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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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We have a conclusion to the "Braveheart" saga, precipitated by a viral video of a Scottish girl defending herself by waving a knife and axe at a man filming her. This incident was discussed in multiple comment threads, with @ArjinFerman summarizing the discourse here.

Per the BBC reporting on the court case:

A man has been found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground.

The court heard that Belov had said "hello sexy, I'll show you a good time" to the girls while walking past them in the Lochee area of the city.

After one of the girls called him a creep, he had returned to confront the group and called his sister, who arrived shortly afterwards and assaulted one of the girls.

His sister has also been convicted, in what appears to be a complete legal victory for the Scottish girls.

A noble effort. But hopeless. The first thread already demonstrated that priors were set by who you hated most: (1) females; (2) young hoodlums who bullied you; (3) white people.

This thread will not shift any priors.

Then why are we here?

Is this meant to be a reference to left-wing/anti-native British media bias?

It's meant to be a reference to the specific post I linked to, that said if you think the "Braveheart" narrative is likely to be true, and remain unmoved by official government statements, it's because you hate brown people.

I do not appreciate your dishonesty. That is not what I said, and it is not what I implied.

  • -10

I remember that post. That was basically the implication I took from what you said. It seemed to be condescendingly dismissive towards the people believing the take that ended up being vindicated, and psychologizing them as holding that take because they were mysognist, racist losers.

Rereading it now, the "females" part strikes me as less clear, and possibly a dig at the people thinking the girls were just terrible feral youth, but I think phrasing it as "females" made me interpret it as sarcasm directed at the right-coded people on the Braveheart side, because I didn't think you would use that kind of language sincerely.

There were a lot of hot takes flying around when that incident happened, and most of them seemed to me to be entirely tribal- people deciding on the narrative based on, as I said, who they hated most. I tend to be a "wait and see" type of person because the quantity and quality of detail was lacking, making it very much a "choose your own narrative" scissors incident.

I might still self-identity as a liberal, but anyone who's been around here for a while would know better than to casually ascribe the most bad faith "woke" perspective to me. So it still surprises (and annoys) me when that's what people do.

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