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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 Lowe 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.
The methodology of the Lowe inquiry was to believe victims the way Democrats believed Christine Blasely Ford or the UN believes Hamas atrocity propaganda. I don't think part of that process includes thinking about whether numbers are accurate or not. Most of the things said are consistent with what we know was going on from other sources, but at least one of the allegations is obviously false (there is a trained rape dog on page 97 - and in fact "Kate"'s entire account is implausible - she also claims that the first time she was raped, the rapists jumped her in the street and gang-raped her on the spot, in public - which as well as its inherent implausibility is not the MO of a grooming gang).
The 250,000 has been the standard estimate on the British right, but it comes from a Reform peer making a guess in order to ask a Parliamentary question - basically "I think there were 250,000 - if you have a lower estimate please share it". I would be very surprised if there is any complexity beyond that.
It goes without saying that my attention was drawn to this alleged rape dog and the one in an Israeli prison by very different social media posters, and that the number of non-Motteposters who called out the obvious falsity of both allegations is likely to be zero. Most people are sane enough not to give a sh*t about politics, but the vast majority of the ones who do will believe in the rape dog when it is politically convenient for their side.
A rape dog in the context of a rape gang seems less absurd compared to a rape dog in the context of a military agency.
My gut feeling would be the obvious - that a rape dog in an organisation with a tradition of dog training is less absurd than a rape dog in an organisation which eschews dogs ownership for religious reasons.
That said, the point is that both are about as likely as the Motte endorsing AOC in the 2028 Presidential election.
My gut feeling is that, for most people, the higher barrier that prevents them from having rape dogs is their dislike of committing or enabling rape, rather than their inability or dislike of training dogs.
When someone posts an account of rape dogs being used by a group the median Motteposter finds sympathetic, we get posts explaining why trained rape dogs are almost certainly physically impossible. (In this case, probably correctly). When someone posts an account of rape dogs being used by a group the median Motteposter finds unsympathetic, we now have two people trying to defend the plausibility of rape dogs.
And this is supposed to be a rationalist forum. If I posted on X saying that Pakistani gangs in Glasgow were feeding white virgins to the Loch Ness Monster, then I would expect right-wing Americans to believe me, because X is full of retards. But on this forum, I hope that people would manage to point out that there is no Loch Ness Monster, and possibly also that there are no virgins in Glasgow.
Who are those two people? I see just zeke5123a responding to your statement about rape dogs, and neither defended the plausibility of rape dogs. The point was pretty clearly to call out the reasoning that went into claiming some sort of equavalency in the plausibility of IDF rape dogs versus Pakistani rape gang rape dogs. Whether or not the latter is particularly plausible or even more plausible than the former is neither here nor there; it's the reasoning used to conclude that that's being criticized.
And I recall that there was actual discussion about the plausibility of IDF rape dogs when that was posted, with some people concluding that it was implausible, but at least one poster writing paragraph after paragraph about why he found the reports credible. That's what's supposed to happen when you attempt to rationally discuss something. Different people have different perspectives and they make their arguments, hopefully rationally. And when arguments fail at rationality or seem otherwise biased or unreasonable, others are supposed to call out that failure with the full confidence that their criticism of the reasoning will not be falsely interpreted as an attack on whatever object-level position is being discussed.
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