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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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One thing I do enjoy about the Motte is people going out in a blaze of glory. It seems to happen about once every other month or so. This one might be the best ban bait yet.

That said...

When I look at what happened in England, I feel a lot of the same visceral disgust that you do. It feels impossible for such horrific crimes to happen at the so-called "end of history". But it's nothing new. Were these Pakistani monsters worse than the Japanese during WWII? Were the British toffs who let it happen worse than the genteel Germans who looked the other way?

Of course not. Rotherham was bad, but on a world historical scale it's rather mundane. Humans are capable of great evil, and there's nothing racial about it.

The only thing that's particularly strange about this is the who/whom. Rarely until the present moment did a dominant ethnicity allow a minority one to abuse it so violently.

The only thing that's particularly strange about this is the who/whom. Rarely until the present moment did a dominant ethnicity allow a minority one to abuse it so violently.

There was also the class dimension. The pre-colonial-British-descent victims were largely working class.

Were these Pakistani monsters worse than the Japanese during WWII? Were the British toffs who let it happen worse than the genteel Germans who looked the other way?

The Brits that allowed it might or might not be worse, but they're more pathetic. Collaborators are often held in even lower esteem than invaders. The Pakistani gangs are an alien, evil group of invaders. That's horrible, but it's intelligible. If you could find a Chinese guy that was worrying about anti-Japanese sentiment on New Year's Eve of 1937 in Nanking, I'd probably hate him even more than the Japanese soldiers raping their way through the city.

Were these Pakistani monsters worse than the Japanese during WWII?

One noticeable difference is that Chinese officials, to my knowledge, did not cover up what the Japanese may or may not have done in incidents such as the Rape of Nanking. Nor did such officials persecute or prosecute native Chinese who had unwholesome things to say about the Japanese.

Of course they did. China was rife with collaborators, motivated by a combination of self interest, ideology, and domestic politics. Wang Jingwei was Chiang Kai-shek's left wing arch rival within the KMT, who eventually ended up as China's Quisling. He was more than willing to praise Japan post Nanjing, and actually set up the capital there.

I don’t doubt the ROC had turncoats, but where’s the part where there was widespread suppression of knowledge of the massacre by Chinese media and officials, and punishment of Noticers who objected to Japanese presence in China, lest the Japanese become victims of Chinese racism?

Also, Nanjing was already the capital of the ROC before the massacre, and has been the capital of various Chinese governments several times over two millenia. Nanjing just means Southern capital, just as Beijing means Northern capital. It’s not as eye-popping as if a UK official worked with Pakistan to set up a new capital in Rotherham in the aftermath of the scandal.

What's unique and horrifying is no one is fighting back.

The japanese did it and the bloodiest war in human history was the result. This happens in England and no bombs are going off no throats are being slid, no blood-dimmed tide is loosed.

England was the home of Analytical philosophy, rationalism, liberal tolerance, the enlightenment, and this place... That the streets aren't running with blood drawn from garden implements if need be is enough to discredit the entire enterprise.

A man who won't defend his people has discredited the rest about him.

If they can fight back, they will lose, unless that fighting-back can be coordinated at a sufficiently large scale. Perhaps there was some time when outrages produced mobs. Now they do not.

If you just push people to fight back, and there's not coordination or a broad-scale shift in what is within the overton window, don't expect much.

Their dads(well, of the few of the girls who had them) gave up. These girls were abandoned to their fate by the last resort to protect them.

Their dads(well, of the few of the girls who had them) gave up.

No they didn't. There's at least one case of a father being arrested for trying to rescue his daughter - the police weren't just ignoring the systematic rape of working class children, they were actively aiding and abetting it.

Yes, he allowed himself to be arrested and then gave up. He didn’t try to see how many goatfuckers he could take with him.

  • -11

Fighting police officers to the death would not have improved the outcome for his daughter in any way, and most likely would have made things worse for her. The people who you should actually be attacking and blaming in this case are the rapists themselves, the police who protected them and the politicians responsible for the entire state of affairs - not blaming an individual working class father for not turning into Conan the Barbarian and single-handedly murdering several rapists and several more well-armed police officers.