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Notes -
The UK Home Office just published a guide for asylum seekers on... how not to rape women.
Some extracts from this 9-page document:
What could happen if you do not follow those rules?
Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the booklet saying the government wanted to make UK law "explicitly clear".
Finland has also been offering classes on "how to behave towards women" since... 2016. The fact that a government department, under UK Labour, produced a 9-page guide on these points, in this register, suggests that those migrant crime statistics are not so trivial after all. Incredible.
In a time where even legal immigration has become THE hot button topic for the right and even parts of the left, shouldn't it logically follow that people who treat the law and age of consent as optional are not blending in with the doctors and engineers if you DON'T want to harden public opinion against immigration? It's like they're not even trying.
In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.
Indeed, it isn't!
A booklet bears no responsibility. It is a booklet.
The government that produced the useless booklet is also the government that let in culturally-incompatible rapists that, assuming they can even read the booklet, will not waste their time. The government has failed fifteen ways to Sunday and is so deep in the Oedipus Trap that they'll produce a booklet instead of doing anything even remotely theoretically effective.
Edit: oh god i just noticed the examples posted online of the booklet are in English. What an absolute fucking joke.
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If the Jews I hid from the Gestapo proceeded to rape every non-Jewish girl in my neighborhood that they could get their hands on, I would be well within my rights to turn them over to whomever I pleased, or just kill them myself. It's nonsense to say that people need to accept endless victimization to protect other people from endless victimization. If the asylum seekers want help, they can cooperate with their supposed allies instead of defecting.
Like, what are you actually proposing here? That the British keep letting their women be raped? No turning away anybody, ever, as long as there's a war on?
He's proposing that the British take steps to ensure asylum seekers are socialized and understand local laws and customs. Which is what they did and what everyone is complaining about.
I dispute the efficacy of "please don't rape children" pamphlets. I don't think you can actually "socialize" would-be child rapists with mandatory HR training.
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There are many times in life that Doing Something that are so egregiously tone-deaf and counter-productive that they are more likely to make the problem worse. By producing this booklet, the government has almost certainly reduced the rate of assault 0%, but generated even more outrage about the problem and opposition to immigration. It would be too-clever-by-half for fiction; as it is, it's just sad.
Do you really think any rapist has had their mind changed by a brochure? How about one from a completely different culture? I note that the only examples of the brochure publicized are in English. Did some pathological progressive say it would be too racist to distribute them in meaningful languages?
I'm reminded of, during COVID, British Columbia producing propaganda encouraging LGBT+ people (well, we really know which letter, but still) to use gloryholes to avoid face-to-face contact and reduce the spread of COVID. This ran concurrent to advice that people not host holiday parties or visit their dying relatives. Or, like, 90% of similar "harm reduction" ideas. Or the XKCD about voting machines, from back when it was funny.
I mean, yes? What, do you think all non-Europeans are just animals that can't understand words? How do you propose to teach someone the rules of a society - should we strap them down Clockwork Orange-style? Or just chemically castrate them as a prerequisite for asylum?
I know, I know, the real solution is: let's not allow anyone into the country that isn't already a Western liberal. It's a bit late for that though.
Obviously this brochure isn't the complete solution, but it's a step in the right direction that admits to the problem and tries to address it.
I guess it's whether you think the modal immigrant rapist is a mistake theorist or a conflict theorist. Shabir Ahmed moved to the UK when he was six, he absolutely knew the rules. But he also thought that white slags were okay to rape and that Pakistanis were '...the supreme race, not those white bastards' (an exact quote from his trial).
I don't think these guys are children who don't realise that rape is wrong. I think they consider it a wrong (as in, a wrong was done to me) but their circle of empathy doesn't extend to the women of their host society.
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Maybe it's my failure of imagination but my experience with criminals is that they are not dissuaded by brochures. I find it hard to swallow that there's much overlap between "people that think women are second-class citizens, think rape of an unconscious person is acceptable, etc" and "people that are convinced to not do something because of a finger-wagging brochure." I just- I won't say strictly impossible, it's probably not a true null set, but there's probably not many people going "oh I was gonna go rape that 12 year old, but this brochure telling me that's not nice convinced me not to."
Now that is an impressive lack of charity!
I do rather doubt that English is their first language, for the relevant population at hand. I also doubt that potential rapists are dissuaded by polite pamphlets when there's probably no consequences anyways.
Scott's famous pieces like Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled come to mind. The kind of person that needs to be told this and hasn't already learned it is not the kind of person that's going to change their mind by reading.
IIRC Denmark requires migrants to attend language and culture classes to receive any benefits, but doesn't strap them down.
Deporting anyone that refuses to attend the class seems like a fine standard, but since the UK won't even deport rapists if they can avoid it, it's a lost cause.
Second best time to plant a tree and all that. They could at least stop accepting more, but that's apparently too difficult too.
Reasonable punishment for the rapists among them, at least. But alas, someone decided they have a right to recidivate instead.
I'll concede to a little hyperbole, but I was responding to the question 'has any rapist had their mind changed' - not, is this brochure the best way to change minds, but literally 'I don't think a single one of these people could be convinced to stop raping'.
Anyway, I think there's two groups you're conflating. Rapists in modern cultures are generally sociopaths who don't care that what they're doing is wrong. But rapists from these immigrant communities are much more common than the incidence of sociopathy. They see nothing wrong with things that in Western countries we consider rape (e.g. date rape, marital rape, rape of those from a lower caste) because they are from a culture that sees these things as normal. They're not raping because they don't care about the rules, but because they are following different rules. It follows, then, that part of the solution must be educating them on the new rules. Not the whole solution, but a start at least.
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I think people are primarily complaining about how they did it, rather than what.
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Putting aside the euphemism of asylum seeker, I think your argument is somewhat flawed.
Yes, true refugees probably should have a lower standard relative to an immigrant. But there comes a point where the damage caused by refugees outweighs the moral benefit of taking them in.
I think “they rape so much we need to explain ‘rape is bad’” is the line.
The funny thing about rape is the west only made rape illegal in around 1865. It’s not even that ancient of a thing that was practiced in Western Society. A civilized advanced society still had rape legal only 80 years ago.
The interesting thing here is that it’s the asylum seekers who think they have a right to rape the British. That says more about who thinks who has power.
The group that has access to another groups women is generally in power. The group politely asking to not rape their women is generally not politically powerful.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is nowadays to track down the actual Code Noirs in regards to treatment of slaves in the American South?
To quote;
source
Now, there is a valid arguement to be made that the enforcement of said laws wasn't exactly strict, or that there wasn't fair and equatible treatment thereof. But you can't say that, by the written law on paper, that the situation was a case of 'It's free real estate!' for people to do whatever they want with thier female slaves.
And, yes, this is only one case of a very specific state in regards to thier treatment on slaves. But it was also put to paper in 1724. I don't have the time to invest to track down and compare all Code Noirs from that particular time period, or do a comparative analysis on how things changed over time leading up to the Civil War.
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Rape was not legal in the West before slavery was abolished. Slaves just didn't count as "people" and so you were allowed to do many things to slaves that were crimes if done to non-slaves.
Rape was illegal long before 1865. The abolition of slavery did not (finally) criminalize rape; it just added former slaves to the category of people to whom legal protections (theoretically) apply.
I really dislike this disingenuous form of argumentation.
Furthermore I'm pretty sure it wasn't legal to rape other people's slaves at any point -- I don't think it was that common actually for slaves not to be considered "people"; the sticking point was that they were people who you owned. And what's the point of owning someone if you can't have sex with them?
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Do Britains count as people to the asylum seeking groups? Or are they not their people to them?
I think this is where I see the parallel. The asylum seekers don’t view Britains as their tribe and hence the protections from rape don’t apply in their worldview just as Americans didn’t view blacks as people.
You are arguing that Britains were being raped in the modern sense that has been illegal for a long time and I guess I would agree with. My argument is the rape gangs were raping in the far more disrespectful sense that the West even condoned fairly recently of allowing the rape of a rival lesser tribe.
Protections from rape don't apply in their worldview because they are from cultures where rape of their own women is more of a property crime (offense against the woman's father/husband) than a personal violation. Women behaving in their culture the way British women do (i.e., walking around freely not under the obvious protection of a man) are also viewed as fair game.
If they view it as a property crime then me comparing it to raping slaves would seem to be the same thing?
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Although it would also be a contrarian argument, I think it might be fair to say that rape in the modern sense was only made illegal when marital rape was, which was even more recently. That's because it completed a framing shift to ongoing consent; ancient rape was a major crime but a property crime, and the shift to the current understanding was a gradual one.
I'd argue that rape "in the modern sense" has been illegal for centuries. As with abolition, the criminalization of marital rape simply expanded the category of people to whom legal protections against criminal assault applied. (Wives were in a sense considered property of their husbands- much as it used to be legal to beat your children.) You can still read people arguing that marriage implies permanent unconditional consent and therefore marital rape doesn't/shouldn't exist.
Which is why I find @RandomRanger's argument that Africans are not human beings like us unconvincing; low IQ people have problems modeling other people's minds, showing empathy, or thinking about consequences, but it's also downstream of culture. Many Muslim immigrants are not particularly low IQ, but it's their culture that tells them women are property and caring how a woman feels about being raped is like caring how a chicken feels about being eaten. The ancients likewise considered rape a property crime, not because they couldn't understand that women had feelings and didn't like being raped, but because that just wasn't part of their moral framework.
I'm sure culture is one input, but I still think this is over-weighting it. There are real differences in moral emphasis and social control. The profiles of Pakistani grooming gangs and the black men in that video track more closely with impulsivity, low future orientation, weak impulse control, and the simple absence of strong deterrent in low trust environments. I'm not a hardcore HBDer, but there is a genetic component to culture, and human behaviour is driven by continuous feedback loop between genetics and culture.
I don't disagree that there is a hereditary component and that genes affect behavior (and thus culture). I would argue that an African or Arab raised in a Western culture might still be comparatively low in intelligence, impulse control, etc., but would be much less likely to be an amoral barbarian incapable of understanding that rape is bad. We know that African Americans are more likely to be criminals, 13/52 and all that, for reasons HBDers recite endlessly, but the vast majority of African Americans do not act like those South African men.
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What country are you referring to here? As far as I'm aware, rape has been illegal for centuries even in the now third world societies. Do you mean age of consent and/or marital rape?
I thought it was obvious by saying 1865. That would include rape of slaves. I included 80 years ago too because Japan had comfort women during WW2. I think that’s the limits of wealthy nations doing rape recently. Some passport bro stuff still has huge power imbalances but not quite rape. Christopher Columbus did rape with native girls. One of the founding stories of Rome was the Raping of the Sabine.
The my main point is that asylum seekers doing raping is quite odd because it’s usually the more educated and advanced people doing the raping historically. Rape is disrespectful to British in ways that other crime would not be.
But we're discussing rape as a "public security" issue in peacetime. The "random strangers in an alley rip off a teenager's clothes and force themselves on her at 3am" kind, where the perps do not belong to the educated and advanced profile. That has been a crime for centuries, and remains an ambient problem in third world societies. Not really comparable to wartime atrocities IMO. And many of these societies do criminalise that kind of rape, but are hindered by structural challenges in actually enforcing the law. Now China is an advanced country, but marital rape is "legal" there. Yet Chinese men in the west rank bottom in all crime statistics.
Which would be fine if it was peacetime.
But here, one section of the populace is running cover for their very literal footsoldiers, which serves to encourage them to use the local(s as) comfort women.
That doesn't sound like peacetime to me.
This sort of thing is only rape if you think the locals have the right to their own bodies, but judging by how they have reacted to being raped, I think the upper class's view (the people running that cover and the people voting for it[1]) that they do not is completely justified. Americans justified slavery pre-1860 with this observation as well.
By contrast, if you think they do own themselves, the excuses the upper class gave for that were literally "we don't want to give the local populace an excuse to start fighting our
migrantsoccupation force". Though in defense of inaction, rapes are basically just the equivalent to the random rocket-bombings of 1984, where it would be more expensive to fight the Party to have them stop than accepting it's just the cost of doing business[2].[1] Which can either simply be a power thing (these people generally don't have daughters, so that's OK), or they're so morality-porn-brained that they think it's good that the migrants are permitted this kind of salary.
[2] Orwell thinks it's important enough to say they haven't realized, but would it even matter day-to-day if they did? Just as the average Afghani thinks, there is no Britain for them. There is simply 'where can food/water be obtained from, where the lodging is'.
Nationalism is not natural.
I get your hyperbole but peacetime is conventionally understood as "not in active military conflict".
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Japanese comfort women were in areas that Japan had achieved occupation and not as part of a battle followed by mass rape. Japan had legal control at the time over places like Korea. They had administrative control and apparently ratified things like The Hague Convention but still set up mass rape facilities.
And I thinking hiding behind well slavery was legal before 1865 so rape of Africans doesn’t count is weak. US effectively allowed mass rape of other humans as part of slavery.
I think my main point is that the West or the semi-civilized Japan have allowed rape on different tribes under certain conditions. And Asylum seekers raping lower class Britains is a strong sign they don’t view Britains as their tribe. I may be wrong but I don’t think Pakistanis regularly rape Pakistanis but have systems to mitigate that.
I'm not disputing that certain forms of rape were legal in western countries until very recently. Rape is punishable by death in Pakistan, but they have a hard time in actually enforcing the law. I did not get your point before, yes there is a thing as "revenge rape" but I'm unsure about the tribal element. Some 82% of rapists in Pakistan are fathers or brothers of the victim, which don't get reported. It's likely true they don't view Britons as their tribe, but I think they target white girls simply because white people are the UK's majority.
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I'm somehow getting the feeling you are referring to something very specific, and not "you could just drag a random European chick into the bushes, and have your way with her, and it was perfectly legal all the way up to 1865".
1865 was the Thirteenth Amendment. So long as slavery was legal, it was legal to rape slaves.
Is that actually true? The premise does not necessarily imply the conclusion. For example even today, animal ownership is legal, but it is not legal to rape (or torture) animals.
I'll note that I'm not the OP, and also that I didn't mean that slavery being legal entailed that raping slaves must have been legal, I was merely making explicit Opt-out's apparent factual claim that this was so with American slavery pre-1865.
Quickly looking into it, the situation does seem to have been more complex, and unsurprisingly varied from state to state. When it comes to white masters raping their black slaves, no state seems to have been so crass as to explicitly allow it in law, even if it was a widespread practice. That being said, I did find this 1850s Mississippi Supreme Court case which explicitly ruled that "the crime of rape does not exist in this state between African slaves" as "their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners". This seems to decriminalize master-on-slave rape only by implication, but it does at the very least explicitly legalize slave-on-slave rape, so it was sometimes legal to rape slaves.
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I thought you meant "the west" in general, or on average, not "in one of the western countries".
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No they shouldn't. I have no obligation towards Jews. I may help people because I like them. If they don't clear my likeability bar they should raise complaint with the Gestapo.
And no one in Europe aside from Ukrainians and Russians is real asylum seeker.
A phrase I’ve always detested whenever I would hear it goes something like, “First they came for me for I X, then they came for him because I Y, lastly they came for me a second time (or some shit) and there was no one else to defend me,” or some idiotic diatribe like that. There are far too many examples in society of pathologically altruistic people who spend way too much time advocating for the interests of groups who in turn, quickly turn right around and dispose of them at a moment’s notice and never saw them for anything more than a useful idiot to be discarded after all the value had been extracted out of them. I’ve seen it with every group out there including my own family. People who will come to you with a sob story so you’ll take them in and then they proceed eat you out of house and home and after you’ve been consumed and spent, they say to themselves “The well’s all dried up here,” and then they move onto the next victim. They’ll quickly forget you ever existed and stop taking your phone calls when you need them. I had this discussion with a peer a long time ago who did a prison stint for activity he was part of when he was still in a gang. Got out and found he was PNG’d. He said to me, “All that work put in and this is how they’ll treat you. Damn. The hood forgets you really fast.”
I’m an enjoyer of parodies of that poem. One example that has been making the rounds:
First they came for the gypsies—I said nothing for I was not a gypsy.Then they came for the Somalis—and I said “good, make sure you get all the Somalis.”
One I loled at:
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, for I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the migrants, and I did not speak out, for I was not a migrant.
Then all the problems were solved, so they kind of stopped coming for people.
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Wog poetry. Any true son of the soil knows that gypsies are worse.
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That's rather my point (I mean, I'd say there are a few others e.g. Uyghurs, but same difference). As someone who does believe in the moral duty to aid genuine asylum seekers, I dislike the fact that the "asylum seeker" category has been turned into "immigrant 2.0" and massively overstrained. I would like it to get its old meaning back. Therefore, I approve of official documents which acknowledge that coexisting with asylum seekers is not necessarily comfortable; that when and if we choose to grant that status, we do it out of ethical duty, not because we are mistaking the asylum seekers for swell, prosocial immigrants whom we'd love to see put down roots once the crisis is over. Asking if asylum-seekers are a good fit for Western values is a category error, and pretending that they must be before we can let them in is precisely the overreach that lets asylum-seekers trade on public goodwill to turn into permanent residents.
Just to add a little on this point. The other day I briefly caught the first half of a Piers Morgan episode while at work that was pretty hilarious. Shmuley is a guy who has zero self-awareness of how bad of a job he does for his own cause (he’s a 100 on the neurotic scale) and never once in his life learned to simply shut his damn mouth (along with Dershowitz incidentally).
Anyway, at about the 49th red herring he pulls out of his ass, he accused a fellow Nordic of being an immoral guy for refusing to take in Palestinian refugees or advocating for them to seek asylum in Iceland. Shmuley would’ve had a valid point to make, only to the extent that Iceland played an active role in the ongoing destruction in Gaza. The US is responsible solely for its contribution to the problem, of which it’s a co-belligerent and one of the primary enablers if not an outright instigator itself. I will also acknowledge a moral requirement to make good for the harm you’ve caused or participated in and wouldn’t object on those moral grounds that one should be obligated to take in select asylum seekers.
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I think this is a profoundly tasteless context in which to invoke the Holocaust. Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide? Most of the headlines I've seen boil down to "we can't send this man who raped a British woman back to his home country, because he'd be put to death for having committed the same crime over there (which was, in fact, the very thing that prompted him to flee in the first place)".
My point is that they should be - that this is what the legal category "asylum seeker" is supposed to be for - and the booklet makes sense in that context. To the extent that the category has been artificially expanded in a way that makes the booklet look weird, it's the expansion that is to blame, not the booklet.
Well, you know, be the change you want to see in the world and all that.
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I think the revealed preference of a lot of people is that they don't actually want a coherent asylum system, they want a practical one. The moral sentiment of a right to asylum is nice, so people are for it so long as the technological and political situations are such that its full implications are never seen.
That is the mismatch between the populace and the people who have to implement the rules as written.
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