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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
GreenlandIceland, you probably shouldn't assume the perpetrator was brown.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.
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.
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.
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