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Rotherham, H1B's and the news cycle on X
On X (formerly Twitter), Elon likes to say "You are the media now". I think, he's... kinda right.
One thing that always amazed me about the mainstream media was their ability to control the news cycle. You'd wake up one Monday, and all of a sudden the entire media would be talking about one story like it's the most important thing in the world. Everyone is using the exact same language, repeating the same facts, etc... You'd be forgiven for thinking that a government propaganda bureau is directing it all from a central office. But the media wasn't actively conspiring, it was just group think and herd-following.
What's more, it mattered. Stories that got major media exposure led to real action from political and corporate leaders. The summer of George Floyd may have been the platonic ideal of this.
Well, X seems to have its own news cycle now.
Last week, X was aflame with a intra-right culture war between those who support and those who oppose high-skill immigration, especially from India. Feelings were hurt, accounts were banned, and it didn't die down until Trump made a statement.
This week, the big story is the Rotherham grooming gangs. I'm not exactly sure why it's being revisited now, but every other story in my feed is about the horrific crimes and the massive coverup which extends in England to this day. Perhaps people smell blood in the water. Kier Starmer, the incredibly unpopular PM of the UK, was head of CPS during the critical years. It seems he chose not to aggressively prosecute many of the monsters who gang-raped 13 year olds.
In my opinion, X provides a better platform for ideas to percolate into the public's consciousness. In the past, unless a story was "too big to ignore" like the Trump assassination, corporate newsrooms could and did bury stories that reflected their political team in a negative light. This can't happen on X. Moreover, a lot of the coverage of news events is less retarded on X (depending on who you follow of course). I'm sure there were lots of bad takes during the H1B kurfluffle, but I didn't see many. I saw a lot of nuanced but fearless conversation that went a lot deeper than anything you'd be likely to see on ABC or in Time Magazine.
I think that there is some special sauce in the technology.
Traditional journalism is top down. We (the authority figures) tell you what to think. On the other extreme, discussion sites like Reddit allow anonymous accounts to speak with the same authority as established ones. As a result, they are gamed by bots, and flooded with low value opinions. X seems to be a hybrid. Authority figures can post to their audience, but they cannot do so without getting pushback from others. When using it, I somehow feel connected to the people and ideas that matter.
I'll probably have to delete the app again in a few weeks.
Not to diminish the need to jail all the monsters, but my take here is that closure here requires investigating and disciplining all the parts of the government that refused to confront the issue for so long.
I'm not optimistic that it will happen, but generally a failure across that many departments merits an inquest designed to realign them to their duties.
The most shocking part of the revelations on Twitter, to me, has been that many of the victims had dads- who accepted being arrested by the police for attempting to prevent their daughters from getting raped. Most people I know would agree that the correct response to that situation is kulakrevolt-approved, I guess I could understand that not every dad actually did it, but none of them?
Most victims didn’t have fathers who were involved in their lives. You don’t have to believe every word of the official reports, but there’s no reason to disbelieve the clear through-line that a huge proportion were in social care, in and out of foster homes and (essentially) orphanages etc. There were a couple of high profile cases of fathers going after some of the men that are constantly reposted, but there is no major trend of it.
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These girls weren’t just random British girls. They were of the underclass, if you’ve read Life At the Bottom (which you should) you’d know what these people are like. The dads are rarely even involved at all. That’s what made these girls vulnerable and partially why there is muted uproar in England.
Sure, that was my initial assumption- girls who don’t know who their dads are get sexually abused the world over, it’s a cultural universal. But dads who are involved enough to attempt to stop it, but not willing to suffer the consequences, is the surprising part.
As in the US, the system is more worried about the types of abuse noncustodial fathers might commit than the types of abuse an involved noncustodial father might prevent.
The fathers who were arrested were arrested for violating court orders enforcing the mother's custody - up to and including violating restraining orders taken out by mothers claiming domestic violence (being the sort of man who rescues his daughter from a dangerous rape gang is somewhat correlated with being the sort of man who would attract credible DV allegations).
This makes sense but it also seems like this is correlated with being the sort of man who does not care about the illegality of doing so anyways.
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"A disarmed population is a peaceful population" -- somebody, probably.
I mean, UK citizens seem able to get firearms if they try hard enough(and are willing to do hard time, but, like, the law would see it as murder anyway). This is men failing.
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Governments nowadays have overwhelming force, and have had it for a while. Law-abiding people know that, and don't resist, because that can only make it worse.
Your kid is getting raped, regularly. How much worse can it get?
You get imprisoned and raped too, and your kid continues to be.
I mean that was happening anyway, and at least you can draw attention to what’s happening
You wouldn't. The most that would happen is you'd get your face attached to a headline about some far-right prole carrying out a racially-motivated attack on a poor innocent PoD (person of diversity)
This seems way too pessimistic. Daniel Penny stood up for strangers and in NYC of all places managed to get a not guilty verdict. Granted the UK is different but what jury would convict a parent of such a thing?
We are already aware a few parents tried to intervene but were arrested. So you already must admit you are wrong on this, just looking for excuses why these parents did nothing
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How common do you think the rape of middle-aged adult men is in UK prisons?
As common as middle-aged adult men who aren't hardened criminals themselves are in UK prisons.
On what possible basis? Even in the US that isn’t the way it works, let alone countries in which prison rape is much rarer.
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I think this is not correct -- based on what I've heard (from people who ought to know) the whole semi-acceptable prison rape thing is mostly specific to the US. Not that you might not get the odd gay-psycho-rapist in the commonwealth systems, but that if nothing else the other prisoners tend to keep such guys more or less in check.
The UK underclass is pretty violent though -- I could believe 'severe beatings' as a fact of life for non-players-of-the game who found themselves incarcerated there. Sounds like most of the dads involved would be the type who were pretty involved in that culture in the first place though.
Again, the difference is Sam Colt -- there's not much a guy with a cricket bat/kitchen knife can actually do to seek revenge against a large gang of violent criminals, and there probably wasn't any single obvious target to go after within the diffuse blob of authorities refusing to take action.
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Yes, you would die trying. But is that not better than living knowing you didn’t even try?
Arguably, there have been several instances where acts that were themselves considered terrorism have at least swayed the public consciousness about other events. I find the Oklahoma City bombing pretty abhorrent, but it demonstrably caused reconsideration of the narrative behind the Waco siege. Or the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation kicked off the entire Arab Spring. Or why we're all talking so much about health insurance denials suddenly.
Of course, plenty of actions meant this way are not successful, but IMO something dramatic and well-documented in this instance might have caused public outcry.
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