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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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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.

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