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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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I came to this thread today hoping to find a steelman somewhere, so thank you.

Is there any additional steelman for the cases themselves? The screenshots on twitter from official reports that show 13 year olds being gang raped multiple times by multiple groups in single days, being pulled out of police stations to be raped in cars, are all just.... insane.

What's the median rape case here? A troubled girl exchanging sex for alcohol and drugs? (I don't ask this to diminish that as a crime). I can't possibly believe examples like the above are anywhere close to average across 3,000 kids.

The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?

Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing. Activists continue to beat the drums about Rape Culture, and accuse campuses of providing impunity to rapists, promoting disrespect of and aggression against women. But, inconveniently, the numbers show that girls in college are much less likely to be sexually assaulted than girls in the same age group not in college. Whatever bad things colleges and fraternities were accused of doing, they weren't delivering much VORR! It's tough to make the argument that colleges were particularly bad on sexual assault (at least not without making the kind of racist/classist arguments on demographics that campus feminists would sooner be raped than make out loud).

Similarly, as an American Catholic I've endured a thousand lazy pedo-priest jokes, and probably made quite a few myself though I think mine are clever and cutting rather than lazy. And while the abuses of the Catholic church are horrible, they've turned out not to be nearly unique. Rather, Catholics suffer for being the largest and most organized denomination in America, and as such the abuses are larger in scale, and are easily attributable to The Catholic Church, where stripmall startup Evangelicals and Megachurches only represent themselves. The Southern Babtist Convention, the second largest denomination, and Jehovah's Witnesses have turned up similar piles of cases. And the independent evangelical megachurches haven't done much better. This clown got caught in a sting operation soliciting a minor for sex and showing up to meet her at a motel, plead it out in some corrupt bullshit where he went to counseling, and now he's back in the pulpit every Sunday in Virginia Beach for a huge congregation. So, has the Catholic Church done wrong? Sure. But do they have much VORR over other denominations? That's a tougher question.

Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.

Or it might be a case that genuinely delivers a great deal of VORR, I haven't actually read much about it in years and years as this case is so old at this point, and I have no idea where one would find an unbiased source.

Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners - I would be just as outraged if they were native Britons, Americans, Australians, Dutch or Israelis. What is actually responsible for my outrage is the total dereliction of duty on the part of the police, legal system and media... but that wouldn't happen, because the explicit reason for their dereliction of duty was to avoid inflaming racial tensions.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners

It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.

It is, if they were native brits this wouldn't have happened. Those in power are not only cowardly the are also traitors.

There were numerous paedo scandals involving white perps which broke around the same time as Rotherham. Jimmy Savile was the most media-friendly, but in terms of numbers of victims the various scandals in children's homes were the biggest. But the number of different sex abuse scandals that broke after Savile died was so large that it two years just to define the remit of the enquiry into them.

Arguing about cold cases of child sex abuse was the current thing in the UK for most of the 2010's, and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser. (And this isn't UK-specific - this was going on during the height of the Epstein era).

and it eventually became clear that abuse of chav-tier teens had been de facto decriminalised regardless of the race of the abuser.

And fathers trying to rescue their kids from the abusers were also getting arrested, and social workers were arguing that "well ackshully that 14 year old gave consent"?

And fathers trying to rescue their kids from the abusers were also getting arrested, and social workers were arguing that "well ackshully that 14 year old gave consent"?

The system arresting non-custodial fathers who try to protect a child from abusers - SOP. Admittedly the abuser is normally the custodial mother's new boyfriend, not a rape gang. The case where the stories about fathers being arrested first went viral in the UK was the Oxford gang, who targetted girls who were in foster care or children's homes, who had been taken away from their parents for a (not necessarily good or sufficient) reason. Noncustodial fathers are the one group of potential abusers that the system does protect kids from.

"Well Ackshully that 14 year old gave consent?" - institutionalised by Gillick. See Winston Smith for what the culture was like in UK children's homes at the time - back in those days left-idiotarian social workers profoundly and genuinely believed that adult authority figures should not have enough control over teenage girls to stop them engaging in ill-advised and illegal sex.

The system arresting non-custodial fathers who try to protect a child from abusers - SOP.

Ok, if you want to say that there was nothing particularly partial about how Rotherham and Muslim rape gangs were handled, I'll try to keep an open mind.

What doesn't sit right with me here is the amount if denial around this particular episode. There were a handful of people making your argument (I was giving Julie Bindel some shit the other day, but I think she was essentially making your argument at the time these stories were coming out), but other than that essentially no one was saying "oh yeah, this is just like the Oxford gang". They either stayed really really quiet hoping it will all go away, or outright dismissed it as a conspiracy theory.

The other thing that doesn't fit, is that even if police were trained to arrest fathers / stepfathers / mothers' boyfriends attempting retrieve underage girls, that still does not explain the police returning the girls into the custody of a known brothel.

Finally, assuming you're right about all this, and the British system was really just this fucked up, and it had nothing to do with Muslims or immigrants, all that changes is the amount of bodies that need to be hanging from lampposts, and I'm not even referring to rapists here.

"Well Ackshully that 14 year old gave consent?" - institutionalised by Gillick.

I heard about it re: trans issues, but I thought this is restricted to medical decisions? The wiki seems to confirm this, and mentions several exceptions even in that context. How does it relate to prostituting underage girls?

that still does not explain the police returning the girls into the custody of a known brothel.

Because they saw these girls as criminals not victims. Prostitutes, drug addicts, habitual liars. The police has a vast exposure to the underclass and most of that exposure is to put it mildly not positive. Add in sexism, classism and police simply did not have any empathy for these girls. In essence they were blaming the victim. It's just what girls like this do. Exchange money and drugs for sex. Terms used by cops about the victims included "undesirables", "druggies", "habitual liars" and that's in official notes! That they were sluts and whores was taken to be axiomatic. While solicitation, pimping and operating a brothel are technically illegal and prostitutions itself was not, the attitude of police to sex workers was, well not great. As an example this is them publicly talking about a serial killer(!) of prostitutes in the 80's in Yorkshire, the same county as Rotherham.

"has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies."

"Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women."

Some of his attacks were on victims as young as 14. Yet the only ones they cared about were "innocent girls" (i.e. not prostitutes).

Cops long exposure to underclass behavior (whether white, black or otherwise), makes them develop certain attitudes, and social workers are often no different. They may have 30 kids on their books, half of them run away, another half are sneaking out to go to night clubs at 13, some are addicts, some are thieves, some are having sex for drugs or money, and the idea this is all just normal behavior for these people is insidious. Social workers becoming jaded and burning out is ubiquitous. However it was also left wing social workers who were responsible for blowing the whistle. And many did in fact make reports to the police which were ignored.

Half of the issue was the race of the perps, but the other half is a combination of classism and sexism and the fact that for many of these girls were seen more as troublemakers and criminals than victims.

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Gillick said that the NHS could provide contraceptives to girls under the age of consent even if the parents didn't want them to. The Law Lords (at the time the UK's de facto Supreme Court) ruled on the basis that this was a case about medical decision-making where the controlling legislation was the laws setting up the NHS. The Court of Appeal ruling that the Law Lords overturned said that this was a case about the scope and limits of parental authority and that the the relevant legislation was the 1969 Family Law Reform Act (which lowered the age of majority from 21 to 18, and allowed certain rights at 16 including medical decision-making). Two of the three Court of Appeal judges said obiter that if the case needed a "best interests of the child" analysis (they thought it didn't and children under 16 couldn't consent to any medical treatment as a matter of black-letter law) then the existence of the criminal law prohibiting underage sex meant that it couldn't be in the best interests of a child.

So the legal framework which the Law Lords overturned in Gillick was one where age of consent laws were an additional reason (beyond general principles of family law) to uphold parents' rights to control their underage daughters' sexual behaviour. And the framework Gillick created was one where age of consent laws are irrelevant to the relationship between government service providers and underage girls.

There’s a strain of progressive who believes that telling girls(and it does seem specific to female-identified persons) they can’t have sex is unacceptable under any circumstances, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was overrepresented among these social workers.

Yes, social workers are a problem.

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Seconded. I've tried not to comment on this topic, but my personal take is that this is a tragedy and a farce that so many were failed, and all the qualifications about how little could be done to not fail the victims can't overpower the tragedy-porn aspect of it for me.

The steelman against taking harsh illiberal action towards any particular target over a rape panic is that one needs to talk about averages. What's the Value Over Replacement Rapist (VORR) that the Paki immigrants are bringing to the table here?

Frequent panics have been had on American college campuses about rape, and particularly about Fraternities, with the result that colleges have forced organizations dating back decades to close their doors, and that campuses set up kangaroo courts to persecute young men who were even vaguely accused of wrongdoing.

This is not a steelman that is consistent with the opinions of people who actually complain about rape panics against immigrants.

I guess I'm not sure what the philosophical heart of steelmanning is, in my mind I'm extending absolutely maximal charity by assuming that they're lying, and are in reality thinking bad and mean but true things they won't say out loud. That may be outside the bounds of this conversation.

Uh, I kinda hope not to hear the answer, but can you find a case of a preteen girl outside of a war zone being gang raped by multiple groups of western men in the same day without any apparent coordination? I’ll reckon you can’t. You can find some who were gang raped by an equivalent number of perpetrators in a single instance, and some sex trafficking victims with strong coordination by a pimp.

This specific behavior is a Muslim thing.

Wait, are you missing context here? The grooming gangs were grooming the girls into prostitution using the tried and tested "boyfriend" method. Some of Muslim men in question WERE their pimps, while some were "johns". The "boyfriends" would then sell access to them to other men for drugs and money. Which is how the police often came in contact with the girls, and wrote them off as drug addicted prostitutes, undesirables, and habitual liars.

So strong coordination by a pimp is exactly what we had here. The "boyfriend" model (for grooming) and the so called "party" model for groups of men with coerced girls is common throughout the world, unfortunately. From Epstein to Diddy probably.

About 20% of members of these gangs in England are Asian (which is a strong over-representation compared to demographics, just to be clear) but simply due to numbers most grooming and prostitution gangs in England are mostly white, largely with the exact same MO. The actual methods used are not unusual at all within the CSE playbook.

So there was coordination here, that is in fact the whole point. If there wasn't they wouldn't be grooming gangs. The pimp would bring a girl to one "party", then the next and so on.

https://www.salon.com/2009/10/27/gang_rape/

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41514602

https://www.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/cuap/db.cgi?uid=default&ID=5350&view=Search&mh=1

Just a couple random cases. I've worked on a few similar cases that I'd prefer not to share anything about.

The world on its margins is so much grimmer than imaginable.

There was a fairly infamous case in Cleveland, TX in 2010. Some might debate "Western men" here, but those charged were American citizens as far as I know, not MENA immigrants. Maybe some of them were Muslim, but probably not all.

the girl who was raped was placed by the Child Protective Services in the care of the Girls' Haven in Beaumont, Texas. In December 2011, she ran away from the residential facility and was "on the streets for about a week," as the Jefferson County prosecutor stated. He revealed that, at some point, she met a 30-year-old male with a prior conviction as a drug dealer in Fort Bend County, who subsequently assaulted her at his apartment in Beaumont. The assailant was arrested and pleaded guilty in September 2012 to aggravated sexual assault of a child in exchange for deferred probation. In 2013, the girl revealed she was pregnant, allegedly from her "15-year-old boyfriend," and that they would keep the baby.

Holy shit dude.

Fair enough, although I’ll note that authorities just pressed ahead with charges despite all the perpetrators being African American(which is definitely western even if it isn’t white), and it was taken seriously by the powers that be.

Uh, I kinda hope not to hear the answer, but can you find a case of a preteen girl outside of a war zone being gang raped by multiple groups of western men in the same day without any apparent coordination?

So - this is not the exact same thing, but a reasonably popular song by TI (ft. Kendrick Lamar and Kris Stevens) reminiscing about childhood opens with TI talking about gangbanging someone with mental disabilities:

Aye, in my apartment a long time ago
I knew a bad bitch, but she was kind of slow
Still gave it up when it's a few of us
She let me finger fuck her on the school bus
We used to cut school with her and run train
She want to hang with us, we want one thing
Just penetrating her throat, dawg
She choke on it like smoke, dawg

These, of course, weren't men, more kids of the same age, but consent-wise, it probably balances out with her being a simpleton. Multiple dudes fucking underage girls happens in the west too.

Well, people writing songs about multiple dudes fucking underage girls.

If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud

Isn't it worse because law enforcement and media are highly motivated to scrutinize i.e. the Catholic Church but those same institutions circle the wagons to protect Pakistanis from just legal and reputational punishment, all on the altar of Liberal Values?

Isn't it worse because law enforcement and media are highly motivated to scrutinize i.e. the Catholic Church

Well the whole point was they weren't highly motivated for quite some time right? There were cover ups and priests were allowed just to be moved around rather than arrested etc. I heard jokes about "pedo" priests in the 70's after all, and it didn't start coming to a head until the 2000's. And indeed the reports go back through the 50's and before. With: .."government, police, and church had colluded in an attempt to cover up the allegations"

So back in the 80's to 90's the media and law enforcement weren't really highly motivated to scrutinize the Catholic Church either. Despite some stories throughout the 80's, Sinead O'Connor raising it on SNL in 92, it wasn't really until a decade later anything much came of it, with the Boston Globe story in 2002.

The grooming gang story broke in a big way just 9 years later in 2011. The very earliest the media at least could have been on the grooming gang story was maybe 2001, more likely ,through 2006 with Heal's study. Before that the main issue preventing discovery of the activity was the cops treating the victims as drug addicted, lying prostitutes rather than victims (as very evident in some of the note's taken at the time, even when they had no idea who the pimps and so on were).

If anything the consensus broke much faster with the Pakistani gangs than it did with the Church.

It's been the subject of huge media coverage, jokes, movies, TV shows, everything for decades now. Comparing timelines seems nonsensical to me. The story hasn't really "broken" as much as non-institutional actors are making the story go viral, forcing the issue on a media and legal apparatus that wants to sweep it under the rug. There's no basis to say the Catholic Church has gotten less scrutiny than this story related to the Pakistani gangs.

he story hasn't really "broken" as much as non-institutional actors are making the story go viral, forcing the issue on a media and legal apparatus that wants to sweep it under the rug.

The story was broken in 2011 in a big way by a standard journalist in a newspaper. That journalist won a national award for his work and is working for The Times. There is no way to frame him as a non-institutional actor. Jayne Senior the social worker who attempted to raise the issue with police was working for the local government, and was awarded an MBE in 2016 for her efforts. Convictions even started in 2010.

The story going viral now is a decade late, so it certainly cannot be said that non-institutional actors were the ones who broke it. It was broken already. They are rehashing it sure, making it go viral internationally absolutely. But it was exposed years ago.

None of that is to say it shouldn't have been broken earlier, but it was traditional media which broke the story into the UK public consciousness, 14 years ago. Just like with the Catholic abuse scandal with the Boston Globe in 2002.

Probably. But at least in an American context I'm unconvinced that the cops have started throwing the book at people like John Blanchard.

Most of the perpetrators followed the "boyfriend" model. They ply vulnerable girls with alcohol, drugs, and attention (for why that is important consider the idea that strippers often have Daddy issues), and pretend to be their boyfriends, before pushing them into more and more extreme acts, initially with themselves. Then they use that, the "relationship" and threats against the girls and/or their family to pimp them out. Remember these are first and foremost prostitution gangs.

To the police jaded with contact with the underclass, contact with these girls makes them look like prostitutes. Ones with drug addictions, who sneak out to go to bars underage, and who given their backgrounds likely have behavioral issues as well. To the police they were criminals and scum not victims.

It was the perfect intersection of left and right blind spots, suppress it due to the race of the perpetrators, ignore it due to the perceived immorality (and class) of the victims. Remember this started in the 80's into the 90's when police approaches to rape as a whole was pretty unsympathetic, particularly for those who were in theory in some kind of relationship with the rapist.

Beat cops in that time frame were not a beacon of racial harmony, so the race issue only came into play when things began to bubble up to higher (and therefore more political levels).

Sure, but there are still the insane cases which are not even close to that. There is the girl who went to a police station complaining about a CSA, then got kidnapped within the station and raped, then dropped off on the street, kidnapped again and raped again. All in a row.

I am not aware of anyone today defending or minimising what actually happened so I cannot really suggest a steelman of that kind – it seems to have been extremely bad. The police (I think in the early 2000s or late 90s?) claimed the victims were unreliable, and some of them (not the DPP) chose to turn a blind eye because they saw the girls as consenting.

To some extent the stuff about community cohesion may have been a cover to disguise the sheer laziness of the police, though community relations were obviously in the simple minds of the police as something they were 'supposed' to protect.

Yes the girls were very troubled and vulnerable, often in state care. I couldn't describe exactly how 'consensual' the median case was (obviously that word is quite wrong as they could not consent but to your question).

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