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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14096 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.

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.

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.

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