Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
13d ago
If there goal is recession avoidance at any cost, and it's lockdowns that risk triggering a recession, there's a really easy way to succeed. Just don't do lockdowns. Not to mention most of the anglosphere has plenty of room for unpopular policies on deregulation (particularly construction) that would do more to raise GDP and be less unpopular than mass immigration.
Actual ideological belief in both lockdowns and mass immigration is more likely than a failed attempt at popularitymaxing.
Tophattingson
14d ago
A big unanswered question is why so much of the anglosphere decided to dramatically increase net migration after 2020-2021. UK, Canada, Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand all see a slow upward trend turn into a sharp upward trend after borders opened back up. Perhaps in the US as well but I am having an awful time actually tracking down net numbers.
Tophattingson
18d ago
The 16 years + 1,400 figure come from the same report, the Jay Inquiry, which estimated 1,400 over those 16 years. In other words, the length of time could be longer, but if it is the number of victims would go up.
Are we sure all these victims are from the 70k people in the Rotherham town limits and not any if thethe 270k people in the surrounding area?
The gang certainly operated within Rotherham town limits. The most likely alternative target in the surrounding area is not the rest of the borough (which gets rural) but instead Sheffield. No, we don't know.
How are anything around 1/6 young girls practically abandoned by their parents in this town? What horrible societal breakdown occurred to produce so many un-cared-for children? Googling a bit I see talk of Rotherham having low unemployment. Housing is relatively expensive. But it's not a ghetto.
This is a misunderstanding of UK class structure but I think is probably beyond the scope of what I can explain. Rotherham is actually extremely poor. Mostly bottom 10% of the country bad via "Index of Multiple Deprivation". It just doesn't show up in unemployment because in the UK you are either employed, briefly between jobs, or on some kind of scheme where you aren't employed but not unemployed either. The actual level of economic inactivity in the area is 28.7%, higher than the 21.2% average for England.
Tophattingson
18d ago
The second targeted demographic mentioned is usually travellers (i.e Roma), which gets lumped in with white in census data.
Metropolitan Borough refers to the type of local government, not that Rotherham is a large metropolis with Rotherham Town at it's centre. And the map you linked randomly includes Swinton (population 15k) and Wath upon Dearne (population 16k) with Rotherham. You are otherwise right to question whether this is the best number to use. The Rotherham Grooming Gang seems to have been specifically based in the town proper, but this doesn't necessarily mean their victims were limited just to the town, or even to the Metropolitan Borough. Sheffield is the likely alternative target. But it's also possible Sheffield has it's own separate grooming gang.
Tophattingson
19d ago
I calculated it myself last August (while considering potential causes of our riots at the time, one of which was in Rotherham) and it is a reasonable approximation that 1 in 3 girls who lived in Rotherham while they were within the targeted age range would have been victims.
Rotherham the town has a population of 71,535. Of this, 20.5% are under 16, and the actual targeted age range was 11-16, so assuming that age distribution from 0 to 16 is even (reasonable, people move away after 16 for university), Rotherham has 5,500 people aged 11-16. Only females were targeted, so make that 2,250. And then only Whites, 78% of the population, were targeted, so 1,760. But as there were 1,400 victims over a 16 year period, that would have been enough for the demographic cohort to be replaced 2.7 times, so the actual size of the targeted population would have been 4,750. So if you were a 11-16 year old white female in Rotherham during this period, there was a 30% chance you would be gang-raped by Pakistani men, probably multiple times. That is not rare. To express this another way, even assuming each victim was only attacked once, this corresponds to a sexual assault rate of 4,971 per 100,000 for this demographic. Compare to the worst city-level homicide rates in the world, which struggle to exceed 100 per 100,000.
Tophattingson
19d ago
I did some calculations on this back in August elsewhere, so I might as well finish the job and present a model using demographic data from here.
Rotherham the town has a population of 71,535. Of this, 20.5% are under 16, and the actual targeted age range was 11-16, so assuming that age distribution from 0 to 16 is even (reasonable, people move away after 16 for university), Rotherham has 5,500 people aged 11-16. Only females were targeted, so make that 2,250. And then only Whites, 78% of the population, were targeted, so 1,760. But as there were 1,400 victims over a 16 year period, that would have been enough for the demographic cohort to be replaced 2.7 times, so the actual size of the targeted population would have been 4,750. So if you were a 11-16 year old white female in Rotherham during this period, there was a 30% chance you would be gang-raped by Pakistani men, probably multiple times. That is not rare. To express this another way, even assuming each victim was only attacked once, this corresponds to a sexual assault rate of 4,971 per 100,000 for this demographic. Compare to the worst city-level homicide rates in the world, which struggle to exceed 100 per 100,000.
TL;DR between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 is reasonable for Rotherham. As for the whole country, that gets harder. How do you extrapolate Rotherham to the rest of the country to get an upper bound worst case scenario? Probably via demographics? Rotherham has 60 convictions and therefore 23 victims per perpetrator. It's population is 15.5% Asian, which isn't all Pakistani Muslim, but that group is probably around 10% of the population, so ~7,150 people. So about 1 in 120 of this demographic are perpetrators. The total Pakistani Muslim population of the UK is 1.6m, so if everywhere is as bad as Rotherham, there would be about 13,300 perpetrators and 300,000 victims. So I'd say the claim of "hundreds of thousands" is at least within the bounds of plausibility but a million is right out. This all has the caveat that it's entirely reliant on applying current demographic numbers to crimes that, as so far investigated, were largely carried out in the 90s and 00s. If the gangs are an ongoing problem, or if the Pakistani population in Rotherham was far smaller in the 90s, then the numbers change a lot.
Tophattingson
19d ago
This week, the big story is the Rotherham grooming gangs. I'm not exactly sure why it's being revisited now, but every other story in my feed is about the horrific crimes and the massive coverup which extends in England to this day. Perhaps people smell blood in the water. Kier Starmer, the incredibly unpopular PM of the UK, was head of CPS during the critical years. It seems he chose not to aggressively prosecute many of the monsters who gang-raped 13 year olds.
Probably worth adding context that this isn't just twitter rabblerousing. It made the jump to much of the rest of the media in about 24 hours, and merited responses from prominent politicians including a former PM.
Tophattingson
25d ago
If you have lung cancer and are in your 80s you're going to be dead soon enough anyway. There's pretty much no demographic that can clearly gain QALY from covid restrictions. To give specific numbers people in their 80s have a life expectancy of 2.5 years and an IFR of 8.5%, so avoiding covid is worth only 77 days. You likely have poor quality of life as is (so you have less QALYs to lose) and abiding by restrictions will reduce that quality from poor to near zero.
And a related note, but most covid comorbidites have small effects compared to just being older. In other words, the hypothetical 40 year old lung cancer patient still does not benefit because covid is about as dangerous to them as it is to a healthy 45 year old. If there is an exception to this, and it's a big if, it's kidney disease, not cancer.
Tophattingson
28d ago
If Barnhart thinks that a cause has to be difficult and brave to be worthwhile, then maybe he should switch to an even harder, more controversial cause than the poor, sick, or homeless. So why not advocate for Nazis instead? In reality, nobody, including Barnhart, decides what causes to support on that basis.
It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it.
Even having to play devil's advocate, the response seems pretty easy to me, because the argument Dave Barnhart made is incredibly self-refuting. He's not listed good reasons to support abortion. He's listed good reasons to oppose abortion and inexplicably framed these good reasons as bad.
"Thank you for pointing out how easy it is to advocate for the unborn. How undemanding they are. How morally obvious. And how even those without money, power or privilege are just as capable of advocating for and protecting the unborn as the rich, powerful and privileged are. But this only raises the question of why you, despite recognising how easy and morally uncomplicated it is to advocate for them, still fail to do so."
Yeah this could do with some editing to make it slightly snappier but it's not my argument, so that's best left as an exercise for an adherent.
As for the second paragraph, it would be less snappy, but you can just respond to that by saying there's no reason to only care about one thing. Does someone who cares about the poor therefore not care about the sick? No. So why exclusively apply such reasoning to someone who cares about the unborn?
Tophattingson
1mo ago
One contributor to the UK's economic dysfunction is probably that we have a slim majority of the population with living standards that have been entirely insulated from the wider state of the economy, by pensions, welfare, or otherwise. Causes all kinds of political malincentives to place almost all the burden on a dwindling share of gainfully employed childbearing-age adults, while giving them nothing in return. The prescription exemptions are just a tiny fraction of the whole system.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
I'm joking obviously, but the way that people on Reddit are talking about this murder is frankly concerning.
There's a reason far-left governments turn into skull factories within 5 minutes of coming to power. It may be concerning but it shouldn't be surprising. Once Reddit (or similarly far-left dominated communities) manage to coordinate deciding that some individual or group be put to death, they're not going to be quiet or subtle about it.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
A) Cremieux argues that much of the gap in life expectancy between America and Europe is due to obesity. But America is good at one thing at least – spending money on health care. Combine high spending with effective weight loss drugs, and the U.S. is on track to significantly narrow its life expectancy gap with Europe.
Self-driving cars will close the gap further.
The comparison between America and Western Europe is usually done because they are seen as peer developed countries. But after 15 years of no meaningful economic growth in much of Western Europe. the U.S is on track to no longer have European countries as it's peer, but rather sit entirely above them in it's own category. The U.S. can buy its way to higher life expectancy not because it's good at spending money on healthcare, but because it has the money to spend on healthcare.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome seems like a very strange choice for the latest brand of anxiety-like illness. Unlike all the others, it's an existing disease with diagnostic criteria, symptoms that are pretty exclusive to it, and a suspected genetic cause. Are people now claiming to have Ehlers-Danlos despite lacking connective tissue symptoms?
Tophattingson
1mo ago
I prefer to describe these as anxiety-like illnesses, since they're all co-morbid with each other and with anxiety, and share demographics. Yes, that includes hysteria.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
The White Genocide conspiracy theory can also be steelmanned as people using an overly-expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, akin to the one originally proposed by Lemkin:
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
And then the flaw of the steelman is that if we were to revert to Lemkin's original wording we'd have to reclassify a lot of stuff that isn't treated as genocide as such, and then would inevitably need a new word to replace genocide to describe the narrower meaning.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts.
To add to this, if "conspiracy theory" was used in a neutral way instead of only being used against right-wing beliefs, then supporters of the mainstream response to COVID are conspiracy theorists. After all, they believe, without evidence, that masks stop covid, in the same way that a tinfoil hat might block mind control. They believe, without evidence, that imprisoning the entire population in their own homes, for just two weeks, with a "real" lockdown, will make covid go away. And they believe that governments that don't do this, such as Florida under DeSantis, are conspiring to commit mass murder while covering up the true number of deaths. Similarly, they treat all opposition to policies they support as motivated by criminal conspiracy (by some combination of Trumpists, Russians, the religious, or far-right) rather than by differing opinions or priorities.
Pretty much every crank view on the right has an equivalent on the left, just couched in academic language and with institutional support. There's plenty on the left that believe in a "Trans Genocide" or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, to state the obvious equivalents to white genocide conspiracy theories. And as for broader conspiratorial worldviews like QAnon, critical theory is just that: a conspiracy theory. Just one that's popular enough in academia that it dodges the definition.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Muslims are definitely not fargroup in the UK yet this pattern still holds.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
And for what it's worth from an Atheist, I've only ever seen this attitude get applied towards Christians, not towards the religious in general. Opposing e.g. Islamophobia has the baked-in assumption that Muslims can't simply choose to not be Muslim to avoid discrimination. But when it comes to discriminating against 'fundies' there's no such consideration.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
North Korea has performed six nuclear tests since 2006. Based on this alone there's about a 17% chance that North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon in any 6 month period. But with only 6 weeks of the year left, the chance should now be 4%. That prediction market was broken from the start because nobody seemed to account for the most likely nuclear use case.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Vernon Dursley is the director of a mid-sized company. Second paragraph of the first book.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.
The books and films might have lowered his mannerisms below what you'd expect for such a position, but that's because it's meant to be a negative stereotype. And part of that negative stereotype is that he gets to be the director of a distinctly unfashionable business, rather than working in a high-paid but fashionable (for the 90s) profession.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Harry Potter's adoptive parents are an overtly negative stereotype of the Tory-supporting upper middle class, as would have been understood when the series began in the 90s.
I believe this is the same phenomena playing out on Wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_engagements_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
Oh, it's been changed since I last saw it. It previously had a result column that listed Hamas as the victor to most engagements. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_military_engagements_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war&oldid=1265753911
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