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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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I dislike the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists

What exactly is the problem with these people?

Is it the 'black' part? What do you think of racists who call the police to get their dying victim arrested? Ironically, present-day Britain likely has more brown 'I-don't-like-looking-at-them-garden-variety racists' than white ones at this point.

but a group that I already considered enemies regardless.

'already'? When we are at iteration 1000th of the rhyme? We're all way down the list, not at the start. The anti-racist rhyme is the water and you are the fish.

which suggests that Powell is concerned about browns enacting genocidal violence on whites.

Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose?

"In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man"

What is a whip used for again?

Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose? (…) What is a whip used for again?

Either that, or he has smuggled in the implication that browns are inherently liable to be physically violent to whites without actually justifying it in any way whatsoever, which again makes his entire rhetoric founded on silently assuming the most crucial conclusion. Pick your poison, but he doesn't come out looking good in either case, intellectually speaking.

Since experience seems to be solidly backing him up - as I never tire of reminding people, blacks in London are 8x as likely to commit murder as whites according to statistics quoted by the former chief of London police - this is less an assumption and more of an observation.

But again, FttG originally praised him as "a conservative voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration". Even if I we grant that he had those kinds of statistics in mind, he just comes across as a mealy-mouthed coward for not having the guts to explicitly discuss his most important claim or the evidence for that claim. He would be leaving the most important "uncomfortable truth" unspoken.

I find it profoundly petty that, when someone makes a prediction which, decades hence, is soundly vindicated, you rap them on the knuckles for not showing their workings.

Well again I'm not actually convinced that he made that prediction. I still find it a more natural and coherent reading of the text that the strife he perceives in Britain's future is the political oppression of white racists by an electoral majority of brown anti-racists. I don't actually think there's any textual evidence that he was envisioning a plague of acts of personal brown-on-white violence like Digwa's. If that had been his point, I contend that his rhetoric would have been burying the lede to such outrageous degrees as to make the overall speech laughable, but I don't think it was his point.

(I think you actually have a much better case in the other sub-thread when linking his doomsaying, not to modern crime statistics, but to the rise of anti-free-speech legislation, which can legitimately be seen as a slippery slope from the concerns he voices. This doesn't wholly rehabilitate the speech in my eyes, because I still think that in fact a just society should not allow racial discrimination, and allowing it in the name of preventing a free-speech-destroying slippery slope is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; and also because he's still complaining about private responses to racist behavior i.e. the children chanting "racialist", not just institutional overreach, so his principled-libertarian cred is less than stellar; but it's a fair defense.)

I still find it a more natural and coherent reading of the text that the strife he perceives in Britain's future is the political oppression of white racists by an electoral majority of brown anti-racists.

I can't find any point in the speech where Powell claims that white Britons will ever be outnumbered by brown migrants or their descendants. He specifically predicts that, by the year 2000, one-tenth of the UK will be Commonwealth immigrants or their descendants. (The 2001 census found that 8.6% of the UK was Asian*, black or mixed.)

I don't actually think there's any textual evidence that he was envisioning a plague of acts of personal brown-on-white violence like Digwa's.

In the speech, he describes the experiences of a lady living in Wolverhampton which has recently become much more ethnically diverse:

The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out. The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door... She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant.

The clear implication of this anecdote is that Wolverhampton is becoming vastly more dangerous and unpleasant to live in (to the point that an old woman who has lived there her whole life now feels afraid to leave the house) as a direct consequence of its recent influx of immigrants, and that Britons across the country can reasonably expect the same to happen to their communities should contemporary trends in immigration continue. I don't think you can remotely accuse him of being a "mealy-mouthed coward" when he includes the anecdote above to illustrate his point.

I think you actually have a much better case in the other sub-thread when linking his doomsaying, not to modern crime statistics, but to the rise of anti-free-speech legislation, which can legitimately be seen as a slippery slope from the concerns he voices.

And he explicitly voiced this specific concern in the speech itself:

When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.

Need it hardly be said that her concern was well-founded? White Britons have been sent to prison for "racist" offenses far less serious than refusing to rent out rooms in their house to immigrants.

*Which, in the British context, primarily refers to people from the Indian subcontinent.

And he explicitly voiced this specific concern in the speech itself:

Well, not exactly; this is concern that penalties for those guilty of out-and-out racial discrimination would get a lot harsher, which is not quite the same slippery slope as sanctions being extended to those only "guilty" of thoughtcrime. But as I said I do take the point.

I apologise if I was overly confrontational today and yesterday: looking back over some of my comments, it seems I was rather spoiling for a fight and I hardly covered myself in glory. While I feel frustrated by your opinions at times, on the whole I value the input of you and your fellow-travellers, and your ability to maintain your composure in the face of aggressive disagreement is admirable, and something I aspire to.

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