, surrounded by civilians who - regardless of what their leadership may or may not believe or say - want to kill and pillage its inhabitants and take their land. The only winning move was not to play, but that was decided a long time ago.
In the long term, I increasingly feel that the only hope for Israel is that whoever first invents and controls ASI (Amodei, Altman, maybe Brin and Page) takes pity on their co-ethnics and/or purported homeland.
Otherwise the geopolitical situation is bad, the demographics are bad, the reputation is bad. Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever, especially as they stream into Western lands in ever higher numbers and grow to be politically prominent there, too. As Scott has said so many times, only a small number of people have to really care about an issue to get their way if most people don’t care about it, and Muslims care about Palestine as much as Jews care about Israel and are far more numerous. The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population. No cunning, no chutzpah, no number of places on the Forbes billionaires list can stand up to that.
The only possibility was gambling that the easy prosperity and trade ties that had persuaded the Gulf Arabs into reducing their hostility could be replicated in an Iran in which the revolutionary regime was defeated, and that possibly as a consequence over many decades hostility toward Israel could be reduced. The Mossad judged that, after the recent widespread protests, a killing blow to the ayatollah and IRGC and cabinet elite, plus using Claude and image recognition to dynamically identify and track police stations, local pro-regime militiamen and troop movements and strike them with air superiority, would bring the people back to the streets in a way the government could not crush. That gamble clearly failed. The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home. The Iranian middle class are simply too comfortable to rebel in a way that threatens, for most of them, their lives. Most of us would do what they did, which is nothing.
What more is there to say? The decline may be fast or slow, maybe both. You can’t hold out against the world forever, surrounded by enemies.
2rafa
6d ago
There is no plan. To understand the Iran War from Israel’s perspective you have to understand that it was a Hail Mary move.
Since the JCPOA it was clear to Mossad that Iranian nuclear weapons development continued largely unabated. Inspections were limited and easily misdirected. Iran had no need for a large domestic nuclear power program. The founding mission of the Islamic Revolution was the destruction of Israel. Iran was funding proxies. The IRGC controls much of the export economy and therefore foreign currency.
The risk for Israel is not necessarily being overrun. This remains the ultimate risk, but there are others. The risk is that regular attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis perhaps, make life in Israel unliveable for those who want first world conditions, and they leave. The economy collapses, leaving a mass of zero skill ultra orthodox who don’t work, some Arabs and various Mizrachim who have no foreign passports or the skills to get a visa. At that point, the country ceases to exist in a defensible state. That is why they felt Iran had to be defeated.
They gambled and they lost. They’re not that smart.
2rafa
6d ago
The excerpt is questionable. A pacifist approach in the decades that followed would have been far more disastrous for Zionism than the misadventure described. Arabs, particularly Levantines, are more feminine, more emotional, and more neurotic than the one dimensional ‘Arab mind’ narrative suggests, sure. That is only part of the story.
I think the main thing is familiarity, as mentioned below by @Bartender_Venator, unstructured interaction of the kind that happens constantly when you’re in other people’s presence.
For example, I have always had the suspicion that many people who work in a team or a small organization with, like, the same 5-10 people every day for many years or even decades are often far closer and more earnest friends than they care to admit, but because it’s considered loser behavior to say your coworkers are some of your best friends, people don’t discuss it.
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