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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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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.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners - I would be just as outraged if they were native Britons, Americans, Australians, Dutch or Israelis. What is actually responsible for my outrage is the total dereliction of duty on the part of the police, legal system and media... but that wouldn't happen, because the explicit reason for their dereliction of duty was to avoid inflaming racial tensions.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners

It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.

It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.

There were numerous paedo scandals involving white perps which broke around the same time as Rotherham. Jimmy Savile was the most media-friendly, but in terms of numbers of victims the various scandals in children's homes were the biggest. But the number of different sex abuse scandals that broke after Savile died was so large that it two years just to define the remit of the enquiry into them.

Arguing about cold cases of child sex abuse was the current thing in the UK for most of the 2010's, and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser. (And this isn't UK-specific - this was going on during the height of the Epstein era).

and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser.

And fathers trying to rescue their kids from the abusers were also getting arrested, and social workers were arguing that "well ackshully that 14 year old gave consent"?

And fathers trying to rescue their kids from the abusers were also getting arrested, and social workers were arguing that "well ackshully that 14 year old gave consent"?

The system arresting non-custodial fathers who try to protect a child from abusers - SOP. Admittedly the abuser is normally the custodial mother's new boyfriend, not a rape gang. The case where the stories about fathers being arrested first went viral in the UK was the Oxford gang, who targetted girls who were in foster care or children's homes, who had been taken away from their parents for a (not necessarily good or sufficient) reason. Noncustodial fathers are the one group of potential abusers that the system does protect kids from.

"Well Ackshully that 14 year old gave consent?" - institutionalised by Gillick. See Winston Smith for what the culture was like in UK children's homes at the time - back in those days left-idiotarian social workers profoundly and genuinely believed that adult authority figures should not have enough control over teenage girls to stop them engaging in ill-advised and illegal sex.

The system arresting non-custodial fathers who try to protect a child from abusers - SOP.

Ok, if you want to say that there was nothing particularly partial about how Rotherham and Muslim rape gangs were handled, I'll try to keep an open mind.

What doesn't sit right with me here is the amount if denial around this particular episode. There were a handful of people making your argument (I was giving Julie Bindel some shit the other day, but I think she was essentially making your argument at the time these stories were coming out), but other than that essentially no one was saying "oh yeah, this is just like the Oxford gang". They either stayed really really quiet hoping it will all go away, or outright dismissed it as a conspiracy theory.

The other thing that doesn't fit, is that even if police were trained to arrest fathers / stepfathers / mothers' boyfriends attempting retrieve underage girls, that still does not explain the police returning the girls into the custody of a known brothel.

Finally, assuming you're right about all this, and the British system was really just this fucked up, and it had nothing to do with Muslims or immigrants, all that changes is the amount of bodies that need to be hanging from lampposts, and I'm not even referring to rapists here.

"Well Ackshully that 14 year old gave consent?" - institutionalised by Gillick.

I heard about it re: trans issues, but I thought this is restricted to medical decisions? The wiki seems to confirm this, and mentions several exceptions even in that context. How does it relate to prostituting underage girls?

There’s a strain of progressive who believes that telling girls(and it does seem specific to female-identified persons) they can’t have sex is unacceptable under any circumstances, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was overrepresented among these social workers.

Yes, social workers are a problem.

I really want to dissect this part of social worker culture, but it's difficult because so much of it happens behind closed doors, and is only hinted at in official documents.
The first time I noticed it was the glamorization of "sex workers" in my college sociology courses populated by future social worker girls (I was one of two guys in all of the classes). And it was always "sex worker," the same way fetish communities fixate on specific words to describe things.
The upper level course that I didn't take by the same prof had the girls go to the closest sketchy part of LA to campus and larp as hookers, then write an autoethnography about it. There wasn't a single guy by that course, of course.

We keep seeing these tiny glimpses of it, like that scandal with the woman including "sex worker" in a school career day, etc., but it's never explicitly argued for or explained in detail. I still don't understand how it exists in that weird superposition of "sex work is good, men who employ sex workers are evil predatory pedophiles."
In normal practice the "sex positivity" media glosses over it entirely by making all the examples "queer" and thus non-problematic by definition; we've all seen those tumblr-style comics with the hello-kitty bright colors and smiling lumberjack-bearded women giving handjobs to a wheelchair guy in a hijab.

Do we have anyone at all who could do a deep dive into that whole culture? It seems like one of those heavily onioned ones where you don't get to see the heart until you've passed through all the layers of initiation rituals and privately had "the conversations y'all folx aren't ready for."

It worries me because (as already pointed out) these people already seem to run our entire social work and therapy systems, and we've already seen other "inner circles" of crazy socjus ideologies bubble to the surface and burn through mainstream culture with no resistance.
People saying "that stuff's crazy, nobody wants that crazy stuff, you're crazy" aren't much comfort when they were saying the same thing about racial socjus in 2015.

I know very little about social work or its culture, but certainly I was educated in ways similar to you, where "sex work is work" was the unchallengeable dogma, in the sense that any parent who would react to their daughter saying "I got a job as a hooker at the local brothel" any differently to her saying "I got a job as a server at the local restaurant" is necessarily a misogynist, and I think it's just another instance of the humanities in academia going off and declaring things as true based on what sounds convenient rather than based on what is actually true in reality. How much time, do you wager, the professors who taught this sort of this stuff, actually spent around real prostitutes working the streets or the internets or whatever, actually learning and documenting what the median or modal woman who goes into this industry would experience? I'd wager that what little time they spent with IRL prostitutes wasn't spent in actual meaningful documentation and knowledge generation, but rather on confirmation bias. It's convenient to just believe a simple slogan and then fit all observations into that slogan instead of trying to modulate one's worldview based on observations. Doubly so when you spend your entire professional and most of social life surrounded by people who all agree with you on this, many of whom have very high status and are willing to heap more status onto you for agreeing with them more loudly. Both logically and logistically, you run into major holes in your belief if you actually start thinking about and observing the way customers interact with sex workers and how sex workers get into the industry and how the employment structures work, but why think about logic and logistics, when there's valuable status to be gained?

I really don't think there's anything deeper than that. It's not an ogre onion, it's a balloon.