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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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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;

VI. We forbid our white subjects, of both sexes, to marry with the blacks, under the penalty of being fined and subjected to some other arbitrary punishment. We forbid all curates, priests, or missionaries of our secular or regular clergy, and even our chaplains in our navy to sanction such marriages. We also forbid all our white subjects, and even the manumitted or free-born blacks, to live in a state of concubinage with blacks. Should there be any issue from this kind of intercourse, it is our will that the person so offending, and the master of the slave, should pay each a fine of three hundred livres. Should said issue be the result of the concubinage of the master with his slave, said master shall not only pay the fine, but be deprived of the slave and of the children, who shall be adjudged to the hospital of the locality, and said slaves shall be forever incapable of being set free. But should this illicit intercourse have existed between a free black and his slave, when said free black had no legitimate wife, and should said black marry said slave according to the forms prescribed by the church, said slave shall be thereby set free, and the children shall also become free and legitimate ; and in such a case, there shall be no application of the penalties mentioned in the present article.

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.

The funny thing about rape is the west only made rape illegal in around 1865.

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?

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?

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.

but it's their culture that tells them women are property

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.

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.

But we're discussing rape as a "public security" issue in peacetime.

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 migrants occupation 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.

That doesn't sound like peacetime to me.

I get your hyperbole but peacetime is conventionally understood as "not in active military conflict".

I don't think he intends it as hyperbole.

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.

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.

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.

I thought you meant "the west" in general, or on average, not "in one of the western countries".