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Notes -
"Adolescence"
As I was giving my brother a lift on Saturday, he asked me if I watched anything new recently. He told me that there's a new netflix series that everybody's talking about, about a murder in a high school, and that in typical netflix fashion there's been a race shift. However since the character in question is a murderer, the shift has been in a direction opposite from the often memed one.
Later that day, my wife told me that everybody's talking about a new series, and it's about a teenage boy getting radicalized by the far right. I acknowledged nearing about it, and she gently mocked me, saying that she can hear from the tone of my voice that I instinctively recoil at the premise.
Yesterday, I saw my high school geography teacher, now the headmaster of said high school, recommending the show on facebook. This was my final cue that it in fact reached some critical mass of normie recognition. I started reading up on it, saw that it was an UK production, and that gave context to the tidbits that I heard while jumping channels in the car on the weekend, with people on the (Polish) radio talking about violence against women in England.
I won't paste the whole synopsis from Wikipedia, but the tl;dr is that it's about a 13 year old who gets radicalized by The Manosphere, asks out a classmate who had her topless photos revenge-posted about someone else earlier (thinking that she'd be easy), she rebuffs him, later insinuates that he's an incel, the boy get cyberbullied, eventually he finds a kindred radical, and stabs the girl. The plot proper is in the aftermath of this, with various authorities questioning the 13-year old Jamie, and parents wondering how it all went wrong. In the end, Jamie decides to plead guilty.
I tried to find something about the inspiration for the series, to corroborate my brother's info, and it turns out it was inspired by three cases of stabbing. The only one named by showrunners is the case of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old transgirl stabbed by two 15 year olds, white girl and white boy. Possible speculation about the other two cases include Ava White (12 year old stabbed by a 14 year old "not named for legal reasons" 🤔) and Elliane Andam (15, black girl stabbed by 17 year old Hassan Sentamu). The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.
So, my first, second, etc. thoughts on all of this were unbecoming of this forum.
My nth thought can be summed as: the absolute audacity of them.
Yes, knife crime, and other violent crime, and crime in general is on the rise in the UK youth. But the unacknowledged elephant in the room is that the current UK teens are a dramatically different cohort from teens. The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
Cf. "stop asian hate", where assaults perpetrated by other demographics were also presented as if it were the whites' fault. We get the usual kvetching about radicalization, Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American) and whatnot. Are white boys in the UK actually radicalizing? I don't know, probably not, the first pass suggests that in every place that isn't South Korea the boys/young men stay roughly where they were politically, while the world shifts from under them. But if they are, that's a reasonable reaction to the world that tries to scapegoat them for things outside of their control and treats them only with suspicion.
(Yes, I am aware that the perps ih Ghey's case were in fact white. But even there, the girl perp was probably the main instigator of the murder, a far cry from the fictionalized version.)
P.S. (From the synopsis: "Katie used this form of encoded language to accuse Jamie of being an incel". At age 13? I sure hope he was.)
Im very curious about the people who rant and rave about the show. What psychologically is the source of their enjoyment? Obviously it does not conform to some previously unexpressed trauma of white boys murdering classmates. Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.
They believe it captures the lived experience of young men who enter the alt-right/manosphere/incel pipeline for whatever reason and thus provides the antitode to that way of thinking. It doesn't for a whole host of reasons, the primary one being that the main character is 13 years old and most fears young men have about their social status and manhood kick in from around 15-16 onward after maturity has hit.
The plot gives me 'progressives talking about sex instead of having it' vibes. I mean you also see that with progressives addressing lots of other things, it's not a super-specific problem. But progressives live in a world with functionally no one under about 20; not understanding what would be normal-if-bad behavior for a teenage boy and what would be extremely abnormal is expected behavior. The 'plot to get laid' aspect seems like something out of an eighties movie about actual highschoolers, not the real behavior of thirteen year old boys(who are much earlier in puberty than people who only deal with adults tend to believe).
To add a point of anecdata, when I was thirteen I wanted to touch some tits. Getting laid, let alone constructing a psychological profile of a potential "weak" girl to do so, was somewhere in the realm of strange vaguely gross things that didn't seem so appealing.
Yeah, when I was 13(maybe more like 13 1/2) I probably would have had sex if suddenly confronted with a willing woman, but going out of my way to get some seemed like weird alien behavior. There were girls I liked but picking one on the basis of ‘more likely to be willing to have sex’ wouldn’t have occurred to me.
"Men and boys, from a very young age, are influenced by hardcore online pornography and The Manosphere(tm) to [among other things] see women merely as sex objects" is a vital component in the origin story progressives tell themselves.
And indeed, most men have "been exposed to hardcore online pornography" (translation: they, or someone they know, typed "boobs" into the Internet) by this age. They're not going to tell you that, though; it's one of those things adults are weird about, and they know that.
No mechanism for how this actually happens is ever expanded on beyond mumble mumble sexual novelty, but whether or not it actually makes sense is generally irrelevant.
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These people are very concerned about Andrew Tate. That’s it. They’re concerned about sexism spreading among adolescent boys(and to be fair, I don’t like the spread of Andrew Tate sexism among adolescent boys either- even if it seems to be much less pronounced than the literati like to claim). That Andrew Tate fans are almost certainly less white than the general population is immaterial; specifying ‘white’ just makes their concern socially acceptable to themselves.
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My completely baseless speculation based only on reading the OP and skimming the Wikipedia page:
The series isn’t actually about violence, at least not thematically. The series is about sexualization, and the violence of the framing narrative serves as a grand metaphor. The series is cathartic because it validates the “ick” that women feel at unwanted sexual attention as being homoousian with physical violence.
IIRC when women are surveyed about what they mean by 'the ick' it's typically behavior in wanted or desired parters which falls short of an ideal.
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I agree with some other replies, most likely the fans think white boys are a concerning problem. They probably have a blind spot preventing them from seeing it any other way. Other fans likely hate low-status (white) men and the show is like a minstrel show - legitimately entertaining as a sneer.
But, the writers could have more principled worries and know this is the only way to express it. By comparison, The Handmaid's Tale is actually inspired by Muslim theocracy, not Christian theocracy. The two stories are not completely comparable since THT I think is more of a cautionary "it could happen to us" and AFAICT this show is not meant to be a hypothetical -- it seems to be a show about current social issues.
In the vein of my previous comment, that maybe there is more similarity between me and the liblefts than I previously thought, I wonder if there is an aspect of racism of low expectations here. Maybe liblefts have essentially given up on shaping POC boys, and they view decent well behaved white boys as a last bastion that cannot fall to the distinctly vulgar and uncivilized Andrew Tateism. Maybe they view conservative whites as a part of a functioning political ecosystem, and see it collapsing with their slow disappearance.
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I described something similar here, a Straussian reading of a novel I haven't read and don't intend to.
Thanks, an interesting read
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I like this. I'll probably steal it and use it the next time I get in a political argument.
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I don't think it's that deep. I think the normies, especially internationally, don't have the first idea about the state of the UK. Mentioning the crime discrepancies between demographics is the taboo in the west right now, so no, they're not freaked out about "POC violent youth", because they hardly have a concept of it. Fwiw, it might be a well directed show, possibly tugging at heartstrings of the parents in a "this could happen to you[r kid]" way. I wouldn't know.
Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.
White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.
Going by the murder rate data from the government, black overrepresentation is actually slightly worse than the famous 13/52 in the US. The issue as a whole is way less pronounced because there are fewer murders per capita from any ethnic background, sure, but the relative differences are pretty much the same.
That's most likely not an inherent property of crime though, but of geographical racial segregation, at least in the US. That's obviously a fairly trivial observation, as an environment gets more diverse you'd also expect the ethnic backgrounds of murderer-victim pairs to be more random, but the discrepancies are still pretty stark, e.g. in 26% black South Carolina about half of all white murder victims are killed by a black perpetrator. Since roughly 2020 this holds across most states in the South too, with Hispanics chipping in in states like Texas with fewer black people, while interracial murders are rising as a share of the white total nationwide as well.
In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups. As places like Newcastle or Leeds become more demographically similar to today's London, even Northerners living in their supermajority native towns and cities might get caught up in that.
Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.
Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.
Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.
The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.
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It’s pretty clear they aren’t all that concerned with BIPOC knife crime since their government just released sentencing guidelines that call for different “tiers” of sentences depending upon the race of the offender
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I don't know if you remember being a kid, and had somebody fuck with you (steal your toy, punch you, cheat off you during a test) and then to add insult to injury they also successfully lied and got you in trouble for it?
That's all this is. It's virtually inconceivable these people don't know who's really committing the rapes and knife crime in the UK. This is just the victory lap of their conquest, presaging how'll they'll write the history of the genocide of the Anglo-Saxon's.
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