This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Rupert Lowe has published on twitter, The rape gang inquiry report
A quick introduction is that for decades in the UK, Pakistani Muslims have been systematically raping young white girls. The police have ignored this at best or helped cover it up at worst because this highlights an inconvenient-to-the-narrative reality about this group of people.
The claims from this report are not some of the most horrific things I have ever read, but by far the most horrific things I have ever read. It's not close. Imagine the worst, most fucked up things you can imagine seeing in "2 girls 1 cup" adjacent abuse porn (I don't know if there is a name for this, but like...where the point seems to be the humiliation and degradation, and often physical harm of the women involved), and then imagine that this was being done at scale to young white (specifically white) girls in the UK for decades by Muslims men from Pakistan.
The report estimates approximately 250,000 young white girls (again, specifically white, they were specifically targeting young white girls) were raped by these men.
Here are my questions/thoughts on this:
Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.
Is this actually true? I admit I don't know who Rupert Lowe is. Is this a serious person?
What will happen as a result of this? I can't honestly believe that it's nothing, is it?
What should happen? How do you even begin to prosecute something of this scale in a way that doesn't resemble some of the darkest times in human history?
To that point: is this the darkest point in the history of the UK? What would be worse than this?
I have made the mistake of habitually mentioning the rape gangs to an average social media lib British woman and I think she would call the police on me if she could. The reaction was quite similar to if I tried to grope her on the spot, gross disbelief, anger and disgust. Unfortunately not in a position to ask further what was the exact source of her reaction since this led to hard social/internet blocks from her. But my point is, this is by no means an event one can talk openly in Anglo polite society.
Something something "believe all women."
Unless those women are 250,000 little British girls, I guess.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Essentially the issue is that the Tony Blair government set out to permanently change the UK using immigration policies and the political class in London were dead set on covering up any problems. Pakistan took the opportunity to rid itself of some of it's worst behaved ethnic groups.
There's too much complicity for important people. The Crown Prosecution Service is a key figure in covering up the crimes and it was run by now PM Keir Starmer.
I actually think they only way to fix things at this point is for a judge in an ICC signatory country to indict Starmer.
Europe already agrees that the ICC can ignore the parts of its charter against indicting heads of government, so I think it's the only way to force the issue. There must be a Canadian judge wild enough to do it.
More options
Context Copy link
The Right doesn’t understand how political convictions are formed. Political convictions are reflexive emotional responses developed through repeated conditioning with powerful stimuli, and are also vicariously learned through socially-modeling attractive activists (using the primitive heuristic of “imitate the high status”), and similar things. Facts do nothing. Facts do something for 2% of the population who have a particular temperament. For everyone else, their views are the result of multimedia conditioning. This entire report is less persuasive than one popular singer at a concert making a ten second remark, or one short segment in their favorite TV show. So to answer your [3], nothing will happen. If the UK wants something to happen, they need to put out multimedia about this event which successfully conditions an emotional response. Essentially they need to produce the reverse of the Adolescence Netflix show. And then they need to find beautiful women with personality disorders to cry sympathetically about the event, while receiving positive attention and praise afterward, so that others will model this behavior.
More options
Context Copy link
I guess I'll jump on this one as well. In the US if one is selective one could get away with horrible things against underclass girls on any given day. If most of the males she knows are junkies they're probably willing to sell her, or abuse her themselves. But rapists - any large group of criminals - are not known for low time preferences and careful planning at scale, nor at scale do you completely avoid girls who only marginally underclass with non-underclass connections. It does seem like you will eventually run into a beloved niece of a hard ass willing to do something.
More options
Context Copy link
Are these women meaningfully their women at this point? Would you ruin your life for someone who considers you despicable? I am sure fathers (if present at all, this is all lower-class people) should have done more but the people in those gangs probably knew how to pick out the vulnerable ones. You can't kill chivalry and then expect no consequenes.
In a particularly lurid case the police were summoned and arrested a father for trying to "liberate"/get his girl back from a gang's hideout several times. How the father didn't murder everyone involved, I do not know. In some cases the local police were also involved on the side of the rape gangs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He's an admirable man, but his decision to found a splinter anti-immigration party to split the Reform vote in order to spite Nigel means that he, individually, could well end up contributing to the rape of thousands of more girls if our next government ends up as a Labour/Green/Islamist coalition.
Farage will welch. When push comes to shove, Nigel won’t do what’s necessary to re migrate the population. He is mOre cowardly (if possible) than Trump. I think Lowe actually would, notwithstanding media howling, affect real re migration. Hell a couple of Nigel’s key members are the architects of the migration replacement. Nigel is offended by people like Tommy Robinson. He backed off his rage comment re Henry Novak.
I’m hoping that restore beats out reform somehow in the Makersfield election at which point there would be preference cascade.
And how exactly is he going to do that with 3% of the vote the 1 seat in parliament?
Obviously I’m saying if he won (ie if reform support went to restore)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The police in the UK have a very bad track record of caring of what happens to the UK's poor and vulnerable. This is more about class than anything else.
As a comparison there's the case of Fred West and his wife Rose West. They raped, tortured and killed and dismembered their victims. It is the most heinous criminal case I know about, that I stopped listening to true crime after hearing this one. One victim went straight to the police after being raped, but because she didn't want to press charges the Fred West was fined 50 pounds. The police failed not just once, not only several dozen times, but more than a hundreds of times to do their due diligence.
I don't recommend reading the details of what they did.
The women that Fred West and his wife killed came from the same crop as Rotherham case.
With how global the world is it can be easy to forget that there's a lot of people being forgotten right here, and what's being done to them.
If it was a class issue where are the white british rape gangs? Why are they all pakistanis? Why are the victims all white?
Here is a quote directly telling you that the police covered this up because they were worried about race relations:
"In Rotherham, a senior police officer told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by Pakistani heritage men became public knowledge"
A girl is raped by an "Asian" man, she escapes, flags down a taxi driven by another "Asian", who then rapes her again.
Does this seem like a class issue to you? Do you think that a white taxi driver would have raped this girl?
Its a class issue that when a pakistani calls up his pakistani friends and with the promise of gang raping a british child his pakistani friends don't immediately report him to the police?
Its a class issue certain not white demographics commit rape at rates orders of magnitudes higher than the native brit population?
Did Fred West call up all his friends to join in? Did a bunch of Fred West's friends join in when offered? Do you think that the typical lower class brit would join in on gang raping a child if offered the chance? Did the police cover up Fred West's crimes because they were scared of race riots?
More options
Context Copy link
Fred West's count topped out just over a dozen, and he was a native son of the land. Meanwhile the Muslims victimize 20,000x the number of girls as Fred, and they have no reason to be there in the first place.
There's a scale here that you have chosen to pretend doesn't exist. And then there's the point that we tolerate from family what we don't from neighbors or strangers.
And my point is that we need to stop doing that.
If everyone follows an ethic of 'lenient rules for Us, strict rules for Them', humanity falls into the abyss of endless conflict. It is only with a universalist ethical system, in which the permissibility of an action does not depend on race, religion, or rank, that we stand any chance of reaching the stars.
And if everyone but whites follow that ethic, and whites are the only ones that don't, then what happens?
I do not live in the world we ought to have. I live in the world as it is. And as it is right now, there are literal hordes of foreigners who will gladly swarm over my homeland and have no compunctions about protecting their own and exploiting the outsiders.
Nobody else thinks this way, and if you're the only one that does, then it's suicide.
By setting a good example, you convince everyone else to follow, bringing us to a world where people of every colour and creed work together for mankindish goodgain.
That may seem like a long shot to you, but the odds are a damn sight better than they would be given the eternal existential zero-sum racial warfare advocated for by the failed painter.
This is fantasy. It is simply not true, and you have no reason to believe it's true beyond faith and hope.
I'm not saying you can't change people's behavior, but it isn't going to be be example alone. It must include punishment and consequences for failure. You will never convince everyone, and so you must, eventually coerce.
I don't know how you can look at the world, see what's happening in Australia and Ireland and France and every other white country, and then repeat this dreck. It's willful ignorance, it's head in the sand. It's a long shot, so long as to be impossible, which is why I'm not betting on it, and certainly not relying on it for the future of my children and grandchildren and descendants.
I'm not saying it's guaranteed to work; I'm saying it has a possibility of working, whereas the chances of a good outcome from a constant battle between racial groups are as near as makes no difference to zero.
If you go into a casino and bet on a single spin of a roulette wheel, you probably won't win if you bet on any of the numbers from 0-36, but you'll definitely lose if you bet on 93.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Then why not start by telling all the feminists and progressives of various stripes, that they should be at least as outraged about this as they were about Harvey Weinstein and George Floyd (arguably as much as both combined)?
I have. I have never supported cultural relativism, and have long argued against the pernicious notion that a vile act done by a white man somehow becomes excusable when done by a Person Of Colour.
I stand against anyone, alt-right or ctrl-left, who claims that a thing forbidden one person ought be permitted another, solely on the grounds of their respective race, class, gender, religious affiliation, &c., or that blame for the misdeeds of one person ought fall on others sharing the aforementioned characteristics.
Where? I haven't seen you trying to convince progressives that they should be as upset about this as they were about #MeToo, and what you describe in the following sentences changes the subject completely.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure. That’s all well and good. But importantly most of the grooming gangs weren’t full of white people. And yes, white people act terrible. But the rape gangs were specifically racially and religiously homogenous. We shouldn’t bury our heads to this.
If Fulan al-Fulani commits numerous acts of of sexual assault and grievous bodily harm, we shouldn't bury our heads to it, and Mr al-Fulani should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law; I do not disagree with you on this.
However, if Dhuhath al-Dhuhathi has not committed any such crimes, he does not deserve to be treated as bearing responsibility for the actions of Mr al-Fulani.
I would not want to be held accountable for things I didn't do, merely because the people who did them all looked like me; therefore, the Golden Rule precludes subjecting Mr al-Dhuhathi to the same fate.
So let’s say you are designing an immigration system. Let’s say you want some small amount of immigration but a lot of people are coming to your country.
Are you going to make decisions based on limited info and discriminate against the group who commit crimes at massive rates or will you “treat everyone like an individual?”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
State capacity. This is the sort of thing that used to be dealt with by vigilante action, or even by revolution. Neither is possible any more; the state is too good at self-preservation. So if the state wants Pakistani rape gangs to go unpunished, by and large they will... and any vigilantes will be vigorously prosecuted if not accidentally killed awaiting trial.
More options
Context Copy link
This is US, French, and Ukrainian men erasure, in not at least considering them as contenders:
US (white) men, with their simping and water-carrying for blacks, and going along with LatAm illegal immigration.
French men, something similar but with MENA migrants instead of LatAm illegal immigrants.
Ukrainian men, getting bombed and shot at in trenches while their countrywomen are riding the carousel through nightclubs and Tinder dates in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic.
Only you Sloot, could hate women so much to conclude that Ukrainian men dying to defend their homeland from foreign invaders makes them cucks because their women-folk might be having sex. What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do, live out their lives as chaste old maids waiting for dead men?
They shouldn't be in Poland in the first place. They should be staying in Ukraine working in a drone factory or on a farm or in some way that materially contributes to the same war effort their male countrymen are literally sacrificing life and limb for. Or literally making more Ukrainian babies with a Ukrainian spouse so that their country can have any sort of future after the war.
More options
Context Copy link
Live in Ukraine, of course. Go find a Ukrainian husband instead of abandoning her countrymen to go secure a foreign husband.
More options
Context Copy link
... yes? That seems like a very reasonable minimum expectation. This is insanely dystopian, imagine being forcibly conscripted, then your gf just goes away and gets a new bf somewhere else, and everyone you talk about this to just goes "Well, what should she do, have no sex?". And it happens at scale.
This is complete insanity to me, men are expected to literally sacrifice their life for their country if needed, and having even the most tepid minimum expectation for young women is considered unacceptable. And then people are surprised that many modern men refuse military service.
Sloot wasn't complaining about adultery, he was complaining about Ukrainian refugee women having sex at all.
This is just such a willful sidestepping of the obvious context of the issue. @Sloot's comment was very clearly about Ukrainian women who left when the war started and are now going to bed with EuroBros elsewhere.
Your comment isn't in bad faith, per se, but it's an intellectual dodge. You're better than that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From what I have seen there is in fact expectation for Ukrainian women to be loyal to their men (sometimes that backfires against the war effort because they help their men escape the conscription officers). I'd assume that most women who emigrate to be prostitutes are unattached (or that prostitutes in general are unattached, for that matter).
If I were Ukrainian I would be much more concerned about being forcibly bussed to the frontline where I might very likely die to a drone than the behaviour of any women back home, some of which may or may not be my partner.
Any system that wants to survive will occasionally need to defend itself. Doing that entirely through voluntary service has extremely bad incentives & selection effects - you sacrifice your strongest supporters, who die for the benefit of precisely those people not willing to defend the system. Conscription for everyone solves this issue. It's ugly, but makes sense. The only workable alternative I can see is highly prestigious and well-paid elite military service, but that is not nearly enough in an existential crisis.
Maybe if conscription was truly for everyone.
It makes sense from the perspective of a system to throw the least loyal to the meatgrinder to maintain itself, but frankly, I'm profoundly unsympathetic to the perspective of a system.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think we're talking about prostitutes, more like party girls. They're probably also unattached, but this is a collective question, which makes it so icky to the liberals, but I don't think it's easily dismissible. War is inherently a collective endeavor, and the men that get conscripted have every right to ask "What am I fighting for? What will I be coming home to, if I somehow manage to get through this?".
I'm afraid the men who get conscripted don't, by definition, have a right.
The kind of war fought in Ukraine is not so much a collective endeavor as it is a negotiation between Putin and Zelensky (Putin and NATO, as it is usually seen) about who gets to wield the influence and land. Negotiation that happens to consume lives in the process. The "collective" is not getting shit out of it other than stopping the war if they win.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, kind of? Have you seen what these people have to go through to defend their "homeland"? What does "country" even mean at that point.
Nothing, which is why you have press gangs, anyone who could already fled the country.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What exactly are the underlying assumptions here? That adultery is good, actually, or that the women who leave the Ukraine are not the wives of the soldiers fighting to defend the Ukraine?
Sloot wasn't complaining about adultery, he was complaining about (single, presumably) Ukrainian women going on dates while living as refugees abroad.
I know a young Ukrainian woman living in the UK. I don't know if she has a boyfriend, but it would be absurd to demand that she avoid getting one because her male peers are fighting. Nobody benefits from that.
Were Ukrainian women encouraged by the government to flee for their oen safety? If not, why are they refugees at all? Ukraine hasn't been conquered. They should be back home assisting the war effort and maintaining some semblance of a domestic economy while the men are at the front. Living it up fucking hot europeans on an extended vacation while your nation burns and your men die screaming in the fields is, at the very least, in very poor taste. If the men are being forced to fight and die, it's not too much to ask that the women help put drones together or work as nurses or something .
More options
Context Copy link
She's abroad in the UK, and might have a boyfriend there. Which would then imply that she is very likely going to stay in the UK permanently, since I assume very few Britons would elect to move to the Ukraine.
In what sense is she peer to the men risking their lives in the eastern Ukraine?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Genderslop aside, he's pointing at a real problem. What "country" are they fighting for, if one half of the population gets thrown into the meatgrinder, and the other half leaves and starts a new life with foreigners? What's going to be left of the nation after all is said and done? Is it really "woman hating" to expect that they wait for the boys to come home any more than it's "man hating" to conscript them to begin with?
More options
Context Copy link
That would seem somewhat appropriate, until they can return and rebuild with the men. Chastity shows a level of seriousness and an awareness of the sacrifices others are making.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
All of these are quite bad but I think they are a far cry from the mass rape of hundreds of thousands of literal children by foreign gangs.
I want all of the latam illegals gone, and they certainly rape more than the locals, but by and large they marry fat latina chicks and seem content with that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sometimes the partial toleration of native criminal gangs can reduce the influence of foreign criminal gangs, like the way probiotic bacteria outcompete dangerous bacteria for nutrients.
The Japanese seem to have long tolerated the presence of their native yakuza until very recently. The yakuza would probably not tolerate the existence of Pakistani rape gangs in Japan. I believe the yakuza do engage in human trafficking, but that seems more focused on foreign southeast asian women serving a primarily Japanese clientele.
Separately, it seems that only some white, western democracies are susceptible to this particular problem. It doesn't seem to happen anywhere else. So yes, the current generation of white UK men might be the most cucked men ever, so far. At least with colonialism the subject people's women were coerced by some type of force, the white UK men have no such excuse.
The British example would be organised football hooliganism. Steven Yaxley-Lemmon isn't a football hooligan, but he chose "Tommy Robinson" as a nom-de-guerre because he wanted people to think he was. There have been multiple cases where have-a-go heroes who took down stabby Muslims in London turned out to have learned to fight with the Millwall Bushwhackers, who also organised a defence of Eltham High Street during the 2011 London riots.
"Why didn't the Millwall Bushwhackers pogrom a Muslim rape gang operating on their turf?" is a question nobody is asking, and possibly should be. In the case of of Millwall specifically, I assume part of the answer is that the the Bangladeshi Muslims in our part of London are an order of magnitude less rapey than the Pakistani Muslims who dominate the cases identified by both the official and Lowe inquiries.
If we leave the natives out of it, tolerating criminal gangs of better-behaved immigrants as a tool against worse-behaved immigrants is something that did happen - Sikh vigilante groups effectively defended their turf against both the 2011 rioters and the Muslim rape gangs, with the authorities being apparently unbothered. (This attitude is part of why much of the British right waited to see which way the political winds were blowing before coming out against kirpans after the Nowak murder).
Huh, fun to have context on why Bernard chooses Millwall supporters to punch him out on Black Books.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
AFAIK the London crime scene has had a colorful series of ethnic upheavals on major drug trafficking markets in which the 'Roadmen' class tend to only be involved in relatively petty and antisocial crime since the Albanians have come in whilst way more organized and capable of escalating force on anything that's actually durable and worth doing longterm as a criminal enterprise.
More options
Context Copy link
Apparently this kinda thing is basically how the Mafia got started.
That's the whole basis of a protection racket, right? Sure, you're paying for "protection" from the mafia, but it's bad for their business if someone paying for said protection does get harmed by a different gang.
Recent years in the US have made me mourn the death of organized crime and its replacement with disorganized crime.
More options
Context Copy link
Allegedly, the origins of Cosa Nostra (though almost certainly untrue) was when a French sergeant tried to rape a young married Sicilian woman. Her husband killed the French and then the mafia protected the husband from the occupying French.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Indeed, there's actually an even bigger native gang in Japan than the Yakuza that runs a protection racket over the entire home islands.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If I recall the reports of Rotherham correctly, the typical victim was from the underclass. You might as well ask why the men of Victorian Britain allowed the conditions described in Oliver Twist and the like.
This leads us to the deeper origin of the atrocity in question: the belief that humanity can be divided into Lives That Matter and Lives That Don't Matter. Some of the Muslamic Ray Guns made the division at 'Muslims' v. 'infidels'; some of them, the ones who victimised children of Pakistani extraction, drew the line at 'members of my clan' v. 'everyone else'; the police who ignored the issue saw it as 'respectable people' v. 'chavs'. But if your solution is to concede that pernicious belief, and merely to move the boundary to 'white Anglo-Saxons' v. 'brown foreigners', you are not just letting in the proverbial camel's nose, you are admitting almost the entire animal and trying to exclude the tip of its tail.
The correct solution is to put all the progeny of Adam and Eve into the 'Lives That Matter' category; if you need an outgroup to define yourselves against, let it be the Nature which wants half of all children, the white just as much as the brown, black, yellow, and red, to die before they are grown.
More options
Context Copy link
The difference being that, as far as I know, poor people in Victorian Britain were not subject to such levels of police state anarcho-tyranny as modern Britain. Being left to your own devices and ending up victimized by people stronger than you is one thing. Being actively and racially profiled by the police such that if you defend yourselves against people weaker than you, or even speak out against them, you get arrested is an entirely new level of victimization.
I do somewhat agree that the cuck label doesn't apply here due to class distinctions.
More options
Context Copy link
The men of Victorian Britain were straightforward in their class bias and sincerely believed the lower classes were fundamentally-distinct in terms of inclination and potential, and talked about this openly.
Obviously everyone still understands this on some level but in the current context it must be denied at least publicly, and I'm surprised to find that such attitudes persist to such a degree as to result in the lack of outrage we see today.
And yet the same logic isn't applied to immigrants? I'm not trying to be cute when I say that this confuses me.
Like, I can throw cynical epicycles at the problem (something something signaling) but at some point I'm just speculating and every answer seems to raise further questions.
It probably is correct to say, though, that the British upper class considers itself distinct from the rest of the population, which it does not care about the welfare of that much, and that class does not track neatly to race or ethnicity. Rishi Sunak is upper class - he went to Winchester, and has a first from Oxford. He's in the club. The people in the club care about other people in the club, you know, the right sorts of people, made not only by descent but also by education, lifestyle, and even accent.
In this case, both the perpetrators and the victims are lower class, and therefore unimportant. Class solidarity is much stronger than ethnic solidarity. British uppers do not consider themselves 'one people' with British lowers.
Part of what happened is that this is true, fractally. Under normal consequences, the white British respectable working/lower-middle class - critically, including the police - hate white British chavs at least as much us toffs do. (All bets are off in the face of a foreign-coded common enemy, or a tabloid-driven moral panic about sex crime) It took two things going wrong to create this crisis - one was a decision to tolerate crime by ethnic Pakistanis to avoid being called racist, and the other was a culture were sexual offences against underage chavettes had been effectively decriminalised regardless of the race of the perpetrators. On an initial skim of the Lowe report, my first reaction was shock at just how many of the girls had been raped by (presumptively white British) family members or "stepfathers" before the Pakistani gangs got to them. Nobody involved with either the official or the Lowe enquiries found those rapes, or the non-prosecution of the perps, surprising or worrying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The mistake here is to assume there's widespread ethnic consciousness among native Brits. I don't think that someone like Keir Starmer and most of the men who vote for him consider the victims to be their children in any meaningful sense - it probably registers for them in the same way that hearing about children being abused in Afghanistan does. As for the men who did want to do something about it, a large part of the scandal was that the authorities blocked them from doing so.
My gut instinct is that the figure of 250 000 sounds higher than I would have thought credible, although this might be wishful thinking. I admit I haven't read the report (this whole matter is so grim that I generally try to steer clear of the details). The fact that this seems to have been going on for decades though does make it more believable.
Leader of Restore UK, the party who think Reform are too soft on immigration and would rather implement large-scale remigration. I think he's serious enough that this report will add some fuel to the continued migration of normies away from labour/conservative and towards Reform.
I don't think there'll be rioting and/or mayhem. The people who would want to are too diffuse, and the authorities would come down like a ton of bricks. Any real impact will likely only be felt at the next election.
In an ideal world, all the people involved are appropriately punished and the victims and their families are offered restitution in whatever form is possible. As for how that could happen, well, it can't, because it's not really compatible with how the UK functions as a political entity. The UK is a multi-ethnic administrative and economic zone* with Muslims as the most favoured tribe and where inter-ethnic conflict is a perpetual issue to be managed (maybe this is true of most western nations these days, idk). Addressing these crimes in any way that someone like me or you would presumably see as just would require a complete insutitional re-orientation away from this model at every level. This is probably what the main political fight over the next few decades in the UK is going to be.
*I should mention here that I come from a family of migrants to the UK, although I like to think you wouldn't guess it if you met me IRL.
The figure of 250,000 victims is not credible. The report says it was calculated by extrapolating the victim counts of the Rotherham and Telford gangs to a national scale, but neither the report nor the Reform peer who originally came up with the number shows their working. A more serious problem is that Rotherham was the first Pakistani rape gang to be busted precisely because they were exceptionally prolific - there have now been thorough local investigations into Pakistani grooming gangs in about a dozen towns, and Rotherham and Telford are an order of magnitude worse than the typical case. My back of the envelope estimate is that if you extrapolate from the whole sample of properly investigated cases rather than just the worst two you get a number around 100,000. And if you assume that the convenience sample of "gangs who have been busted" skews more prolific than average (which I think it probably does), then you get an even lower number.
None of this matters to the politics, of course. The median voter is innumerate, the median Reform-curious voter is even less numerate, and caring about factor-of-two errors in political messaging is considered autistic even by numerate people.
How is even 100,000 acceptable? I'm sorry this community has tacitly supported this behaviour and activity. They have no right to exist in the UK. If I was in power I would be telling everyone of Pakistani origin they have six months to fuck off, before I force them to fuck off.
Anyone on the left who opposes can fucking join them. It's absurd they are more worried about minorities than they are against people of lower class. It's long past time to bring back the death penalty, and honestly it needs to be used liberally. Its time to stop being a nanny state and time to give freedom, but also actually enforce consequences for bad actions.
More options
Context Copy link
A few thoughts:
It is assumed that Rotherham is the most prolific. The report talks about London and how the mayor there has denied any such problem in London while more evidence is coming out. Is it possible that other areas were simply more tight lipped than Rotherham?
It seems with larger populations, it would be easier to “hide.” Not sure how this cuts (ie maybe larger amount but smaller per capita or larger amounts and larger per capita because the police have other things to worry about like people tweeting).
Who did the investigation I. Those other towns? Was it “I investigated myself and turns out I did okay?”
More options
Context Copy link
The way this number was calculated and is being bandied about makes me actually wonder if it was placed as fact-checking bait. It gives the anti-rape-gang people the grounds to ostentatiously complain about splitting hairs, e.g. "Oh OK, so it's probably not literally a quarter million. Maybe it's off by 10 and it's only 25k. How many underage victims of rape gangs do YOU find to be okay?" It's somewhat akin to the utterly absurd claim that 1/5 - 1/3 of women going college in the USA would be raped, which fortunately seems to have mostly disappeared.
More options
Context Copy link
That's more precise than anything we get out of Ukraine and Gaza. Good enough for government work, I believe is the phrase.
People even feeling bold enough to 'fact check' this kinda stuff under their own names whilst even relatively marginal pushback on Gaza would get you deplatformed
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Very good points. Extrapolating like that is very sloppy.
And still, it speaks volumes that anyone having had to do with these gangs have not been either gorily lynched or swiftly executed. I find it hard to contradict those who call the UK 'cucked' or dooomed, and similar countries with similar issues. It really does seem like the peoples of Europe are going very gently into that dark night.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From my (American) perspective, this seems like half the problem: the race/immigration elements are obvious, but the intra-Anglo class elements seem just as insidious, and less commented on. These complaints were, in part it seems, discarded because the girls in question were lower-class and "that's just how they are".
It feels at least a bit like how the opioid epidemic in the US was ignored as long as it stayed in rural areas and effected poors: "that's just how they are". Even today, it's not hard to find comments from Coastal Elites (tm) expressing indifference to outcomes in "flyover states" or "MAGA country".
I'm sure most of the right would be all on board rounding up all the junkies off the streets and sending them to "rehab.". But you're right that if it's out of sight, most people couldn't care less.
More options
Context Copy link
This. They were broadly treated like child prostitutes and the social workers and NHS staff patched them up and sent them back about their business.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Most of the stories were previously reported, the new reports are actually quite limited although I appreciated their collation. The report is horrific, although barely more so than many of those published over the last 12 (!) years since the scandal broke. Over that period, of course, net immigration from beyond Europe effectively quintupled, only recently (in the last year) beginning a slow fall, but still far higher than it was in 2014. There is outrage and there is action. Nothing will happen.
Rupert Lowe quit Nigel Farage’s political bloc out of personal disagreement and has now positioned himself to his right. His main effect is that if he can continue to draw 5-7% polling support, then in combination with Farage’s group (~24%), and the Tories who continue to hover around 20-22%, they will split the conservative vote (probably an absolute majority of the voting public) and hand Labour another 5 years in absolute power in 2029.
So we have that to look forward to, which is nice.
The only general election since WW2 where right-wing parties got a majority of the popular vote was 2015. (They might have done in the 1951 election if every seat in Northern Ireland had been contested). The estimated national vote shares from the 2025 and 2026 local elections don't show a right-wing popular vote majority. (I haven't checked further back). Of the major UK pollsters, only More in Common shows a right-wing polling majority.
So it looks like there is a narrow left-wing majority (split between Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and various minor far-left parties). Not that this matters under FPTP, of course.
More options
Context Copy link
Farage seemingly still supports Muslims in the UK as a class. He is okay with a multi cultural society as long as it remains slightly British slightly longer.
More options
Context Copy link
Um...I thought Farage defenestrated him and literally called the cops on him? Did I miss something?
At that point, it's war. If you're gonna screw people over, make sure they'll stay that way. Seems like Farage's miscalculation as much as anything.
You can still criticise Lowe, surely, for taking actions that make it more likely that people he opposes will be elected and will govern his country. If he thinks Reform would be better in government than Labour, and his actions increase the odds of Labour winning, then isn't he undermining what he himself believes is best for the country out of a personal grudge? It seems reasonable to criticise that.
This is all downstream of Britain having an awful FPTP multi-party electoral system, of course.
Labour is unpopular and it's a long wait till an election. No one knows what'll happen or what pacts will be made.
I think what Lowe would say is that Farage chucked him for being too radical (serious about his positions in his view) and that he's trying to do what Labour did and slide into power off the back of an unpopular party without having to make any concrete but unpopular promises.
Given they've already had one set of Tory politicians promise one thing and then perform a total betrayal it's not insane to be distrustful. Why not pull a Farage and attack him from the right and prevent him from just taking his base for granted and becoming the new Tories?
Well, 2rafa said why but I can see why he wouldn't just slink off into ignominy and trust the competence and good will of someone he think smeared him to cut off any potential challenge to just betraying the base again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Lowe did an interview where he called Farage a cult leader, said he didn’t have what it took to be PM. Farage discovered or invented depending on your view some bullying rumors and used them as pretext to remove him. It was during that growing spat that the police were called.
But that only starts at the middle of the story. They’re both big egos and Farage has always been a solo leader.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is one of the most important problems our civilization is facing, but I'd really like to get better backing for the 250k stat if we're going to use it; I think it might be true, but it's such an extraordinary claim that extraordinary evidence is merited to make it unimpeachable rather than merely shocking. That's approaching one percent of the current population of white British women, and easily far larger than a percent if we even begin to control for age cohort and affected region.
Bear in mind that the 250k figure includes victims from the 1970s up to the present. I'd be a lot more suspicious if it was e.g. 250k victims in the space of a year.
UPDATE: A closer reading suggests I was mistaken. Mea culpa.
Also funny that people who were extraordinarily credulous for claims like the Canadian Indigenous Reservation School genocide or acting like Black Deaths in Custody were about 100x higher than they actually are can suddenly do basic mathematics and modeling to contradict this particular issue.
Likewise "hundreds of thousands of Gazan children are going to starve to death in the next 48 hours!"
'DOGE instantly killed 30 Million people via cutting funding' and whatnot
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is it that funny? Most people require nothing to believe something that confirms their biases but require iron-clad evidence to believe something which contradicts their worldview. Liberals and progressives included.
I loathe immigration. When I first heard 250k, my reaction was “is that number real.” Why would someone’s first reaction be “Catholic schools murdered a bunch of native Americans?”
More options
Context Copy link
Substitute “political bias” for “scientific understanding”. If I point a scanner gun at a metallic box and it says “aluminum” I’d assume it’s correct, if it says “xenon” (gas except at extremely cold temperatures) I’d assume the gun is broken and run further tests.
The main difference is that politics is based less on solid evidence, and much less on reason from first principles.
I saw Project Hail May too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd argue most conservative factchecker types tended to be more motivated by autistic desires for accuracy rather than necessarily choosing to go along with their side's narrative on other things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's still an average of a small classroom full of new victims every day for fifty years, and I'm guessing it wasn't at a constant rate over those fifty years. (A regular-sized classroom if you're accounting for it just being the girls.)
Rephrasing: this is numerically roughly equivalent to if the UK had established a formal policy in the 1970s that every day, a random class would be selected by lottery and all of its white girls would be sold into sex slavery overseas, and that policy had continued ever since. Maybe it's an alternate timeline where the Ottomans won the World Wars. I don't know.
Its not just the girls.
Oh, I'm sure, but that stat was about the girls. And I was already taking for granted that abusing the girls to that degree is going to indirectly fuck up the boys too; even if we unrealistically assume that you happen to be subjected to no violent crime yourself, what's it going to do to you to grow up as a boy in a community where the majority of your female peers are compelled into sex slavery by foreign invaders?
I continue to be baffled by the "foreign invaders" line as if being compelled to sex slavery to locals is totally lindy.
What's so baffling? An intra-ingroup crime is an individual matter, a cross-group crime is a collective matter, everyone knows this deep down, including the perpetrators.
Even progressives acknowledge this in an inverted way. The drama over Harvey Weinstein was a lot bigger than the fallout from the rape gang, and it's because they know these two things are not the same.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link