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UK, are you OK?
Labour councillor calls for people to 'cut the throats' of 'Nazis and fascists'
Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’
Probably anyone reading this is familiar with the story so far: three gradeschool children in Southport were knifed to death, and ten others injured, on July 29th at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club. The alleged perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, is reportedly the son of Rwandan immigrants and was 17 years old at the time of the incident, but has apparently since passed his 18th birthday. The events, allegedly in part as the result of some false reporting concerning Axel's identity, led to a number of protests, which led to a number of counterprotests.
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist. It's pretty important to not be racist. Sufficiently important, I suppose, that people would rather talk about that, than about the dead schoolchildren who, but for recent immigration from Africa, would likely still be alive. Not that Axel is an immigrant, of course. He was born on the magic soil of the UK, so it's apparently racist to notice that his parents weren't. I saw one article suggesting he might be autistic? Good sources are hard to find.
That brings us to the current events! Labour councillor Ricky Jones apparently found some inspiration in Axel's extracurricular activities, as he is very clearly articulating additional knife violence as the proper response to people protesting the murder of little girls. I actually had a surprisingly difficult time finding the original video; most of the articles throwing around the word "alleged" did not judge me fit to judge for myself. I assume Ricky was born tone deaf because throat cutting seems like an especially poor choice of words given the circumstances--though I guess I don't know for certain that Axel managed any literal throat cutting in the process of (EDIT: ALLEGEDLY) butchering schoolchildren. The UK does not have any particularly meaningful or toothy Free Speech legislation, either, though in this particular case I can imagine Mr. Jones facing consequences even here in the United States. Remind me, is it still okay to call for the punching of U.S. Nazis? Was it ever? I seem to have lost track.
Axel's knifework is not being treated as a terrorist attack (yet?), but here's where things get weird.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Taylor Swift shows in Vienna canceled over alleged planned terrorist attack
Suspects in foiled attack on Taylor Swift shows were inspired by Islamic State group, officials say
Will we hear more about Axel's motivations? I suppose Taylor Swift is just so famous that at this point any plot to kill large numbers of people would, statistically, run into Taylor Swift events eventually. But now I'm wondering if Axel was just, you know, reading the same weird terrorist handbook as the Austrian terrorists. They were even the same age--the two arrested in Vienna are 19 years old and 17 years old. If I had a nickel for every time a 17 year old boy tried to murder Swifties en masse, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
I'm sure much smarter and well-connected analysts out there are way ahead of me on this one. And probably it's nothing! And it wouldn't really matter if it was something, beyond maybe bankrupting a handful of Taylor Swift event ticket scalpers in the near future. But it's all very weird.
Especially the part where counterprotesters started literally calling for and cheering on more knifings.
There is a certain kind of young man who finds Taylor swift incredibly annoying. I’m not certain why, exactly- she seems not appreciably more annoying than other pop stars of similar ilk, at least- but it is a thing. And both of these involved young men.
In Islam and Hasidim, women can’t sing in public to others. This to me is the real misogyny. Misogyny isn’t telling women to fulfill their biological duty, misogyny is restricting them from fulfilling it. Singing is a biological duty, it is social and sexual expression. This could have something to do with the attacks as an Ariana Grande concert was also targeted.
Exactly.
The thing about Islam is that it's a religion from a place that has basically zero natural resources; it's starting from a condition of overpopulation and permanent, complete dependence on resource-gatherers (i.e. men) with very little to invest in industry or other secondary development (men extract, women refine, but refining can't happen without extraction, they have no way to increase extraction, and are barely extracting enough as-is).
Thus women in that religion remain a mere resource to be managed and controlled; time and resources spent on their desires and flourishing is in that context a deadweight loss. And because this has been the default state for all but the most recent ~15 generations of humankind (for Europeans and their Consequential Industrial Revolutions, less than that or even 0 for other parts of the world), this default state is baked into male biology and requires some effort to overcome (and note that it's only "misogyny" if the surrounding society is advanced enough to make running on pure biology maladaptive; everywhere else just calls that "normal gender relations").
Religions that have their genesis in lands of material plenty without relative overpopulation tend to be able to cope with women able to act as men through technological advancement much better. Islam succeeds when areas become more populated and less technologically advanced, which is probably why the European elite (who uniquely have technological devolution as a core tenet of their own religion- their desire to murder their fellow citizens and otherwise degrade their standard of living is universal) get along with them so easily.
Until the industrial revolution everyone in the long run was either (1) in a Malthusian trap, (2) had a lot of war, or (3) had a lot of disease. Before sustained economic growth and birth control, something bad was always the check on population growth.
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But the same is true of almost all other cultures. Even China had pretty strong control over women (look up foot binding) and most of the rest of us have long since ditched those controls. Some of the results are obviously good — women can contribute to earning money for the household, they can make and sell art, and aren’t restricted in communication with the rest of society. And some are quite obviously bad— children essentially raised as daycare orphans, single mothers, the denigration of the military as it must loosen necessary requirements to accommodate women who aren’t and cannot meet the standards, the growth of welfare state benefits out of proportion to the growth of the tax revenue collected, safetyism.
I thought foot binding was a largely upper-class phenomenon as a result of a Versailles-esque status-game gone bonkers, which then spread among the general population?
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I followed you up until the point you lost me. Islam as a religion-as-meme uniquely suited to areas with low resources makes intuitive sense to me.
However, the meme might break down a bit once you look at the oil-producing gulf states awash in plenty. Maybe their inclinations towards religious extremism is toned down by the generous state handouts.
And finally, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call the European elite technological devolutionists, but saying they have a desire to murder their fellow citizens and otherwise degrade their standard of living is probably pushing it. I think it's altogether more insidious; it's vibes. They are bound to a vision of technological devolution because they're attracted to a future where they can recreate classical paintings of bountiful farmlands of plenty, vs the banlieues and urban hellholes of depreciated industry, it's an aesthetic and a fad. They'll loop back to something else just as insane in a few decades. They don't want to murder their fellow citizens, they don't even think of them as fellow citizens. I fall on the side of believing their misery happens entirely as a side effect of the European elite's quest for vibes, not out of any active desire to see them suffer. The elephant doesn't consider the ants it crushes.
The Gulf states not being awash in oil money is still in living memory in those places- they have liberalized a bit, but they're going to need more time. Countries that did technically speedrun those changes (thinking mostly of the Asian ones) still took a hundred-ish years to see major changes and their culture didn't start in the desert.
But they still do want to murder them, proof upthread. Also, that's pretty funny, considering the elites' entire problem with the riots is that the natives pretty clearly don't see the new imports as "fellow citizens". But then again, citizenship is for subjects.
Enh, he was a former councilor and he was arrested. A proper elite wouldn't have been arrested. This is a clown playing to his audience misreading the audience a bit. If this man was anywhere close to elite, he would have actually murdered his fellow citizens if the urge struck, and gotten away with it.
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