MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7hr ago
My gut feeling would be the obvious - that a rape dog in an organisation with a tradition of dog training is less absurd than a rape dog in an organisation which eschews dogs ownership for religious reasons.
That said, the point is that both are about as likely as the Motte endorsing AOC in the 2028 Presidential election.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
13hr ago
Let's take a pause from the gender politics and think about the Canadian language politics. If Seth Hatfield is the perp's real name, then this is an Anglo-Canadian incel who wrote a manifesto in English (based on a quick skim of the citations, I don't think the author is familiar with Francophone culture) and travelled to Quebec to commit incel terrorism.
Will the Quebec elite be able to even pretend to be hurting while they smugly crow about how this proves the moral superiority of French-Canadian culture?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
15hr ago
If the defense of the British establishment
It isn't a defence of the British establishment, it's an explanation for the passivity of the average middle-class Brit. Compare the public and political response to the grooming gangs to the equivalent response to the much lower number of second-generation Pakistani immigrants who blew themselves up on public transport around 2005 - that was a case where it could be you or your child.
The only possible defence of the British establishment is that it may have learned the lessons since the scandal first broke around 2010, one retirement at a time. Starmer, in particular, was one of the people involved in breaking the scandal (as Director of Public Prosecutions when the first batch of gang members were prosecuted) rather than in covering it up. Andy Burnham as metro mayor commissioned a metro-wide inquiry into grooming gangs on his turf (Rochdale and Oldham were the medium-sized ones, there were also some small ones) and was responsible for Greater Manchester being one of the only three police forces to consistently report ethnicity of criminal suspects, according to the 2025 audit carried out by Louise Casey.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
15hr ago
if there were 1,000 distinct 'grooming gangs' over the period exained, each one would need to rack up 250 victims to reach that figure
The Rotherham and Telford gangs both had well over 1,000 victims. If every grooming gang was that prolific, you get to 250,000 easily. But they weren't. The third largest gang was Oxford, with about 300 victims. Rochdale and Oldham were in the 100-300 range, and none of the other individual town-level gangs that got busted was over 100.
Like most criminal activity, this looks like a power-law type problem, not a Gaussian-type problem.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
Agreed. Morally and legally, there is no difference between "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls and one of them might have been your daughter" and "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls who were the kind of girls everyone considered rapebait anyway". The guilty parties should be drummed out of public life (they mostly have been) and, if they committed crimes, prosecuted. (They mostly didn't, although the Lowe report implies that some individual cops accepted bribes). But if you are asking the question "why is the average Brit not outraged by this?", which most Motteposters posting about this issue are, that is a question about politics.
Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news, the Pakistani grooming gang scandal has had less political legs than the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association, the Afghan rapefugee scandals in various Continental European countries, or even a mostly-fake scandal like the US campus rape crisis. And the reason for that is precisely that your daughter is safe if you are someone who matters.
The methodology of the Lowe inquiry was to believe victims the way Democrats believed Christine Blasely Ford or the UN believes Hamas atrocity propaganda. I don't think part of that process includes thinking about whether numbers are accurate or not. Most of the things said are consistent with what we know was going on from other sources, but at least one of the allegations is obviously false (there is a trained rape dog on page 97 - and in fact "Kate"'s entire account is implausible - she also claims that the first time she was raped, the rapists jumped her in the street and gang-raped her on the spot, in public - which as well as its inherent implausibility is not the MO of a grooming gang).
The 250,000 has been the standard estimate on the British right, but it comes from a Reform peer making a guess in order to ask a Parliamentary question - basically "I think there were 250,000 - if you have a lower estimate please share it". I would be very surprised if there is any complexity beyond that.
It goes without saying that my attention was drawn to this alleged rape dog and the one in an Israeli prison by very different social media posters, and that the number of non-Motteposters who called out the obvious falsity of both allegations is likely to be zero. Most people are sane enough not to give a sh*t about politics, but the vast majority of the ones who do will believe in the rape dog when it is politically convenient for their side.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
This is false. Fundamental to how and why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to operate was that the girls were chavettes at a time when statutory rape of chavettes was effectively decriminalised. About half the girls whose accounts form the first half of Rupert Lowe's report had already been sexually assaulted by male relatives, "stepfathers" or children's home staff before the Pakistani rape gangs got to them, with the perps being significantly less likely to face justice than the Pakistani gangs were.
If you are a middle-class married father in an intact family, your daughter was mostly safe.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Reform also ran a disaster-class of a campaign (possibly a sign of the future, possibly a one-off).
They had a candidate who was as thick as pigshit (believing that "let's nominate the local plumber" was a simple way of hacking by-elections in the Manchester suburbs) and had a history of obnoxiously sexist social media posts. But I didn't notice the campaign as such (which, like most potentially winning by-election campaigns, was run by Farage's people) going badly wrong in ways which weren't simply candidate quality.
I doubt that Burnham has the ability to bulldoze through court politics like that.
If he can, it will be by enlisting the Labour Party in the country outside London as an ally against the Deep State. Some of Starmer's silliest failures, with the Chagos deal being the one that gets talked about on the Motte, involve not pushing back against dumb ideas coming out of the Deep State. Five minutes talking to backbenchers representing provincial seats would stop a PM who was in touch with his Party making those mistakes.
Both your links about why "people familiar with Andy Burnham's political career are unimpressed" are to articles by London-based right-wingers. They may be correct on the merits about Burnham's character (and I think Leslie is), but they are not familiar with the facts on the ground in Greater Manchester.
Burnham's constituents in Greater Manchester are impressed - he has won three elections with 60+% of the vote in territory which while Labour-friendly is not that Labour friendly - Labour only won 43% of the vote in Greater Manchester in their 2024 General Election landslide. And then he wins the Makerfield by-election comfortably, beating Reform in one of the to 10% most Reform-friendly seats* in the country with a campaign that focussed on bringing out his personal vote. And the rest of the left are impressed with Burnham precisely because he is popular in his turf. You can't do what he did without being either a more effective governor or a dramatically better communicator than your opponents. Part of what he has done is allowed Manchester proper to get richer** - there is a common cynical view that the structure of local government in the North of England was deliberately set up by Thatcher to encourage northern cities to fight with their suburbs rather than allying with them for regional prosperity (and potentially against London-based Tories). Burnham has managed to convince the rest of Greater Manchester that a successful Manchester is good for places like Makerfield, and delivered on this.
I don't think anyone can fix Labour's problems now - the Tories left the country in enough of a mess that the only workable approach was to double down on (mostly correctly) blaming the Tories (similarly to the tactics used by the incoming coalition in 2010). Within the first 100 days there should have been a big speech with the gist of "Sorry. The Tories ruined the country more than I thought. I am afraid you are going to be suffering the consequences of Tory failure for the next few years while we try to fix the problems". To do that now requires Burnham to turn on Starmer as well as the Tories.
And I don't think Burnham is the kind of politician who would do that if he could, for similar reasons to Ian Leslie. I think there is a "Burnhamism" that could improve the UK in the same way it has improved Greater Manchester (see the writings of Tom Forth for an idea of what it would look like***), but it isn't the left-populist message that Burnham is selling to London-based lefties, and in any case would need a full term without getting blown off by events to deliver benefits on a national level.
* Makerfield isn't just the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to form a government after the next election, it's the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to remain politically relevant. On uniform national swing, it is the 29th Reform target seat.
** Opponents of Burnham say that credit for the economic improvement in Manchester should go to Richard Leese who led the City Council in Manchester proper from 1996 to 2021, not Burnham. This is mostly correct, but it is significant that Burnham supported Leese rather than sabotaging him in order to appeal to left-idiotarians who don't like sensible pro-business local politics and pensioners in the burbs who don't like change.
*** Short summary: A diagnosis of the British Problem as "the potential of the North of England, and particularly cities like Manchester proper, is being wasted" and a programme of promoting local and regional initiative in the North (including normal pro-local-business boosterism from local Labour politicians like Burnham who might otherwise be business-sceptical, although Burnham personally won't be the face of this any more once he is PM), soft YIMBYism (you don't need to "crush the NIMBYs" in the North - they are a lot less organised and powerful than in the Home Counties), and targetted investment in fixing the biggest transport problems in the region. But even though this sounds milquetoast, it isn't compatible with low-energy managerial politics in a geronto-democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The media always run a "the new PM needs to call an early general election to seek a personal mandate" campaign because general elections are good for business. The only PM to listen was Theresa May, and look how well it worked out for her. Burnham will ignore them.
We don't have a presidential system of government in the UK, and the media wanting one is not a reason to change the constitution, let alone a process for changing it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think the best diagnosis is that Starmer has allowed things to drift. Some things were drifting in the correct direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the correct direction under Starmer. In particular, gross immigration is falling back to a pre-Boriswave normal and net immigration is falling further (and possibly negative) due to remigration of EU citizens post-Brexit. Some things were drifting in the wrong direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the wrong direction under Starmer. In particular, the minimum wage is drifting upwards faster than the productivity of unskilled workers (Counterintuitively, this was a Conservative policy dating back to the 2015 election) and the construction industry is drifting into overregulated paralysis.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The technical term for attacking a country you are at peace with without declaring war, or for resuming attacks when a valid ceasefire is in place without publicly announcing you are revoking the ceasefire, is "perfidious". The US attack on Iran should qualify (I won't argue the technicalities), either on basis that the US and Iran are not at war, that the US was a de facto party to the ceasefire ending the 2025 12-day war or because there was an implied ceasefire for the duration of the ongoing nuclear talks in Oman.
If any of the Iranian officials directly involved in the Oman talks were the subjects of a targeted killing this would also be a separate war crime (attacking diplomats) - although it now looks like this was a mad social media threat that was not carried out, rather than something that happened.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Taking this question seriously, I would say the period where it looked like the Oslo accords might work counts (lets say from the Madrid Conference in 1991 which started the Oslo process to the start of the Al-Asqua intifada in 2000).
I wouldn't say I actually felt good about the situation during the period between about 2005 and 2012 when it looked like Israel under a Kadima-led government might be able to meet their security needs by building walls, rather than needing to oppress Palestinians on a day-to-day basis, but it was a lot less dismal than the Israel-Palestine conflict normally is.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Obviously the Chagos deal is also non-ideal for the US.
The Chagos deal was pushed by the US deep state during the Biden administration. That is perfectly compatible with the idea that the deal is non-ideal for the US, but not with the idea that it is a shocking betrayal of the US by the UK.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Now the urgency is over, read the relevant pages on our Rightful Caliph's professional psychiatric website, including in particular his long and frank discussion of inpatient psychiatric admission because you need to decide how much effort you will put into avoiding (or, possibly, forcing) an inpatient admission if this happens again.
There isn't any other comparable online resource on psychiatry targetted at 120+ IQ non-clinicians.
It is also worth noting that if you have one, your regular GP/primary care doc is a lot less scary than a psychiatrist or an ER psychiatric nurse and part of what they are trained to do is triage the distinction between "you need a shrink right now" or "you need a shrink when you have time and money to see a shrink"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
And in any case the information on the ID isn't legally sensitive, so BigTechCorp could give itself permission to share with volunteer moderators, and immunise itself against accidental breaches by rogue volunteer moderators, with a one-paragraph change to a clickwrap ToU (in the US) or $20,000 worth of GDPR paperwork (in the EU).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Unlimited freedom is a frontier society, which certainly isn't always safe, but I wouldn't describe it as hellish and dystopian.
Frontier societies are functional because there isn't enough concentrated wealth to attract predators. Unlimited freedom in an affluent society where the administrative cost of running a complex scam is Nigerian minimum wage plus a smartphone is more like a frontier society subject to constant Indian raids.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID.
A quibble, but most of the big US websites have implemented schemes where you can age-verify an account by logging on from a phone with an obviously-adult (as detected by AI) FaceID. Only babyfaces and newly-minted 18-year-olds need to submit ID.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Young men yearn for high variance life outcome scenarios. They do not want to be average. They want a world split into a small number of winners and a great number of losers and they want to gamble on being in the former category.
This is true at the margin compared to a status quo of feminised welfare-state capitalism. But peace is almost always popular with men who remember war, and the New Deal (and equivalents in other countries) was popular with men who remembered devil-take-the-hindmost libertarianism. Several posters have already mentioned that traditional socialism and communism were very male because they emerged from male-dominated labour movements.
Even MAGA feels more nostalgic for the time when Walter the Schlub could get a $20 an hour union factory job and a 6 who ironed his shirts and didn't get fat than they do for a more mythical past when the top 20% of white American men could crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
I don't think so. At no point did I claim that the pre-MAGA power structure in the GOP was more entrenched than the Dem equivalent, or that it couldn't be challenged. I was making a comment about where power sits and how it is challenged.
If power sits with formal leadership, you challenge it by voting out the formal leadership. This happened with MAGA. Arguably it also happened with Reagan.
If power sits with "the Groups", you challenge it by setting up a new group and doing enough Group things to earn the capital G. (I am not a Democrat, or American, so I don't know how this works in practice, but it clearly does). This happened with BLM and Sunrise. The Greer post I linked talks about how it happened with the feminists.
In the current year, you can't shift the direction of the Dems by voting in primaries, because whoever wins will do what the Groups want them to do, with Biden as proof of concept. And you can't shift the direction of the GOP by setting up Groups, because elected Republicans will ignore you, grassroots Republicans will laugh at you and the MAGA netroots will ask which Jew is funding your Group.
I think where we disagree is not about how elite factionalism works, it is about the role of the grassroots. In your model, the grassroots have agency, and Trump is proof that the grassroots have a level of power in the GOP that they don't in the Dems. In my model the grassroots as such don't have agency. Individual people - like Charlie Kirk - who organise the grassroots have agency, but once you have organised enough grassroots activists to matter, you, personally, are now a party elite. (Incidentally, Kirk is a point against my thesis - TPUSA is a "Group" in the sense that I am using the term, but I note that TPUSA can't criticise Trump and stay relevant, whereas a left-wing equivalent would be constantly criticising a Dem president.) In my model the GOP grassroots are the terrain elite factions are fighting over - in effect as a source of primary votes and hard-money donations.
Another way of looking at this - was MAGA a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon? The grassroots rage against the GOPe that he took advantage was real, but if Trump doesn't run the angry grassroots cope, seethe, and either stay home or hold their noses and vote for Ted Cruz in the primary (who then loses to Hilary in the general). Trump (or some similar exceptional leader) was a necessary component of the MAGA takeover. It is hard to tell whether Trump is driving the bus with the MAGA base along for the ride, or whether Trump can be forced to dance with the ones that brung him - they don't disagree that often. But where Trump and the base do disagree, Trump normally wins. Iran is the most spectacular example - the MAGA base have totally cucked on this issue and are running around claiming that they always supported the war and Trump has won it.
The idea that young men are somehow financially worse off than they were previously is just dead wrong.
This is true in the US, where economic growth has been fast enough to keep pace with Boomer greed. It isn't true in other first-world countries with slower economic growth and similarly greedy Boomers. The detail is confusing because the relative price of housing has increased so much compared to both other basic necessities like groceries* and minor luxuries like streaming video subscriptions or avocado toast.
This makes the online generational wars very confusing, because people from across the Anglosphere (and from globohomo communities outside it) are posting to the same websites and think they are participating in the same conversation.
* The relative cost of healthcare has also increased, but that isn't a basic necessity for the young men we are talking about.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
But safe returns can also be found in 'house prices up only!' lending, which directly undermines the demographic sustainability of civilization and transfers wealth from young to old. Or SEO/adtech/addictive mobile games.
If you think that middle-class homeownership as the default is a good thing, mortgage lending is the biggest pro-social things banks do*. The transfer from young to old is driven by housing scarcity - generous mortgage finance just determines how it plays out.
If we didn't have a mortgage finance system that allows desperate upper-middle-class youth to somehow-or-other scrape together enough money, then the Boomers would be selling out to investors who would become a new landed aristocracy. Given the less-generous mortgage system in the US post-2008, this is already happening at the low end of the market. (Hence the moral panic about corporate landlords buying SFHs - this is actually less harmful than individual landlords buying them, but easier to demagogue).
* In dollar terms, the mortgage bond market was traditionally bigger than the stock market. The recent run-up in the stock market means this is no longer true in terms of outstanding market cap, although the SpaceX IPO will mark the first and possibly only year when the stock market was bigger in terms of new issuance, which is a better measure of the impact finance is having on the real world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Conventional wisdom is that Versailles was so expensive to build and run that it cost the Bourbons their throne and heads when the bill came due. (This is probably false - Louis XIV's wars cost far more than Versailles). Whether this makes it good inspiration for Trump's ballroom or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
It's interesting to me how women get so upset (seemingly instinctively) about inexpensive male sexual gratification.
Historically, not just women. Men were on board for the Victorian-era campaign against Onanism, for example. Feminism is now the only socially acceptable reason for people to be prudes, but I don't think it is the only (or even the main) reason why people were prudes historically.
Most families have two cars, and if this sort of a thing was an attractive option you would see more two car families economising on the second car.
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