MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
In general you are correct, but in this specific case I remember the moral panic around historical connections to slavery around the time the Edward Colston statue was pulled down in Bristol, and nobody except the aforementioned right-wing trolls connected it to the moral panic about the return of African artifacts (including the Benin Bronzes) going on at roughly the same time.
My theory of Peak Woke is that the pro-establishment left eventually realised that being tarred and feathered by the anti-establishment right was a lot scarier than being called racist on social media by the anti-establishment left.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Nikke featured an artwork where the placement of a female's hand somewhat resembled the small penis gesture
My understanding is that this relates to a Korea-specific moral panic over penis length, rather than being applicable to gender politics more generally. The other key difference with Korea is that the sex (not gender) wars being actively fought on both sides is comfortably inside the Overton window.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
16hr ago
There's people and people. In the UK, the pressure to repatriate the bronzes and the buzz around them came from the progressive crowd who I think were pretty surprised to learn the historical context (I personally didn't know until maybe 2021?) and the pressure to export seems to have dropped considerably. You're right it's not the same, and maybe I was muddying the waters, but I don't know that many torture porn cases so I was feeling out the area.
The pressure to return artifacts has declined because of Peak Woke, not because of the specific connection of the Benin Bronzes to slavery. The claim that the Bronzes belong in the British Museum as lawful trophies of a just war against slavery is mostly advanced as a piece of right-wing trolling, although I believe it unironically.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
17hr ago
That falls into my second category of "teenagers who are above the age of consent but where the age gap is large enough to give curtain-twitchers the ick" - I agree with you that a lot of scolds will at least hint at it, and some will actually call you a "paedophile" straight up. But the British tabloids are careful not to throw around the "paedophile" word when the girl was 17 because it would be legally defamatory. If the girl was 15 essentially everyone would be calling you a paedophile, and would be happy to defend the allegation as straightforwardly true in front of a judge.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The people who wrote the Constitution had crushed Shay's Rebellion already and knew how to deal with the Whiskey Rebellion (and the violent crushing of these rebellions was broadly popular). As of 1789, the primary reason why the well-regulated militia was necessary to the security of a free state was because it could be used to do the crushing - avoiding the need for a (politically dangerous) standing army.
The structure set up by the militia clauses in the Constitution was designed to maximise the centrally controlled military power of the Federal Government within the limits of "no standing army" and the practical impossibility of drilling and training a geographically dispersed militia from Washington DC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
There is no steelman for sex with pre-pubescent children, but the current public understanding of "paedophilia" includes sex with physiologically mature teenagers who are below the local age of consent, and in some cases with teenagers who are above the age of consent but where the age gap is large enough to give curtain-twitchers the ick. The steelman for this expanded definition of "paedophilia" is that it is just normal human sexuality.
Regardless of my views on the underlying merits of what ICE are doing, good.
There is a widespread view, historically on the left and increasingly on the anti-establishment right as well, that participating in a political protest should be a mitigating factor for ordinary violent and property crimes committed by protestors, when it is actually an aggravating factor. (The situation is different if the only crimes committed by the protesters are public order crimes). Political violence (including deliberate property destruction) is more dangerous than random criminal violence, and ideally the punishments should be harsh enough to push the frequency down to zero.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Most families have two cars, and if this sort of a thing was an attractive option you would see more two car families economising on the second car.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Let's take a pause from the gender politics and think about the Canadian language politics. If Seth Hatfield is the perp's real name, then this is an Anglo-Canadian incel who wrote a manifesto in English (based on a quick skim of the citations, I don't think the author is familiar with Francophone culture) and travelled to Quebec to commit incel terrorism.
Will the Quebec elite be able to even pretend to be hurting while they smugly crow about how this proves the moral superiority of French-Canadian culture?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
If the defense of the British establishment
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
if there were 1,000 distinct 'grooming gangs' over the period exained, each one would need to rack up 250 victims to reach that figure
The Rotherham and Telford gangs both had well over 1,000 victims. If every grooming gang was that prolific, you get to 250,000 easily. But they weren't. The third largest gang was Oxford, with about 300 victims. Rochdale and Oldham were in the 100-300 range, and none of the other individual town-level gangs that got busted was over 100.
Like most criminal activity, this looks like a power-law type problem, not a Gaussian-type problem.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
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.
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Reform also ran a disaster-class of a campaign (possibly a sign of the future, possibly a one-off).
They had a candidate who was as thick as pigshit (believing that "let's nominate the local plumber" was a simple way of hacking by-elections in the Manchester suburbs) and had a history of obnoxiously sexist social media posts. But I didn't notice the campaign as such (which, like most potentially winning by-election campaigns, was run by Farage's people) going badly wrong in ways which weren't simply candidate quality.
I doubt that Burnham has the ability to bulldoze through court politics like that.
If he can, it will be by enlisting the Labour Party in the country outside London as an ally against the Deep State. Some of Starmer's silliest failures, with the Chagos deal being the one that gets talked about on the Motte, involve not pushing back against dumb ideas coming out of the Deep State. Five minutes talking to backbenchers representing provincial seats would stop a PM who was in touch with his Party making those mistakes.
Both your links about why "people familiar with Andy Burnham's political career are unimpressed" are to articles by London-based right-wingers. They may be correct on the merits about Burnham's character (and I think Leslie is), but they are not familiar with the facts on the ground in Greater Manchester.
Burnham's constituents in Greater Manchester are impressed - he has won three elections with 60+% of the vote in territory which while Labour-friendly is not that Labour friendly - Labour only won 43% of the vote in Greater Manchester in their 2024 General Election landslide. And then he wins the Makerfield by-election comfortably, beating Reform in one of the to 10% most Reform-friendly seats* in the country with a campaign that focussed on bringing out his personal vote. And the rest of the left are impressed with Burnham precisely because he is popular in his turf. You can't do what he did without being either a more effective governor or a dramatically better communicator than your opponents. Part of what he has done is allowed Manchester proper to get richer** - there is a common cynical view that the structure of local government in the North of England was deliberately set up by Thatcher to encourage northern cities to fight with their suburbs rather than allying with them for regional prosperity (and potentially against London-based Tories). Burnham has managed to convince the rest of Greater Manchester that a successful Manchester is good for places like Makerfield, and delivered on this.
I don't think anyone can fix Labour's problems now - the Tories left the country in enough of a mess that the only workable approach was to double down on (mostly correctly) blaming the Tories (similarly to the tactics used by the incoming coalition in 2010). Within the first 100 days there should have been a big speech with the gist of "Sorry. The Tories ruined the country more than I thought. I am afraid you are going to be suffering the consequences of Tory failure for the next few years while we try to fix the problems". To do that now requires Burnham to turn on Starmer as well as the Tories.
And I don't think Burnham is the kind of politician who would do that if he could, for similar reasons to Ian Leslie. I think there is a "Burnhamism" that could improve the UK in the same way it has improved Greater Manchester (see the writings of Tom Forth for an idea of what it would look like***), but it isn't the left-populist message that Burnham is selling to London-based lefties, and in any case would need a full term without getting blown off by events to deliver benefits on a national level.
* Makerfield isn't just the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to form a government after the next election, it's the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to remain politically relevant. On uniform national swing, it is the 29th Reform target seat.
** Opponents of Burnham say that credit for the economic improvement in Manchester should go to Richard Leese who led the City Council in Manchester proper from 1996 to 2021, not Burnham. This is mostly correct, but it is significant that Burnham supported Leese rather than sabotaging him in order to appeal to left-idiotarians who don't like sensible pro-business local politics and pensioners in the burbs who don't like change.
*** Short summary: A diagnosis of the British Problem as "the potential of the North of England, and particularly cities like Manchester proper, is being wasted" and a programme of promoting local and regional initiative in the North (including normal pro-local-business boosterism from local Labour politicians like Burnham who might otherwise be business-sceptical, although Burnham personally won't be the face of this any more once he is PM), soft YIMBYism (you don't need to "crush the NIMBYs" in the North - they are a lot less organised and powerful than in the Home Counties), and targetted investment in fixing the biggest transport problems in the region. But even though this sounds milquetoast, it isn't compatible with low-energy managerial politics in a geronto-democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
The media always run a "the new PM needs to call an early general election to seek a personal mandate" campaign because general elections are good for business. The only PM to listen was Theresa May, and look how well it worked out for her. Burnham will ignore them.
We don't have a presidential system of government in the UK, and the media wanting one is not a reason to change the constitution, let alone a process for changing it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I think the best diagnosis is that Starmer has allowed things to drift. Some things were drifting in the correct direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the correct direction under Starmer. In particular, gross immigration is falling back to a pre-Boriswave normal and net immigration is falling further (and possibly negative) due to remigration of EU citizens post-Brexit. Some things were drifting in the wrong direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the wrong direction under Starmer. In particular, the minimum wage is drifting upwards faster than the productivity of unskilled workers (Counterintuitively, this was a Conservative policy dating back to the 2015 election) and the construction industry is drifting into overregulated paralysis.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
The technical term for attacking a country you are at peace with without declaring war, or for resuming attacks when a valid ceasefire is in place without publicly announcing you are revoking the ceasefire, is "perfidious". The US attack on Iran should qualify (I won't argue the technicalities), either on basis that the US and Iran are not at war, that the US was a de facto party to the ceasefire ending the 2025 12-day war or because there was an implied ceasefire for the duration of the ongoing nuclear talks in Oman.
If any of the Iranian officials directly involved in the Oman talks were the subjects of a targeted killing this would also be a separate war crime (attacking diplomats) - although it now looks like this was a mad social media threat that was not carried out, rather than something that happened.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Taking this question seriously, I would say the period where it looked like the Oslo accords might work counts (lets say from the Madrid Conference in 1991 which started the Oslo process to the start of the Al-Asqua intifada in 2000).
I wouldn't say I actually felt good about the situation during the period between about 2005 and 2012 when it looked like Israel under a Kadima-led government might be able to meet their security needs by building walls, rather than needing to oppress Palestinians on a day-to-day basis, but it was a lot less dismal than the Israel-Palestine conflict normally is.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Obviously the Chagos deal is also non-ideal for the US.
The Chagos deal was pushed by the US deep state during the Biden administration. That is perfectly compatible with the idea that the deal is non-ideal for the US, but not with the idea that it is a shocking betrayal of the US by the UK.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Now the urgency is over, read the relevant pages on our Rightful Caliph's professional psychiatric website, including in particular his long and frank discussion of inpatient psychiatric admission because you need to decide how much effort you will put into avoiding (or, possibly, forcing) an inpatient admission if this happens again.
There isn't any other comparable online resource on psychiatry targetted at 120+ IQ non-clinicians.
It is also worth noting that if you have one, your regular GP/primary care doc is a lot less scary than a psychiatrist or an ER psychiatric nurse and part of what they are trained to do is triage the distinction between "you need a shrink right now" or "you need a shrink when you have time and money to see a shrink"
Identify as bisexual. Then you can come out of hiding and any SJW/woke who attacks you is engaged in biphobia. You don't need to actually sleep with someone of your own sex to be bisexual nowadays.
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