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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32878 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Quran damaged at school recorded as ‘hate incident’ by police

The home secretary has expressed concern after the police recorded a “hate incident” at a school where four pupils allegedly caused “slight damage” to a copy of the Quran.

West Yorkshire police became involved at Kettlethorpe High School, Wakefield, after a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game. It was damaged, allegedly after being dropped in a busy corridor.Four pupils were suspended for a week and the police intervened as false rumours spread that it had been set alight.

Inspector Andy Thornton addressed concerned parents at the local mosque and told them the damage was being treated as a “hate incident”.

Tudor Griffiths, the headmaster, said there had been “no malicious intent” but the pupils’ actions were “unacceptable”. Wakefield council said the Quran had suffered “slight damage”.

You can also watch this hostage apology video from the mother, apologizing, earnestly explaining Islamic dogma while wearing a hijab like she's some Dhimmi. I don't know how to put my contempt for that entire situation into words.

This to me seems like more confirmation of by now an ancient belief of mine: being an alleged victim group that's willing to kill people is worth more than the sum of its parts. If everyone just admitted that the fear here was that Muslims would riot, hurt the family or just generally misbehave there would be no doubt that what happened was deeply ominous and the police - and everyone - would have to pick a side.

However, because there's the patina of victimhood, actions that should be deeply worrisome instead get to be written off as defending against racism. A Swedish man being able to reliably trigger violence by burning a book is somehow not a worrying signal from the minority group, it's about Swedish "far right" types. We wasted a lot of time debating whether Charlie Hebdo was "Islamophobic" , as if it had anything to do with the price of tea in China.

The desire to cast all ethnic groups as oppressors and victims prevents basic analysis here.

The standard argument I've seen against hate speech law is that we can't punish what's in people's minds. But maybe we can add: you can't trust people to treat minorities and their differences sensibly. As in: we're apparently doomed to conflate "racism" against "gooks" for owning all of the grocery stories with being worried about groups that can be reliably triggered into illiberalism and, even worse, outgroup violence by not-even violations of medieval norms (this isn't the first time that straight lies have been used to enflame this issue)

And nobody can do anything with this information. Cause it's racist.

And yes, I think it possible the police acted quickly (and out of proportion) to forestall the sort of drama we've seen elsewhere when Islamic norms are violated. Hell, it might have even been to the boy's benefit for people to hear that the police are on it so they don't seek self-help (until everyone lets it go). But, if that's your local maximum, you're far too close to Pakistan for my liking.

This is part of the reason I’ve basically decided to admit I’m a bigot up front so I can have intellectual honesty.

After the DOE came out saying lab leak seems correct (or possible or likely etc) I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians (which I think was mostly just reclassify normal violence as hate violence; also widely done by blacks and not the people who were talking about lab leak early on). Then I came across official lefties spreading that message and understood why it was being parroted further into the internet as the official tribe “narrative”.

This is a I would say worse than your example - with Muslims I do think it’s direspectful to purposely damage another groups sacred objects and the group of kids actually did something wrong; though blown massively out of proportion. In the lab leak case there’s nothing wrong with doing scientific analysis (I guess only my view) trying to figure out why a deadly pandemic occurred. But “violence” is nonetheless the cited reason why it can’t be talked about (or that might be a euphemism for Trump talked about it and he can’t be right).

And to a third degree labeling something “racism” or “violent” that a group is talking about can then cause “violence” on the group labeled “racists”. We’ve had violence against conservatives by crazy people who now associated those people with being actual Nazis.

At this point I’m not sure how humans can even talk about anything since any discussion could make a group look bad and then be justification by some crazy person to do violence against them.

The whole 'Anti Asian Hate' rhetoric has always felt like a weird attempt to bandwagon racial animosity/'Me Too' the whole BLM thing.

In the vast majority of Western nations, especially the developed post-colonial ones, Asians have the best average life outcomes in terms of education, income, crime, lifespan etc.

As an aside: Early during Covid there was a narrative for a couple of weeks of east Asian business owners experiencing racism from the majority population in them not visiting their businesses out of fear of covid. Plenty of people repeated this on twitter, opinion columns were written and even state officials made mild comments in that same direction.

Then a news paper did a small investigation where they went around and asked Asian restaurant owners what their experience was and it turned out that yes they were suffering economic hardships but not because the native Swedes didn't come, because they still did, but because their co-ethnics didn't, because they consumed a lot of Chinese media...

It wasn't the Asians trying to start this and noone had even really bothered to ask them what was going on before they ran with the xenophobia narrative.

I don't mean this to challenge. merely to ask. do you remember that exact newspaper? I'd love to have that saved for posterity when arguing about this in person in the future.

I believe it was SvD but it could have been DN as well, I can't find the article though after googling a little. The whole issue quickly became moot when the country locked down a month later.

The one article I found that explicitly mentioned the number of customers was in Expressen though and it's behind a paywall so can't tell you what it's says beyond the headline. I don't read Expressen though so I doubt I remember it from there.

Also, it seems I had forgotten that the Chinese ambassador was trying to stir up shit as usual, but that's its own issue.

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