MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
In the context of disproportionate retaliation for a perceived insult, no.
Nor did the judge, given that Digwa is going to an ordinary prison and not a secure mental hospital.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Cummings' real-world achievements, including leading the successful Vote Leave campaign, are incompatible with being a midwit. What Cummings does appear to be is a high-IQ quokka who sees himself as a political genius because of his proven success in manipulating the great unwashed with carefully A/B tested and focus grouped nuggets of emotional manipulation. But as soon as he tried to be a political player in his own right rather than Michael Gove's henchman, he had to engage in conventional political intrigue, at which he proved to be about as cunning as Baldrick after eating too many turnips.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
If that exact scene were put into a Sopranos style prestige drama, the point of the scene would be to show that the murderer was an unhinged psycho with a pathetic, brittle ego and "random encounter" levels of impulse control.
Apart from the "psycho" part, I would agree with your characterisation. Brittle egos and unhinged responses to perceived minor insults are normative in some barbarous cultures like prisons (because they show you are not a pushover), and deliberately cultivated as necessary survival instincts by non-psychos who spend long enough in such cultures, but unacceptable in civilised cultures.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
The median voter (remembering that the old and rich vote more often than the working-age and poor) likes the consequences of mass immigration, apart from crime. Almost all voters like their noncriminal immigrant friends, neighbours and co-workers and want them to stay. To make mass deportations a winning issue at the ballot box, you need to convince the median voter that the people you are deporting are disproportionally likely to be criminals - which turns out to relatively easy, particularly when they actually are.
Dominic Cummings always said that the idea of competently managed mass immigration (i.e. a Canadian/Australian points system) focus grouped as popular in the UK.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
The essence of populism is that it is popular because it takes the stated concerns of people seriously rather than airily dismissing them.
Although there are popular populists, it isn't necessary for the term to apply. Nigel Farage was still a populist back when UKIP were getting single-digit percentages of the vote.
Even now, populists are generally not popular, in the sense that they tend to lose elections to centrists. (Yes, Trump won. But the Republican theory of the 2024 election is that there was no centrist on the ballot, not that Trump beat a centrist).
No, but it is what the Brexiteers said they were going to do. Vote leave campaigned in existing Commonwealth immigrant communities saying that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for Commonwealth immigrants, told business leaders that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for work permit immigrants, and told the electorate that the Australian and Canadian points systems were good models for a post-Brexit immigration policy at a time when Australia and Canada had much higher legal immigration than the UK.
While the Boriswave was happening (but before the small boats became the dominant media narrative around immigration), Dominic Cummings said that the British people were not unhappy with the Boriswave because, unlike immigration of EU citizens under freedom of movement, it was under democratic control. Reader, he was wrong.
Boris was always planning to do a Boriswave, and made no effort to conceal this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
17hr ago
"Loyalist" in practice means "sympathetic to political violence on the Protestant side of the Troubles". Northern Irish Protestants who make loyalty to the UK central to their political identity but don't support political violence are called "Unionists".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
17hr ago
That is a minor variation on the populist trap. The essence of populism (both left-populism and right-populism) is to channel inchoate anxiety among the populace into hatred of the designated (ideally but not always foreign-coded) scapegoat. The centrist trap @Corvos is referring to is to attempt to dismiss inchoate anger by pointing to a non-existent scapegoat.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
17hr ago
The video shows Nowak calling Digwa a "bad man" repeatedly while filming him shortly before the murder, and continuing to do so when Digwa is walking away from him. That isn't legal provocation, and nobody suggested it was, but it pattern-matches to "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time" much more closely than "unprovoked attack by crazed thug from violent foreign culture".
We don't know what happens in between "Digwa is walking away from Nowak, who continues to abuse him verbally" and "Digwa attacks Nowak with a big-ass knife", but "Digwa turns round and demands satisfaction, and a series of mutually escalatory threat displays lead to a fight" is quite plausible, as is "Digwa turns around and chops up the guy who he incorrectly thought was stalking him with no further warning", or anything in between. If we were trying to adjudicate Nowak's Darwin award nomination, the crucial point would be whether Nowak follows Digwa. Following someone while filming them and verbally abusing them is genuinely provocative (though not a provocation in the technical legal sense), and culpably stupid if the guy is visibly armed in a way which means they will win a fight. But the police didn't find any evidence either way on this point, and in any case it is legally irrelevant to Digwa's guilt.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Why would you assume it's about race? There have been minorities in Britain for centuries. There have not been not been horrible and prolific murders and rapes in Britain like this. Nobody cared about minorities when they acted British and identified as British and cared about British people and their values.
The largest immigrant minority in Britain before the Empire Windrush docked in 1948 was the Irish. (They were legally British, but so were the Jamaicans on the Windrush - people who are inclined to racism didn't see either group as remotely British). Moral panics about Irish wickedness were an ongoing feature of 19th and early 20th century British politics. There is also the notorious indigenous minority with their own unique kind of sexual deviance, the Welsh. Anti-Welsh racism has also been an on-and-off feature of British politics, and there was at one point in the 19th century a semi-serious moral panic among a certain type of conservative Anglican about the spread of Welsh-influenced Nonconformism* in England.
The British are less prone to ethnic hatred than most countries, but we are not immune to it. It is just that the ur-racism in England was never about skin colour, and this confuses Americans and lefties raised in the American tradition of anti-racism.
* Nonconformism is a general term historically used in British religious politics for and form of Protestantism that is not Anglican or Scottish Presbyterian (both of which are official state religions in different parts of the UK).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
19hr ago
My point is that it is the constant murders of white people by ethnic minorities that is radicalising whites against ethnic minorities, not the Twitter algorithm.
The safest countries have about one murder per year per 100,000 people. At least a quarter of those will be outrageous enough to make good social media copy. So a group of 5,000,000 people will commit one potentially viral murder per month, if they are as peaceful as the Swiss. And one a week if they are only as peaceful as white Americans or black Britons (both around 4 murders per 100k). Since there are more than 5,000,000 nonwhite people in the UK (and an order of magnitude more than that if you are looking at immigrant crime globally, as most of the Americans poasting about the situation in the UK are), your Twitter feed being full of murders of white people by ethnic minorities could just as easily be caused by the algorithm as by actual crime. If Elon Musk wanted your Twitter feed to be full of white-on-white murders, he could make it so. And if he wanted it to be full of cute cat pictures, he could make that so.
How much do you know or care about white-on-white crime in Belfast? It's a complex issue given the history of the Troubles and the number of ex-paramilitaries hanging around. And yet you feel the need to have an opinion about crime by asylum seekers in Belfast.
There is enough crime in Zurich to fill a tabloid or a social media feed with crime stories. To know whether the constant stream of crime being shoved in your face by people who don't have your own interests at heart (at best they want you to keep staring at the ads between the criminal fnords, and in the case of Twitter coverage of migrant crime in the UK, we know that these posts are being amplified by a foreign billionaire who has made no secret of his desire to foment political violence in the UK and drive the British government out of office) is caused by the people doing the crime or the people doing the shoving, you need to look at statistics. So let's do that.
Murder has dropped since mass immigration started in the UK and continues to fall slowly. Ditto stabbings*. Ditto violent crime where the victim ends up in A&E. Ditto violent crime measured by victim surveys. Ditto property crime measured by victim surveys. There is some evidence that property crimes which mostly target tourists and therefore wouldn't appear in a victim survey have increased, including phone snatching and pickpocketing. Shoplifting (which also doesn't appear in victim surveys because the victims are businesses and not individuals) has definitely increased. Sexual offences by ethnic Pakistanis in the UK were out of control 20 years ago, and these cold cases are being regularly relitigated on social media in a way which suggests to people not paying attention that the crimes are still going on. (I genuinely don't know if they are or not, and the people outrage-poasting about them aren't bothering to check either). Cyber fraud is also rising, but it isn't what right populist agitators or tabloid journalists are talking about when they say that "crime is out of control".
Right now the UK right-populist discourse is dominated by two murders that went viral on social media. One was a case of "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time, unfortunately someone is dead because someone else brought a knife to a fistfight". The murder of Henry Nowak is only newsworthy because of the shockingly poor (and probably racially motivated) police response - and yet the social media peanut gallery are calling for penal laws against a demographic who commit less crime than the white British. Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US). The other case is a real failure of the UK immigration system - the Belfast attacker was a Sudanese falsely claiming to be a Somali who crossed the open ROI-NI border in order to claim asylum in the UK instead of the EU. But you wouldn't have learned about the difference from social media posts by right-populists.
* Police recorded knife crime is up (but peaked in 2024 and is now falling again), but actual stabbings are down, as measured by NHS administrative data. The most likely reason is that the police have been told to be more careful about checking whether a knife was used in muggings and suchlike where violence is threatened but nobody gets stabbed.
** Singh is the second-most common surname of VC winners, after Smith.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
20hr ago
I think I've seen Americans talking about "stepping on a lego in the night"
But if you are right, "Legos" as a plural-formed mass noun is a weird usage. There are other examples ("clothes" is the most obvious, some people use "cattle" in this way) but they are rare.
The finance bros who are any good at it tend to prefer a low-drama 8 to a high-drama 11. The only person I worked with who actually dated eastern European models was more of an upjumped computer programmer than an actual finance bro.
The English traditional elite produces a lot of not-too-smart daughters who fit the bill re. looks and drama potential and know that they are at risk of downward mobility if they don't marry money. A lot of my colleagues dated hot primary school teachers. There is some overlap between these groups.
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