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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.
It's also kind of insane that the Rotherham crimes were able to occur because there is a lot of red-tape you have to deal with if you have contact with children in the UK. Apparently, some of the men involved had criminal convictions which should have automatically barred them from having regular contact with children who are not their own. So not only were the police ignoring accusations of sexual assault but they were also ignoring crimes where the prosecution should be very straight forward. Also, people in positions of authority who deal with children are meant to be trained to notice signs of abuse and I believe there also mandatory reporting requirements. So the people who covered this up or ignored it not only fucked up their jobs but it is likely they committed some kind of criminal act as well.
While many of the victims were in social care, the men weren’t involved in it, so they would never have undergone a background check. Some places have more recently instituted background checks for taxi drivers (which many perpetrators were), but this mostly didn’t happen or was little enforced during the period of most of the crime from the early 1990s through to the late 2000s / early 2010s.
The view of the police was that these were teenaged prostitutes from broken homes who were underclass ‘chavs’. That’s not to say there was no political correctness involved (there certainly was from the more middle class social workers, left wing press, council officials, and national government/Home Office) or no more banal corruption (eg local officials with close business and personal ties to some perpetrators), but it’s not the whole story without the class angle.
That's true of many 'racial' issues.
"The black pawns and the white pawns have more in common with each other than with their kings; if they organised together, the whole board could be a republic in a dozen moves." (GNU Terry Pratchett)
In the UK the white pawns are monarchist, and so are the knights. It’s the castles and bishops who are in favour of a republic.
You can play down the class angle too much, but you can also play it up too much. Terry Pratchett understood this perfectly well, which is why all the viewpoint characters except Vimes have a much more nuanced view of royalty and social organisation generally.
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