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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27006 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Update on the Scottish Dual-Wielding Incident:

The BBC has now published a brief but informative report on the Scottish “dual-wielding” incident, mostly relaying statements from the local police. If you missed the story: a Bulgarian couple, male and female, were approached by local youths in St Ann Lane, Lochee, at about 7:40 pm on Saturday. At some point, an axe made an appearance. The police have issued a statement, and the BBC, in a notably careful choice of words, clarifies: “BBC News understands that officers have found no evidence to substantiate claims being made online the youths were at risk of sexual assault.”

Of course, I have every confidence that some corners of the internet, including select denizens of The Motte, will find this hopelessly unconvincing. If your current epistemic stance is “If she floats, she’s a witch; if she sinks, she’s a witch,” then no combination of facts, logic, or official statements will ever suffice. If your model of the world is that everyone is lying except you and your Telegram group, my ability to shift your priors is probably limited.

Still, let me offer my own semi-informed perspective as someone who is, if not a local, at least more familiar with the Scottish context than your average Redditor. From the beginning, both /r/Scotland and /r/Dundee expressed skepticism toward the popular Twitter narrative. You know the one: a pair of wide-eyed local waifs accosted by a “brown pervert,” who then had no choice but to brandish medieval weaponry in righteous self-defense. You can practically hear the John Williams score.

Now, Scotland is not short on delinquent youth. The British white underclass is, in fact, legendary for its supply of teenage hooligans. Here in Scotland, the local taxonomic label is “ned.” While “non-educated delinquent” is probably a post hoc invention, the behavioral phenotype is easily identified. There is a rich ecosystem of teenagers hanging around bus stops, acting tough, and performing questionable antics. One of their favorite tactics, if challenged, is to shout “pedophile” at the nearest authority figure, thus flipping the script from “annoying brat” to “potential victim.” This tends to work, at least until they age out of the game and (statistically) either get jobs or fall prey to Dundee’s prodigious drug scene.

On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense. For the Americans in the audience, this is not Texas. Not only is it illegal, it is also, in local context, not normal to walk around with an axe. While I actually find this arrangement not to my libertarian sensibilities, that's neither here nor there. My own priors, which seem to match those of most actual Scots I’ve spoken to, lean toward a more mundane explanation. The girl went out carrying because she wanted to impress her boyfriend, or at least to raise her standing among her peers. She might have been looking for trouble, or simply wanted to show off, and twelve is not too young to have social status games on your mind. Puberty isn’t the only thing that comes early in these parts.

I can only reiterate that an axe is not normal to carry, even if one feels threatened. A pocket knife? I can understand, sure. But this is about as 'extra' as taking a hand-grenade to a seedy pub when you're worried about being roofied.

As for the “migrant crime” angle, I want to point out that Scotland is not England, and certainly not Rotherham. The “migrant problem” is much less pronounced here. Outside Edinburgh or Glasgow, brown skin is still a curiosity, more likely to prompt a friendly question than suspicion. Most of the time, it’s just an excuse for conversation. Scotland has its own problems, but racialized sexual predation is not at the top of the list.

I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.

Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise.

Thanks to the media coverage people have now taken note of the man's social media accounts, such as his Instagram account ali.dumana.5 and his TikTok account alidumana1. We know the Instagram account is his and not someone else with the same name because it uses the same profile picture as the picture used by the Daily Mail article.

Here is an album of some posts of note, such as one of him in a ski mask captioned "Gypsy Gangster Man", another on Tiktok tagged "gypsy" and "gangsta", one captioned "I'm waiting for you whores to get in my super car", and one of his posts showing off cash. Also he put "gangster.com" in his Instagram bio. I went to the bother of making an Instagram account to confirm these posts are real and still up (I didn't bother with Tiktok since they're more of the same). Archives: 1, 2, 3.

Some of the older tiktok ones are interesting:

https://tiktok.com/@alidumana1/video/7190441685413809414

"UK 🐈‍ money" apparently...

Good find. My first thought is "🐈‍ money"="pussy money"="prostitution money". I suppose the benefit-of-the-doubt interpretation would be that they're separate and he's saying he's getting UK money and pussy. But the fact that it's displayed over a large quantity of visibly used cash wrapped in rubber bands (not just what's in his hand but also in the background) favors the first interpretation. (As does the "Gangster party" label over a party a few seconds later.) Unfortunately search engines don't do well with emojis so I don't know if it's established slang.

The situation is clear, only @ArjinFerman has asked the right question: "Why am I seeing this video, did Dumana upload it?"

Fatos Ali Dumana, 21, says he came to Britain legally from Bulgaria and he and his wife have an eight-month-old-baby

The self-styled 'digital creator' ...

... He moved to Dundee in June 2021 and now lives in a council property

Right.

The scenario where Dumana is the good guy is if he didn't upload the video, if it were the police or third-party via release from the police. It seems the order is the video went viral, then the girl was charged, and he calls himself a "digital creator" so we know his motive. An adult man who "legally" migrated to the UK to live in council housing, who posts videos of tween girls for internet clout, is factually and essentially in the wrong. Factually, again, he was recording tweens for clout; essentially, because he was exploiting for gain the most vulnerable members of the population of his exceedingly gracious host. His responses in the article offer further insight.

'If she's only 12 why was she messing with me and having weapons?

'I was going to the shop and she was stopping me going on my way.'If I did hurt the girl, why didn't the police arrest me?

'They have done nothing to me.'

No empathy, no expression of concern for greater order, innocence via appeal to authority rather than "Her behavior concerned me so I made the video in case I had to show the police." Repeated "I didn't touch her, I didn't hurt her," right, what did you say to her? That wasn't in the video. Convenient.

On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense.

What bears repeating more is a 12 year old girl can do literally nothing to physically defend herself from a healthy man unless she has a gun.

The weapons are extra, they tell you she doesn't know what she's doing. The hatchet's a joke, she's not even getting through a t-shirt with that. The knife would pose a problem if it were small, but it was a kitchen knife and it's the UK so it's a rounded tip, right? If he gave her a free shot, if he let her wind up and stab his bare abdomen with both hands, she still only might break skin. It tells you she doesn't know what she's doing, whether she's a "ned-to-be" she doesn't know violence at that moment.

It could be she was trying to impress somebody, but even if you're right, that is an incredible reach. She correctly viewed Dumana as a creep, she "brandished" the weapons as a threat, and the most reasonable explanation for why she had the weapons is because this was not the first time a man has creeped on her and her sister. The appropriate response would be to have a talk, maybe check out her home life, see if her mom has a scuzzy boyfriend, but that they've charged her is grossly wrong--unless, I guess, charges don't carry the same weight there, and it's just the bureaucratic of "We have to do this for the paperwork to check out her home life." A 12 year old girl doesn't ever carry a knife because her government failed to tell her she can't.

What bears repeating more is a 12 year old girl can do literally nothing to physically defend herself from a healthy man unless she has a gun.

The weapons are extra, they tell you she doesn't know what she's doing. The hatchet's a joke, she's not even getting through a t-shirt with that.

You're overstating the case.

It's true that a 12-year-old girl dual-wielding a hatchet and a knife is someone I or most men could easily overcome unarmed without a high chance of wounds, but this isn't because the weapons can't break skin (it's not that hard to break skin; I once accidentally stabbed myself with a table fork and hit bone). It's because in both cases I could catch the swing; a hatchet has a haft that's safe to grab and a knife isn't long enough to counteract my reach and speed advantage (so I could grab her arm before the knife reached my torso). If you gave her a sword (and I weren't wearing hand protection) it'd be quite a bit dicier, because they're much, much harder to catch bare-handed; I'm not saying she'd win but the potential for wounds is high enough to still be a massive deterrent (particularly when taking into account that in this hypothetical I'm a criminal who instigated the fight, which means that if I go to hospital and they ask "why was this guy in a swordfight?" there's a chance of winding up in jail).

And let's not even get into bows. Yes, I've met Anthony Kelly, but I'm not Anthony Kelly, and even he isn't 100% reliable at that trick (note that his world records were against somebody only half-drawing a simple bow, so that's basically tween-girl levels, and even then he didn't catch all of them).

Good points, but I'm not sure you'll have better luck going around the UK with a sword or a longbow (the worm has sure turned on those laws!) than a gun or a knife?

Might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, so they say; are you doing your part?

So what exactly are you alleging that the guy did wrong?

Anything from completely engineering the situation, to following a sudden inspiration to give the girls a gentle push into a a reaction that will do numbers on TikTok.

Though I wouldn't take the groomer hypothesis off the table yet either.

That he propositioned or made lecherous remarks at the girl's sister, the girl brandished, he started recording, changing to intimidating and taunting them to goad her into brandishing again, now on video, then he uploaded the video to TikTok.

The plot continues to thicken.

Yesterday, 480K-follower account Aesthetica claimed to have gotten in touch with the mother of a friend of the two girls in the video, who was with them at the time. Her message:

"Yes. So what happened was the girls where out just walking and the man in the picture made comments to lola(the younger girl) calling her sexy and other sexual remarks then the girls started to tell this man to leave them alone and stop following them and making sexual remarks to them. After that the man's sister (also in the picture) came around the corner and physically attacked ruby(the older sister) she grabbed her hair dragged her to the floor started to punch her then both the man and woman where kicking her in head while she was on the floor. At this point my daughter (mayah) called the police so my daughters account after that is all abit blurry. But that is when lola had the weapons she pulled them out to protect ruby. After that the man came back at lola recording her making sure she showed the weapons to the camera and antagonising her. Ruby was hospitalised after the attack with a severe concussion a tennis ball sized lump to the back of her head aswell as lots of bruises."

Aesthetica also set up a GiveSendGo whose funds are to be received by one "Elaine Thomson". GiveSendGo has allegedly verified the details.

Is this believable? On the one hand, 480K followers is a lot. I'm not familiar with the account, but I doubt it would have gotten so big if it had a history of such brazen fraud as this would be if proven false. Such a track record would at least make that follower count less likely. Of the many replies asking for evidence or accusing him of scamming, I haven't seen any pointing to a past instance of grift. On the other hand, my googling hasn't turned up any connection between Elaine Thomson and Mayah, and no other reporting has disclosed the names of the other two girls.

Or, not in connection with this case. Two girls named Lola and Ruby were reported missing in July. Moreover, the description of the clothes Lola was last seen wearing -- "a blue Nike t-shirt and light blue jeans with tears on the knees" -- precisely matches what was seen in the video. That can't be a coincidence.

So how did Aesthetica know their names? Two possibilities that I can see: either he's telling the truth, or he was somehow made aware of a news story about missing girls with matching physical descriptions, connected the dots, hopped right on fabricating the mother's message -- using the girls' real names to make it believable (but shrewdly waiting for other accounts to provide "confirmation" in the form of the news story where he found them) -- sprinkled in some falsifiable info like Ruby's hospitalization for no apparent reason, and got GiveSendGo to go along with it. I think it's more likely that he's telling the truth. (Which is of course a separate question from whether the mother is telling, or knows, the whole truth.)

(Edit: I searched "lola dundee" on X and found one account, a right-wing-coded account with 139 followers, that made the connection before Aesthetica's post. That does make the fraud story somewhat more plausible.)

I don't want to speculate too much on what it means that the girls had been missing for weeks. "They're feral children" and "they were abducted/being groomed" can handle that datapoint about equally well. One thing that puzzles me is why the woman Aesthetica corresponded with didn't mention that the girls had been missing.

Let's consider the other side of the Bayesian story. In an earlier comment I posted that one gypsy grooming gang had been caught in Dundee within the last few years. Zoomer Historian on X has pointed to two more stories involving gypsy grooming gangs operating in Dundee, raping girls and coercing them into prostitution. As for Ali Dumana himself? If this screencap is to be believed, he has bragged on social media about bringing in the "UK [cat emoji] money".

So we have:

  • A video of a gypsy, a (taking your word for it) tiny minority group in northern Scotland, accosting a pair of underage girls, one of whom says something like "Get away from my sister",
  • In a city where gypsies are known to have been running grooming gangs,
  • With a hard-to-fake, probably authentic (from Aesthetica's perspective) story from their friend's mother explaining that the girls had been defending themselves against sexual predation,
  • And the man himself dropping thinly veiled hints about pimping on social media (again, assuming the screenshot wasn't faked).

Against this we have:

  • A BBC report with an easily backtracked statement that there is "no evidence" the girls were at risk of sexual assault,
  • A police report warning against "misinformation", without specifying what exact rumors have been misleading,
  • Prejudice against Scottish LHC, from the "informed" perspective of a foreigner who lived within a few hundred miles of the area for a year or two.

Others have stressed the BBC and the authorities' dismal track record on stories like this. I'm with them that these mealy-mouthed official statements provide almost no evidence one way or the other. When migrants harm or predate on sympathetic white victims, they obfuscate it. Even when it's inevitable that the full story will eventually see the light of day, they slow-walk it in the hope that the furor will have died down by the time that happens. They did it for years with the grooming gangs in England, they did it with Southport, and I see no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again here. Dumana might still turn out to be wholly innocent (and not an NGO plant as @ArjinFerman speculates) -- though I doubt it -- but even if so, this level of smug condescension towards anyone not willing to take the BBC's word for it is completely unwarranted.

Wait, wtf? Their names were Lola and Ruby? Is this a simulation? Why not just go all out and name her Lolita, geez... (sorry if this is an inappropriate joke. I just feel like it adds to the strangeness of the situation)

If the narrative on this event flips one more time I'm calling the Architect and telling him I want a new Matrix.

I've seen the story make it's way through the feeds. I'm reluctant to believe because of how easy it is to prove/disprove for any "field correspondent" and how much egg on face it would be for thrainstream. Not that it hasn't happened before, I suppose.

I'm calling it, this turned out to be an excellent Scissor Incident.

There is insufficient context to judge the situation or the participants, but taps into multiple underlying prejudices that audience has to impact the personal conclusions they reach. For some this is clearly a creepy brown migrant perving on vulnerable girls. For others, clearly a delinquent with illegal weapons harassing a relatively innocent bystander.

The arguing over whether carrying bladed weapons is 'normal', or at least understandable given the potential dangers, or actively a sign of a juvenile delinquent, the inability to truly ascertain the race of the guy filming, just going off the accent, the somewhat muddled story about what led to the incident. The various cultural cues that read different ways to different people.

The question that we definitely can't answer is what would have happened to this girl and her friends if she weren't armed, and the incident wasn't filmed. I personally doubt that this particular migrant was actually going to assault this particular girl, but yeah, the background information that girls like this have gotten raped by gangs of actual migrants sort of has to color this discussion.

Just, epistemic humility demands that you acknowledge the uncertainty and don't make bold statements of certainty when the reliable information is still very limited.

But even our generally rational forum has got people digging in on both sides, expressing high confidence in their assessment.

the background information that girls like this have gotten raped by gangs of actual migrants sort of has to color this discussion.

As far as I've gathered, the background information is that girls have been typically raped by gangs of migrants through gradually grooming them in, not jumping them on the street. I don't think carrying axes would've helped against that.

Yeah, but I'd accept "this girl heard the stories of migrant rape gangs and her response to the threat is to carry weapons around" as a feasible explanation.

Of course, if its an actual organized gang, the knife and axe won't ultimately protect her either.

Of course, if its an actual organized gang, the knife and axe won't ultimately protect her either.

Indeed, the gang putting its explicit stamp of approval on the migrant rape gangs- that being the British government- has tanks and fighter jets.

What will an axe or sword do against them?

I mean, it's hard to gradually groom someone who's attacking you with an axe, isn't it?

More to the point, pre-/low-teen girls (or boys, for that matter) aren't known for great epistemics or rationality. It's possible for a 12 year old girl to incorrectly but reasonably, by 12-year-old definitions of reasonable, to believe that an axe would provide her with some significant amount of extra protection against grooming gangs.

After all, even fully grown adult women with brains that have had time to develop often take inconvenient steps to protect themselves against the stranger-jumping-you type of rape, despite the fact that those are quite rare. I think it's the viscerality/salience and availability bias, like how people often get more paranoid about flying than about driving, because plane crashes are severe and usually fatal to most people involved, and the news tends to report on them more than any particular banal car crash.

Now, these specific girls? Not having seen the video, I cast no vote, but my default presumption is that, outside of what's directly seen on video, there's no meaningful wider conclusion that can be made just from a brief out-of-context video that takes place as part of a longer interaction. Too many unknown unknowns.

Yeah, I was thinking it’s very Toxoplasma of Rageish. Like, if I wanted to pick/manufacture the perfect heroine and villain for my long-planned rising, these aren’t the ones I’d choose.

In the context of people complaining about migrant crime and racialized sexual predation, gypsies and Bulgarians are not the same thing, even if the gypsies come from Bulgaria.

And sure, the girl is probably a thug, especially with reports of the police constantly finding knives on people her age.

Yeah. The chavette's likely a member of the permanent antisocial underclass. On the other hand, what world view is going to suggest that shipping in members of Europe's permanent antisocial underclass to live on government handouts next to the antisocial underclass is going to accomplish anything especially positive?

I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.

Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise.

I think the deeper issue is that while you're correct that someone refusing to accept any possible evidence that contradicts their position isn't approaching the topic rationally, it's not unreasonable to consider sources like the BBC and the UK police largely discredited when it comes to issues like these. That people might therefore hold practically unfalsifiable beliefs about the nature of this incident is more a reflection of lack of trust in the establishment than people desperately clinging to their priors.

That people might therefore hold practically unfalsifiable beliefs about the nature of this incident is more a reflection of lack of trust in the establishment than people desperately clinging to their priors.

That's why I explained general impressions and attitudes on the ground. Dundee has been entirely quiet, all the screaming and shouting has happened in Terminally Online circles. Funnily enough, I passed through the city today, and people do not give two fucks.

Disregard the police report, if you absolutely must (and I think this is dumb, but can't stop people), but nobody here is actually up in arms about it. That alone should be cause for update. Without naming names, certain Mottizens have, as I predicted, not updated one jot. They're lost causes, and I do not say that lightly. For the skeptical, we can disagree on the degree of skepticism warranted, but at least you haven't gone from the extreme of having a mind so open your brains fall out to the opposite, a brain so insensitive to new information that it's practically calcified. That makes us practically half-cousins.

Nobody cares because it seems to be a case of low-lifes tangling with other low-lifes. That doesn't mean one or the other low-life wasn't the aggressor.

This is just a long way of expressing the favorite point of retreat for reactionary (in the sense of “reacting irrationally and overconfidently” sense, not the ideological sense) conspiracy theorists after they’re proved wrong: “The fact that I could have believed it speaks volumes about how bad my enemies are.”

Calling this a favorite of the reactionary is a bit rich; from my first steps on the internet over 25 years ago, lefties were throwing around "Poe's Law Strikes Again!" when discovered that what they were saying about righties weren't correct, but it didn't matter because righties were so bad you could totally believe that completely made up thing.

(in the sense of “reacting irrationally and overconfidently” sense, not the ideological sense)

I explicitly said that I did not mean “reactionary” to mean right-wingers. How was that not clear?

No it it isn't. The causation is completely reversed. There's nothing in the comment to which you're replying that indicates that the commenter believes that his ability to believe something implies anything to do with anything, including how bad his enemies are. The commenter is explaining why he has the ability to believe something, and that it is due to his enemies "sources like the BBC and the UK police" having established themselves to be bad as dependable information sources. You can argue that they have not established themselves to be such, but there's nothing in the comment indicating that the commenter's ability to believe this is proof/evidence/argument/etc. for the notion that these sources are bad sources. That they are bad sources is already part of the premise, not something being argued for.

I think you're assuming quite a bit here. FWIW, I'm not especially convinced one way or the other that this was a migrant sex attack. I really have no idea. I just don't think the BBC or the police releasing a statement represents a particularly high standard of evidence against the possibility.

Having finally watched the video, I am so confused at people's takes on this. The guy filming is clearly trying to do one thing - get a video of the preteen open carrying a knife and an axe. She's not 'intimidating him', she's cracking under the pressure and revealing her illegal behavior. And he's not a 'creep' (the most plausible reason people might think that is because he has a foreign accent and doesn't clearly articulate what he's about) but it's absolutely obvious from the video that his concern is documenting the armed children hanging out in the park.

I'm generally opposed to the excessive levels of immigration in western countries, but this video makes me more sympathetic to the immigrants. Poor guy was probably just walking in the park when the psychotic natives started brandishing weapons at him.

I guess I don't have much else substantive to add, except to note that the whole story seemed much more interesting to me until I finally got around to watching the video myself. I wonder how many culture warriors out there also haven't even bothered to watch the video, or already had their minds made up by 2nd and 3rd hand commentaries so that they couldn't take in the primary source objectively.

Normal people dont take videos of other people, particularly children, unless there is something positive happening. If you are an adult male taking a video of an underage female, you better be taking a video of your niece that you are sending to her grandparents. Outside of that sort of situation, you are the problem.

If we take this situation in the light most favorable to the video maker, he is a wierdo man who walks up to 12 year old girls then films their reaction to him.

For people who even saw the whole video but linked with some unambiguous caption 'girls fend off migrant predator', they're primed to jump to different conclusions when hearing the older sister screaming "she's only 12, get away from her!"

Given a different context, it's much easier to imagine she's saying that like 'stop filming and trying to get my sister in trouble or embarrass her on the internet, she's only a retarded 12 yr old who was trying to impress the older kids!'

Then there's just left the debate where people can make assumptions about what happened before the video: whether this was probably a poor guy minding his own business who was practically attacked, or finally a pro-social citizen doing his part to police public spaces, or likely a tattle-tale karen trying to get his 5 minutes of fame, or possibly a predator whose pickup attempt failed and is now embarrassed and hoping 2 wrongs make a who-cares.

Poor guy was probably just walking in the park when the psychotic natives started brandishing weapons at him.

According to your own earlier story, the guy filming provoked the preteen into brandishing the weapons at him, This hardly seems like a reason for sympathy.

I didn't say anything of the sort. I said he most likely saw the girl brandishing those weapons and tried to document it. I think this is consistent with both his and her actions in the clip.

The guy filming is clearly trying to do one thing - get a video of the preteen open carrying a knife and an axe. She's not 'intimidating him', she's cracking under the pressure and revealing her illegal behavior.

As for the “migrant crime” angle, I want to point out that Scotland is not England, and certainly not Rotherham. The “migrant problem” is much less pronounced here.

From the same city:

BBC: Grooming gang convicted of raping women in Dundee

While official sources do not mention ethnicity, commenters online (from before the recent incident) appear to believe these Romanian gang members are ethnically Romani. Other commenters viewing a picture of the Bulgarian couple believe they are also Romani. Personally I am no EthnoGuessr expert and can't identify any of them except that they do seem to be vaguely non-white.

Outside Edinburgh or Glasgow, brown skin is still a curiosity, more likely to prompt a friendly question than suspicion.

I think the low population of non-whites actually makes it less likely to be a coincidence? (Though non-coincidence isn't the same thing as guilt, for example the children could be harassing them over their race if they associate that race with local gangs.) Especially if they and the prior grooming gang arrests in the same city are both indeed Romani, which only make up 0.2% of the Scottish population. Unfortunately I can't find any source on the Romani population in Dundee. The Romani population in all of Scotland is 6,500 and the population of Dundee is 150,000. The "Romani in Dundee" Facebook group has 2,100 members, but it's public and I don't know how many spambot members Facebook groups tend to have.

All the people in the picture in the BBC article are white in the bio-anthropological sense (which has always included swarthy MENA types for good scientific reasons). The 19th century "scientific racist" bio-anthropologists didn't think there was a clean biological distinction between swarthy and non-swarthy whites, and modern DNA evidence has confirmed that they are correct. Gypsies are white in this sense. The men in the picture don't look like stereotypical gypsies, but they look a lot more like stereotypical gypsies than stereotypical non-gypsy Romanians.

The MO of the criminality is consistent with both gypsy organised crime and non-gypsy Eastern European organised crime, but the latter is more associated with the FSU and former Yugoslavia than with Bulgaria and Romania.

If the term "white" is too contentious, we can start saying "ethnic Europeans" instead. That would probably be for the best. It's less ambiguous. (Romani are a mixture of European and non-European ancestry.)

Frequently when people try to frame Romani or MENA rapists as "white", the political angle is that they want to deprive European peoples of the language for distinguishing between themselves and ethnic outsiders (even though wokes have no trouble distinguishing between white and non-white people in contexts where it's more beneficial for them to do so). But these are attacks being perpetrated against Europeans by ethnic outsiders, and Europeans have a right, arguably a duty, to frame their self-understanding in this fashion.

Except they're Europeans. They've been in Europe for a thousand years and don't exist outside of Europe. Saying they have a "mixture of European and non-European ancestry" is about as useful as saying that English people have a "mixture of English and non-English" ancestry because of that dirty Norman blood.

Black Americans have been here for hundreds of years, I suppose we can throw out the term “black” too and just talk about the American race from now on?

I'd describe them as black but not African. You were the one who conceded they were white, so you tried to argue that they weren't European, which makes even less sense. I don't know why you're hell-bent on otherizing certain people.

Saying they have a "mixture of European and non-European ancestry" is about as useful as saying that English people have a "mixture of English and non-English" ancestry because of that dirty Norman blood.

No, it’s not, because Anglo-Saxons and Normans were extremely genetically-similar populations even before intermixing. Whereas gypsies originate in the Indian subcontinent. They have also practiced a large degree of endogamy, meaning that they have maintained a very large non-European component to their ancestry despite their long existence living alongside Europeans.

Yes, they have inhabited the European geographical area for a long time, but surely you can understand that that’s not what people are referring to when they call them “non-European”. There is a genetic/ancestral cluster from which the peoples of Europe collectively descend, since many thousands of years ago. Gypsies are highly peripheral to this, as their arrival into Europe is comparatively very recent and they maintain significant genetic difference — manifested in their obvious phenotypic differences from the surrounding populations — from that genetic cluster.

My understanding is that Romani have substantial Indian/Punjabi ancestry, and a quick search finds this study supporting that. Not that this is terribly relevant to how visually identifiable they are, which can be determined more directly by those more familiar with their appearance.

A very important thing to note here:

The police proactively tracked down the gang. There was, as far as I can ascertain, no period where citizens had to take to the streets, where whistleblowers went hoarse, while the coppers tried to suppress the magnitude of the case. That is the polar opposite of a cover-up! As far as I can see, that is a reason to trust the police there more than you would by default, for British cops.

Further, while the people involved seem reprehensible, their crimes seem far tamer than what was going on in, say, Rotherham.

This specific example:

One of the charges he was convicted of was under the Human Trafficking Act, by forcing a woman into prostitution.

Prosecutor Lisa Gillespie KC said this victim had been sold a "pipe dream" of how she could make "lots of money" from selling her body.

Excuse me? It sounds like this particular lady signed up for this. Doesn't sound like she was beaten or drugged. At worst, she was a victim of false advertising. If being sold dreams of money were illegal, most influencers on TikTok or Insta would be in jail tomorrow.

(Just to make it very clear, these guys were also convicted of relatively more clear-cut cases of rape, but this is not what people normally imagine when they think of forced prostitution or sex trafficking)

I can tell you they are definitely not ethnically Romanian/Bulgarian.

Of course, I have every confidence that some corners of the internet, including select denizens of The Motte, will find this hopelessly unconvincing. If your current epistemic stance is “If she floats, she’s a witch; if she sinks, she’s a witch,” then no combination of facts, logic, or official statements will ever suffice. If your model of the world is that everyone is lying except you and your Telegram group, my ability to shift your priors is probably limited.

This hardly seems fair.

First of all, saying that "no combination of facts, logic, or official statements will ever suffice [to shift your priors]" is like saying that "no combination of tanks, nuclear missiles, or hugs will ever suffice to dissuade Putin from invading Ukraine." If all you've tried are hugs then you're not allowed to handwave tanks and missiles as equally useless. Likewise, if all you have are official statements, please don't demean our intelligence by putting them on the same level as facts or logic. Official statements aren't evidence of anything. They're just statements made all the less convincing because they emanate from the officials who are under suspicion in the first place.

Secondly, I already know the Bulgarian guy who was holding the camera phone is a creep. Do you know how I know? Because pointing a camera at a 12-year-old girl and following her around while she's clearly trying to disengage is A-tier creepy behaviour. You can try to "shift my priors" all you want, but I think he's a creep because he filmed himself acting like a creep. The video itself may not provide evidence that he's committed any particular crimes, but if that pattern of behaviour was repeated over a longer period of time I think it would rise to the level of criminal harassment. It would also invite justified suspicions of pedophilia.

Is it possible this is just a weird case where four weird people met by chance? That make the result extra weird and newsworthy, but not really representative of anything.

Like you said, it's pretty weird for a guy to be filming an unrelated 12-year-old girl. And apparently his wife was there with him.

It's also very weird for a 12-yr-old to be carrying weapons, especially a freaking axe. And then her 14-yr-old sister didn't seem to think that was odd.

It seems to me like two chuunibyou middle school kids trying to act tough. Maybe hoping to join a gang later, maybe they read some news stories about migrant gangs and got scared, or maybe they just thought it would be fun to go around wacking things with an axe. Then a weird creepy guy started filming them, but he probably wasn't intending to do anything else. And then the whole thing blew up.

I'm not like, defending this or anything. But there's plenty of much worse evidence out there of actual crimes.

It seems fair to me.

Because pointing a camera at a 12-year-old girl and following her around while she's clearly trying to disengage is A-tier creepy behaviour.

Is there a video longer than the than the 45 second one? There are a number of types of altercations that result in a Bulgarian man feeling compelled to, provoked into, or choosing to film a girl wielding a couple blades instead of walking away. Potentially, the Bulgarian man was not actually threatened by the encounter, but understood it was illegal, wrong, or entertaining. Most of the scenarios I envisage involve the kid instigating some shit as kids who stash weapons on the block do. Filming obscene, novel, or even dangerous things is now the response I expect from most people. Do it for the gram, fam.

In the 45 seconds of footage I saw, the girl start out keenly aware that brandishing her weapons on camera is bad, wrong, or illegal. I guess whatever preceded this was meant to be for show, but not to show everyone. This is why the video starts with her hiding the weapons. Called out, the punk instinct kicks in, and she reveals her weapons. She must be well educated in the arts of the street, because upon a challenge she chooses to keep it real.. What is she gonna do, stab me? Wu-tang!

There's a possibility that this girl is what many want it to be. Just like it was possible that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist, and that possibility carries on to the present. Maybe she had ready access to weapons in the land of loicenses because she was practicing for an upcoming tryout for the local HEMA club. Maybe. Perhaps she, to borrow language from people I associate with the outrage, dindu nuffin.

So I'm not beating up on a potential victim I'll pledge $100 to a Scottish youth charity that looks like it goes to underprivileged (white) Scots so long as we find reasonable suspicion the girl in the video is responding to immediate sexual advances by the man filming her. If there's no such of charity I'll ask locals decide where it should go.

Lol, so this is the video? I'm sorry but if you think filming this is "A-tier creepy behaviour", then you are just a porn brained pervert who shouldn't be let near women or children. Absolutely not surprising that this whole thing is a fully online discussion.

Lay off the cheap ad hominems.

Maybe she had ready access to weapons in the land of loicenses

I followed all the rest of your logic, but: even in the UK, is it really so hard to get your hands on a chef's knife and a hatchet? My ten-year-old carries equally deadly knives (much more carefully) whenever she unloads the dishwasher, and in a pinch I bet she could find our camping equipment bag if she wanted variety.

I'm pretty sure it is a "Photo ID, please" ordeal to purchase a hatchet or chef's knife from the store. I do not know to what extent this is enforced. If I were to guess this is easy to work around for teens, just as getting beer as a 16 year old isn't a very serious hurdle in the US. I didn't mean this proves she is some some hardened criminal, but carrying bladed weapons in public has a well understood meaning and is a strong signal in the UK.

I'm pretty sure if you're a low-life kid, you get the chef's knife from the kitchen and the hatchet from the shed. Maybe not YOUR kitchen or shed.

It seems fair to me.

The rest of your post deals with the specifics of the video itself, and I couldn't give less of a shit about what actually happened if I tried, so I apologise if this seems like I'm picking on you, but my intention is to point out that Sunshine made a phenomenally excellent point. Smuggling in 'official statements' with facts and logic, like they are even in the same universe, is beyond ignorant. The difference between smh and the telegram chuds he scoffs at is that the misinformation printed on those telegram channels is written by someone who actually believes it.

An official source is written by a professional. The writers aren't concerned with the truth of a situation, they are concerned with its management. They will omit details, use careful wording ("no evidence to substantiate claims") and construct a story that serves their interests first and foremost. They aren't necessarily lying, but they are absolutely not telling you the whole truth. They are spin doctors, and to take their word as gospel is profoundly naive. Just like trusting a random dude on social media, trusting official sources is just outsourcing your critical thinking to people that have repeatedly proven themselves unworthy of that trust.

Also lol at the idea distrusting the authorities is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt. Was it Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder Footsoldier? Who ran the Spanish inquisition again?

I know everyone wants to talk about this shit, because it's currently popping off. So I don't expect everyone to adhere to my 'wait at least a week before I even consider judging the facts of the situation' stance. But it would be nice if the people who brag about epistemic humility actually employed it.

The difference between smh and the telegram chuds he scoffs at is that the misinformation printed on those telegram channels is written by someone who actually believes it....

Putting aside how significant that difference is, am I to grant more latitude to flat earther propaganda because they hold actual beliefs when journalists, you say, do not?

The information environment sucks. Traditional and nu-media, professionals and amateurs, they all contribute to the state of it. I don't care for the meme right's slop factory products or The Guardian's. All I can do is complain about it, so I have and will continue to.

They will omit details, use careful wording ("no evidence to substantiate claims") and construct a story that serves their interests first and foremost.

I'm not comparing chuds to journalists, saying one is more honest than the other, or judging that one has better epistemics as a category. I don't particularly trust journalists. Scott's assessment is correct, but he is too kind to internalize the more severe implications of a "not touching you" grade of truth in reporting. I am not inclined to tolerate wishful bullshit of others because of journalism's failures. I'll add that 'telegram chuds' isn't charitable a complete description. It's a variety of online right wing subcultures that are chomping at the bit to slurp down the outrage.

My suggestion is to build a gallows. Whoever can be scapegoated as the highest possible government official who failed with knowledge of grooming gangs at the time has to go. Yes, retroactively. They probably can't re-sentence the perps, so they need to make a big show of another newly convicted Asian guy. Sucks for him, but the people bay for blood.

Also lol at the idea distrusting the authorities is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt. Was it Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder Footsoldier? Who ran the Spanish inquisition again?

I share an impulse to scrutinize authority. Not all scrutiny is good, pro-social, or justified.

But it would be nice if the people who brag about epistemic humility actually employed it.

I am not entrenched in some position. I thought I was pretty clearly arguing that we don't know shit, so you shouldn't have that opinion with certainty, because it is not founded. I gave my opinion on what it looks like to me with the limited information we have. I am more than happy to vacate my position of ignorance for a better informed one. I'm probably not going to get that information from the outrage factory.

For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.

I think that sums up my stance, and is, in fact, what I actually said. I am not leaning uncritically on the police report, I consider it significant, but I have taken pains to explain the local sociocultural milieu.

Just like trusting a random dude on social media, trusting official sources is just outsourcing your critical thinking to people that have repeatedly proven themselves unworthy of that trust.

Also lol at the idea distrusting the authorities is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt. Was it Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder Footsoldier? Who ran the Spanish inquisition again?

The fuck? Scott has a point about "bounded distrust". Governments, and their official mouthpieces are neither infinitely trustworthy nor untrustworthy. You can throw just about anything Pyongyang says into the trash, other nations command more credibility. Britain is not North Korea.

If firefighters ask you to evacuate your building because of a gas leak, don't tell me you're going to go lighting matches to see for yourself, because you don't trust a damn thing The Man tells you.

What is that I imagine hearing you say? I'm strawmanning you? Then I'd invite you to reconsider attempting to brand me as someone slavishly dependent on the "official" take.

I don't consider that strawmanning, I consider it a misunderstanding of my position. It does illustrate my point though. I would not light matches to see for myself, no, because a fire-fighter telling me there is a gas leak in my building is an immediate authority dealing with an ongoing situation. A police department's press office is a completely different animal, they are engaged in narrative control after the fact. Conflating the two and suggesting they require the same level of compliance... I don't have a brand, I have a label maker and OCD.

Anyway my point is that Pyongyang or London, lumping official statements in with facts and logic is downright insidious. As for 'nudging your priors at least a little' if that is indeed all you meant and it wasn't an ironic 'OBVIOUSLY this is the correct take' line, then you should think about how you write everything else in your post, especially the faux wistful "Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise." that follows it. That is not the language of the thoughtful truth seeker, it is the language of the partisan drawing battle lines.

You began with your preferred narrative - "little ned girls harassed a dude who didn't deserve it" - and then assembled your evidence to support it, deploying the official statement as a key soldier in your army. That is the same thing the telegram denizens do. The exact same thing. You are outsourcing your critical thinking to people who don't deserve it.

self_made is himself an immigrant in the UK. I would be more surprised if he didn't subtly take the side of the "Authorities"/migrant party in this kind of incident.

Lay off the cheap ad hominems.

ok, I thought I deleted it almost inmediately but apparently it wasn't the case.

In the 45 seconds of footage I saw, the girl start out keenly aware that brandishing her weapons on camera is bad, wrong, or illegal. This is why the video starts with her hiding the weapons. Called out, the punk instinct kicks in, and she reveals her weapons.

That's the part that doesn't make sense to me. She doesn't look like she's even trying to be intimidating, and the punk instinct in this specific situation is to run, not to try to scare away a guy twice your size.

The other part that is suspicious is the length of the video. Why is it so short? Ok, maybe this is where he turned on the camera - why isn't it played until the situation is concluded? It obviously belongs to the guy, did he upload it? This specific cut of it?

Just like it was possible that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist, and that possibility carries on to the present.

The Rittenhouse narrative that the media tried to drum up made no sense from the start, it wasn't a case ofnmissing context.

She doesn't look like she's even trying to be intimidating

Because girls don't know a lot about intimidation. Not even on the streets. They see what boys intimidating people looks like and and try to emulate it. Given enough time, dedication, and maturity the insecurity is dropped and girls can go pull the weave out dat hoes head without thinking it's not hard enough. Ain't no bitch need to fight like a man.

The other part that is suspicious is the length of the video. Why is it so short?

I am suspicious of all short videos. I assume she wasn't filming or calling the police, because she was breaking the law. How much earlier did the blades come out in the altercation? No idea, but doesn't look like she carries them on her person.

The Rittenhouse narrative that the media tried to drum up made no sensw from the start, it wasn't a case ofnmissing context.

The people that latched onto the narrative didn't need context. They still don't need the (truthful) context, because they already know what they want to believe. That is selfmade's point, but he is polite.

Despite sympathizing with the outrage quite a bit I fear demand for migrant rapists has already exceeded supply. The UK has only been able to openly talk about this for a few years!

Because girls don't know a lot about intimidation. Not even on the streets.

I'm saying: not even trying, not trying and failing.

I am suspicious of all short videos.

As per the link from jkf, the dude is a """digital creator""". This video is short, because that's how he wanted it, which means he's hiding something. The quotes in the paper make him sound like OJ Simpson.

I'm calling it / doubling down: the whole thing is fake. She's not Braveheart, and he's not a poor migrant targeted by racist chavettes, which is what this video was originally meant to show, but backfired. The only thing left to find out is if he's working for an NGO.

s per the link from jkf, the dude is a """digital creator"""... The only thing left to find out is if he's working for an NGO.

Thanks for the link I hadn't scrolled. Oh my. Well, if that's the case I suppose the blackpill doesn't taste so bad going down.

EDIT: It now occurs to me that one answer to "not even trying" perception: kids are awkward and do lots of things inexplicably poorly. Assuming this guy is mostly a normal pedestrian, then it's a good thing the girl, sensing discipline, acts awkwardly and doesn't commit to anything too crazy.

Secondly, I already know the Bulgarian guy who was holding the camera phone is a creep. Do you know how I know? Because pointing a camera at a 12-year-old girl and following her around while she's clearly trying to disengage is A-tier creepy behaviour.

This tbqh famalam. I have avoided commenting on this anywhere because it's so ridiculous. A 12 year old chavette has an axe in the park. To paraphrase the great Tyler the Creator, nigga just walk away from the child just like nigga turn around and leave haha.

This point reminds me of one of the more bemusing points from my adolescence, which was that during unusual hours, it was relatively common for creepy adult men to sit in their cars around my school and film children and teenagers. They had the angriest, most hateful looks on their faces when they did it. I don't think that they were even (mostly) pedophiles, they came across more as busybodies and paranoiacs, with their attention more directed at boys who could plausibly be mistaken for a threat than at girls. It was a very nice school, too! Just a small and relatively well-hidden-away one that these people could convince themselves was just a random building where teens were congregating and loitering for no reason.

To be fair, though, maybe they actually were pedophiles and they just got those looks on their faces because they noticed that I noticed them. Who knows. Old memory.

I don't think that they were even (mostly) pedophiles, they came across more as busybodies and paranoiacs, with their attention more directed at boys who could plausibly be mistaken for a threat than at girls

So they were [would-be] molesters. That look is how you know they're getting off on it. (Women do this too, that's what the 'but kids need to know about gay sex' thing is.)

That is utterly bizarre. Were they overprotective dads? Or were they actually just complete randos?

No one I or anyone else I spoke to recognized, at least.

At some point, an axe made an appearance.

Was the axe wielded by a poltergeist?

Or was it the anthropomorphic axe from this cartoon by Tom Gauld?

'Choppy helps out!' - my sides. He certainly does.

As for the “migrant crime” angle, I want to point out that Scotland is not England, and certainly not Rotherham. The “migrant problem” is much less pronounced here.

Maybe, but there still is one. A Romanian (gypsy, judging from the complexion?) grooming gang was caught operating in Dundee in 2022.

A noble effort. But hopeless. The first thread already demonstrated that priors were set by who you hated most: (1) females; (2) young hoodlums who bullied you; (3) brown people.

This thread will not shift any priors.

brown people.

I thought @self_made_human was brown people(*)!

(*) The good kind of course.

Wait, were you using a generic "you"?

I used to be Caucasian before being exposed to the merciless heat of the Caledonian countryside?

You joke, but I’ve known some very brown farm labourers. 60 years of all-day tanning with do a lot. Though they were Japanese and not super-pale to start with.

I’ve lost track of the number of medium commercial hvac techs(=roofs, for their entire [long]workdays) I thought were Mexican until they took their shirt off.

There are very brown secretaries, almost guaranteed to have fake lashes and nail extensions alongside lips that look like an anaphylactic reaction! Scottish beauty standards for women are wack, some of them are more bronzer than water by body weight.

Coco Chanel (the original populariser of the tan) has a lot to answer for.

Minus the extreme browning, that seems to be the current beauty standard among young German women.

Are they all fake blondes with fake eyebrows, too?

The only real blondes I've seen up here are the Golden Retrievers. They've usually got better, silkier lashes too.

Yeah but he's very firm on trying to escape India (for a myriad of justified reasons inclusive of locals)

You forgot one (or weren't granular enough for my liking) - the poors.

This thread will not shift any priors.

Could we make this like a signature that gets appended to every op?

I knew something was up with this when the alleged assailant was the one who recorded the video. Putting aside why you would record your attempts to perv on a little girl, why would you post that online? The only other person who could have posted it would be the police, and there's no indication that the video was released by police. Why is a twelve-year-old girl hanging out in a place where she feels unsafe enough that she needs to carry weapons? Why do they keep slowly backing away instead of running? I know that when I was a kid if I had ever though someone was about to abduct me I'd get out of there as soon as possible. It's not like it wasn't a wide open public place with plenty of escape routes. And although it's not unheard of, it's certainly rare for attacks of the type that have been implied to be carried out by a man and a woman working together. I didn't comment earlier because I didn't want to speculate without more information, but the whole thing seemed fishy to me from the outset, because it conformed to a narrative certain people have. It's almost as if some of them want it to be true, and are hoping that it will turn out that these were nonwhite people there trying to rape children because it will validate the ideas they have about immigrants from certain parts of the world.

I know that when I was a kid if I had ever though someone was about to abduct me I'd get out of there as soon as possible.

Eh, temperament. Especially in a group, they might’ve felt the need to stick together more than to run.

I knew something was up with this when the alleged assailant was the one who recorded the video.

As others pointed out, this is completely nornal behavior from various creeps.

I agreed with Hoffmeister when he said something was off about this. In particular, the girl's behavior doesn't exactly scream "big sister trying to scare away stranger" or whatever was being sold. On the other hand, the way the video conveniently starts off not showing any context, and the way she meekly displays her weapons when pushed is inconsistant with whatever you guys are trying to sell.

They usually don’t publish their video all over the public internet though.

Yeah they do. You think that dude who harassed Central Park Karen was forced to upload it? You think it got leaked?

This really isnt persuasive to me at all. Posting video online where someone over-reacts to your jerk move is pretty standard fare. We have the Shiloh Hendrix case, thousands of cases where women dress provocatively at the gym for the purpose of cussing out men who looked at their butt or bosom, trans people being aggro then filming clerks who "misgendered" them, and many more. I think the term is outrage farming. Its super common. My presumption now is that anyone filming a sole, private citizen, in public at a non-public event is probably a bad actor. You dont just film a 14 year old girl, even if she is being an asshole and brandishing a hatchet if you are a normal guy. A normal guy just shrugs and leaves. Video guy tries to provoke the situation so he can get a good video. Whether he is just a jerk video guy, a snitch, or a creepy rapist remains an open question. But I see no situation where he is actually a positive contributor to the community.

(Assuming that the girl started an interaction and was harassing/intimidating, which we don't know):

But I see no situation where he is actually a positive contributor to the community.

I think there is a case for thinking (not saying) 'fuck you, you little punk. You don't get to scare me out of public spaces. I'll film this for the police.'

I do agree most people would leave, however there is a pro-social element of recording teenage thugs to make public spaces safer. Particularly if they interact with and brandish a weapon at you. Its not for everyone and its probably prudent to just leave things be and tell any police you walk past what happened.

If the kid hadn't initiated an interaction though and the man did (say after spotting she was carrying an axe), well its much harder to justify that in the current zeitgeist.

Edit: Looks like the kid started it (the guy says he has a witness and cctv reviewed by police) from @jkf

The transcript in that video is really weird, though. Her words are aggressive, but he keeps saying variations on, 'yes, yes, show the knife'.

It could be 'get the knife again, I want the world to see what you were threatening me with' but coupled with the weird way she's holding them (face on to the camera, maximum display, minimum threat) and his background as a 'digital artist' I would not be at all surprised if he's paying her.

Okay, but paying for what purpose? What's the exact business case for a video showing yourself being threatened with an axe and a knife by an underaged girl?

To go viral, one assumes. Then you sell the story, plus when you sell your services as a content creator you can point to when one of your videos was literally world famous, etc.

BLM2 electric boogaloo. Or just raising your profile as a Stunning And Brave artist, which I think worked quite well, if that was the goal.

Ah yes, George Zimmerman and Derek chauvin, easily mistaken for middle school girls.

When demand exceeds supply, you gotta make do with what you have.

The point being moreso the "by an underaged girl" part than "video showing yourself being threatened with an axe and a knife" part.

The fact that we're talking about it is proof that it's an effective way to raise your profile, no?

Open carrying weapons is common in some American states, and nowhere else. By definition, this makes red states the exception. To each their own, but the base prior has to be that the 'woman wielding the unwieldy weapon was wrong'. The outrage was contrived.

Yeah, by default, weapons are illegal. If they believe otherwise, then the burden of proof is on the Americans. And the pudding ain't sweet.

the base prior has to be that the 'woman wielding the unwieldy weapon was wrong'

I am, personally, never going to be upset about a woman (especially a girl!) carrying a knife around, no matter what the letter of the law says. It would be great if we lived in a world where the average adult man couldn't trivially overpower any woman they see due to inherent physical asymmetries, but that is not our reality. A knife makes it possible for a girl to defend against a predator.

Upthread there's a link about a gypsy grooming gang that was active in the city where this took place, the guy in this case may well be a gypsy, ergo I side with the 12 year old girl against the weird brown creep who was filming her.

I will concede that my support of the girl in this case is not unconditional. If there was evidence that she was trying to rob the "Bulgarian" man by brandishing her weapons, I would (begrudgingly) side with him. Merely scaring creepy men away from the place where you and your friends like to hang out is, actually, based.

Merely scaring creepy men away from the place where you and your friends like to hang out is, actually, based.

Should public parks belong to whoever is most successful at scaring everyone who's not their friends away from them? I'm afraid that's how you get ghettoes. Filled mostly with older teen/young adult men, not young girls, mind.

I'm afraid that's how you get ghettoes.

A Scottish ghetto? In Scotland?

A Scottish ghetto? In Scotland?

A ned/chav ghetto. Despite the best efforts of intermeddling foreigners to obfuscate this, it remains obvious to anyone who actually lives in the UK that social class and not race determines who to avoid.

I think Scotland writ large (the parts of it containing Scottish people, anyways) has been best avoided by the upper crust on this basis for hundreds of years, though?

Should public parks belong to whoever is most successful at scaring everyone who's not their friends away from them?

My response to this doesn't quite rise to the level of a gigachad, but it's close. I am very much not pro "CHOP/CHAZ"-adjacent behavior, and if it ever reaches that point, with youth gangs permanently occupying large public spaces and accosting anyone who passes near, that is obviously bad. But I think groups of youths having a place they feel is "their spot" and yelling at anyone who comes too close to "fuck off" is just teens doing dumb teen shit, and that's what this tends to look like in practice. My experience is they're also likely to try to bum some smokes or get you to buy them some booze. Antisocial, sure, but I wouldn't say it's turning the neighborhood into a ghetto. I think this kind of low-level dysfunction is pretty close to unavoidable in urban areas without extreme measures.

Belt knives of any size are legal in Canada as well -- I don't know that it's come up, but I doubt there's any law about toting around an ax, either. For that matter, carrying a rifle around is typically not specifically outlawed here, although it tends to cause more trouble than it's worth in urban areas.

There's a semi famous case where some busybody Very Concerned Citizen daubed in a kid riding the bus home from target shooting because they noticed him trying to hide his .22 wrapped up in a jacket or somesuch. Extensive prosecution resulted in a conviction for carrying a concealed weapon -- the ruling as I recall claims that there would have been no violation if he'd carried it openly. (although I imagine the system would have tried pretty hard to generate something in that case)

Is Canada OK? I think it's not bad.

The open carrying of weapons has been the norm across the world for 99% of human history. It only became banned when modern high capacity states gained the capacity to suppress vigilantism.

This is another example of how the modern right has erased class from their view of history. It was not normal in almost any premodern society to allow just anyone to open carry weapons of any kind. The carrying of weapons was nearly always carefully prescribed according to class-status concerns, and the carrying of weapons served as a denotation of class. The peasantry and urban underclass were almost never allowed to openly carry weapons without punishment.

and the carrying of weapons served as a denotation of class

Which creates a different angle, where banning the carry of weapons is meant specifically to stratify a society by class. The [modern right] is more egalitarian than the [modern left], so it's natural they'd push in an egalitarian direction.

This kind of ties back to militia stuff too; the class of person expected to defend the society from outside threats when called up with his personal weapon is naturally worthy to bear that arm at any other time. To do otherwise is stealing, in a way.

This is another example of how the modern right has erased class from their view of history. It was not normal in almost any premodern society to allow just anyone to open carry weapons of any kind. The carrying of weapons was nearly always carefully prescribed according to class-status concerns, and the carrying of weapons served as a denotation of class. The peasantry and urban underclass were almost never allowed to openly carry weapons without punishment.

There was also a big difference between urban and rural areas. The extreme case was the Roman Republic, where all classes of citizen were allowed to open-carry outside the pomerium and only lictors attending a dictator were allowed to open-carry inside the pomerium. In medieval and early modern England the "freedom of the City" meant the right to carry weapons inside city walls, and even the nobility didn't have it by default unless a specific noble had been granted the freedom of a specific city (or more likely was an officer in a regiment which had been collectively granted the freedom). There is a curious welcoming ritual every time the Monarch visits the City of London (i.e. the historical square mile inside the old walls, which is also the modern financial district) which is intended to obfuscate the question of whether royal guards need the permission of the City authorities to carry weapons inside the City. Whereas all Protestant Englishmen enjoyed the right to keep and bear arms in the country from the 1689 Bill of Rights up to the introduction of modern gun control.

No, it’s common in western history for the entire free population(granted, not 100% of the population) to have open carry privileges. After the abolition of slavery the law often restricted it to ‘respectable’ citizens, not nobles- that respectable citizens could obtain concealed carry licenses easily remained the law on the books until Austria-Hungary fell, at least.

I didn't refer to nobles, only to the peasantry and underclass and to class more broadly. While you start by rejecting my point, you then outline exactly what I'm talking about: Only the free, not the enslaved or serf populations; only "respectable" citizens, not the underclass. We can debate how we would sort the participants in this particular dispute into historical categories for the purpose of examining it in a hypothetical Roman or Medieval or Tokugawa legal context.

What I think we agree on is that the statement I was responding to

The open carrying of weapons has been the norm across the world for 99% of human history. It only became banned when modern high capacity states gained the capacity to suppress vigilantism.

Fails to take into account class as context. It was nearly always the norm for someone to be allowed to carry weapons in varying contexts, an upper class that can variously be called citizens, nobles, knights, respectable, bourgeois, free men, as the case may be. It was nearly always the case that there also existed classes of people who were not allowed to carry weapons in varying contexts, and who could be punished by the law or directly by their betters for doing so, whether we call them slaves or serfs or peasants or untouchables or the poor or foreigners or children or what have you.

It's not the case that one can say simply or easily that everyone carried weapons all the time and it was no problem before the rise of the modern state.

Hell, even in America, even in the wild west, the shootout at the OK Corral starts because there's a rule in Tombstone that you couldn't carry guns within city limits, and Wyatt Earp was on his way to enforce that law.

The population of Anglo-Saxon England forbidden from carrying weapons was around 10%. ‘Not at the very bottom’ seems to have been the rule of thumb for lots of Germanic societies.

I don’t know exactly what ‘respectable citizen’ meant under Austrian law at the time, but it probably excluded more along the lines of the bottom third than the bottom two-thirds; even today former Hapsburg lands are unusual in Europe for their relatively liberal policies on concealed carry licenses.

The unfree villein population of England pre Norman conquest was around 60-70%, and they required the permission of their lord to possess or carry arms.

Not weapons as such, but there are many tools the peasants would carry on a daily basis which could be used to hurt/intimidate someone if needed. You'd need to be able to fight off wild animals outside the cities. It would be bizarre for someone not to carry a knife at all times - they're just too useful.

Of course, the knife the average person carried looked very different from a jeweled dagger or weapon of war.

The modern-day equivalent would probably be those guys who carry a Leatherman around in a belt clip. It's not the kind of thing that would draw much attention at all, and if it did even the most anti-gun person would probably assume that the guy was an outdoorsman or often made a bunch of minor repairs, not that he was open-carrying a weapon.

Do you know if it is legal for someone to walk around with a Leatherman in the UK or is that a concealed weapon?

Sort of. UK law allows you to carry a folding knife with a non-locking blade up to 3 inches without reason or justification. Most Leathermans have locking blades, so they're out, but there may be older ones or similar tools from other companies that qualify. BUT, you are allowed to carry one if you have a good reason to carry one (other than defense), so if you're hiking or use it for work or something it technically wouldn't be a problem. I have no idea how strictly this is enforced.

It's a "lock knife", so it's illegal to carry one if you're not a tradie in the process of doing tradie things.

It was also fairly common for anyone to have a cane/walking stick/cudgel with him at any time.

But the size, shape, and type of tools/weapons/accoutrements allowed to ordinary folk was heavily regulated and violators harshly punished in urban areas throughout European history.

Yeah, you couldn't hold your ground against someone armed with a real weapon (like a noble or their household) with what the peasants carried around.

I would imagine that would depend very much on the combatants, right? There's a lot of combinations of guys where I'd bet on A with a shovel over B with a broadsword.

I'm more getting at the fact that at many points in history, a peasant who walked about with a real weapon of war was liable to punishment under local custom and law.

Whosoever draws a sword and does not strike will be fined 1 grivna.

(c) Russian Law Code, XI century

The big unspoken filter is being able to afford a sword. A peasant would have an axe or a knife tucked into his sash. Both of the utility variety.

Fascinating. Thanks for pointing that one out.

A sheathed sword ia still "open carrying", though I guess the girl would be screwed either way. Wonder how much this would be in today's money.

Pretty based law, I have to say.

Drawing a sword is equivalent to brandishing, which AFAIK is illegal essentially everywhere unless you are in a situation where pulling the trigger would be permissible self-defence.

From cursory googling, a grivna at that time was an about 200 gram silver bar and equaled the cost of a combat steed or a year's wages of a Norwegian mercenary.

Weregild for the murder of a free man was 40 grivnas, for comparison.

Most ancient societies had rigidly (lethally) enforced rules about who was allowed to carry weapons.

On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense. For the Americans in the audience, this is not Texas.

While carrying a gun openly on your hip is a sufficiently mundane sight here as to prompt no questions(or perhaps merely a harbinger of an hour long political conversation with no polite avenues for escape), carrying an axe will prompt questions- probably more in the vein of 'So, you heading to an SCA meeting?' or excited ten year old boys asking 'Can I see it?' than law enforcement relevant ones, but still. I believe there's also still a select list of weapons that are flat banned from carrying(including brass knuckles, switchblades, and sword canes- you can open carry a katana but not a 'concealable' blade). Holding a weapon in your hand is also illegal without very good reason, unless it's a polearm. And tweens don't get to carry weapons, you have to be a legal adult(either 18 or 21 depending). What this girl did would be illegal and unusual here- Florida man story. She could've probably gotten away with pulling a pocketknife or even a filleting knife, though. Technically illegal but no one thinks it's particularly serious.

flat banned from carrying(including brass knuckles, switchblades

Those are legal now in Texas since 2019 and 2013, respectively.

But not sword canes?!

Nope, those are legal now too. Just can't take em into bars, schools, or government buildings. They were illegal pre 5.5 inch knife ban reversal though.

The one thing I will say is that it's quite possible in Texas that if the weapons were being used to prevent a more serious crime (which seems to be in dispute in this case), the potential illegal weapons charges would be allowed to slide.

Probably, yeah, but teenagers from lower class backgrounds facing potentially serious charges aren't exactly reliable witnesses.

This is why I withheld judgement and just waited for more info to be released. It's too easy to be swayed by out of context videos and narratives.

Scotland has its own problems, but racialized sexual predation is not at the top of the list.

The thing about this type problem is you don't need many incidents for it be a major problem.

The thing about this type problem is you don't need many incidents for it be a major problem.

Doubly so if it simply was not a problem before and now its one on the increasing list of things that you have to worry about now.

It does seem more likely to me that this is underclass behavior than a self-defense video from a rapey migrant. However:

no evidence

It is written in the scriptures that:

Law of No Evidence: Any claim that there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit.

No evidence should be fully up there with “government denial” or “I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way they can prove anything.” If there was indeed no evidence, there’d be no need to claim there was no evidence, and this is usually a move to categorize the evidence as illegitimate and irrelevant because it doesn’t fit today’s preferred form of scientism.

Now we're not talking about the scientific establishment this time, but a part of the United Kingdom. While this incident is not from Rotherham or Yorkshire, the state and its justice system from have a history of covering up child abuse by immigrants in the name of "community relations", as well as coming down disproportionately heavily on people who object. While you might say there are proportionately fewer migrants in Scotland, external online observers are going to be aware of Scotland's woke politics. There was the Adam Graham Isla Bryson case, where a rapist adopted a transgender identity during the court process, and was sent to a woman's prison. A sibling comment already mentioned the railroading of Count Dankula. There was also the £7bn superinjunction covering up the importing of 18000–19000 Afghans. It is very easy to say "we found no evidence" if "we" choose not to look very hard, and very easy for an external online observer to believe that the police and other systems in Scotland would do just that, given that we know from West Yorkshire that local police have been part of cover-ups in the past.

So I think it is perfectly rational to have suspicious priors if one is familiar with Rotherham and the extent of similar coverups in the UK, only saw a still from the video, and/or only read suspiciously carefully worded articles from mainstream sources. But the perspective of the camera in the video makes it harder to believe. Screaming "pedophile!" is a weapon underclass kids know how to wield; so is the reflexive "phone camera on, start recording" move. If there was a migrant behaving inappropriately I would expect to see him in the shot, as well as the armed girl.

It has been alleged that the camera man perved on the the 12yo sister and when rebuffed hit her and planted her on the ground, then the older sister went and got her dual wielding setup.

I am having trouble reconstructing this scenario mentally.

  • the camera man pervs on her sister
  • the older sister decided that the situation is serious enough for armed self-defense
  • the older sister goes away, leaving her sister alone with the perv (???) for whatever time it would take to retrieve the dual wielding setup and come back (their house, or anyone's, does not appear to be within arm's reach
  • the younger sister is apparently prevented from leaving at that time, because otherwise if the older sister could leave, so could she
  • the area does not appear deserted but no one stops the cameraman from physically preventing the younger sister from leaving

I would like to get the other side of the story, but preferably not from internet randos.

Unfortunately the only things I can find arguing that story are still at the "screenshots of chats" level of evidence.

I would also suspect that genuinely creepy migrants wouldn't be filming the altercation. If deterred they'd just book it.

Anyways, you know what else is not normal? Following 12 yo girls around the park taping them with your camera in order to report them to the police.

Even allowing your hypothesis that the girls are l.h.c. (likely) and had the weapons to impress their friends (rather than fend off rapists) -- how about just, like -- leave them alone?

I guess the current parlance would be "don't be a Karen" (particularly when you're in somebody else's country) -- but I prefer good old MYOB for pithyness and broad applicability to all of life's struggles.

If I am going to have a less than completely friendly interaction with 12 year old girls, I am going to be filming everything start to finish, out of simple common sense self-preservation. Moreover, if there are 12 year old rowdy girls loitering with axes in my neighbourhood, I will in fact be seeking an interaction to figure out what that is about (and potentially report them to the police, based on what that interaction reveals). To not do so seems irresponsible to me - what are they going to do with that axe? Break into someone's house? Threaten someone? Hurt themselves?

It seems to me that some people analysing this incident are operating off of a mental model of the UK as some sort of zombie apocalypse movie setting, where it is reasonable for children to carry scavenged weapons if they have to go outside in broad daylight to defend themselves from the hordes.

To not do so seems irresponsible to me - what are they going to do with that axe? Break into someone's house? Threaten someone? Hurt themselves?

Do you actually think that's what was up? And anyways brings us back to MYOB -- if you actually truly believe that this girl is extremely dangerous, engaging with her and filming her is the last thing you should be doing, no?

It seems pretty clear from the video that the girl was in fact threatening somebody. The only question is whether he deserved it or not.

I think the "wanted to impress friends" story from some parallel comments is the most likely, but the "break-in in the making" one is at least like 5%.

"Up to no good" does not imply "extremely dangerous". Without firearms in the picture, a 12 year old girl is not going to be dangerous enough to warrant unconditional avoidance. Note that even if your preferred response would indeed be as you say, it is enough if some people would think as I do (this is a situation where you should confront while filming) to reduce the probability of the scenario the culture warriors wish for ("this video depends a rape by brown immigrant being narrowly averted") precipitously.

This is a terrible response to public disorder. These youths are able to get away with this stuff precisely because of the attitude of resigned acceptance with which they’re treated by passersby.

The British public has demanded and actively enforced that resigned acceptance through its laws and edicts.

It doesn't get to be upset when it gets what it asked for. The filming of this (and the actions of the filmer) are an expression of pure moralfaggotry and "getting chased off with an axe" is a healthy reaction to people like that.

Di you live in the UK? Because that certainly doesn't seem like a description of the situation. Not least necause you are eliding a very important consideration. Class. Britain does indeed enforce behavioral rules on underclass/lower class groups.

Case in point I am back home right now and a guy was yelling at a family event. No threats, just effing and blinding as my mum put it, and the cops just rolled up and dragged him off after being called.

Community norms require and often get community involvement. A Karen is just someone trying to enforce norms others don't agree with. Someone helping enforce popular norms is a good citizen.

Get away with what stuff?

I suspect that the kids were walking about acting disorderly, yelling at people and/or waving weapons around.

This just sounds like a fun afternoon for me and the pals when I was a kid. What kind of statist nonsense is this, that you want to deprive kids of the right to yell and wave harmless "weapons"?

A cursory perusal of my output on this website will reveal that I’m a pretty hardcore statist. Kids should be doing way better things with their time than bothering productive adults in public, acting like shit-heads, and that means somebody is going to need to make them.

Adults doing productive things like filming little girls who ask them to go away?

It’s perfectly reasonable to film preteens in public if they’re acting like assholes, or if you get into a confrontation with them and they attempt to accuse you of trying to molest them.

FWIW, and knowing not whether anything about this incident is remotely as it seems to anyone, I can absolutely imagine a scenario in which a perfectly well-adjusted adult films little girls doing stupid shit in order to gather evidence of their misbehavior to present to their parents or to the police. The adult in question repeatedly demanding "Show the knife!" would fit in with that.

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  1. What makes you think that? They seem to be mostly running away in the video.
  2. So what? A twelve year old yelling at people is not a police matter, even if she has a hatchet.

On 2)- any person waving an actual axe around and yelling at people is a police matter. In the US she would have been shot(and the shooter would walk free), assuming that this is indeed what happened.

(and the shooter would walk free)

I highly doubt that, especially in Scotland. If a gang of ten armed men covered in gang tattoos come after you with RPGs and AK-47s, and you use your ninja skills and your licensed bread knife to dispatch them all nonlethally, then maybe you'd avoid charges on the grounds of self-defense. But shooting a 12-year-old-girl who has a blunt piece of metal she probably found in a ditch? Believe it or not, straight to jail.

In the US she would have been shot (and the shooter would walk free)

Really? A twelve-year-old girl? I'm not saying it could never happen, but still, hardly business as usual. Now if we were talking about a boy, especially one with a couple of years on her - maybe. Hell, if she had a gun. But I don't think "tween girl is messing around with a hatchet" would inevitably, or even likely, end with a dead body. And if it did, I'm confident there would be a massive media circus, nor would I gamble on the shooter's odds of "walking free".

Oh itd be controversial, but the cop who shot a girl(and I suspect her US equivalent is black) for waving an axe around after yelling at her to put it down would not serve time.

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Yeah. Considering how unsympathetic the protagonists of 'unfair self defense/police violence' media circuses have been in the last few years I'd be shocked if a literal 12 year old girl didn't get the full weight of the media in her favor regardless of whatever she'd been up to prior.

What makes you think that? They seem to be mostly running away in the video.

Yes, this is extremely typical of teenage troublemakers. The second the threat of consequences or being caught/embarrassed appears, their brash aggression is replaced by the performance of fear and vulnerability.

So what? A twelve year old yelling at people is not a police matter, even if she has a hatchet.

So it’s not a police matter, but also regular civilians are not supposed to intervene or even film? This is a recipe for utter chaos and disorder.

So it’s not a police matter, but also regular civilians are not supposed to intervene or even film? This is a recipe for utter chaos and disorder.

You will be surprised to learn that chaos did not reign in the years prior to widespread filming of public activities -- I guess if the guy wanted to take her toys away himself I'd be OK with that, but would recommend just ignoring her. Going to the cops is just weak -- do you record speeders with a dashcam and call them in?

You will be surprised to learn that chaos did not reign in the years prior to widespread filming of public activities -- I guess if the guy wanted to take her toys away himself I'd be OK with that, but would recommend just ignoring her.

You will be unsurprised to be reminded of the fact that the years prior to ubiquitous handheld cameras were also the years of greater ethnic homogeneity and stronger Leitkultur.

Going to the cops is just weak -- do you record speeders with a dashcam and call them in?

Would if I could! This is a law and order country, and everyone needs to do their part.

At least in the UK, things were kept reasonably orderly in part because the police were usually local and knew everybody, and because they were freer to make assumptions about who was up to no good.

When you have to apply the laws completely equally and show no evidence of prejudice, the laws are going to have to get a lot more onerous and specific.

Do you think the difference in the damage a 12 year old and an adult could potentially do with an axe is really so significant?That seems ludicrous to me. If I would call the police on anyone older than a toddler waving an axe and threatening people, I do it equally on a 12 year old, because they still have the strength to kill many members of society.

"Take her toys away himself". So it's not important enough for the police, but it's also somehow important enough to initiate a violent confrontation over? This doesn't make sense.

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No, but I call in potheads behind the wheel. Granted, how much of this is due to concern for public safety and how much of it is because I hate pot I couldn't tell you.

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I, for one, wouldn't be surprised to learn that chaos did not reign in the years prior to widespread filming, because as far as I know those years largely overlapped with the years when children harassing random citizens could be beaten, and such applications of minor corrective violence were overlooked by law enforcement. Today are not such times. Neither is ignoring underage hooligans in the making a recipe for a pleasant society.

If someone speeds through a pedestrian crossing and nearly runs a crossing person over in a display of wanton negligence, I wholeheartedly support the right of that person to throw a brick through that car's window, and if there is no such right, I consider submitting video evidence to the police the next best thing.

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The police have issued a statement, and the BBC, in a notably careful choice of words, clarifies: “BBC News understands that officers have found no evidence to substantiate claims being made online the youths were at risk of sexual assault.”

This is one of those non-substantive claims. It offers nearly zero Bayesian evidence of anything, because what would evidence look like? What evidence does "threatening sexual assault but stopped before contact via intimidation" leave behind? There would be no physical struggle, no wounds, no semen. All this means is that the incident was not caught on camera and it's entirely a "he said she said" situation. There's no evidence to substantiate these claims, but there's symmetrically no evidence to in-substantiate these claims. My prior is that both hypotheses (pervert immigrants or delinquent teens) are plausible, and the police or media saying what they said does not shift these priors in either direction, because this is exactly what I would expect them to say in either scenario.

Given a complete and utter lack of evidence, everyone is going to stick to their priors and this is the rationally correct response.

The information that this was a Bulgarian couple, rather than a single man, should surely be significant. Surely even a genuine pedo would be unlikely to go after a pair of preteen girls with his own wife right there? Not saying it couldn't happen, but still.

That mf definitely sounded like a gypsy and not a Bulgarian. (The gypsies from EE LOVE to identify as citizens of whichever country they came from, see also Romanian gypsies)

It's not unusual at all for a pedophile to be assisted by a wife or other adult female accomplice. There was a recent case of a grooming gang in Dundee that involved a woman. That was in January of this year, in the exact same city (Dundee, Scotland) as this incident.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/003/125/092/9a1.jpg

"Bulgarian man" in the same sense as the "Swedish men" who are always doing grenade attacks and such.

(or the "Welsh man" involved in the actual knife violence in Southport for that matter)

I mean, the difference is that there are people who move to Sweden from the third world. Or Wales. Bulgaria is... not that. It's a depressing second world country with a population shrinking from outmigration because it's poorer than Mexico. I register a strong prediction that anyone referred to as 'Bulgarian' is actually 'Bulgarian', including if they stand accused of serious crimes.

It's a depressing second world country with a population shrinking from outmigration because it's poorer than Mexico.

By what metric is it poorer than Mexico?

Well, that made me curious.

Bulgaria has about 50% higher GDP per capita than Mexico. Similar inequality, and slightly human development index too.

I'm guessing it's plainly incorrect, since I don't see any room for a nuanced take in the face of those numbers.

You might have been thinking of Ukraine, whose GDP per capita is a third of Bulgaria's.

That's kind of what I mean -- isn't it a common pattern for people from shithole countries to anchor in second tier EU ones prior to heading somewhere nicer?

Not really. Most go directly for the rich countries and almost no-one anchors in the real EE shit holes. Some do "anchor" in Italy or Spain before heading north though.

Not as far as I know- migrants get to Germany as fast as possible instead of dithering in the Balkans.

I register a strong prediction that anyone referred to as 'Bulgarian' is actually 'Bulgarian', including if they stand accused of serious crimes.

As I mentioned in another comment, gypsies alone probably constitute up to 10-11% of Bulgaria’s population, and then an additional 8-9% are Turks, so you’re looking at up to a fifth of its population that’s visibly non-Bulgarian. Yes, Bulgaria is poor and its native Slavic population is far from impressive in terms of development, but it’s still the case that a Bulgarian committing crimes abroad has a strong probability of being non-ethnically-Bulgarian.

But these people were originally from Bulgaria and born to parents who are originally from Bulgaria. I have no sympathy for gypsies but, you know, the ones from Bulgaria are from Bulgaria.

Being born on the magic soil doesn't make them Bulgarian, no more than Mexicans born in the US makes them Americans.

By that logic you'd have to concede that nobody but Indians are actually American, no?

Aren't "American Indian" and "American American" are two very different identities?

When the americans were busy killing the uppity indians they were not Indian even when the were born on currently or formerly Indian territory. By your logic, all americans are native American Indians and the indians should have no qualms about their displacement.

no more than Mexicans born in the US makes them Americans

Aye, that one’s a consequence of the Magic Document

We got em. There they are just standing there, menacingly.

(They do look quite tan. I guess these are Romani?)

Romanes Eunt Domus.

However, that look and posture (and the actions that brought them to this) demonstrates these people have integrated perfectly into British society, because that's exactly how the natives act too.

I dunno dawg. I googled "Bulgarian people", and they pass to me.

This just in:

Now we can reveal the man being threatened is a family man who has been living in the UK for four years – and who was accompanied by his wife on the way to the shops when the incident occurred.

Far from being fresh off a cross-channel small inflatable, as implied by Robinson and Musk, Fatos Ali Dumana, 21, says he came to Britain legally from Bulgaria he and his wife have an eight-month-old baby.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15040815/The-truth-migrant-Dundee-schoolgirl-brandished-knife-wrong-rabble-rousers-Elon-Musk-Tommy-Robinson-were.html

Fatos Ali Dumana -- very Bulgarian, much European ethnicity.

@Quantumfreakonomics @hydroacetylene -- just in case you were wondering.

Fatos is an Albanian name. I could not find info on "dumana" but the related "Dumani" seems to be traceable to Albania as well.

So yes, very much European ethnicity

I wonder if it's common for Bulgarian Gypsies to carry Turkic names / be nominally of the Turkic/Muslim minority.

I was all ready to be impressed with the Mail for actually doing some investigative journalism & finding some facts, and then

Despite rabble rousers such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk suggesting that the man who filmed it was a small boat illegal migrant, we can reveal Fatos has lived in the UK for four years

Oh gosh. Four years. How could we be so mistaken?

Police sources have also confirmed there is no evidence to support the online rumours Mr Dumana is a migrant or committed any offence.

He's only been in the UK 4 years by the article's own admission, but somehow 'not a migrant'. Does he have PR or citizenship? The article only says he has legally been in country for 4 years. I would consider any first generation immigrant to be a migrant.

Anyway, I'm now thinking the girl started it, because apparently the cops reviewed footage from a nearby shop and there was a witness (presumably not his wife, but this article is maddeningly imprecise so who knows):

'They saw from the CCTV cameras from Farmfoods that she was stopping me go on my way to the shop.

'There was one more person also who told them (the police) she was attacking me and calling me a f***** migrant.

"migrant" in the UK context almost exclusively refers to illegal immigrants, and often specifically the small boat kind

The self-styled 'digital creator'...

Ok, things are starting to coalesce...

There is a possibility those "bulgarian" men may have only become bulgarian quite recently. And that they may be quite a bit more melinated than the average bulgarian.

More time needed on ethnoguesser 'dawg' -- since you like wikipedia so much:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Lazarki_from_Gabra.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Sv%C4%9Bt_knihy_-bulharsk%C3%BD_folklorn%C3%AD_soubor_135.JPG/1280px-Sv%C4%9Bt_knihy-_bulharsk%C3%BD_folklorn%C3%AD_soubor_135.JPG

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Veselin_Topalov_Sofia_Airport_24.10.2005.pic-01.jpg/800px-Veselin_Topalov_Sofia_Airport_24.10.2005.pic-01.jpg

I am, in fact, rather fond of Wikipedia. It is a handy utility.

It also, quite helpfully, notes that the ethnogenesis of modern Bulgarians, includes, among others:

Bulgars – a semi-nomadic Turkic tribal federation, possibly from Central Asia, which settled in the northeast of the Balkans in the 7th century CE, federated with the local Slavic and Slavicized population, organised early-medieval Bulgarian statehood and bequeathed their ethnonym to the modern Bulgarian ethnicity, while eventually assimilating into the Slavic population

The couple in question, while ethnically ambiguous, look "Turkic". It is certainly not out of the question, unlike labeling the offspring of two Nigerian immigrants as Welsh might be. I have functioning eyes, and the myopia is corrected by glasses.

The Bulgars, much like the Magyars whose language managed to persist in Hungary, did not intermarry with, and thus left little to no genetic impact on, their Slavic subjects. What did leave a Turkic ancestral legacy (and the legacy of Islam) in the Balkans was the Ottoman Empire, which conquered the Slavic Bulgarians in the 14th century. Many in the Balkans today do have some Turkic ancestry, but it’s not because of the early medieval Turkic confederations, which were Turkic only at the most elite levels.

Have you met Bulgarians? Been there? I'm one for two, so while I'll grant that there's probably a range of appearances I stongly suspect that either these two or their parents (or both) were not originally from Bulgaria.

I can only reiterate that an axe is not normal to carry, even if one feels threatened.

That's a hatchet, not an axe.

IDK about Scotland but in my dialect everyone except actual lumberjacks just calls a hatchet an axe- and my filter bubble is more aware of the difference than some inner-city Scotsmen.

How dreadful. Next you're going to tell me that your bubble can't tell apart an adze, a pulaski, a mattock, and a splitting maul.

We know the difference, but in non woodworking contexts we don’t care. If I’m lumberjacking and I ask for an axe and get a hatchet I’m upset. If I refer to a hatchet hanging in someone’s garage as an axe and they correct me, likewise.

Although 'hand axe' and 'hatchet' are often used interchangeably in contemporary usage

I presume this axe was wielded by hand, unless the young lady had unprecedented access to heavy industrial equipment.

This is a hand axe; I suppose a modern equivalent would be just an ax head, with no handle? Not a commonly seen tool.

'hand axe' is not an idiomatic usage for small axe/hatchet anywhere that I'm aware of, and I'd be unsurprised if whoever wrote that wikipedia page is not a native speaker.

It looks like in the US, no one but the random-letter Chinese brands on Amazon calls those things a "hand axe", but in the UK, Rolson, Draper, and Kent and Stowe at least do call them hand axes.

As opposed to a felling axe, I suppose, the long-handled thing used (with a two-handed grip) to chop down trees.

Fair enough I guess -- I can say that this is not a UK usage that has transmitted to Canada anyways.

Maybe the right term now will be "Assault Ax"?

If you search Amazon UK or other UK tool sites you will see things labelled as hand axes, not as commonly as hatchets maybe but the term is in use. I had a Rolson hand axe in my shed for a number of years for example.

Also used in Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs which might be where more online non-Brits see it.

In D&D a hand axe is an axe designed for one-handed use.

Yes, thats the point indeed.

They were BULGARIANS? I can't stop laughing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Everyone's all like, "Migrants huh? We know what these Pakis are all about," and then it turns out it was a Bulgarian couple. Bring back @BurdensomeCount, we deserve the effortpost about white-on-white crime.

See @jkf’s post above. Also Bulgaria is full of gypsies. Same with how when you see that a crime was committed by a Romanian immigrant, your mind should immediately cast toward a brown gypsy, not a white ethnic Romanian. (Although certainly there are ethnic Romanian criminals as well.)

From the beginning, both /r/Scotland and /r/Dundee expressed skepticism toward the popular Twitter narrative. Y

Local reddits skew crazy to left, compared to actual inhabitants of those territories. If one read, to use an example I know the most about, /r/europe, one would think that the centre right party (EPP) got every single vote by cheating, as not a single person supports them. Meanwhile, one would think that Volt party, whose main policy is much closer integration, only fails because the elections are stolen from them, given how popular it is among the people.

Reddits suffer from selection bias: /r/europe is not populated by Europeans who happened to find reddit, but by redditors who happen to be European. Ceteris paribus for other reddits. Thus imagine the average /r/politics poster, who happens to be European/Scottish/fan of anime. That is the population of the reddit dedicated to that topic.

The police have issued a statement, and the BBC, in a notably careful choice of words, clarifies: “BBC News understands that officers have found no evidence to substantiate claims being made online the youths were at risk of sexual assault.”

Grooming gangs were covered up, BBC covered up Jimmy Saville.

None of this should be taken to mean I think the truth is that some Indian attempted to rape two whote girls. No, I think if a teen girl is wielding bladed armaments, she is more likely to be similar to violent members of the American underclass in terms of disposition towards other members of society.

Respectfully, I don't find "Scotland is not England." persuasive in and of itself. Can you elaborate on what factors are present in England that aren't in Scotland that should change our priors in this case?

All I know about Scotland's justice system is the Dankula debacle, which is more than enough for me to default to assuming dishonesty from it. But if there are some moderately high-profile cases of immigrants running into the same kind of tyranny, that would be evidence against the expected racial discrimination and two-tier justice system from the non-US Anglophone world.

I also think that you are poisoning the well big-time with your witchcraft analogy. Witches are not real. Alien rapists given cover by their co-ethnics in positions of power and whites with outgroup bias are extremely real, and until very recently, the common consensus was that they weren't and that only a paranoid racist lunatic would believe they were.

With that being said, I am at least open to the possibility that this was naked unprovoked aggression from our dual-wielder. But to me, the BBC weighing in is not evidence, and neither is the justice system, until I can be shown how this is different than the position we were in with Rotherham ten years ago.

Respectfully, I don't find "Scotland is not England." persuasive in and of itself. Can you elaborate on what factors are present in England that aren't in Scotland that should change our priors in this case?

There are far fewer migrants about. That's the big one. In the small town I used to live in, we had about five brown people, including yours truly. Think the couple running a hotel, a few working part time at an Indian restaurant or convenience store. Dundee is larger, sure, but it is far from cosmopolitan. Most Asians present are either students in the local unis, professionals like me, or working in small businesses. There is no massive, self-perpetuating nucleus of questionably employed refugees, asylum seekers or layabouts on the dole. I presume such folk are less constrained by the vagary that is the availability of psych training posts, or, like them, I'd have moved to somewhere with better weather. They prefer to go to the nearest mini-Mirpur once they've stashed the boat and made a run for the hills, and that would be somewhere in England.

This, in turn, breeds a more congenial attitude towards those of us who do live up there. While there are many Scots who dislike immigrants, they're not constantly confronted by massive ghettos or the government handing away hotels to asylum seekers. Even the working class aren't as anxious about losing jobs or facing competition.

This analysis is restricted to places north of Glasgow and Edinburgh. I have not spent enough time there to comment. I have, in fact, spent enough time in places like Dundee to know how things work there.

All I know about Scotland's justice system is the Dankula debacle, which is more than enough for me to default to assuming dishonesty from it. But if there are some moderately high-profile cases of immigrants running into the same kind of tyranny, that would be evidence against the expected racial discrimination and two-tier justice system from the non-US Anglophone world.

I had no idea what's up with "Dankula", and looking it up suggests I'm not as terminally online as I thought. I do not see how a (stupid, overreaching) action against a small-time YouTuber over his "Nazi" dog is enough to entirely discredit the veracity of statements made by the local police. That looks to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or squeezing one against the grate so hard it turns into juice.

I also think that you are poisoning the well big-time with your witchcraft analogy. Witches are not real.

Eh? Witches were real, at least in the sense that there were women in medieval Europe who believed that they possessed supernatural powers acquired by heretical means. There were not nearly enough of them to meet local demand, and the epistemics behind identification of such ladies had a rather intolerable rate of Type 1 error.

There are "alien rapists" in the UK. There are probably several in good old Scotland, and I'm not talking about Viking raids. I do not deny this. I say that there are far fewer, in total and per capita. If you hear about a sexual assault case in Greenland Iceland, you probably shouldn't assume the perpetrator was brown.

With that being said, I am at least open to the possibility that this was naked unprovoked aggression from our dual-wielder. But to me, the BBC weighing in is not evidence, and neither is the justice system, until I can be shown how this is different than the position we were in with Rotherham ten years ago.

Then I must invite you to explain what form of evidence might, in theory, sway you.

I am of the opinion that most people who haven't entered this discussion having already made up their minds will at least consider alternative explanations given the new evidence. My ire is reserved for those who are beyond convincing by any means known to man or deity. When this whole story kicked off, I refrained from running my mouth (despite severe temptation) because I retain sufficient skepticism, preferring to wait for further evidence one way or another. We are unlikely to get anything better than this.

Then I must invite you to explain what form of evidence might, in theory, sway you.

Hmm. Recorded footage from someone else, verified to not be selectively edited, showing initial misbehavior from Team Dual-Wield and no prior interest from Bulgarian Man would be strong support. If the based wing of the Internet is unable to dig up any history of deceptive or antisocial acts from Bulgarian, that would also be weaker evidence in favor.

Witches were real, at least in the sense that there were women in medieval Europe who believed that they possessed supernatural powers acquired by heretical means.

With respect, the fuck is this? People believing themselves to be Napoleon or Jesus or fucking married to Professor Snape on the astral plane do not mean that any of those things are real. The systematic, extended, and horrific abuse of young women and girls in Great Britain by aliens, which was explicitly and deliberately covered up and minimized by the government and media, was a real thing that happened to real people, in spite of people claiming it didn't happen. Conversely, no one in Europe had social or sexual relations with Lucifer the Archenemy, uses hexes to spoil crops or kill livestock, spied on their neighbors through the eyes of a familiar spirit, or flew through the air on a broomstick.

Describing something as a witch hunt is evoking a community turning on someone for committing crimes it is impossible for them to have committed, because magic (and evil magic in particular) is not real. The rape of young girls by foreigners is real, was ongoing for a very long time, and was covered up by people who used every rhetorical deceit in their power to obfuscate, deny, or simply attack people who spoke otherwise. It is, in short, a bad stylistic choice to move my priors in this case, especially when paired with an argument from numbers which seems to be contradicted by another grooming gang incident in the same city dug up by my sibling posters.

If you hear about a sexual assault case in Iceland, you probably shouldn't assume the perpetrator was brown. Why shouldn't I? I know that crimes are not equally distributed by race and sex; I know that in America, African-Americans and Hispanics commit violent crimes in excess of the White population per capita (https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-43), and that the numbers are so swayed that a strict majority of murders are committed by a 12% of browns; I know that murders tend to be investigated in more depth because there is almost always a body laying around, and I know that specifically in Great Britain it is the observed policy of police and government to minimze the crimes of brown perpetrators, especially against the vulnerable White underclass, and double-especially when it's sex crimes and young underclass girls.

Given all this, why should we assume that a random sexual assault case was done by some type of brown, barring specific information otherwise? If we heard that there was a sexual assault in a convent, whose population was 19 female nuns with no criminal record and one escaped sex criminal with a dozen convictions for sexual assault, what sex should we assume the perpetrator is? (And, to be clear, this example is stacking the probabilities in a way that is more exaggerated than racial differences in crime rates are, and that it is not the case that literally all crime is done by some-flavor-of-brown men and that there are plenty of criminal Whites who get up to similarly-heinous shit, but the point is that we are not starting from an equal playing field and that numbers and base rates matter.)

With respect, the fuck is this? People believing themselves to be Napoleon or Jesus or fucking married to Professor Snape on the astral plane do not mean that any of those things are real. The systematic, extended, and horrific abuse of young women and girls in Great Britain by aliens, which was explicitly and deliberately covered up and minimized by the government and media, was a real thing that happened to real people, in spite of people claiming it didn't happen. Conversely, no one in Europe had social or sexual relations with Lucifer the Archenemy, uses hexes to spoil crops or kill livestock, spied on their neighbors through the eyes of a familiar spirit, or flew through the air on a broomstick.

Hang on. You're pattern matching something I've said, into something I did not.

My point was:

  1. There were a non-zero number of "witches", including people who self-identified as such.
  2. Such people obviously did not fuck Lucifer or ride brooms in the sky, unless they picked the wrong mushrooms.
  3. Far too many people were accused, of being witches, than there ever were "actual" witches
  4. This lead to many women who hadn't done anything objectionable cowering in fear. And to the Inquisitors and gullible peasants imagining witches behind every bump in the night and stillborn calf.

The UK has/had rape gangs. I have specifically alluded to the fact that I'm aware of this. I have explained that such rape gangs are thin on the ground in Dundee and similar cities in Scotland, and there is little reason to imagine their involvement in this scenario beyond rampant pattern matching.

On the Right, there is far more popular demand for Scottish rape gangs run by migrants than there are, in fact, actual migrant rape gangs. Specifically in the less urbanized parts of Scotland. I took great pains to make the limits of my knowledge, and that of my ignorance, very clear.

In fact, I have responded to the previous incident in Dundee:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/359937?context=8#context

The police proactively tracked down the gang. There was, as far as I can ascertain, no period where citizens had to take to the streets, where whistleblowers went hoarse, while the coppers tried to suppress the magnitude of the case. That is the polar opposite of a cover-up! As far as I can see, that is a reason to trust the police there more than you would by default, for British cops.

That is a rather important thing to keep in mind. Which way, Western Man? Trust the Dundee constabulary more for cracking down on a minor sex trafficking ring, or despise and distrust them because of something that happened on the other end of the country? It is, at the very least, exceedingly poor form to use their success to condemn what they say later.

Tangential but there were in fact, no witches. The witch hunts of europe were started by a guy who wanted an excuse to get a bunch of women who disagreed with his preaching executed and spiraled out of control. The only crime any of the people accused of witchcraft actually committed was at worse disagreeing with a powerful person on theology.

The majority of people accused of witchcraft were men, and it wasn't organised, it was local disagreements and hatreds escalating into lynchings. These were almost always halted when anyone with any authority outside the village found out what was going on and put a stop to it.

Do you have a source for that? I thought only around 20% of people accused of witchcraft were men, e.g. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/witchcraft-work-women

This link blurs the distinction between "tertiary source" and "game of telephone", but while https://digpodcast.org/2020/09/13/male-witches/ agrees that, for witchcraft accusations in total, 20-25% were men, it claims there was a huge variation from period to period (as in @Corvos' reply's suggestion) and especially from place to place, going up as far as 75-80% men in Russia and 90% men in Iceland.

An academic work and various articles I read 10 years ago when I was trying to write a novel on witchcraft. I'm afraid I don't recall the name but it was regarded as being the top work at the time.

My understanding was that the consensus had settled (note weasel words!) on 'most victims of witchcraft accusations were men, witch-burnings were much rarer than lyncings, witchcraft accusations are best thought of as spontaneous riots rather than having much to do with religion or politics'. But that's all I've got to back it.

The only thing I note about the article you linked is the first paragraph:

While both men and women have historically been accused of the malicious use of magic, only around 10–30% of suspected witches were men by the 16th and 17th centuries. (Emphasis mine)

Perhaps we are discussing different periods? Doesn't seem likely though. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I'll admit I have limited trust in a blog post by the University of Cambridge from 2023, whose main citation is an article in Gender & History. For myself I’m going to say that this is epistemically undetermined for now :)

The Malleus Maleficarum was written by a man who was kicked out of multiple monasteries because he just could not shut up about witches and demons; he was under a gag order but that was probably more about him being annoying than about his theological views. Most women accused of witchcraft were merely unfortunate and a few of them probably did worship Satan in the edgy loser way or try to cast spells in the overweight loser way. But the median accuser was a peasant mob targeting misfits or irritating people, not a cleric, and witch burning was more common in protestant countries which militates against it mostly being a measure targeting heretics(Catholic countries being much stricter in that regard).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunning_folk

"I'm a witch, but I'm one of the good ones you see!"

I obviously do not think that "witches" ever had any form of supernatural power.

If you hear about a sexual assault case in Greenland, you probably shouldn't assume the perpetrator was brown.

A terrible example; Greenland’s population is almost 90% Inuit, and they’re pretty damn brown. Were you thinking of Iceland?

Next, you'll tell me the people of Brownland are actually yellow.

(Thanks, even if I meant brown as in the standard definition of "brown people", I'll correct it)

I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise.

No sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I think that given that at every turn the british response to real problems has been to lie about them until forced to come clean it is understandable that many will not give credence to the official narrative.

Also, that thread of /r/scotland is not all speaking with one voice, there are plenty of people who DO think this was rapey brown guy, they are just downvoted and at the bottom. This could be evidence that those people are crazy and the majority knows it, or it could be exactly what happens on every reddit thread related to the culture war where the left perspective is upvoted and the right perspective is downvoted and the truth of the matter is secondary to this pattern at best. So calling this conclusive opinion of the locals is not convincing to say the least. Frankly, trying to use a reddit thread to establish general consensus around the left wing view makes me less likely to believe that is the case, as if it were it seems like you could find a better source.

And while I totally agree that little girls carrying blades about is not normal, to me this makes the rapey migrant explaination MORE likely. If someone is carrying around multiple hard to conceal weapons it is indeed very odd, and begs the question of WHY. And given the context of the video the most simple explanation is "because she and/or her sister had been harassed before so she chose to arm herself this time."

You may well be correct, but given the full context I don't think it is fair to call the unconvinced "paranoid".

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/child-10-caught-knife-capital-35322556

"More than a dozen 13-year-olds - including two girls - were also subjected to positive blade searches"

She probably was worried about being harassed - by other teenagers with knives. I bet she knows more people who have been stabbed than have been groomed/abused.

When the police in London wanted to reduce knife crime they asked Scotland for help.

If someone is carrying around multiple hard to conceal weapons it is indeed very odd, and begs the question of WHY.

Because she's a rancid little slapper who is gearing up to get herself into real trouble and do hard prison time as soon as she's old enough. Believe you me, there's a lot of kids running around with dumb shit like this and it's not to protect themselves from potential rape by brown people. The girl I know who stabbed another young woman in the stomach at a house party was not protecting herself from an immigrant rapist, she was in an environment of drink and drugs and already down the path of petty crime and drug addiction by this time.

Yeah, normal twelve year olds don't run around with knives and hatchets. This is not a normal twelve year old, or at least not normal except for coming from a sink estate.

rancid little slapper

Always delightful to encounter more localized insults like this.

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