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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.
Just a quick point which has been bugging me in several of these Motte threads about the issue...
Isn't it definitely worth mentioning that if he were born in the UK, it's not at all a "recent" immigration? That's just flat out wrong!! Objectively! I don't know why all the comments seem to conveniently gloss over this. Even if we're playing the counterfactual game, which is always epistemically suspect in the case of individuals, the debate would be about immigration policies 18 years ago, not current immigration policies. Now, given, the PM at the time was Tony Blair, who was Labour, so maybe there's a connection there, but still (it's not like Labour has been in charge for long enough to meaningfully affect immigration policies themselves, and instead it's the Conservatives who were in power for much more than a decade). The situation also pretty much requires asking "how well does assimilation work in the UK"? Answering that is pretty much required context if you're going to connect it to immigration, because otherwise the local UK culture is presumably just as much "to blame" as his parent's upbringing.
But yeah, Taylor Swift being repeatedly brought up is a little odd. But if your goal is to create maximum media attention to an act of terror, choosing as your target a bunch of sympathetic young people and even kids at a Taylor Swift event ( a figure who has a ton of built in attention already) is probably close to the "ideal" target. Now, of course, this kind of terrorism is consummately counterproductive, but to the more delusional kind of terrorist (such as a 17 and 19 year old) it might seem attractive.
Location of ones birth being a factor on determing if a person is an immigrant or not, is a New World concept, not a universal one.
This proves way too much. Any crime commited by an immigrant, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had the immigrant been prevented from entering the country. Your general dismissal of "counterfactuals" leads to erasure of immigrant crime.
Assuming that the receiving state should invest in assimilation, is begging the question that people who require assimilation should be let in anyway.
If indigenous peoples if the British isles murder and rape children at lower rates than people who are of foreign ethnic extraction, it is ludicrous to blame the British values for the crimes of the latter. because the later will surely on average adhere to them les
Location of birth mattering or not is, yes, a unique cultural concept that differs across time and place. The simple fact however is that the parents did not give birth, move back to Rwanda, raise their child there, and then bring him back to the UK right before the murders. Much of the conversation in this thread makes it sound like this is the case. No, AFAIK, he spent all 17 years of his life in the UK. That's 100% of his life, and also, a pretty substantial chunk of time. So if we're playing the blame game, we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree. That's why I bring up assimilation. You can't just ignore it. Insofar as it makes sense, there's a reason that sometimes in for example a legal examination of a car accident, we sometimes go so far as to talk about "percent of blame" due to different parties. That's the broad idea I'm getting at here. He, himself, is not an immigrant in most meaningful senses of the word. He must be understood as a second-generation immigrant, a term which exists as its own, different "thing".
Please note I was fairly careful in my wording, and for good reason. I talk about counterfactuals as applied to individuals, because there's a big risk of bias interacting with numerical/scientific issues in latching on to the wrong thing. We can still have a conversation about counterfactuals, but they need to be grounded in larger, more visible, and more real effects, perhaps using statistics. To say nothing of the fact that making conclusions about large populations from the actions of one or a few child murderers is already a bit suspect. Again, we can have this conversation. Your last paragraph even starts one! But it requires nuance. And it requires at least some degree of rigor which I'm not seeing. A point you make quite clearly when you dismiss counterfactuals so easily without an understanding of why they are problematic in any sort of evidentiary or logically consistent sense.
There's nothing unique to the UK about Subsaharan Africans committing massive amounts of crime. It's true in the USA, it's true in Sweden, it's true in Brazil, it's true in France, and of course it's true in Africa and the Caribbean.
The rioters know this. They also know they are being ethnically replaced. Trying to muddy the waters by saying things like 'Axel was born in Cardiff' (as if he might be a Welshman called David Llywelyn) is asking them to ignore their own lying eyes, and all the crime statistics.
Do you think there is any meaningful difference between first and second generation immigrants from these countries, and do you think the median Briton would agree?
See ArjinFerman's answer basically. There can be a difference between second and first generation immigrants, and a difference between second generation immigrants and natives.
The fact that SSAs commit boatloads of crime wherever they are in the world suggests that the causes of this are genetic, rather than cultural. That is to say, whatever British cultural norms 2nd gens adopt, they clearly aren't enough to reduce their crime rates to the native average. British culture also seems incapable of causing Chinese people to drink as much and commit as much crime as the natives. The British-born Chinese stubbornly remain model citizens no matter how much integration they experience.
Of course, even that assumes that it is only possible for 2nd gens to adopt the culture of their home country. The existence of UK-born jihadis (adopting wahabi islamist ideology) or drill music (adopting African American hip hop culture) demonstrate otherwise.
As for the second part of your question, I think the answer the median Briton would give would depend on how you define 'meaningful difference'.
Just to be clear, that was not my angle. I was going more with: pro immigration people assume integration happens automatically, and that by the time you reach 2nd generation immigrants, they absorbed all the same cultural norms, to the same extent as the native population. I disagree with that assumption.
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