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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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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.

If I recall the reports of Rotherham correctly, the typical victim was from the underclass.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.