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 -
This is false. Fundamental to how and why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to operate was that the girls were chavettes at a time when statutory rape of chavettes was effectively decriminalised. About half the girls whose accounts form the first half of Rupert Lowe's report had already been sexually assaulted by male relatives, "stepfathers" or children's home staff before the Pakistani rape gangs got to them, with the perps being significantly less likely to face justice than the Pakistani gangs were.
If you are a middle-class married father in an intact family, your daughter was mostly safe.
I don't understand how this add-on makes the statement you're replying to false. Rape gangs chose vulnerable targets who didn't have much parental oversight - kinda obvious that those targets would be mainly working class and from dysfunctional households.
Why does the fact that many of these girls had previously been abused conflict with or deny the claim that much of the scale, perseverance and overall modus operandi these rape gangs were operating under very obviously were tied to the tribalism and ethno-religious chauvinism of the Pakistani, specifically Miripuri, diaspora?
The fact is that countless WOMEN within these communities were fully aware of what their male kinsmen were up to, but condoned it due to - in their own words - the victimized girls being outside of their community and faith. The mental tradeoff these diasporas operate under is very simple - "would sending a member of my family/clan to prison be better than a faithless outsider experiencing suffering at their hand? It would not, therefore I won't take action against it." This is how these rape gangs are allowed to operate with impunity - since quasi-everyone in the diaspora has some knowledge or involvement in it, combatting it by means of law enforcement would effectively engender taking legal action against the vast majority of the entire localized diaspora, which police nor politics won't do for obvious reasons. It's the exact same issue Europe has been having with gypsies for decades - trying to combat their criminality essentially means criminalising the entire community since the vast majority of them are criminals, accessories to the crime, or at the very least highly aware, yet unbothered by it.
More options
Context Copy link
That's right. While it is true that that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape someone's daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion", your daughter would be safe. Mostly.
Agreed. Morally and legally, there is no difference between "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls and one of them might have been your daughter" and "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls who were the kind of girls everyone considered rapebait anyway". The guilty parties should be drummed out of public life (they mostly have been) and, if they committed crimes, prosecuted. (They mostly didn't, although the Lowe report implies that some individual cops accepted bribes). But if you are asking the question "why is the average Brit not outraged by this?", which most Motteposters posting about this issue are, that is a question about politics.
Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news, the Pakistani grooming gang scandal has had less political legs than the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association, the Afghan rapefugee scandals in various Continental European countries, or even a mostly-fake scandal like the US campus rape crisis. And the reason for that is precisely that your daughter is safe if you are someone who matters.
But the UK elite love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household. This is a key part of the identity of the progressive elite in the Anglosphere. The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community. The math (maths?) on this was that their reputation would be more harmed by representing White poor than by representing the minority community, because its higher status to be worldly and pro-diversity than pro-White. But it’s the same group of people who promote welfare benefits and spots for the poor at Oxford who were unwilling to go against the minority block, no?
I agree that this is true, but (to my knowledge, I’m not British) there’s an additional element of class at play in Britain. It’s obviously true that western elites writ large “love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household” but in the UK this attitude is standing on the back of a long history of especially stark class differences which persist to this day, such that the poor are not merely “the poor” but fully other, a separate and inferior culture. Today they deserve pity and perhaps charity but are still broadly contemptible. This differentiates the native lower-class from poor immigrants, who are now seen as Diverse and Enriching to the culture, where the native poor are seen as the same drag on the culture they’ve been seen as for centuries.
I suspect this cultural history is the secret sauce for how this problem became so much more pronounced in Britain than anywhere else: other countries have problems with migrant crime, including sexual violence, but not with mass-scale organized rape gangs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Everyone has heard of "damning with faint praise". I'm not sure what to call this. "Defense by appeal to damnation?"
If the defense of the British establishment is just "Who cares, they were poor?" then said establishment can kindly shut the fuck up forever on all other moral matters. They have no right to opine about anyone or anything else. Their every utterance will be dismissed with a Soviet-style "And have you stopped raping the poor girls?"
Forget "drummed out of public life", such an establishment would deserve to be violently purged. Genuinely worse than the history of racism in the US, and casually, without a shred of decency, grace, or remorse. More deserving of anti-Apartheid levels of hostility and scorn from the decent peoples of the West than Rhodesia and South Africa.
It isn't a defence of the British establishment, it's an explanation for the passivity of the average middle-class Brit. Compare the public and political response to the grooming gangs to the equivalent response to the much lower number of second-generation Pakistani immigrants who blew themselves up on public transport around 2005 - that was a case where it could be you or your child.
The only possible defence of the British establishment is that it may have learned the lessons since the scandal first broke around 2010, one retirement at a time. Starmer, in particular, was one of the people involved in breaking the scandal (as Director of Public Prosecutions when the first batch of gang members were prosecuted) rather than in covering it up. Andy Burnham as metro mayor commissioned a metro-wide inquiry into grooming gangs on his turf (Rochdale and Oldham were the medium-sized ones, there were also some small ones) and was responsible for Greater Manchester being one of the only three police forces to consistently report ethnicity of criminal suspects, according to the 2025 audit carried out by Louise Casey.
Kier Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, let 13,000 suspected rape gang members and pedophiles off with warning letters.
Andy Burnham appears to believe that the problem has already been fixed because they produced a report from an inquiry.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think it's a moral/ethical defense, but rather a sort of realpolitik analysis of why things are happening the way they are. Of course, once you enter that realm, then it follows that if enough anti-rape-gang Brits decide to implement what you say is deserved, there's no grounds by which to condemn them other than by gaining enough power to stop them. Which usually leads to bad results for everyone all around.
Sure ,but there are implications that follow from that, such as the total loss of moral standing from the people being so analyzed.
Maybe it's my latent American Millennial Progressive bleeding through, but imagine this. Imagine that Latino gangs were doing this to black girls. Imagine that over the last 25 years, they had kidnapped, drugged, gang raped, and sex trafficked somewhere between 125,000 and 1.25 million underage black girls. Imagine if the defacto policy of the US government was to suppress any reporting, prosecute members of the community who spoke out, and literally gave escaped sex slaves back to the cartels responsible. Imagine if they blithely dismissed any calls for action, while reacting with utter fury and the full force of the state against any black parent who tried to protect his daughter. Imagine if, when pressed, the retreated to "Well, they're just ni**gers. You know how those girls are. Sluts were probably asking for it. What do you want us to do about it? What about the taco trucks and MLB players?"
I've lived through two generations of guilt and shame and atonement for vastly lesser offenses. The British establishment and middle classes come out of this looking like inhuman monsters.
Sure, but the thing about inhuman monsters is that they're often very good at having their way over the preferences of humans.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The reason this news is still relevant / milkable is that precisely zip has been done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Where are the new migration guidelines? Where is the MacPherson report? Where is the anti-anti-racist training for the police?
The closest I’ve heard of it is some white paper that Mahmood is supposedly shopping about.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link