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PaperclipPerfector  17hr ago (text post)   1922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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The Traveller Question

In rural England, two girls are raped by a group of 13 and 14 year old boys. Eventually arrested and charged, a judge sentences them to community service, because he wants to “avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily”. An outrage ensues, even the Prime Minister calls the sentence a disgrace. Little reported on: these youths were neither migrants nor the traditional native underclass of Albion. They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.

A year or two after I first moved to London, I witnessed a commotion outside Harrods. A large group of white teenagers was arguing with the store’s security. White teenagers are not particularly rare in London, but an entire group that is white and mostly blonde and blue eyed is. They were also dressed in an unusual way, the boys in an exaggerated version of the ‘Deano’ style of the time with some designer accoutrements - Prada caps, Gucci cross body bags; the girls in tight dresses or shorts and push-up bras, full faces of heavy makeup, much costume jewelry. Dressing like this is a working class English pastime, but in most English towns and cities it’s the preserve of college aged adults. These were children, maybe 12, 13, 14. Of interest, too, was that many were couples - 13 year old girls and boys holding hands, that kind of thing. Rare in secular society. There was no parental supervision that I could see, either. These gatherings happen regularly outside Harrods; occasionally someone is stabbed (the last time this happened in that exact location was a few weeks ago).

They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies, a highly clannish, poor and violent population who live itinerant lives across the British Isles, bane of farmers and publicans, fond of suing anyone who crosses them under anti-discrimination laws they lobbied for (in both the Irish republic and United Kingdom) that grant them special status as an ethnic minority. In Ireland, they are 0.7% of the population yet 12-15% of prison inmates, an astonishing level of overrepresentation that even many much-maligned other minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to match.

But here’s the unusual thing about Irish Travelers: they’re Irish. Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population. Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge. What genetic studies have been done claim to show difference only in terms of higher levels of inbreeding over the fewer than 12 generations for which they’ve existed (discrediting earlier theories that they had some ancient or Romani ancestry, which they do not).

The Irish Travellers are younger as a people than the Amish, for example. They are younger, depending on how you look at things, than the Ultra Orthodox Jews, who arguably first emerged at a similar or earlier time in the mid-18th century. HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller. They also have a very interesting culture. Despite the girls dressing very immodestly, they place a very high emphasis on both sexual purity and very early marriage, for example, sometimes as early as 14-16, for both boys and girls. They have a total fertility rate of somewhere around 3, higher than even many fecund minority groups and perhaps double the (rest of the) native population.

Beyond the occasional London gathering (which at times involves these people racing their horse-drawn buggies - chariots really - through the city) Irish travelers mainly live in the country, where they are widely hated by rural residents for (perceived or real) squatting on their land, theft of property and livestock, domestic burglary, petty crime, and welfare abuse. One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths, and who then decided to wait for them, lights off, at the top of his staircase with a shotgun. He killed one, with the judge ruling that this was clearly a trap rather than self defense (he had bragged about it, which was unfortunate) and initially went to jail for life before being reduced to 3 years after a public outcry. There was another famous case recently in which a local cop was brutally killed by some Travellers driving away from a crime scene, dragged behind a car for a mile which killed him, they didn’t stop; this resulted in another major outcry, which led to sentences for cop killers being increased. Beyond this, the English state is, as it is in so many cases, broadly incapable of doing anything, forced assimilation is impossible even for settled populations, let alone itinerant ones.

But there is a large slice of the English countryside where the greatest ire is reserved today not for migrants or any other foreign population, but for these Irish Travelers. There is even a (flawed) case sometimes made that much historic prejudice against Irish migrants was more about these people than the rest of the Irish (although, as mentioned, this is wrong at least until very recently). Over time, their birth rates mean they will be an ever larger proportion of the population.

This could plausibly be explained by genes, as the selection event that filtered Normal Irish into Traveler Irish would have selected for the most antisocial Irishman. If Cromwell’s invasion caused many Irish to be homeless, and this is the event which triggered the formation of the traveler community, which type of Irishman decided to continue living itinerantly post-upheaval? Which decided to continue this way of life over the centuries? Those who were made homeless but who were prosocial didn’t stay homeless; those who were prosocial yet born into the community would have left (throughout the 18th century). So there’s a plausible genetic mechanism by which [make most of the Irish homeless] followed by [select those who continue being homeless after a decade] would have selected for the uniquely antisocial. All that’s left would be [let the prosocial born in the community leave], which didn’t happen in the 20th century but could have in the 18th and 19th, followed by [let the most antisocial have the most children]. If the itinerant lifestyle selects for antisocial genes because the most antisocial traveler can steal the most goods and thus afford the healthier children, then we can maybe work out a genetic explanation. In the same way, the Gypsy community weeds out the most guilt-prone because they would be unable to inflict harm on another human without emotional distress via the daily scheming grind. Something something pitbulls and golden retrievers.

We could also have to look at what the normal Irish were doing 18th-21st century. Were they weeding out their antisocial by imprisoning and executing “their own”, while the travelers were simply fleeing with their criminals in tow? This would also elucidate a genetic divergence etiology

One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths

A much stranger episode in Engligh civil law history also involving gypsies has to be Attorney-General v Corke [1933] Ch 89. The case itself doesn't mention whether the "nomadic caravan dwellers" were Irish travellers or Romani but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that a landowner of a brick field near a town allowed them to camp on it for a while. The expected happened and they dumped shit and caused general mayhem in the surrounds outside the landowner's field. The locals were, as you can expect, not amused. Knowing that suing the "nomadic caravan dwellers" was pointless the local authority decided to go after the landowner instead.

They won in court. But the twist was that it wasn't for nuisance or some other everyday tort like that. Instead the judge ruled that this was a situation which came under Rylands v Fletcher. This is a little known rule of English law which holds that:

The person who for his own purposes brings on his lands and collects and keeps there anything likely to do mischief if it escapes, must keep it in at his peril, and, if he does not do so, is prima facie answerable for all the damage which is the natural consequence of its escape.

Normally this tort applies to things escaping due to unnatural use of land, so stuff like fire, water, gas or other dangerous substances (the original case was one relating to a water reservoir breaking and flooding a neighbour's mine) leaking out and carries strict liability, so there's no easy defense for the landowner. Mr. Justice Bennett, in his infinite wisdom, decided though that inviting gypsies to live on your field constituted an unnatural use of land likely to cause mischief if they escaped, and the landowner was accordingly held liable. Now that's something you don't get to see every day!

Of course there's no way such a claim would succeed in the same terms today, this is a bygone relic from an era where English judges were still Based.

They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.

Why am I learning this particular fact right now on TheMotte when this story has been all over the media and Reddit for the last 3-5 days?

To be fair the Daily Mail did report it, as you might expect.

Ah, I refuse to have anything to do with the Daily Fail.

Which is why your survey of the media was faulty.

I have standards you know...

Standards are as standards function. If whatever outlet you dislike routinely reports details of incidents that your media silo doesn't, it may behoove you to pay attention, or find something else to fill that information gap. You can usually do this via X, some of these racists are remarkably precise.

They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.

Was The Snatch not a big hit in the US? It was extremely popular in Russia.

Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge.

Huh, TIL. Is this a counterexample to the HBD argument? Do those of them who dislike the culture simply precipitate out of the community and become sedentary Irish?

We called it just Snatch, but yes it was, or at least was very popular as a cool and good movie among college kids interested in such things. In Latin America, it was called something that translates to Pigs and Diamonds.

Was The Snatch not a big hit in the US?

I've certainly never heard of it.

Is this a counterexample to the HBD argument?

Russia itself is a counterexample to the HBD argument. Incompetent corrupt oligarchy running a shithole for average people that's slightly poorer than Mexico- despite being fairly good at G-loaded tasks like chess grandmasters and advancing higher mathematics.

Snatch Brad Pitt, Jason Statham, seen it many times. No?

I've never heard it referred to it as The Snatch. It sounds like the title of the porn parody.

A Snatch by any other name..

Was The Snatch not a big hit in the US? It was extremely popular in Russia.

I'd assume that most people don't look up what a "poikey" is.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if your average 'murican assumes "Mikey the Pikey" is just the local equivalent of white trailer trash. But I could be wrong.

What's the prevalence of cousin marriage?

There are many non-genetic reasons for why people do terrible stuff. "Idle teenagers do crime for no good reason" has been happening since forever. I would not assume that any explanation is true before further details reveal themselves.

That’s often because people vastly underestimate just how finely grained genetic determinism is at the microstructure of things. I’ve sometimes wondered if memes play an epigenetic role in social behavior and how it occurs.

HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller

In his book The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark does just that. He looks at both the Irish and the English travellers, who I'd previously thought were the same people.

They are stupid and dysfunctional for the same reason that Ashkenazim and Arab Christians are smart, evaporative cooling. If the most intelligent members of the caravan-dwelling class leave their communities and buy houses/get jobs/marry non-gypsies for a few generations, then the Travellers are what you get at the end of it.

I highly doubt that the traveler population has a lower genetic IQ due to evaporative cooling than the native working class of Ireland(which has probably suffered stronger genetic selection by evaporative cooling), and which is not nearly so overrepresented among the prison population. Some cultures are just bad, like this one. The Roma are far less welcomed in Europe than similar IQ Mexicans are in the US- because Mexicans believe in paying their bills through honest work(and then drinking themselves stupid and blaring their polka beats at 2 AM while being incapable of recognizing that requests to turn the volume down aren't requests for an invitation to join the party), while Roma have a culture of stealing and swindling their way into the money to pay their bills with, and then doing the strung out loud noises thing anyways.

If one was to take 50 Irish Traveller babies and have them raised by, say, Utah Mormons (who are closely genetically related given they are largely British and also a high competence population) with no contact or knowledge of their ancestry, do you believe they would be 20x overrepresented as violent criminals (this would be a large multiple of the oft-repeated 13-52 stat)? I just want to be clear about this assertion. Irish Traveller outmarriage was also historically too rare for this to viably explain this outcome.

Some overrepresentation would be inevitable for immediate hereditary reasons. But 20x? This is what reversion to the population mean would imply.

They would probably end up with a higher proportion of IEPs than average, and possibly unemployment and welfare, though that can be hidden by mormons giving each other jobs at below market skill level.

?

I mean mormon nepotism is well known. But why would we assume a higher percentage of IEP's? The mormon advantage isn't all HBD, lots of it is culture.

Because IEPs are to mitigate genetic disadvantages, which they probably have, since their birth parents came from a worse off group. Even if the genetics are similar (though they probably have some issues there as well), if they gave them up for adoption to strangers their parents must have been unusually dysfunctional, and probably have some degree of fetal alcohol syndrome or some such issues.

Perhaps they're like a dog breed. Genetically, they're quite difficult to distinguish from other dog breeds, but phenotypically very distinct due to small genetic differences having an outsized influence. Intense selection pressures over short time periods can have interesting consequences.

Dogs are obviously distinguishable phenotypically. It would be very interesting if every dog breed looked the same but varied hugely in capability.

Phenotype includes behaviors. Dams are a phenotype (or extended phenotype) of beavers, but I would presume aggressive selection could produce a breed of beaver that looked very much the same but did not build dams (or perhaps only built very weak and ineffective dams) in a few generations.

Phenotype is not limited to appearance. Siberian huskies look similar to wolves but of course differ greatly in propensity towards violence against humans. Similarly, Nigerian-Americans are indistinguishable compared to Nigerian-Africans in appearance, but are likely to be a bit more intelligent on average than a typical White American simply due to selective immigration. If you cherry-picked the worst White criminals and put them in one place, you would have a nasty, behaviorally distinct group that nonetheless looks identical to other Whites, and whose behavioral differences are largely due to specific genetic differences.

Siberian huskies are immediately distinguishable from wolves- for one thing they're half the size- and most other northern spitzes are also easy to tell apart. They also interact with humans very differently(I had a cousin with pet wolves growing up, and a different one who had Alaskan malamutes), even aside from aggression. These are very different things and it is not difficult to tell them apart, despite some superficial similarities.

Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population.

Source? Wikipedia says otherwise: "Genetic analysis has shown Irish Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Centuries of cultural isolation have led Travellers to become genetically distinct from the settled Irish.[13]"

HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller

HBD seems tenable as an explanation. Because group differences are just individual differences, if a large enough group of individuals who deviate from the population average in some trait (such as criminal inclination) gather and stay together, then a distinct group average can emerge. Perhaps the group may have gotten their start as a sort of traveling association of outlaws in an era where an organized state was unable to break up their formation. I would like to see this tested via adoption studies or studies of people of traveler descent growing up entirely outside the traveler culture - do those individuals commit more crime than their non-traveler counterparts?

Wikipedia says otherwise: "Genetic analysis has shown Irish Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Centuries of cultural isolation have led Travellers to become genetically distinct from the settled Irish.[13]"

This is unfortunately what I was hoping to avoid a discussion about. Yes, Travellers are “genetically distinct” in the way that every individual and every family is genetically distinct. You can do a DNA test and say “wow, you’re related to a lot of Travellers, you must be a Traveller”. This isn’t evidence of a distinct population.

  1. Phenotypically Travellers are not distinguishable from comparable white Irish the way that clearly different human populations are. Roma are an ethnicity that is easily identified. Travellers are not.

  2. Criminal population isn’t really sufficient or even likely, it’s not a plausible origin story. Even if it were, plenty of Anglo populations including Anglo Americans and Anglo Australians have significant criminal / convict ancestry and yet reverted to their population means in time. It’s extremely implausible, even aside from the actual historical record, that Traveller 20x over representation among criminals in Ireland is explained by a founding population of criminals as if this is some kind of fantasy RPG thieves guild enterprise.

  3. The standards by which some studies claim to show distinct Traveller genetics can also be used to show that every small village was (or was until very recently) its own distinct genetic subpopulation. This isn’t even wrong, it’s just not useful and is a bad Motte and Bailey type argument here.

Granting that yes, 23&Me can tell you’re an Irish Traveller because you’re related to 300 other people who wrote down that they’re Irish Travellers is not sufficient to make this group a separate ethnic tribe.

Hmm, are you claiming too much, though? I'm concerned that your standard would not allow for a distinction between the Borderers versus other English groups that emigrated to the US as described in Albion's Seed.

Yes, Travellers are “genetically distinct” in the way that every individual and every family is genetically distinct. You can do a DNA test and say “wow, you’re related to a lot of Travellers, you must be a Traveller”. This isn’t evidence of a distinct population.

The standards by which some studies claim to show distinct Traveller genetics can also be used to show that every small village was (or was until very recently) its own distinct genetic subpopulation. This isn’t even wrong, it’s just not useful and is a bad Motte and Bailey type argument here.

It is not a motte and bailey. This is precisely what I meant.

Criminal population isn’t really sufficient or even likely, it’s not a plausible origin story. Even if it were, plenty of Anglo populations including Anglo Americans and Anglo Australians have significant criminal / convict ancestry and yet reverted to their population means in time. It’s extremely implausible, even aside from the actual historical record, that Traveller 20x over representation among criminals in Ireland is explained by a founding population of criminals as if this is some kind of fantasy RPG thieves guild enterprise.

Australia is a good counterexample, and I've always wondered why their crime rate isn't higher. I looked into it very briefly, and there are a few things that explain why. First, the crimes were mostly limited to petty theft. The more serious criminals were simply executed:

Most convicts were transported for petty crimes, particularly theft: thieves comprised 80% of all transportees.[4] More serious crimes, such as rape and murder, became transportable offences in the 1830s, but since they were also punishable by death, comparatively few convicts were transported for such crimes.[5]

whereas many criminal gangs even require you to commit murder as a prerequisite for membership.

Second, Australia was not exclusively founded by convicts. They were diluted significantly by regular free immigration. I couldn't find the number I was hoping for (average % of ancestry from convicts), but there is this stat that 20% of White Australians have at least some convict ancestry, so presumably the overall percentage is quite low, perhaps at around 10%.

Adding these factors along with the regression to the mean effect, and we should expect a negligible difference in the crime rate of modern White Australians, whereas the same would not hold under the criminal association theory I gave for the travelers. I don't have a pulse on your last point on the historical plausibility of this idea; perhaps you could fill us in?

Downthread, someone mentioned evaporative cooling, which would be an even stronger mechanism than what I'm proposing, so adding that in should be sufficient to account for the remaining difference.

Yeah the convict population of Australia is always massively overstated. They were one of the first major migrant waves, but the Gold Rush in Australia multiplied the population with free men. There were approximately 200k white Australian inhabitants (which was about 30-40% convict/convict-descent) prior to the Gold Rush in 1851, and about 2 million White Australians 30 years later in 1880.

They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies,

Hang on, I thought these were different - certainly in America, "Gypsy" is a now-offensive term for the Romani. I knew that it was apparently still kosher in the UK, but I assumed that it was used to refer to the same population. Does the British "Gypsy" refer to Irish Travellers rather than Romani? Is it an umbrella title encompassing both?

in America, "Gypsy" is a now-offensive term for the Romani.

Gypsy isn't offensive in America, unless you're talking to someone who goes out of their way to be offended by everything.

I considered typing "now-considered-to-be-offensive" or some other convolution, but ultimately deemed it unnecessary - I think it sort of goes without saying that "offensive term for [ethnicity]" means "term considered offensive by the sorts of people who care a great deal about what terms are offensive", particularly in the context of pointing out that their UK colleagues seemingly came to a different conclusion about the very same word.

No, I don't think those two things are in fact equivalent. For example, one could reasonably say that "nigger" is an offensive term for black people in America. The vast, vast majority of people in the nation would be greatly offended by using that word to describe people. By contrast, only a small (but vocal) minority considers "Gypsy" to be offensive. As such I don't think it merits saying the term is considered offensive at all, because unless you inhabit an extremely lefty bubble nobody is going to bat an eye of you say "Gypsy".

If you want an insulting term that is more apt for Irish Travellers as opposed to Roma, the traditional slur was "Pikey", although as with all slurs the meaning is vague and liable to expand over time.* The Snatch (by the same team as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a most excellent British gangster movie in which one of the many factions robbing each other is a pikey gang, and is referred to as such by all the other characters (except for the visiting American, who has no idea what he is dealing with).

Romanichal is the traditional term for the long-established British Roma community (as opposed to recent eastern European arrivals).

The British version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding is almost entirely about pikeys because they couldn't get any Romani gypsies to cooperate with the filmmakers.

* Apparently British Roma use "pikey" as a slur for non-Roma who lead a travelling lifestyle, including Irish travellers, travelling showmen, and New Age travellers. Wikipedia says that it has become a catch-all term for the feral poor similar to "chav", but I have not heard that usage.

I learned the word chav about 20 years ago. At the place I was working at the time there was a considerable culture of non-Japanese, mostly American/Australian/British. A gay American man, an Aussie woman and an American woman joined brains and came up with the idea to celebrate American Thanksgiving but in what they called collectively "chavvy" style. This meant those of us invited were to wear sweatpants and sportswear (I wasn't entirely sure of this) but also bring what was termed chavvy food. I mention the man was gay only to suggest the idea had its roots in women and gayness. Anyway chavvy food, that's what we were told to bring for the potluck.

This ended up meaning the food I had eaten all my life unironically for Thanksgiving, namely green bean casserole and cornbread dressing (both of which I made myself and brought.) I don't remember much about this festive afternoon/evening except that I got drunk, and that what I made, anyway, was good. I think I also ended up making the gravy. This was one of many experiences I've had with people from outside my world, whereby I realized Southern (white) culture down to the food was viewed as lowbrow. Later reading Nancy Isenberg I would realize such views could even be codified.

Looking back I'm sometimes baffled why I hung out with the people I hung out with, but sometimes living abroad you end up with odd acquaintances. Not trying to derail the thread, I am enjoying reading the discussion.

I have to say something because @orthoxerox made the same mistake but with the excuse of being a native speaker of a language without articles. The movie is called Snatch.

You are indeed correct. I would point out that what you call the film doesn't matter that much - what's important is that you watch it. It's a very good film.

Wikipedia says that it has become a catch-all term for the feral poor similar to "chav", but I have not heard that usage.

I remember hearing that use in the '90s and '00s, but it would seem a little odd to say today. Not exactly because it's un-PC, it's just fallen out of use.

Is it an umbrella title encompassing both?

Growing up in the UK in the 90s, 'gypsy' just meant people in caravans, which meant English or Irish travellers. The UK didn't really have a visible Romani population until Romanians and Bulgarians were able to come here as part of our (at the time) EU membership, and now every town has a dozen Big Issue sellers of Romani extraction that the papers euphemistically call 'Romanian' and which actual Romanians loudly insist are Gypsies and have nothing to do with them.

Fun fact, the Romani call Irish travellers something like 'half breed' because they have the itinerant lifestyle but they aren't Romani (although most Romani are settled these days anyway).

There are two kinds of gypsies in England, Romani and Traveller. Older and less politically correct British call both of them gypsies interchangeably, whether or not they are aware of the distinction.

I gather both have existed here in some form for a long time, but the majority of Roma arrived after the EU accession from Romania and Bulgaria, while the Irish Travelers have moved between Great Britain and Ireland for hundreds of years, since there has pretty much always been free movement except for during the Second World War. For a long time, before the origin of the Romani gypsies was understood as distinctly Indian, there was a widespread belief that the two groups may have been related. Even some Travellers thought or think of themselves as related and, starting in the late 19th century, some travelers actually adopted aesthetic aspects of Romani culture including the brightly painted caravans.

Unless someone is talking about London pickpockets or EU immigration, most British seem to mean traveller when they talk about gypsies, especially if they are rural. The Roma tend to cluster around towns and cities here, even if they are more rural in Eastern Europe proper.

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