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I responded to FtttG here before realizing why there was so little action in that thread.
Tl;dr
Seriously, social media is probably the worst way to learn about public opinion. Unfortunately, most of the public which is opining probably got the idea through social media.
This is still pretty silly. If the IRA is plotting a cooperative pogrom, they’re not doing it on Twitter.
Just you. Belfast has a smaller total population than LA’s black population. In the 90s. I’m not expecting to see anything remotely on the scale of the ‘92 riots.
Kulak predicts a lot of things. I don’t know that he’s been right yet. I’d take the other side of this bet.
With respect, I think you are falling into the centrist trap. Twitter isn't radicalising people. All the horrible murders are radicalising people. Twitter is merely declining to censor them afterwards.
Again, it's not about the discourse, it's about the horrible murders. I don't think you're a leftist shill but I think you are okay, fundamentally, with this kind of thing happening. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't fix it if you could snap your fingers and magically prevent all horrible murders, but ultimately you seem to prefer all the horrible murders to any of the things that would prevent the horrible murders.
If "calling for calm" means "calmly discussing how we are going to begin repatriating these people" then that's fair enough, but otherwise "it's good that politicians are calling for calm" does absolutely translate to "I want you to sit down and do nothing". That's not a discourse thing. That's a basic divergence of political preferences.
Well, horrible murders of whites are radicalizing other whites. I don't care about horrible cartel killings, and I presume you don't either (well, I suppose (royal)you and I might "care" in the way you accuse netstack of "caring" about the Belfast murder).
"These people" might mean criminal and illegal migrants, the recent crop of migrants in general, all Sudanese, or even all nons. I can absolutely understand why a non-white person, or anyone who cares about non-whites and is familiar with the dissident right's rhetoric, might prefer to weather the current storm rather than concede the field and risk the chance of the DR going the distance with the Overton Window. After all, what comes after reclaiming your lands if not seizing theirs in kind?
This does seem to be have been the reaction of the Africans and Arabs to colonisation, who as always are very clear-eyed about how they see other civilisations.
In general you seem to be going off on a weird tangent. My point is that it is the constant murders of white people by ethnic minorities that is radicalising whites against ethnic minorities, not the Twitter algorithm.
The safest countries have about one murder per year per 100,000 people. At least a quarter of those will be outrageous enough to make good social media copy. So a group of 5,000,000 people will commit one potentially viral murder per month, if they are as peaceful as the Swiss. And one a week if they are only as peaceful as white Americans or black Britons (both around 4 murders per 100k). Since there are more than 5,000,000 nonwhite people in the UK (and an order of magnitude more than that if you are looking at immigrant crime globally, as most of the Americans poasting about the situation in the UK are), your Twitter feed being full of murders of white people by ethnic minorities could just as easily be caused by the algorithm as by actual crime. If Elon Musk wanted your Twitter feed to be full of white-on-white murders, he could make it so. And if he wanted it to be full of cute cat pictures, he could make that so.
How much do you know or care about white-on-white crime in Belfast? It's a complex issue given the history of the Troubles and the number of ex-paramilitaries hanging around. And yet you feel the need to have an opinion about crime by asylum seekers in Belfast.
There is enough crime in Zurich to fill a tabloid or a social media feed with crime stories. To know whether the constant stream of crime being shoved in your face by people who don't have your own interests at heart (at best they want you to keep staring at the ads between the criminal fnords, and in the case of Twitter coverage of migrant crime in the UK, we know that these posts are being amplified by a foreign billionaire who has made no secret of his desire to foment political violence in the UK and drive the British government out of office) is caused by the people doing the crime or the people doing the shoving, you need to look at statistics. So let's do that.
Murder has dropped since mass immigration started in the UK and continues to fall slowly. Ditto stabbings*. Ditto violent crime where the victim ends up in A&E. Ditto violent crime measured by victim surveys. Ditto property crime measured by victim surveys. There is some evidence that property crimes which mostly target tourists and therefore wouldn't appear in a victim survey have increased, including phone snatching and pickpocketing. Shoplifting (which also doesn't appear in victim surveys because the victims are businesses and not individuals) has definitely increased. Sexual offences by ethnic Pakistanis in the UK were out of control 20 years ago, and these cold cases are being regularly relitigated on social media in a way which suggests to people not paying attention that the crimes are still going on. (I genuinely don't know if they are or not, and the people outrage-poasting about them aren't bothering to check either). Cyber fraud is also rising, but it isn't what right populist agitators or tabloid journalists are talking about when they say that "crime is out of control".
Right now the UK right-populist discourse is dominated by two murders that went viral on social media. One was a case of "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time, unfortunately someone is dead because someone else brought a knife to a fistfight". The murder of Henry Nowak is only newsworthy because of the shockingly poor (and probably racially motivated) police response - and yet the social media peanut gallery are calling for penal laws against a demographic who commit less crime than the white British. Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US). The other case is a real failure of the UK immigration system - the Belfast attacker was a Sudanese falsely claiming to be a Somali who crossed the open ROI-NI border in order to claim asylum in the UK instead of the EU. But you wouldn't have learned about the difference from social media posts by right-populists.
* Police recorded knife crime is up (but peaked in 2024 and is now falling again), but actual stabbings are down, as measured by NHS administrative data. The most likely reason is that the police have been told to be more careful about checking whether a knife was used in muggings and suchlike where violence is threatened but nobody gets stabbed.
** Singh is the second-most common surname of VC winners, after Smith.
What difference does it make? They're building a parallel society. If you give them a street and they commit less crime it's still not yours to live on. If you give them a city and they make it rich it's still not your money to spend. If you give them your country it's not yours anymore, it's theirs.
Unless they were integrating. Are the Sikhs integrating? Apparently they have their own rituals we have to grant them religious exemptions for. And they don't behave like White Britons -- by your own argument they don't commit crime at the same rate. Presumably they are different.
(Not that I would assume they commit crime at lower rates anyways. Basically every immigrant group commits more crime than native Brits with the exception of other European groups and the Japanese. It's possible the Sikh are genuinely exceptional and I know they are different from standard Indians / Muslims / Arabs / etc. But if a random Sikh murders a kid and his family helps him cover up the crime I'm going to assume that they're actually not exceptional: I've never heard of a Japanese immigrant family doing that.)
I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
Although it doesn't actively proselytize as much as Christianity, Sikhism is not an ethnic religion; any person of any ethnicity can convert to it if they become convinced that its teachings hold the true answers about the Divine. Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
Now as an atheist, I'm not that big a fan of religious exemptions. But ultimately, they're a Chesterton's Fence whose origins are not very hard to dig up. Bad things happen if the government starts steamrolling over the faithful's objections with "there's not actually an angry sky man who will send you to Hell if you work on a Sunday/do indulgences/mix meat and dairies, get over it". Granted Sikhs are enough of a religious minority that pissing them off on their own wouldn't start a religious war, but it seems straightforwardly more principled for the state to say "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of any recognized religion" than "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of Christianity and Islam, but because there's so few of them we're going to functionally write it into law that you cannot simultaneously act in accordance with a belief in the divinely-inspired truth of the Guru Granth Sahib, and be a law-abiding citizen in our country".
We can do the same thing with tariffs. And then we don't have neighborhoods full of foreigners who will hide the Bataclan bombers after they make their getaway.
I don't agree with it, but the English have adopted weapons bans as a virtue. They also have religious freedom as a virtue. In accommodating immigrant Sikh values, they now have to accommodate exceptions in their weapons bans. These are two contradictory virtues. They can't actually coexist meaningfully. This is a conflict caused by immigration. Your proposed solution, essentially, is to jettison arms control in favor of religious freedom, i.e., that English society should change even more in order to accommodate the Sikh. It can be perfectly English to be Sikh! Well, it wasn't 50 years ago, and it wasn't even common until extremely recently. If the challenges of integrating migrants are to be solved by England changing to accommodate them, what's the argument in favor of accepting migrants? Trade deal: You change your society and culture and values, and we give you welfare consumers, a housing shortage, and endless supply of accusations of racism, and occasional stabbings. We will integrate on our terms, not yours, and maybe, just maybe, statistically, we'll perform better on some made-up statistical measures. Oh and you don't have a choice and this downgrade is permanent.
The UK already had hard-won religious freedom; it just didn't have meaningful representation of a religion whose commandments conflicted with a weapons ban, so the issue hadn't come up. It might very well have come up even with zero immigration, if a lot of white Englishmen had started converting to Sikhism out of some trend, in the same way that so many British hippies got into Buddhism.
And I guess I just don't see that big of a conflict there… I think "virtue" is a weird way to describe the weapons ban. I don't believe Brits think it's deontologically wrong or taboo to carry knives; I think they've adopted weapons bans as a technocratic, utilitarian policy. Whether religious freedom is to be thought of as a deontological line-in-the-sand or consequentialist utilmaxxing is perhaps more debatable, but in either case, this makes it sensible to trade one against the other depending on circumstances. Something like: "I believe that in a vacuum, it is good to minimize the amount of citizens permitted to carry knives, as doing so will reduce violent crime and I do not believe that people have an innate right to bear arms. However, I also believe that the state should rarely if ever ban religious practices. Therefore, the best way to maximize utility while respecting the constraints of respecting religious freedom is a weapons for ban for everyone except people whose religion mandates that they carry a ritual knife on their person at all times" is in no way incoherent or self-contradictory.
(Again, it seems isomorphic to other kinds of religious exemptions, i.e. "I do not believe that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of school whenever they like; but I believe it's important for the state to respect religious practices; therefore parents are allowed to let their kids skip school on their faith's recognized holy days, but not for any other reason". I don't think there's a "virtue" of respecting religious freedom, and a "virtue" of mandatory education, that are in conflict here in any problematic way, it's a very common-sensical status quo to end up with.)
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