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Notes -
It's-a mea culpa.
Last week there was some discussion of Rupert Lowe's report on Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK. I accepted the already infamous estimate of 250k victims uncritically, assuming that this number included all victims in the period 1970-2018. But according to this article, the report actually claims that the figure of 250k victims only includes those in the period 2000-18. The linked article tries to come up with a more accurate estimate of the total number of victims.
I was wrong to accept that specific claim at face value, and wrong to disagree with people who were suspicious of it. I think the real figure might be an order of magnitude lower – still a national outrage, mind you, and a far greater scandal than the clerical abuse scandals of the 2000s.
I think this article makes a big mistake by trying to make a distinction between victims who were "actually raped" versus just other victims of exploitation. We have a bit of hyperbole and motte and bailey, but i think it's totally reasonable to read the claims of the original report as claiming that there were approx 250k victims of rape gangs overall, and not specifically that they all met the legal definition of rape. To me this seems like a massive nitpick.
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Ah, so only about 6 times worse than the total number of victims in the entire history of the KKK. I guess that means it should just be ignored, and the UK government should keep right on covering it up, using the criminal justice system to suppress discussion and objection, arresting parents who complain, feeding escaped girls right back into the hands of their abusers, and smiling benignly while police officers participate in the gang rapes.
Even if that number is overshot by an order of magnitude, there is no curse in Elvish, Entish or the tongues of Men for this treachery. The last lynching style murder in the US we executed 2/3s of the perpetrators and gave the only one who showed remorse a mere life sentence. The British should extrapolate that number out.
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It doesn’t matter. Maybe I am a cynic or narcissistic but we have to be honest that most people are NOT as smart as people here. There are areas where you need to be intellectually honest - I guess with high IQ elites etc trying to honestly debate things and then report them to the masses.
To me mass migration is the biggest risks to Human Civilization. Dark ages likely occur if we get this wrong. The point of 250k is it emphasizes the magnitude of the issue to the masses which is true.
I like that fact that India has extremely high IQ people but IQ testing seems to indicate low IQ averages. My instincts tells me that science just doesn’t happen in those type of societies. There are probably as money Vivek types in India as the western world has but some kind of agglomeration effect can’t occur in this society. If that happens to America then science dies is my guess.
And then maybe in 1000 years so very smart group develops somewhere. They have a lot of bloodlust and tribe by tribe they expand and kill the natives until they start to rebuild industrial society again. That’s my downside case for mass migration.
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The fixation on the 250,000 is a distraction tactic. The conclusion of the article says that there were "only" 13,500 rapes of underage girls by foreigners apparently often motivated by religious and ethnic hatred over a nearly 20 year period, which is still absolutely disgusting and horrifying. The article also says that grooming gangs are "extremely rare" because um ackchually lot of abuse doesn't actually involve "human trafficking" or which are apparently prerequisites to taking these massive crimes seriously. The left wants to engage in dishonest nitpicking about terminology and numbers so that attention is diverted towards the credibility of the report writers and pedantic technical definitions, while the right wants to point at the child rapes and shout about how the exact facts don't matter, look how awful this all is. It's inverse holocaust revisionism, "actually it was only 1 million Jews killed and technically they weren't gassed and why were there swimming pool and hospitals in the camps and and and..." Anything to avoid looking at or discussing the piles of bodies.
I don't think there's really any dialogue to be had about this, it's just another cobblestone on the road towards civil conflict.
13,000 victims over the course of several decades is a national outrage, and revolutions have started over less. But it's important to get our facts straight. If there was no good reason to believe the 250k figure was accurate, Howe should not have included it in his report.
As a fellow Mottizen, I agree with you, but the way this correction will be used by most normies is "the number is fake and can be dismissed (and by association, so can everything else in the report)." We are all high decoupling autists here but most people can't hold "it was not nearly as bad as they say, but also it's an absolute outrage and something must be done" in their head at the same time.
Yeah. I wish Howe had gotten it right the first time, but the cat's out of the bag now. Strategically, I think anti-immigration activists would be better off emphasising that there were thousands of victims and that the police knew about it but sat on their hands, but avoid mentioning the specific number of victims the report claims if they can help it.
My charitable interpretation is that the 250,000 might have been a Trumpian overstatement designed to get the establishment media to issue a still-damning correction (actually it was "only" 25,000!) which would fail to deflate the anger and makes the media look out-of-touch. But that depends on the media fumbling the ball.
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Well, good on you, I guess. The Lowe report (and Lord Pearson’s initial bluster) come out looking miserably untrustworthy.
I can’t say I expected much from a substack titled “heretical insights,” but I was pleasantly surprised.
As an aside: I don’t think the specific numbers matter. The Catholic scandals took off because they involved positions of trust. The numbers were smaller but closer to home. A failure of utilitarianism, to be sure.
See, I think it's more to do with 1. hypocrisy ("these people claim to be arbiters of morality but look at how they actually behave") and 2. popular anti-Christian sentiment.
People who love to complain about the clerical abuse scandal never seem interested in talking about, e.g., the higher prevalence of such abuse in public schools, despite it being another example of abuse of positions of trust. That's just not what's interesting.
With the Church, the main thing horrifying people was not the crimes (though there was likely a higher rate of sex offenses than for the general population), but the cover-up.
If the RCC had dealt with sex offenders by sending them to some monastery on some desolate island with no kids around for 200 nautical miles, then that would have pissed off people a lot less.
Instead, the main goal was generally to keep the reputation of the church intact. If people complained, perps were given new parishes where they could continue to victimize minors.
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The Catholic scandals took off in places that did not have popular anti-Christian sentiment. It was actually the proximal cause of anti-Christian sentiment in Ireland, starting when Ireland was still religious(I would argue that Irish collapse in religiosity was overdetermined, but it was still the proximal cause).
The visceral horror of it was that it was happening to kids from good families, who were doing nothing wrong. The public doesn't care very much about homeless prostitutes, never has, never will. Trying to draw attention to their plight(and it is a plight, this is not a fun life), just makes people want to get rid of them. On the other hand the abuse victims came from families that did everything right and were betrayed.
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And also because clerical abuse was so homosexual. Of course for Catholicism this goes way back; some monasteries wouldn't accept young, bare-chinned men as their twinkiness was too irresistible for some of the older monks. Laypeople unfortunately were never taught just how gay their spiritual forebears were.
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I'd also add that there's an element of identity. There's a big difference in street pimps taking advantage of lost poor juvenile delinquents, often with absent or bad parents, vs "Good Kids" whose parents are pious enough to get them to church and make them altar boys. The horror of the latter is significantly larger publicly, even if people won't acknowledge it.
Similar to how school shootings are significantly more horrifying than gang related shootings, even if the gang related shootings kill more kids.
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Why untrustworthy? I thought the entire reason the figure was controversial, was that they were open about arriving at the number through a naive extrapolation.
Unless I’m misreading this, the substack author had to reconstruct a method, since Pearson never explained his numbers publicly.
He was quoted in the report, which again didn’t lay out its calculation.
What do you mean?
This is the verbatim quote of the report quoting Pearson. How do you make it clearer that they took the Rotheram, Telford, and Oxford numbers and extrapolated them nationwide?
EDIT: I can concede they shouldn't use such a strong / high-certainty language in the executive summary:
But I'm not seeing where the detective work to reconstruct the method, and therefore the untrustworthiness, is supposed to come in.
Okay, we’ve been looking at the same quote. I agree that there was no ambiguity about him doing an extrapolation. I think the article was clear that Pearson took the most extreme assumption whenever possible. Not including any of those assumptions means that his original statement was pretty untrustworthy.
Nitpick: I don't think extrapolating from 3 known points is the most extreme assumption possible - that should be reserved for assuming that some / most other places had an even higher rate of abuse than Rotheram.
Well, as long as we're talking about the report, I'd say it criticizeable, but not untrustworthy. They didn't hide the method 5 links deep from an obscure note in the references. The quote is in the second hit when you CTRL+F for "250".
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And the literal police facilitating rape isn’t a failure of trust?
Oh, it totally is. But one that’s less personal.
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