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Notes -
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.
The anti-immigration argument expressed in this post seems too strong. It seems to be along the lines of if there is any kind of downside from immigration then immigration is bad. But I don't think this is a realistic benchmark for any government policy. The positives have to be weighed against the negatives. Maybe certain classes of immigrants are net-negative and a better immigration policy would be able to discriminate against these people but I don't think the UK is at the point where all immigration is net-negative.
Why?
Why?
I mean, I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse. As I've already stated in this thread, I am myself pretty ambivalent about immigration, insofar as it (A) tends to benefit me, personally and (B) tends to economically benefit nations, on average. But when immigration yields a specific, horrific crime against the indigenous population and people get upset about that, telling them to weigh the overall positives against their negatives seems like a non-starter, argument-wise.
In other words--I actually agree that the positives have to be weighed against the negatives. But I disagree that this is the sort of thing that can be resolved by aggregating the relevant interests. If the costs imposed on, say, working class Britons is sufficiently high, then they have good reason to reject immigration even if the aggregate utility rises--for the same reason that the government cannot permissibly harvest your organs against your will when doing so would save five or twenty or even a thousand lives.
You could replace everything in this argument with the case of George Floyd. When policing yields a specific, horrific crime against black Americans and they get upset, telling them to weigh the overall positives of policing against their negatives seems like a non-starter, wouldn't you agree?
And yet, I don't recall you ever making that point five years ago. Perhaps you were just silent, perhaps I don't have Gattsuru's eidetic memory and you'll correct me, but I think it much more likely that you'll split hairs about how the UK rioters are morally justified while BLM was not now that the shoe is on the other foot.
I'm personally ambivalent. What you say is true, and the statistics people give about police brutality and immigration are also, presumably, true. It's not particularly surprising for people to react this way, but at the same time, western democracies need to find a way to adapt to the viral nature of the internet, social media and ubiquitous cell phone recordings without sliding into chaos or authoritarianism. Violent crime has decreased significantly since the 90s in the USA, but it certainly doesn't feel like it given the constant sensationalism in social media and news feeds. And yet, any centralized effort to block production or consumption of viral news is antithetical to our values. Millenials and boomers are probably screwed; maybe the zoomers will become sufficiently desensitized to snuff and viral videos that we'll return to equilibrium after people born before ~2005 die off.
Chris has me blocked, so this is more for the record, than anything, but I guess there's things I can't let go of...
Ok, let's try:
On one hand: sure, this isn't fair, Chris has moderated his views since then, and his comment can be read as a warning for us not to make his past mistakes. On the other: it's not like people here are defending riots, like several high-profile progressives used to, so it's just a tiny-bit rich to hear have him try to hold people accountable for what they did or didn't say 5 years ago.
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