Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
2d ago
The UN rather uniquely tried to do something about North Korea, but this was the one time in the cold war that the communists forgot to veto action and it was not a mistake they repeated.
Tophattingson
13d ago
In fact, I speculate a reason people are disillusioned and ironically proposing authoritarian measures is because we live in unofficial creeping authoritarianism.
Here to deliver my periodic reminder that we do not live in "creeping" authoritarian, the vast majority of countries considered democracies went full totalitarian merely 6 years ago.
This may be a contributor to your specific problem, as again the vast majority of pro-immigration self-described (though I would say they're not) liberals supported this totalitarianism. They provide no explanation of why it's acceptable for the state to lock down everyone including immigrants for the greater good, yet it is unacceptable to deport immigrants for the greater good.
Now, some did oppose this (Hanson included) but even among that subset, vanishingly few were screaming from the rooftops about what was taking place, and treated the enormity of what was happening with the enormity of a response it deserved. And fewer still do.
Or to generalise to something that the average member of the public would find more relatable, governments demonstrated they have the power to just do things, so why can't they just do things about immigration too? Unlimited state power is already out the box. That it's too expensive, too hard, or violates limited government won't be accepted as an answer by the public until there is some sort of reckoning for 2020.
Tophattingson
26d ago
Separation of Church and State just biases in favour of the first group to come along and convince that their moral values are secular. Ideally you'd seperate that too, in practice nowhere does.
Alongside what everyone else has said about how you can reasonably arrive at this figure, I also want to point out that there's nothing unusual about this figure in the historiography of atrocities. Extrapolating from Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale etc is crude, but it's the same starting point that similar studies of covered-up atrocities had to work with. Demanding perfect precision at the outset, in a context where authorities are suppressing data, would mean never recognizing most historical atrocities.
To the extent the report makes a mistake, it's mistake is not showing it's calculations in greater detail and not giving a range. But most historians aren't statisticians and many quoted ranges are taken from taking the credible lower-bound figure given by one historian against the credible higher-bound figure given by another, not some statistical analysis of uncertainty.
There are to my knowledge only two serious pieces of scholarly work on the subject of Grooming Gangs. Peter McLoughlin's Easy Meat, and Rupert Lowe's report. To get anywhere into the ballpark at this early a stage is more than you could expect. To contrast with a work that was at a similarly early stage of Scholarship, consider Mark Twain's far more bombastic claim about the Congo Free State's atrocities from King Leopold's Soliloquy:
They go shuddering around, brooding over the reduction of that Congo population from 25,000,000 to 15,000,000 in the twenty years of my administration; then they burst out and call me "the King with Ten Million Murders on his Soul." They call me a "record." The most of them do not stop charging merely the 10,000,000 against me. No, they reflect that but for me the population, by natural increase would now be 30,000,000, so they charge another 5,000,000 against me and make my total death-harvest 15,000,000.
More recent scholarship leans towards 1.5 million, though given the poor record keeping a higher figure closer to Twain's claim cannot be ruled out.
As for the argument that Lowe is biased. Yes. He is. As was Mark Twain. You can contrast his bias against the bias of British Institutions, which until recently would have put the number of victims of "Pakistani Grooming Gangs" as 0 by denying the very concept.
To add to the debating about whether Western visual novels are actually visual novels, or if they have to be Japanese...
Trends for video game genres are largely driven by technical limitations, not just by creativity, and for the purpose of technical limitations, VNs count among this. Japan's domestic PC market in the 80s and 90s was dominated by the domestic PC-98. These systems were designed with rendering Japanese text in mind, and because of that, required much higher resolution displays than comparable Western computers. However, their actual processing performance was no better. Turns out this is the exact combination that leads to Visual Novels, which are well-placed to take advantage of the combination of big displays and comparatively weak processing power by focusing on exquisitely detailed, static sprite art.
Western developers skipped this stage of technical limitations and went for WRPGs for their branching-choice games instead. Early ones driven more by gameplay than plot, and once the graphics caught up there was no need to dump the gameplay in favour of artwork by then.
As for whether they were drawing the DDLC characters as crossdressing men, when it comes to anime, crossdressing men are often just drawn identically to women anyway.
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