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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.
The plot continues to thicken.
Yesterday, 480K-follower account Aesthetica claimed to have gotten in touch with the mother of a friend of the two girls in the video, who was with them at the time. Her message:
Aesthetica also set up a GiveSendGo whose funds are to be received by one "Elaine Thomson". GiveSendGo has allegedly verified the details.
Is this believable? On the one hand, 480K followers is a lot. I'm not familiar with the account, but I doubt it would have gotten so big if it had a history of such brazen fraud as this would be if proven false. Such a track record would at least make that follower count less likely. Of the many replies asking for evidence or accusing him of scamming, I haven't seen any pointing to a past instance of grift. On the other hand, my googling hasn't turned up any connection between Elaine Thomson and Mayah, and no other reporting has disclosed the names of the other two girls.
Or, not in connection with this case. Two girls named Lola and Ruby were reported missing in July. Moreover, the description of the clothes Lola was last seen wearing -- "a blue Nike t-shirt and light blue jeans with tears on the knees" -- precisely matches what was seen in the video. That can't be a coincidence.
So how did Aesthetica know their names? Two possibilities that I can see: either he's telling the truth, or he was somehow made aware of a news story about missing girls with matching physical descriptions, connected the dots, hopped right on fabricating the mother's message -- using the girls' real names to make it believable (but shrewdly waiting for other accounts to provide "confirmation" in the form of the news story where he found them) -- sprinkled in some falsifiable info like Ruby's hospitalization for no apparent reason, and got GiveSendGo to go along with it. I think it's more likely that he's telling the truth. (Which is of course a separate question from whether the mother is telling, or knows, the whole truth.)
(Edit: I searched "lola dundee" on X and found one account, a right-wing-coded account with 139 followers, that made the connection before Aesthetica's post. That does make the fraud story somewhat more plausible.)
I don't want to speculate too much on what it means that the girls had been missing for weeks. "They're feral children" and "they were abducted/being groomed" can handle that datapoint about equally well. One thing that puzzles me is why the woman Aesthetica corresponded with didn't mention that the girls had been missing.
Let's consider the other side of the Bayesian story. In an earlier comment I posted that one gypsy grooming gang had been caught in Dundee within the last few years. Zoomer Historian on X has pointed to two more stories involving gypsy grooming gangs operating in Dundee, raping girls and coercing them into prostitution. As for Ali Dumana himself? If this screencap is to be believed, he has bragged on social media about bringing in the "UK [cat emoji] money".
So we have:
Against this we have:
Others have stressed the BBC and the authorities' dismal track record on stories like this. I'm with them that these mealy-mouthed official statements provide almost no evidence one way or the other. When migrants harm or predate on sympathetic white victims, they obfuscate it. Even when it's inevitable that the full story will eventually see the light of day, they slow-walk it in the hope that the furor will have died down by the time that happens. They did it for years with the grooming gangs in England, they did it with Southport, and I see no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again here. Dumana might still turn out to be wholly innocent (and not an NGO plant as @ArjinFerman speculates) -- though I doubt it -- but even if so, this level of smug condescension towards anyone not willing to take the BBC's word for it is completely unwarranted.
Wait, wtf? Their names were Lola and Ruby? Is this a simulation? Why not just go all out and name her Lolita, geez... (sorry if this is an inappropriate joke. I just feel like it adds to the strangeness of the situation)
If the narrative on this event flips one more time I'm calling the Architect and telling him I want a new Matrix.
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I've seen the story make it's way through the feeds. I'm reluctant to believe because of how easy it is to prove/disprove for any "field correspondent" and how much egg on face it would be for thrainstream. Not that it hasn't happened before, I suppose.
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