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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.
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.
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.
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.
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