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Twitter saw Elon go full alt-lite on the British government after the Rotherham incident where he has been tweeting about it for the past week and it is glorious to see it. Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.
Keir Starmer, the British prime Minister, made a statement on this going after Musk. In an interesting turn of events, Andrew Tate started a political party named Bruv with the intent of becoming prime minister of the UK while still not having had approval from the Romanian government to leave Romania.
Musk's talking points are positive for anyone who likes the truth, He pointed out the inflated numbers of sex offenders being Muslim migrants in other parts of Europe and has shown support for AfD in the past which is a centre-right party in Germany. The tech right seems to be bending the knee to the traditional right, in a way musk fighting for the h1b made others on it stick with him and similar people like Joe Lindsdale are now posting similar things.
This is very surface-level info, I post this because we are currently in the midst of what one may call a thermidor of sorts where people stopped using pronouns in their bios online and saw a rise of post-censorship worldview, the slop by James Lindsay which got him recognition gets him trashed whilst Musk posts Keith Woods on his timeline. The attempts by the online right got derailed badly post Charlottesville and Jan 6, the latter happening exactly 4 years ago. My main aim here is to get some perspective as to how things were during these two incidents during 2017 and 2021.
Edit - forgot to add Moldbug came up with a new piece directed to alon against the H1B and the O1 that was surprisingly not passive, I quite agreed with most points in it. Elon also gave a meek nod to Tate's LARP of a political run and posted memes about feds on Jan 6 and even questioned the deaths of officers on that day, to the point where the llm embedded in twitter tells you that the people listed all died of natural causes. Interesting times on Twitter.
Edit 2 - Musk tweeted Could what happened to the Yazidi people one day happen to Europe? and the 13 52 for Europe, are we back in 2016? His tweets led to inbreeding advocate Mohammad Hijab to go full mask off and talk about outbreeding native brits
Dude is speedrunning the alt-lite pipeline to a much darker form of enlightenment hopefully.
They do care but only marginally. I was in a discussion just recently. A quasi steelman of their position (copperman?) is that yes, rapes may have happened and political correctness may have contributed to the police failing. HOWEVER, Elon Musk is just bringing up this against Keir for political reasons. The people who bring this up have an agenda, they're motivated and they won't give you the full context. If you have the full context you'd probably find it's a very murky situation and there are no clear goodies and baddies. By the way, you can't find the full context because there's nobody who's disinterested in this so don't even try (also I can't be bothered to look into this, it's not my problem). Every big prosecutor has 10 cases out of 3000 that look pretty bad, Elon is just singling out Keir because he can. What are you supposed to do, get it right every time?
Furthermore, judges frequently let out criminals they thought were truly guilty because that's how the law works (judge says 'I wouldn't say frequently' in reply). Anyway, it was a breakdown in communications, these things just slip through the cracks, it wouldn't be fair to hold anyone accountable for it. Police corruption and institutional failure does sometimes happen but we should be very wary of people who say the police are covering it up or that the authorities have failed us because that's what far-right people and schizos say. Most people who say this are schizos or liars. And there were all these times people were arrested for pedophilia despite not being pedophiles because the wrong people were listened to...
TLDR; rule of law > catching pedophiles and taking them out of circulation. Elon and the far-right are in the wrong here.
Perhaps you can tell from my tone that I don't really agree with this, I find the argument motivated to be maximally unfalsifiable. You could use this kind of reasoning to justify everything, there's a kind of meta-cherrypicking going on: "you can't just pick out bad things politicians have done in the past to attack them in the present when everyone makes mistakes" surely wouldn't be accepted for the wrongdoings of Donald Trump. My conclusion is that IQ once again isn't an unalloyed good. You can use intelligence to achieve any goal, good or ill.
The steelman case is surely far stronger than the above.
It's not that rapes may have happened and political correctness may have been a factor that got in the way.
It's that those things definitely happened and were revealed to be such by multiple both national and local inquiries, in particular the 2022 Jay report. This has been a major news story for a decade in the UK, it hasn't been suppressed at all.
Neither does the steelman case claim that Keir Starmer may have dropped the ball just this once as all prosecutors do.
For a start, he was director of public prosecutions (not a prosecutor but in charge of the entire national justice apparatus).
And he actually did take strong action on the problem, for example appointing a new chief prosecutor in the NW who overturned the previous flawed inquiry and created a model that enabled mass prosecutions to happen.
Neither is it the steelman position that taking paedophiles out of circulation sometimes comes second to the rule of law.
Rather, it's that a much more effective and rapid way to tackle this problem would be to implement the 400 recommendations of previous inquiries (which the Tories did not implement, claiming now that they spent their final two years in power preparing to implement them; Labour have committed to implement them)
The steelman case is that taking action now is better than another multi-year national inquiry (aka kicking the issue into the long grass). This is what the chair of the Kay enquiry and the victim groups are calling for by the way.
I don't exactly know what the response to this version of the steelman case is, because the most prominent people making the case for a new enquiry are not listening to or responding to any of it. I myself am open to the need for further national enquiries, by the way, but I don't think the main figures calling for one have even begun to make a reasoned case as to why one would help deliver justice.
I came to this thread today hoping to find a steelman somewhere, so thank you.
Is there any additional steelman for the cases themselves? The screenshots on twitter from official reports that show 13 year olds being gang raped multiple times by multiple groups in single days, being pulled out of police stations to be raped in cars, are all just.... insane.
What's the median rape case here? A troubled girl exchanging sex for alcohol and drugs? (I don't ask this to diminish that as a crime). I can't possibly believe examples like the above are anywhere close to average across 3,000 kids.
The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?
Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing. Activists continue to beat the drums about Rape Culture, and accuse campuses of providing impunity to rapists, promoting disrespect of and aggression against women. But, inconveniently, the numbers show that girls in college are much less likely to be sexually assaulted than girls in the same age group not in college. Whatever bad things colleges and fraternities were accused of doing, they weren't delivering much VORR! It's tough to make the argument that colleges were particularly bad on sexual assault (at least not without making the kind of racist/classist arguments on demographics that campus feminists would sooner be raped than make out loud).
Similarly, as an American Catholic I've endured a thousand lazy pedo-priest jokes, and probably made quite a few myself though I think mine are clever and cutting rather than lazy. And while the abuses of the Catholic church are horrible, they've turned out not to be nearly unique. Rather, Catholics suffer for being the largest and most organized denomination in America, and as such the abuses are larger in scale, and are easily attributable to The Catholic Church, where stripmall startup Evangelicals and Megachurches only represent themselves. The Southern Babtist Convention, the second largest denomination, and Jehovah's Witnesses have turned up similar piles of cases. And the independent evangelical megachurches haven't done much better. This clown got caught in a sting operation soliciting a minor for sex and showing up to meet her at a motel, plead it out in some corrupt bullshit where he went to counseling, and now he's back in the pulpit every Sunday in Virginia Beach for a huge congregation. So, has the Catholic Church done wrong? Sure. But do they have much VORR over other denominations? That's a tougher question.
Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.
Or it might be a case that genuinely delivers a great deal of VORR, I haven't actually read much about it in years and years as this case is so old at this point, and I have no idea where one would find an unbiased source.
Isn't it worse because law enforcement and media are highly motivated to scrutinize i.e. the Catholic Church but those same institutions circle the wagons to protect Pakistanis from just legal and reputational punishment, all on the altar of Liberal Values?
Well the whole point was they weren't highly motivated for quite some time right? There were cover ups and priests were allowed just to be moved around rather than arrested etc. I heard jokes about "pedo" priests in the 70's after all, and it didn't start coming to a head until the 2000's. And indeed the reports go back through the 50's and before. With: .."government, police, and church had colluded in an attempt to cover up the allegations"
So back in the 80's to 90's the media and law enforcement weren't really highly motivated to scrutinize the Catholic Church either. Despite some stories throughout the 80's, Sinead O'Connor raising it on SNL in 92, it wasn't really until a decade later anything much came of it, with the Boston Globe story in 2002.
The grooming gang story broke in a big way just 9 years later in 2011. The very earliest the media at least could have been on the grooming gang story was maybe 2001, more likely ,through 2006 with Heal's study. Before that the main issue preventing discovery of the activity was the cops treating the victims as drug addicted, lying prostitutes rather than victims (as very evident in some of the note's taken at the time, even when they had no idea who the pimps and so on were).
If anything the consensus broke much faster with the Pakistani gangs than it did with the Church.
It's been the subject of huge media coverage, jokes, movies, TV shows, everything for decades now. Comparing timelines seems nonsensical to me. The story hasn't really "broken" as much as non-institutional actors are making the story go viral, forcing the issue on a media and legal apparatus that wants to sweep it under the rug. There's no basis to say the Catholic Church has gotten less scrutiny than this story related to the Pakistani gangs.
The story was broken in 2011 in a big way by a standard journalist in a newspaper. That journalist won a national award for his work and is working for The Times. There is no way to frame him as a non-institutional actor. Jayne Senior the social worker who attempted to raise the issue with police was working for the local government, and was awarded an MBE in 2016 for her efforts. Convictions even started in 2010.
The story going viral now is a decade late, so it certainly cannot be said that non-institutional actors were the ones who broke it. It was broken already. They are rehashing it sure, making it go viral internationally absolutely. But it was exposed years ago.
None of that is to say it shouldn't have been broken earlier, but it was traditional media which broke the story into the UK public consciousness, 14 years ago. Just like with the Catholic abuse scandal with the Boston Globe in 2002.
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Probably. But at least in an American context I'm unconvinced that the cops have started throwing the book at people like John Blanchard.
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