Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
5mo ago
By vague request of interest in the topic, I am copying over a post I made elsewhere to this thread.
The Chagos Islands Deal, or, The Next Westminster Scandal Is Already Here, You Just Haven't Noticed It Yet
The British-owned Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, host a major US military base, Diego Garcia. Our government is now planning to sell the islands to Mauritius, and to pay them for the privilege.
Brief on the background. The Chagos Islands were originally uninhabited until France brought slaves from Africa to work on plantations in the late 18th and early 19th century. The descendants of these workers became known as Chagossians. The islands, along with Mauritius, came under British control in 1814 through the Treaty of Paris, and were administered as a dependency of colonial Mauritius for administrative convenience rather than any historic connection. In 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence from British colonial rule, the UK separated the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Then, the UK removed around 2,000 Chagossians from the islands to make way for the Diego Garcia base. Mauritius maintains that the separation of the islands was illegal under international law, and has waged a legal battle to get them. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the UK's ownership of the Chagos Islands was unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently passed non-binding resolutions demanding the UK withdraw.
Alright, onto the actual scandal. Over the last few months, the British Government has been rushing to put together a deal that would hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This rush was likely prompted by fears that the next US administration would oppose the handover, and seemingly because of this rush, the British government has kept giving in to new concessions that Mauritus is demanding to seal the handover. So now the UK will also pay $9bn over 99 years to lease the base. Oh, and it'll be inflation-linked. Oh, and front-loaded. Oh, and maybe it'll actually be $18bn instead. A substantial amount of money for a government that is raising taxes, cutting spending, and claiming there's a £22bn 'black hole' in the finances. In addition to the loss of a strategic military base, There are further concerns that the islands would likely end up hosting the Chinese military at the end of all this, too.
And in return for all this, in return for the territory and all that money, the UK gets... Nothing.
So to justify the seemingly impossible, the government has offered an increasingly bizarre list of reasons to hand over the territory, none of which hold up to scrutiny.
- It is good for the Chagossians, and redresses their grievance for being expelled.
No, it is not. The Chagossians hate Mauritius and reject this deal because it doesn't give them self-determination and ownership of the Chagos Islands. In 2021, Mauritius criminalized "Misrepresenting the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory" i.e criminalized Chagossians stating they should own the islands themselves.
- It is required by international law.
Nothing that would be binding. And besides, international law and what army? This is a US military base. If we care to hold it, it will be held, and there's no force that can take it from us.
- It will increase Britain's soft power by showing commitment to international law.
No. It will cause other countries with dubious territorial claims on the UK, like Spain and Argentina, to smell blood in the water. Not to mention generally making the government look like gullible idiots.
- As a former human rights lawyer, Keir Starmer can't help but autistically lawmax, so when he hears international law, he is compelled to obey it.
Unfortunately, it is untrue that Keir Starmer monomaniacally follows international law. For example, his support for arresting Britons over speech crimes violates international law. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." - UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948)
- The Tories also started negotiating to hand it over so really it's their fault.
In 2022, they agreed to enter negotiations. And then in 2023 they realised how stupid handing the base over would be and pulled out of negotiations. This is also, of course, not an argument in favour of the deal.
- If we don't hand over the islands right now, a Swiss Quango might magically change the laws of physics to create a zone over the islands where the electromagnetic spectrum is shut off, disabiling communications for the military base.
I wish I was joking, but this is actually the argument they're currently using.
- The Islands are next to R'lyeh and we don't want to be holding the ball when Cthulhu wakes up
Okay, I did make that one up.
So what's actually going on here? There's not much that can be said with absolute certainty, but there is certainly some plausible alternative reasons that the government aren't so willing to state. For example, Keir Starmer was well aware of this case before becoming Prime Minister. In fact, Mauritius's chief legal advisor, Philippe Sands KC, is one of Keir Starmer's friends. Sands has seemingly (and maybe illegally) entered the islands in the past. Oh, and that last thing about changing the laws of physics to switch off the electromagnetic spectrum. That's also Philippe Sands. In other words, what's been presented as a national security claim from our own government is, in fact, smuggling a claim made by an adversary instead. There's another figure involved, too. Lord Hermer, who is seemingly involved in negotiations on the UK's side in some capacity, while also harbouring life-long anti-British sympathies. But his involvement seems less obvious here.
Anyway, now we have multiple opposition figures accusing Keir of, effectively, treasonous corruption.
Conservative MP Robert Jenrick:
Keir and his mates are colluding against the British people to surrender the Chagos Islands
The cast of characters involved in this ‘negotiation’ absolutely stink - and they all link back to Starmer 👇
Representing the Mauritian Government as their lead negotiator is Philippe Sands KC. Sands campaigned to elect Starmer as Labour leader and described him as a ‘great friend’. Sands has previously spoken about ‘humiliating’ Britain through his legal work.
Lord Hermer hates our history and our country. His role in the betrayal of our national interest over the Chagos Islands is unforgivable. Starmer should fire him.
When we recapture No10 we’ll then retake Chagos, fuck Starmer’s treacherous sell out using his scum lawyer friends getting rich from betrayal - and investigations into everybody involved in the deal. We can roll that into the investigations into Grieve et al and the need for jail sentences for those who worked with foreign enemies to overturn British democracy…
I am gleefully awaiting the next reason the government presents for why we need to hand the islands over in full expectation that it is even more hilarious than the last.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.
The attitude in the UK is similarly bizarre. The government, other blob parties, and supportive institutions have become foreign policy hardliners in a context where those same governments have, at every opportunity over the last 30 years, adopted policies that weaken the UK's ability to fight against a peer power. And I don't just mean in strict military budget terms here. They can increase the military budget right now and this won't improve the situation because the current circumstances make effective utilization of a larger military budget impossible. I mean policies like:
- Outsourcing. Relying on foreign, China-centric supply chains for industry is silly.
- Green energy. Tanks and jets don't run on batteries. Frack to Fuel Fighters.
- Legally empowered NIMBYism. How are you going to build the factories and bases for all this?
- Judicial power and rulings. Why build a munitions factory if you'll get sued over rare spiders? Why fight Russia if you'll get charged for shooting them?
- Weapon Bans. Legal access to firearms would both mean more experienced citizens and a potentially stronger occupation resistance. Instead the government is floating bans for kitchen knives with pointed ends.
- Nationalism. Nobody has found a way to make effective modern armies other than nationalism, and usually ethnic nationalism at that.
- Lockdowns. Shrinking the economy over a cold does not win wars.
- Immigration. This does not turn into military manpower. More British Muslims joined ISIS than are in the British Army.
- Two-tier laws. Dispossession of the demographics most likely to serve in the military is a terrible idea.
- Coffin dodgers subsidies. Why fund pensions or the NHS at the expense of the 20 and 30-somethings who are actually going to fight your war?
A UK that has a small military but is prepped and ready to re-arm and oppose Russia is a UK that looks very different from the UK we actually have. More importantly, it would be an image of the UK that our current government would despise. Cynically, the government isn't genuinely interested in defence, they just see sabre-rattling over this as a good way to go after domestic dissent.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred.
UK law doesn't require that speech isn't used to spread hatred. I am, for now, permitted to spread my hatred of onions as far and wide as I want. Their texture is disgusting and they make everything you put them in taste the same. But also, the UK does not have free speech regardless. The law is asymmetrical. Those to the right of the mainstream are prohibited from voicing their hatreds, while those to the left of the mainstream are allowed to rant about "zionists" and the like all they want.
Which is the inherent problem with the idea of criminalizing spreading hatred. Which hatreds? Hatred of Russia, for daring to invade Ukraine? Hatred of the unvaccinated and so-called granny killers? Hatred of the Far-Right? These are all forms of hatred that have been deliberately spread by the government over the last few years. Why are these forms of hatred not just allowed but endorsed? That's a rhetorical question, because the answer is too obvious.
The result is that restrictions on spreading hatred are always used to promote certain political views while suppressing others. That's not a slight tweak to make freedom of speech all nice and cuddly. Restrictions on hate speech instead directly attack free speech's common purposes: Democratic participation, truth-seeking, and checking power.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Some more claims I did a double-take on, having never heard them before: [...] that masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19?
By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
Some people caveat this by saying the evidence against is weak. My response to this is that if you're going to force billions of people to do so, you should have strong evidence in favour, not weak evidence against it. The default position for medical interventions should be that they don't work until proven otherwise. Others argue against the findings on the basis that masks necessarily must work because physics, on the grounds you don't need to do a scientific study to determine if a parachute works. This is called unfalsifiability, and is the classic sign of pseudoscience. Regardless if we did do a study on parachutes and got a null result that would actually be very good evidence against parachutes.
Stuff like this means we need to caveat any claim that Kennedy has wacky beliefs / conspiracy theories with the fact that his political opponents hold the similarly wacky (but in practice far more destructive) belief / conspiracy theory that masks work for covid.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
This list is just regurgitated partisan op-ed, which is exactly what you'd expect from how GPT-4 works but not meaningful. If you want to look at how democracy ends, historical examples of democracy ending should be listed as the highest risk factors. For instance, why is a military coup not on this list?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
After being burned too many times by claims like this my default is to reject them until demonstrated otherwise. A lot of bombastic claims about climate effects have been passed through seven layers of modelling, each causing more dubious results than the last.
Modelling co2's effect on radiative forcing? Go ahead. Modelling radiative forcing's effect on temperature? Fine. Modelling temperature's effect on rainfall. Maybe. Modelling rainfall's effect on crop yields? You're getting too far from hard data now. Modelling crop yield effects on economic migration? Fuck off.
"Mass Formation Psychosis" just seems like a buzzword.
There's definitely something self-sustaining to lockdownism that makes it uniquely powerful as a variant of totalitarianism. Most ideologies have some sort of engine that, whether by design or by accident, sustains them, by bringing in new people and stopping them from leaving. Dawkins would have described it as a meme by his original intent: a self-replicating bit of culture, some of which are far better at self-replicating than others and of which lockdownism might just be the best ever at spreading.
But I don't think there's anything spooky like "Psychosis" explaining this. I think it's rather simple, actually. The core tenants of lockdownism are self-sustaining. That is to say, if you actually believe in these restrictions and carry them out, then the process of doing this will sustain your own belief in lockdowns:
They control behaviour by robbing people of everyday life. They destroy bonds of friends, family and work, and replace these bonds with bonds to distant figures like Fauci. They make people financially reliant on leadership (i.e the government) for survival. They isolate people from dissenting information by keeping people locked up in their houses, unable to hear or even see those who disagree - all outside sources are dismissed as not merely wrong, but actively dangerous. Any contact with people who don't agree with lockdowns is frowned upon above and beyond that of contact in general - they disagree, therefore they are more likely to be infected, and are more likely to kill you. Through masking, your empathy towards others is decreased. At a broader scale, political pluralism and serious disagreement are de facto outlawed via a combination of bans on public meetings and censorship of alternatives to public meetings...
The weakness is in the long-term. Once everyone is entrenched in this system, the economic wellbeing of society inevitably tanks to the point where it becomes unsustainable. These systems of control don't function once you have rolling blackouts knocking out information control infrastructure, seized up supply networks blocking deliveries, and people emerge from their isolation in desperate search fulfilling basic needs. They also don't function once people notice that the prophesies are failing, and the sinners aren't all dead - Bill down the road is one of those disgusting anti-vaxxers, and you've not spoken to him in months, but somehow his car keeps coming and going. In this regard, vaccine mandates could be seen as a way to resolve this discomfort - a way to make manifest in the real world the sufferings that are meant to befall the prophesized enemies, after they fail to emerge as a result of their sins.
It really shares quite a lot in common with the strategies that cults use to manipulate members. It's just that in this case, the policy prescription of lockdowns is inherently manipulative, rather than (or alongside) being intentionally so. Unlike a cult, it never replaces comradery with the outside world with comradery with the cult itself, instead just leaving a miserable void. Perhaps it's long-term instability is similar to Nazism and Communism, rather than religious cults - it feels good while you're killing Jews/Kulaks/whatever, but inevitably the reality that you can't sustain a society based on killing imaginary enemies sets in.
I don't know if this is a steelman of Mass Formation Psychosis, however. Maybe this is what those people are really getting at, beneath the layers of buzzwords.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...
Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?
The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.
Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.
You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other.
The idea that big conspiracies can't happen because one leak is enough to stop the conspiracy in it's tracks and get everyone involved busted relies on, well, that axiom. That one leak stops it. There's even mathematical modelling of whether conspiracies are viable with this premise baked in. But in the real world, there are plenty of conspiracies where a single leak doesn't stop it from proceeding. In fact there are plenty of conspiracies where tens of thousands of leaks doesn't do anything to stop it. Obvious examples of such could fill a book so I'll just provide a few dissimilar examples.
A political example is the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart in East Germany. That this was actually being used not to protect East Germany from Fascists, but instead to stop East Germans from fleeing to the West, is a conspiracy theory involving something of great importance and implicating tens of thousands of military and political figures in a secret plot to prevent emmigration. And basically everyone knew it. Yet this did nothing to stop the conspiracy until the eve of the fall of the regime engaged in it anyway.
A military example is the Little Green Men that occupied Crimea. That these were actually Russian troops engaged in a plot to annex Crimea is a conspiracy theory involving something of great importance and implicating tens of thousands of military figures in a secret plot to invade and seize territory from another country. And basically everyone knew it. Yet this did nothing to stop the conspiracy, which proceeded to it's completion anyway.
And a medical example is Flibanserin, a drug that almost certainly doesn't work to treat a disorder that almost certainly was made to fit the drug than the other way around. That this was actually just a plot to make money off women in shitty marriages is a conspiracy theory involving something of... admittedly modest importance, and implicating thousands of researchers and clinical workers. As part of the conspiracy, the owner of the drug's IP even set up astroturfed advocacy groups insisting that the FDA needs to approve it, and that if they don't, it's because of sexism against the "female Viagra". And it's very much an open secret. Yet this did nothing to stop the FDA from approving it and it's ongoing albeit limited use.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
I am far too used to people using the parachute idea as justification to not do RCTs in places where an RCT would clearly be best practice. Most recently, involving COVID restrictions, which are assumed to work because "physics" or whatever but never get tested. We don't apply such flimsy reasoning elsewhere. Designer drugs have to go through trials despite being physics telling you they should work because they interact with the target molecule in models. If you can do an RCT, and choose not to, you better have a good reason to do so, and parachutes isn't a good enough reason.
Early parachute designs were actually tested. Nobody took the claims of their inventors at face value, they wanted evidence that they work, so their inventors tested them either personally or with objects/animals. That's why we don't need additional RCTs for the concept of parachutes, even though you could do one using animals. If they were invented for the first time tomorrow, you'd probably want to do something like an RCT:
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Take 20 crash test dummies.
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Randomly assign 10 to use the parachute, and 10 to not.
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Simulate identical falls for all 20.
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Hand the dummies to a blinded team of engineers who assess damage
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Compare the results statistically to see if the safety intervention reduced injuries
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Tophattingson
3mo ago
The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).
Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American)
Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Unless someone is suggesting that committing genocide makes it impossible to simultaneously drink alcohol and play the accordion, I'm not sure how those photos would constitute evidence against the allegations.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
Stalin was definitely worse than the Tsar, but it was a difference in degree not a difference in kind.
I disagree, I think there is a difference in kind between authoritarian and totalitarian governments, because they have different strategies of repression.
The ideal authoritarian regime has an ideal authoritarian citizen. One who is disinterested in politics, disinterested in ideology, disinterested in who rules them, and simply lives a normal, private life as a disengaged citizen. While those close to the regime, such as the military and bureaucracy, need to be kept specifically loyal, the wider public only needs to be kept not actively disloyal. They can even hate the regime if they want, as long as they don't actively threaten it.
The ideal totalitarian regime, however, has a different ideal totalitarian citizen. One who is actively interested in politics, ideology, and who rules them, all aligning with the current regime. It is not enough for you to be disinterested. You need to support the party. You need to actively promote it's beliefs. You need to hang the propaganda posters inside your home. And, eventually, you need to rearrange your entire private life in service to the regime and whatever ideals it believes in.
Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome,
Republican Rome had very weak democratic institutions because the narrow franchise of the Centuriate had more power than the broader franchises of the Tribune of the Plebs. There is no equivalent to this stratification in the US. It's never going to be a good analogue for the US backsliding because the starting points are so dramatically different.
As for the other examples.
Tsarist Russia was heavily authoritarian, and the Bolsheviks made it totalitarian. It was no longer enough to be a disinterested peasant doing your own thing.
The German Empire was a hybrid regime, authoritarian compared to France or the UK but not as authoritarian as Russia. The Nazis also went totalitarian. So there was democratic backsliding here (or really, more of a yoyo, as it went down during WWI as the country became a de facto military dictatorship, up during the "Golden Twenties", then down again before diving off a cliff).
Japan is also an example worth listing, with the Taisho Democracy being undone mostly by the May 15 incident.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians
Discussing the possibility that covid leaked from a very specific facility hosted in China: Racist
Insisting that covid happened because Chinese people eat weird shit: Not Racist, apparently?
The reality is that the mechanism went the other way. Discussing the possibility of a lab leak needed to be tabooed for the sake of certain political ambitions. Calling it racist is just the go-to for doing that.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
If Barnhart thinks that a cause has to be difficult and brave to be worthwhile, then maybe he should switch to an even harder, more controversial cause than the poor, sick, or homeless. So why not advocate for Nazis instead? In reality, nobody, including Barnhart, decides what causes to support on that basis.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.
Hey, there are some of us who are actually consistent on this - pro-abortion, pro drug decriminalization, and anti-vaccination. You just won't find us in the Democratic party.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
An argument I've regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli's intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals.
I feel there's an ommitted piece of the puzzle in this discussion. Even Hanania's broader discussion of it has that ommission even though he gets very close to it. There's an idea common in leftist (for lack of a better word) political spaces that military action provokes a counter-response that results in the target being strengthened, not weakened:
When they say “Israel can’t win by military means alone” what they’re really saying is “we don’t want them to,” because they don’t think it is worth it. Yet they feel a need to appeal to the self-interest of Israelis and make arguments that are convincing to Westerners who support Israel and don’t care that much about the Palestinians.
What's missing? This idea isn't exclusively applied to Israeli military action against Hamas. It's applied in a very ad-hoc way to all "oppressed" targets of military action from the perspective of leftists. Punching fascists doesn't make them stronger, bombing Nazi Germany didn't make it stronger, bombing Japan didn't make it stronger. Killing Russian conscripts doesn't make Russia stronger. But bombing Hamas strengthens them. Bombing Iraqi Insurgents strenghen them. Even the Khmer Rouge, where the US is oft blamed for their rise to power because the US... Bombed them in a desperate attempt to stop Cambodia from falling to a bunch of omnicidal maniacs? In all likelihood this is just the 70s Cold War Left trying to defect from their vocal support for Southeast Asian Communism in the aftermath of it's atrocities, but it's part of the same pattern where some bombs are mysteriously disobeying Lanchester's laws.
Now maybe there's some advanced theoretical reason why certain targets get stronger when you smash their shit up, but I don't see this articulated, nor do those same leftists sincerely act upon those beliefs. Why would they simultaneously chant "Palestine Will Be Free" and "Ceasefire Now" if they believe that bombing Hamas will only strengthen them? "Bomb Me, Almighty Bomber!" would surely be a better slogan.
It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it.
Even having to play devil's advocate, the response seems pretty easy to me, because the argument Dave Barnhart made is incredibly self-refuting. He's not listed good reasons to support abortion. He's listed good reasons to oppose abortion and inexplicably framed these good reasons as bad.
"Thank you for pointing out how easy it is to advocate for the unborn. How undemanding they are. How morally obvious. And how even those without money, power or privilege are just as capable of advocating for and protecting the unborn as the rich, powerful and privileged are. But this only raises the question of why you, despite recognising how easy and morally uncomplicated it is to advocate for them, still fail to do so."
Yeah this could do with some editing to make it slightly snappier but it's not my argument, so that's best left as an exercise for an adherent.
As for the second paragraph, it would be less snappy, but you can just respond to that by saying there's no reason to only care about one thing. Does someone who cares about the poor therefore not care about the sick? No. So why exclusively apply such reasoning to someone who cares about the unborn?
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I'm joking obviously, but the way that people on Reddit are talking about this murder is frankly concerning.
There's a reason far-left governments turn into skull factories within 5 minutes of coming to power. It may be concerning but it shouldn't be surprising. Once Reddit (or similarly far-left dominated communities) manage to coordinate deciding that some individual or group be put to death, they're not going to be quiet or subtle about it.
When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.
There's something fascinating about this video, which seems to be a pattern that I've noticed in the ultra-online US left, where for all the admonishment they'll do of their own side, whenever they speak about anyone right-wing, they speak as if they are so far beneath them that even when right-wingers agree with them they are wrong. I'm not really sure how to phrase it, but it's like... they treat even the centre-right, who in theory should agree with them on far more than the far-left, as axiomatically wrong? As if their perpetual wrongness is just an inherent part of the universe. Almost this meme. And they end up doing the rhetorical equivalent of contortionist backflips to agree with them while pretending to disagree with them.
It's just a very strange attitude to have if you're actively trying to discuss flaws within your own side. Shouldn't you at least give credence to the possibility that those on the other side of the aisle might be right, even if not specifically so in this instance? Seeing a discussion that acknowledges uncertainty in their own views, while simultaneously absolute certainty on others, is weird.
Edit: The highlight here is when they address that conservatives calling out insane views on Twitter, which initially they attributed to being niche nobodies, but now acknowledge as actually becoming mainstream views. Then they just... Blitz past it without acknowledging that they were wrong, and those filthy rightoids were right. Or the Covington and Rittenhouse stuff - shouldn't conservatives get credit for calling it right?
Tophattingson
6mo ago
I did some calculations on this back in August elsewhere, so I might as well finish the job and present a model using demographic data from here.
Rotherham the town has a population of 71,535. Of this, 20.5% are under 16, and the actual targeted age range was 11-16, so assuming that age distribution from 0 to 16 is even (reasonable, people move away after 16 for university), Rotherham has 5,500 people aged 11-16. Only females were targeted, so make that 2,250. And then only Whites, 78% of the population, were targeted, so 1,760. But as there were 1,400 victims over a 16 year period, that would have been enough for the demographic cohort to be replaced 2.7 times, so the actual size of the targeted population would have been 4,750. So if you were a 11-16 year old white female in Rotherham during this period, there was a 30% chance you would be gang-raped by Pakistani men, probably multiple times. That is not rare. To express this another way, even assuming each victim was only attacked once, this corresponds to a sexual assault rate of 4,971 per 100,000 for this demographic. Compare to the worst city-level homicide rates in the world, which struggle to exceed 100 per 100,000.
TL;DR between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 is reasonable for Rotherham. As for the whole country, that gets harder. How do you extrapolate Rotherham to the rest of the country to get an upper bound worst case scenario? Probably via demographics? Rotherham has 60 convictions and therefore 23 victims per perpetrator. It's population is 15.5% Asian, which isn't all Pakistani Muslim, but that group is probably around 10% of the population, so ~7,150 people. So about 1 in 120 of this demographic are perpetrators. The total Pakistani Muslim population of the UK is 1.6m, so if everywhere is as bad as Rotherham, there would be about 13,300 perpetrators and 300,000 victims. So I'd say the claim of "hundreds of thousands" is at least within the bounds of plausibility but a million is right out. This all has the caveat that it's entirely reliant on applying current demographic numbers to crimes that, as so far investigated, were largely carried out in the 90s and 00s. If the gangs are an ongoing problem, or if the Pakistani population in Rotherham was far smaller in the 90s, then the numbers change a lot.
On the other hand in 2024, the left-leaning person is far more likely to have non-white people, LGBT, or other groups that are effected by conservative policies, so it's not a shock that now they have a closer relationship with those folks, they're less likely to be seen as just arguments.
Like, why do I want to be personally friendly with people who want to make the lives of my other friends worse?
This flows both ways. Politics was interested in me personally in 2020 in a way that it wasn't before, and also in a way that disproportionately affected nerdy activities like board gaming. Why would I want to be friends with people who want to make the lives of myself and my other friends worse by supporting lockdowns, which were far more egregious than the average social conservative's demands not least because it also involves partially criminalizing homosexuality anyway? Well, it turns out that I don't really have a choice, because 90% of the people around me want to make my life worse, and the option to join a gaming community with a consensus that opposes lockdowns doesn't exist.
Am I'm banging my usual drum again? Yes. But there's a point: You've given no reason why board games should have gone left to protect LGBT friends who suffered from conservative policies, instead of going right to protect the LGBT friends (hello) who suffered from progressive policies. To go even further, the entire nerdy ecosystem depends on capitalism, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to function. It also has a bit of an obsession with everything military. All things that have (for one reason or another) clustered into Conservatism. If nerdiness is going to have a political slant, why is that slant not for it's natural ally? If anyone's going to get politically purged, then why not the Communists whose political ambitions are mostly incompatible with the continued existence of these nerdy activities?
Further context on this is that criticism of Two-Tier policing began with the difference in how anti-Lockdown protesters were treated by the police compared to BLM protesters in 2020. To summarise, the handful of arrests at BLM protests were for sporadic violence. Other left-wing omnicause protests went unchallenged. Meanwhile, the smaller and less violent anti-Lockdown protests faced blanket arrests for violating lockdowns, which de jure criminalized all protest but de facto criminalized only anti-Lockdown protests.
There have been a number of smaller incidents over the next few years which further enflamed this criticism. The light-touch treatment of JSO, XR, and other environmentalist protesters who sought to commit vandalism, often getting justified in the mainstream on the basis that "climate emergency" justifies unrestrained criminality, was compared to how government media and politicians treated anti-ULEZ protesters. Another was buffer zones around abortion centres outlawing forms of protest as mild as silently praying.
Then then escalated in 2023, where the Israel-Gaza conflict meant that there were constant protests that, in theory, violated the UK's extremely broad anti-terrorism laws, but were met with milquetoast police response. When a counter-protest to these was organised in November 2023, and met by a violent police response, the charge of two-tier policing escalated to the point where a minister was sacked for criticising the police over it. Further incidents, like police going after a Jewish man for being "Visibly Jewish" near protesters, only made it worse.
Edit: And this all takes place in a context that the police have increasingly failed to police crime in general..
The "moderate" explanation for why these events keep happening is that the police are trying to placate a violent mob over permitting peaceful protesters because their goal is to keep the peace, and keeping the peace takes precedent over fairness even when it means arresting innocent bystanders instead of violent mobs. The lesson some people will take from this is that the most violent group wins. Therefore, they should become more violent so that they become the mob that the police have to placate instead. Unfortunately, this lesson is wrong, because the actual explanation for these events is that being left-wing puts you above the law and being right-wing puts you beneath it.
Today, the counter-protesters and the police will argue that they are standing against racism. They are wrong. For the last 9 months, they have either participated in, or been complicit in, their own forms of racism. Forms that the current British government finds more acceptable to it's tastes
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