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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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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.