From the Times:
“Police chief: we ignored sex abuse of children”
Race fears stopped us acting, victim’s father told
A senior police officer admitted that his force ignored the sexual abuse of girls by Pakistani grooming gangs for decades because it was afraid of increasing “racial tensions”, a watchdog has ruled.
After a five-year investigation, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) upheld a complaint that the Rotherham officer told a missing child’s distraught father that the town “would erupt” if it was known that Asian men were routinely having sex with under-age white girls.
The chief inspector is said to have described the abuse as “P*** shagging” and to have said it had been “going on” for 30 years: “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.”
His incendiary language features in a confidential report by the watchdog that upholds six complaints against South Yorkshire police by a former child victim of sexual exploitation.
But it did come out.
-*-
Some earlier Samizdata posts that are relevant:
If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right
Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms
Want to blame someone for Rotherham? Lets start with the Guardian…
Grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham raped with impunity and you won’t believe why!
#MeToo is silence is very loud…
In England and Wales, about 11% of women report having been sexually assaulted before they were 16. That’s about 2.4 million women. Of those, 39% said it had been done by a member of their own family.
We can’t afford for that to come out, either.
Especially not without making 1000% certain that every one of those women is telling the truth.
Being recognized as a rape victim is very popular in some circles these days. I have no doubt that child rape by a family member happens, but I wouldn’t trust any such statistic until it was gone over with a fine-toothed comb, and backed up by independent studies conducted with rigourous attention to the questions that are asked, the manner in which they’re phrased, the manner of answering (written statements only; no T-F or “Often-sometimes-maybe-never” tests, so-called “objective tests”), and the reliability, experience, and good sense of those who read and interpret the results.
I’m quite sure, for example, that no one outside of the Provinces has ever heard of Christine Blasey Ford. But there are those of us who are not entirely certain that she spoke the truth and nothing but during the hearing to confirm J. Brett Kavanaugh as a Justice on the Supreme Court.
Still, at least she didn’t try to claim that he was a family member. But don’t forget, if she were a Brit she might have been included as one who suffered rape sometime or other … she can’t quite remember the year but she was in high school, so quite likely was under the age off consent….
Didnt take NiV long to come out with a truly cuntish take of whataboutery.
Get fucked you horrible wanker.
I’m sure that any police records have been lost or never recorded. My greatest question is why no one superior to the Rotherham police investigated the rumors? Why were surrounding police departments not outraged? The BBC’s and the Grauniad’s silence was to be expected. But SkyNews? The tabloids? Did the orders to look the other way come from much higher up? Or has Political Correctness been a requirement for employment across the board so that everyone involved already knew the script and simply complied? The government should have fallen over this unmitigated failure of justice. Until the perpetrators and enablers are very publicly identified and punished, the moniker “formerly Great Britain” will be more than justified.
P*** shagging?
Nick Griffin sounded the alarm maybe twenty years ago and look what they did to him, including the racist far-left bbc.
Anne Marie Waters is doing the same and look what they are doing to her.
Tommy Robinson has been exposing the muslim rape gangs and look what they have done to him.
Incidentally, today Tommy Robinson is receiving an award in Copenhagen, for promoting free speech. You see, the truth will out, eventually.
Stonyground,
I assume P*** stands for “Paki”, a term for “Pakistani”. In my youth it seemed to range from being about the same level as “Jock” or “Taff” (i.e. could sometimes be matey banter, sometimes fighting words) to being a straight-up racial insult. Nowadays it would always be considered a racial insult.
john in cheshire,
I have strong doubts about Tommy Robinson and none about Nick Griffin.* But I will never forget that Griffin did say this was going on when nobody else would and he was prosecuted for it.
As I said in an earlier post, If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right.
*As I said in the post referenced above, “It will be a cold day in hell before I vote for the Holocaust denier Nick Griffin’s literally fascist party”.
But as Naz Shah MP for Bradford West famously said:
‘Cos Labour is all about “blaming the victim” innit?
When you say “Provinces” Julie, I think you mean “Colonies”. 🙂
As for Christine Blasey Ford…I could here her nose growing in Scotland during that testimony.
John Galt,
Naz Shah MP did not say “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” The line originated as a tweet from an account parodying the Guardian Journalist Owen Jones. She liked and shared the tweet. She claimed that she had shared the tweet on autopilot without reading it because she thought it came from the real Owen Jones, an ideological ally. That was stupid behaviour on her part, as she admitted. (And this was not the only time she’s made a fool of herself on Twitter.) But I found her claim believable enough. I’ve pressed “send” unwisely several times myself. Her tweet was deleted within minutes.
“My greatest question is why no one superior to the Rotherham police investigated the rumors? Why were surrounding police departments not outraged?”
Because they all face exactly the same problem. They know that the kids in poor districts form gangs. They know pretty much who they are, and who is in which gang. They know the sort of things they get up to. But they’re not allowed to do anything about it without evidence and witnesses that will stand up to cross-examination in court, and they’ve got limited resources to go digging for that evidence.
The same phenomenon is more visible in America. Even over here, we’ve heard of the Bloods and the Crips, and the Mara Salvatrucha. Any sociological study of gangs – and in particular, girls in gangs – talks about the way they treat them. ‘gangbang’, ‘run a train’, ‘sexed-in’, ‘hoodrats’, ‘hos’, ‘tricks’, etc. (They’re also predominantly coloured – black or hispanic in this case.) When the Italian immigrants ran the Mafia, they were just the same – back then they called them ‘gangster’s molls’.
It’s a general characteristic of human nature that when people live in a society without law, the men rape the women. It’s got nothing to do with the race of the men – it’s because they’re men. Read about armies in the history books, and you see the same. The invading army always rapes the women. It was considered one of the perks of the job.
So why do the gangs still exist, given that the police know who they are and that they’re criminals? Why don’t they just go round the cities, round them all up, throw them all in jail, and clean up society? You think the police wouldn’t love to be able to do that?
In related news, it seems that, if you are in NY State illegally, you can get away with murder.
Is it the same in California?
Nobody said it has something to do with the race of the men. Not even Tommy Robinson.
“Nobody said it has something to do with the race of the men. Not even Tommy Robinson.”
Then why use the word “Asians” in the title?
I don’t know who ‘we’ is in the above, but the same PC people who kept very quiet about the OP subject were, at the same time and even earlier, redefining ‘rape’ to mean ‘had sex after having had a drink’* in order to create the “one in five women university students have been raped” mantra that Glenn Reynolds mocked. PCers who did not want Rotherham to come out could ‘afford’ to have that fiction ‘come out’.
* The question in one survey of over 20 years ago that I know of was: ‘Have you ever had sex after drinking in circumstances where, if you had not had any alcohol, you might not have?’ The survey reported startling ratios of rape victims – by treating woman who ticked yes instead of no as a rape victim like any other.
Then why use the word “Asians” in the title?
Because it’s an effing quote of what the police official said.
pst314 (January 18, 2020 at 2:53 pm) beat me to it (and mildly enriched the vocabulary I would have used 🙂 ). When the PC use ‘Asians’ as a euphemism for ‘Muslims’, it is absurd to complain if others, discussing the phenomenon, can hardly avoid at times doing likewise.
“Because it’s an effing quote of what the police official said.”
Exactly. So how can anyone say “Nobody said it has something to do with the race of the men” when the title of the post quotes someone saying it had something to do with the race of the men? And the story quoted goes on to say: “Race fears stopped us acting, victim’s father told. A senior police officer admitted that his force ignored the sexual abuse of girls by Pakistani grooming gangs for decades because it was afraid of increasing “racial tensions”, a watchdog has ruled.” Indicating that the police chief, the police watchdog, and The Times all said it was all to do with the race of the men?
I mean, can you guys seriously not see what you’re doing here? You’re not fooling anybody but yourselves.
“When the PC use ‘Asians’ as a euphemism for ‘Muslims’…”
What makes you think they’re using it as a euphemism for Muslims, and what makes you think they’re Muslims, given that Muslim society traditionally has extremely conservative morals about sexuality, such that men aren’t even allowed to look at women, let alone shake hands, or mix unchaperoned, and this sort of behaviour carries the death penalty in Islam?
When you have to start applying special secret decoding rules to turn what they actually said into what you think they actually mean so you can criticise it, we have lost all touch with reality.
For goodness’ sake, NiV; sometimes you make really sensible, if challenging, interventions but here you’re just being autopilot contrarian. Try this one for size.
“Try this one for size.”
Yes? What about it?
NiV,
(A) Those tried were muslims.
(B) Islam is sexually conservative – when it comes to muslim women but not “infidels”.
Islam is sexually conservative – when it comes to muslim women but not “infidels”.
Exactly. To explain away Muslim rape gangs by pointing to Muslim conservatism is dishonesty in the extreme, and suggests some reasonable speculations about why someone would tell such a lie.
what makes you think they’re Muslims
Numerous news reports.
What makes you deny well established facts?
OK. Time to just walk away from NiV. Not sure what he’s on today but it isn’t agreeing with him.
“Islam is sexually conservative – when it comes to muslim women but not “infidels”.”
It’s just as strict with infidels.
“When the PC use ‘Asians’ as a euphemism for ‘Muslims’…”
I would say “euphemism for Muslims usually from certain regions”. Pakistanis and Afghanis and Somalis and North Africans, most often. But of course many Saudis are okay with sexual slavery of “infidels” and there have been many reports over the years of Egyptian Muslims kidnapping and raping young Coptic Christian girls. But we are not supposed to take note of the cultural and religious roots of these crimes.
Nullius in Verba writes,
I can’t recall where you are from, Nullius in Verba, but from what you say it’s not the UK. I’ll take the most important issue first. You ask, “what makes you think they’re Muslims”. In my case it was because I read news reports over more than a decade of the conviction of grooming rings operating according to a common pattern in Rotherham, Rochdale, Keighley, Derby, Oxford, Peterborough, Bristol, Telford and other towns I cannot recall right now. At first many of these reports did try to brush over the fact that they were Muslims, but even the Guardian gave it up eventually in the face of the prevalence of the name “Mohammed” among those convicted. There have been millions of words written about the specific issue of why so many Muslim men felt free to sexually abuse white girls. The general answer was that the victims, who typically were from broken homes and/or in the care system, were seen as infidel trash. The more responsible Muslim organisations have acknowledged this. I must ask you, after all these years how could you have not known they were Muslims?
On the lesser point of the use of the term “Asian”, here is a BBC article from 2012:
“disproportionately from a Pakistani background”: “Investigators are working to trace a total of 426 grooming gang members who abused an estimated 1,500 victims in Rotherham…”
One story reported that the mother of a young victim went to a local Muslim leader for help but he was completely uninterested.
Rotherham has a population of 109,691. The Asian population is 8.3% = 9104. 50% males yields 4552. Eliminate the very old and very young, and “426 grooming gang members” is a large fraction of the “Asian” population. (Via Orwell & Goode. Are these numbers accurate?)
“I can’t recall where you are from, Nullius in Verba, but from what you say it’s not the UK.”
I’m from the UK.
“You ask, “what makes you think they’re Muslims”. In my case it was because I read news reports over more than a decade of the conviction of grooming rings operating according to a common pattern in Rotherham, Rochdale, Keighley, Derby, Oxford, Peterborough, Bristol, Telford and other towns I cannot recall right now.”
We have to take news reports with a pinch of salt. They’re usually imprecise with their terminology, and a lot of the campaigners pushing for them to take one line or another have agendas. Never mind what the newspapers think they are, what does the evidence tell *you*?
There are a lot of bad things that can genuinely be laid at Islam’s door. They’re intolerant, misogynist, homophobic, authoritarian, rigid, and impose stoning to death, lashings and amputations for a wide range of what we would consider minor sins. They are required to wage jihad, to convert the world to Islam. They forbid Western teaching and the adoption Western culture. They have no concept of freedom of speech or freedom of belief. These are all things that we can fairly blame Islam for; they’re in the law books and scriptures.
But Islam absolutely forbids sexual immorality of all sorts, including with infidels, and imposes far more draconian penalties for this sort of stuff than we have since the time of Cromwell. It’s counter to Islam.
So what does it mean when somebody claims to be a Muslim, but commits sins that are absolutely forbidden by Islam? Can you claim to be the sort of Muslim who eats pork, and drinks alcohol, and doesn’t pray to Allah, and doesn’t go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and doesn’t recognise the Koran? Is self-identification as a Muslim enough, or do you have to actually believe and practice it, to meet the definition?
Because if ‘Muslim’ can mean absolutely *any* set of beliefs, we can’t say anything at all about the beliefs or behaviour of anyone who claims it.
People argue that Muslim immigration is to be feared because of the orthodox beliefs of Islam – the supremacist, jihad-waging version. OK, but then you have to stick with that definition, and people who don’t believe in that orthodoxy are not Muslims, whatever they might say.
Or you can accept that ‘Muslims’ are whoever claims the label, in which case you can’t assume they follow the orthodoxy. They don’t believe in jihad and converting the infidel. They’re pretty relaxed about alcohol, and shaking hands with the opposite sex. They watch TV, and the live in ‘infidel’ Western countries gradually adopting infidel Western ways. They’re not the people you’re scared of.
Definitions shift and mutate all over the place, as the debate rages.
In this case, what I suspect the news reports mean is that the gangs are from Muslim communities, and are of Muslim ancestry, and may in some cases claim to be Muslim, but their behaviour has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, and indeed is they very antithesis of it.
“There have been millions of words written about the specific issue of why so many Muslim men felt free to sexually abuse white girls.”
It wasn’t just white girls. There were plenty of Muslim girls abused, too. But they didn’t get the attention and support, and there are major cultural issues preventing them talking about it. (Which *are* to do with Islam – it treats *both* parties to sexual immorality harshly, and sets impossible standards of evidence on girls claiming rape.)
It doesn’t need any complicated explanations, though. The simplest reason is that they were men, and the attitude is almost universal amongst emotionally immature males. One can certainly argue that the conservative morality that prevented them getting social experience with the opposite sex is a reason for their immaturity, but it’s scarcely unusual.
As I said, the same extreme behaviour is seen in gangs of any nationality, race, or religion, across the world and throughout history, as well as by historical armies. We’ve seen what the super-rich do, when they have the money and power to rise above the reach of the law – Epstein and so on. And it goes on quietly in white Christian society, too. Fathers, step-fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, and so on, operating individually within families. We’ve seen the Catholic abuse scandal, which is far bigger and broader in scope than the Rotherham/Rochdale/etc. ones.
However, nobody talks about the 11% of women sexually assaulted as children, because the friends and family members who did so much of it are not brown. (Convicted child rapists are at least 85% white, same as the population.) Nobody is calling for Catholics or people from Catholic nations to be barred from the country, because they’re not brown either. It’s not the rape of children that we’re bothered by, or the role of religion in it that we care about. We divide the world into “us” and “them”, and the sins of “us” can always be excused, and the sins of any of “them” blacken the entire group unconditionally.
Racism is only one particular version of “us” and “them”, and has mostly died already. The last remnants are getting hammered as we speak. But “us” and “them” thinking in general is still alive and well, and every instance of it is just as dangerous. We have to learn to recognise it – even in our own thinking. It bothers me that even here, people seem incapable of recognising it.
NiV: “Because they all face exactly the same problem. They know that the kids in poor districts form gangs. ”
No, because the highest political authority in the Land instructed Police chiefs not to prosecute these activities. The real question is why?
NiV: “(They’re also predominantly coloured – black or hispanic in this case.)”
Why are you mentioning the race? It’s nothing to do with the race, there is definitely another explanation. Wait for it, …. wait for it …
NiV: ” it’s because they’re men. ”
BINGO!! Evil men. But definitely not Asian men though. Because race is deffo., not a factor here.
NiV: “given that Muslim society traditionally has extremely conservative morals about sexuality, such that men aren’t even allowed to look at women, let alone shake hands, or mix unchaperoned, and this sort of behaviour carries the death penalty in Islam?”
Yes. Which might explain why their young menfolk sometimes are such bestial inhuman ( no disrespect to animals ) animals. Their ideology encourages them to victimise ‘out groups’ and given the relaxed attitudes of modern young white women and girls ( once upon a time, it was young Sikh or Hindu women, but for the more ‘robust’ response of their menfolk – who couldn’t be beaten down by the MSM mantra of ‘Racist’!), and the fact that white girls represent one Kafir out-group, sets white girls up for a perfect storm of pent up sexual mania and doctrinal opprobrium. The upshot being, you are not wrong, it’s little to do with race, but your are also wrong, race prejudice is a component.
Proving perhaps, in the world inhabited by NiV, that white girls under the age of legal consent are just racist anti white bigots, gagging for Asian cock. Or, that Moslem men are indoctrinated with a poisonous doctrine that makes them nearly impossible to integrate into a harmonious society we’d all like to live in.
Sure, but they’re now coming into what is essentially a licentious society that ridicules concepts such as fidelity, modesty, and sexual reserve. For normal hormone-propelled young males who have been Islam-repressed all of their lives, it has to be like locking a kid up in a candy store.
Perhaps the problem isn’t Islam per se – it’s the difference between a strict Islamic society and a libertine Western society, and what happens when you bring young males from the former into the latter without building in the sorts of mental limits that those of us raised here are still able to develop over our lifetimes.
But it really doesn’t matter which it is. The result is Rotherham. If we all brought in our immigrants in a manner which allowed for them to fit into our concept of society – if the melting pot still worked – then they could assimilate our own cultural strictures just as we have done. But the present method of importing complete societies that have no need to acculturate leaves them with their medieval attitudes intact, but surrounded by temptation.
As an aside, take a look at Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. Hard-line Islamic. MB support and all that that implies. But, once here (to the dismay of her community) she has an affair with a vendor – an infidel – a married infidel – he gets divorced, she gets divorced, they’re now living together – her own community is now publicly questioning whether Islam can survive here without cleaning up our moral decay. So am I.
Nullius in Verba writes,
The Catholic writer G K Chesterton wrote his pamphlet Eugenics and Other Evils before World War I, long before the term “No True Scotsman” had ever been coined, but that type of argument was common in those days too. Chesterton dismissed it thus:
As regards accuracy, you appear to be underperforming Nick Griffin on the occasion of his prosecution, which should be embarrassing. The following is a contemporary reaction to a Sky news report of his acquitted of hate speech charges in late 2006 (edited for clarity).
No surprise that today we can replace ‘may be’ with ‘have been for some time’.
“No, because the highest political authority in the Land instructed Police chiefs not to prosecute these activities. The real question is why?”
Because, as the quote implied, that was talking about girls over the age of consent who had given consent.
I found it interesting that in the last minute or so of that interview, he said what I’ve just been saying. Seemed like a perfectly reasonable interview.
“Perhaps the problem isn’t Islam per se – it’s the difference between a strict Islamic society and a libertine Western society, and what happens when you bring young males from the former into the latter without building in the sorts of mental limits that those of us raised here are still able to develop over our lifetimes.”
Perhaps. I have a lot of sympathy for that viewpoint. Although like I said, we do it too. We’re just not usually as organised and blatant about it.
“The Catholic writer G K Chesterton wrote his pamphlet Eugenics and Other Evils before World War I, long before the term “No True Scotsman” had ever been coined, but that type of argument was common in those days too.”
So if you claim to be a True Scotsman, although neither born in Scotland or a man, we are to take your word for it?
I must rememer this one for the next time we have the “No True Woman” argument about the transgender. Simply claiming the identity is, apparently, entirely sufficient to be one. 🙂
Seriously – if there is no requirement for Muslims to believe in the tenets of Islam to be counted as Muslims, then you’re right. But what kind of maze of madness does that sort of definition lead us into?!
This is one of those times I’m glad I’m not particularly intelligent. Otherwise I might find myself defending child rapists just to show off how smart I am.
“As regards accuracy, you appear to be underperforming Nick Griffin on the occasion of his prosecution, which should be embarrassing.”
Nick Griffin was correct in his assertion, but so was I. The two are not in contradiction.
It is quite true that slaves can be captured in a jihad – Muslims as well as non-Muslims – and quite true that men have conjugal rights over female slaves they own. But the rules about what constitutes jihad are strict, ownership is formal and singular, and the practices of the Rotherham crew simply don’t conform to those rules. They weren’t engaged in an actual jihad, whether formally declared or otherwise. The women were not captured. The booty was not divided up and ownership assigned by the proper process. The girls were not ‘owned’ in any legal sense. Had they been, they could not have been passed around between multiple men. They were not, otherwise, treated as slaves. It makes no difference in Sharia law, (at least as far as slavery and sex go) whether they’re Muslim or Infidel. Many of the sex acts described are forbidden even between man and wife (or slave) in Islam. And it is a requirement of Sharia, when operating in non-Muslim countries with which one is not at war, to follow local law to the maximum extent consistent with Islam.
Go buy yourself a copy of Reliance of the Traveller. It tells you what the *actual* rules of Islam are, in detail, from the horse’s mouth so to speak.
This is one of those times I’m glad I’m not particularly intelligent. Otherwise I might find myself defending child rapists just to show off how smart I am.
Nobody is defending child rapists. I’m just objecting to people *selectively* attacking only the *particular* child rapists that are in the target category, and ignoring all the rest.
Nullius, you’re a tool of the ruling class*
I’m not talking to you.
Making excuses for British police, for F-sake!!!
It is of interest, though, to make a first attempt at analysis of Nullius’ sophistry.
First, he** makes a claim with blatant disregard for facts and logic.
Then he replies to his critics with a counter-counter-argument that is easily counter*3-argued.
In subsequent iterations, he replies to counter*n-arguments with counter*(n+1)-arguments that are easily counter*(n+2)-argued.
I fail to see how this strategy could possibly help his case; but i invite further analysis of this pseudo-Socratic fallacy.
—-footnotes
*i.e. a liberal hack.
** I assume ‘he’ because otherwise it would be Nullia or Nullium or Nullix.
Aw, c’mon. There’s a big difference between defending child rapists and discussing what makes them into child rapists.
I’m sure there is.
But some might say the deflection is the defense. An effort to move away from a subject without ever having to directly defend it.
“But some might say the deflection is the defense.”
Indeed. If people carefully deflect attention away from all the non-Muslim, non-Asian child rapists, and get upset if anyone points them out, does that constitute a defence of them?
How many posts have we seen here on the Catholic abuse scandal, which was similarly covered up, for example? Anyone want to make a list and compare them?
You’ve offered this argument before – and had the invalidity of it pointed out before. The Koran and the Hadith are the sayings of Mohammed. ‘Reliance of the Traveller’ isn’t. It is a 14th century work of a particular Islamic school that includes directions for muslims in parts of the Dar al-Harb not immediately scheduled for Harb.
Even in its own terms, I have issues with Reliance of the Traveller. As regards the 1991 translation
Taqqiya is part of Islam.
NiV: “Go buy yourself a copy of Reliance of the Traveller. It tells you what the *actual* rules of Islam are, in detail, from the horse’s mouth so to speak.”
That is blasphemous. The *actual* rules of Islam are laid out, in detail, in the Koran. Which is the direct record of Allah’s instructions, how to be Moslem.
Ideally, I suppose, one should emulate the highest exemplar of mankind.
Al-Bukhari: Narrated Sulaiman bin Yasar: I asked ‘Aisha about the clothes soiled with semen. She replied, “I used to wash it off the clothes of Allah’s Apostle and he would go for the prayer while water spots were still visible.”
Nullius in Verba writes,
No, my argument was the almost opposite of that. It was that when it came out that a disproportionate number of Catholic priests had been sexually abusing choirboys it wasn’t good enough for decent Catholics to say, “Oh, but Catholic teaching forbids priests to do that on [the multiple grounds that it did forbid it], so it’s nothing to do with us”. The Catholic church as a whole had an urgent duty to take a long hard look at itself and make drastic, painful changes. Islam is in the same position only worse. Much, much worse.
I don’t want to get distracted into gender issues, so I’ll just say that belief systems, being pure products of the mind, are a different case to gender/sex where there is at the very least a physical difference between XX- and XY-chromosome people that cannot be left out of the discussion.
Islam forbids all sorts of things. That’s why Islamic states don’t have police forces. Because everyone in them always obeys the laws.
Quite how all the alcohol shops in Amman stay in business is a mystery though.
NiV. The difference is this. We have laws protecting children from rape. The police are assiduous in pursuing and the courts strict in sentencing the perpetrators. But only, it seems, of “all the non-Muslim, non-Asian child rapists” that you mention. We see the transgressions of one particular ethno-religious group being ignored. That is what is arousing our fury.
Damn. Responding to trolls. There goes another New Year Resolution.!
Natalie Solent : “She claimed that she had shared the tweet on autopilot without reading it because she thought it came from the real Owen Jones, an ideological ally. That was stupid behaviour on her part, as she admitted.”
I’d be interested to know, how many of Owen Jones tweets she hasn’t ‘liked’. I might look it up myself, but for the fact I’d have to drown myself in a tub of Detol after reading anything Owen Jones writes.
And next, Why can’t Twatter tell the difference between a real Owen Jones account and a fake Owen Jones account.
Frankly, I think Naz Shah MP is being ‘economical with the truth’ and she did write the tweet. Just because a Twitter robot would know the difference between a tweet originating from Owen Jones, and a tweet originating from an Owen Jones impersonator.
The underlying membership account would be different for a start.
NB. I know nothing of Twitter, I’m not on it, and don’t ever want to be. So, I could be entirely incorrect and the autobots are unutterably stupid (shrug).
“The Koran and the Hadith are the sayings of Mohammed.”
No. The Koran is the word of God, transmitted by Mohammad. The Hadith are the sayings of Mohammad and his companions, as passed on through long chains of oral history. The Sunnah is the history and the record of traditional practices in the time of the prophet. You need all three, along with a good deal of background knowledge of what abrogates what, and how to interpret certain events in their cultural context, to actually extract any rules from it. This has been done by Islamic experts over many centuries and constitutes Fiqh, of which Reliance is one of the best and most comprehensive summaries, and the only one translated into English.
“It is a 14th century work of a particular Islamic school that includes directions for muslims in parts of the Dar al-Harb not immediately scheduled for Harb.”
No. While it is written by a scholar of one school, it contains descriptions of where the other schools vary from it, which is a lot less than most people think. And it includes a section on the jihad, and the rules for waging it, including the bit on taking slaves.
There is a section earlier in the book on slavery not translated, but since there are officially no slaves currently, as there has not been a jihad waged for centuries, it’s not as much of a loss as you might think. We know pretty much what it says, anyway.
“Taqqiya is part of Islam.”
And it’s included in the book.
“That is blasphemous. The *actual* rules of Islam are laid out, in detail, in the Koran.”
No they’re not. The Koran plays the same role in Islamic law as the Constitution does in American law. The Constitution itself only contains a small subset of the statute law, and requires a lot of interpretation and case law to define. Islam is the same. Most of it is based on the Haddith and Sunnah.
“No, my argument was the almost opposite of that. It was that when it came out that a disproportionate number of Catholic priests had been sexually abusing choirboys it wasn’t good enough for decent Catholics to say, “Oh, but Catholic teaching forbids priests to do that on [the multiple grounds that it did forbid it], so it’s nothing to do with us”. The Catholic church as a whole had an urgent duty to take a long hard look at itself and make drastic, painful changes.”
If so, then I misunderstood. I assumed the ‘Scotsman’ you was talking about was the true Muslim, rather than the true Catholic.
As for the Catholic scandal, I’d certainly argue that the abuse is strongly contrary to Catholic doctrine, and that anyone who thinks it’s not is not ‘a Catholic’ in the sense of a believer in a particular orthodox set of beliefs, whatever they might call themselves. The Catholic Church bears no guilt concerning the abuse itself, which it has always opposed, only in their failure to properly address it. However, it’s just an illustrative example to show what people are willing to ignore.
“I don’t want to get distracted into gender issues,…”
OK. 🙂
“… so I’ll just say that belief systems, being pure products of the mind”
And do you think that means the mind is not real, and physical?
Whether somebody believes something is an objective matter of fact – something which is true or false. (Beliefs are complex, multi-layered things, so such questions are not easily specified so as to be unambiguous, but they’re as objectively real as the software in a computer.) Just as the way your brain is wired is an objective fact about the world as it is. Just because you can’t easily see it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
“The difference is this. We have laws protecting children from rape. The police are assiduous in pursuing and the courts strict in sentencing the perpetrators. But only, it seems, of “all the non-Muslim, non-Asian child rapists” that you mention. We see the transgressions of one particular ethno-religious group being ignored. That is what is arousing our fury.”
The Rotherham enquiry reported that they found no evidence that the front line police or social services were ever less than assiduous in pursuing the perpetrators. Higher management in both organisations had expressed concern over the political ramifications for race relations, which caused a lot of confusion among the rank and file about what the policy was, but the people working with the kids all did what they could. The primary problems were to do with getting witnesses able to stand up in court. In many cases the abused kids weren’t willing (they considered the abuser to be their ‘boyfriend’ who loved them), or were too scared (one girl almost came forward, but while at the police station got a text message saying “We’ve got your sister” and so she withdrew from making a statement), or had credibility issues (were involved in crime on behalf of the gang, like shoplifting or holding drugs, were habitual liars, had been involved in recruiting other victims, or had sometimes given ambiguous consent). When the police got a statement they could use, they pursued it through the courts. But all such cases are one person’s word against another’s, and the higher ups weren’t willing to spend several hundred grand on a fishing expedition to try to get something more – e.g. by undercover work.
And it’s not just one particular group being ignored. Gangs of many different nationalities do this, including British ones. They also knife one another, deal drugs, guns, do burglaries, muggings, shoplifting, moonshining, counterfeiting, and sundry other crimes. The police don’t have the resources to stop all of those, either. It’s entirely possible they only spent the resources on this bunch because of the massive BNP campaign about it. The London gangs talk about ‘sket lists‘, but that doesn’t get the public’s attention in the same way.
What you see is not the whole picture.
He’s not defending child-rape, nor child-rapists. He’s saying we ought not look over at the Muslim sitting next to us and mutter “damned child-rapist” based on his being Muslim. (I think.)
I’ll disagree with him to the exact same extent that causes me to cross the street when I see a bunch of unknown-to-me young black males standing at the next corner. I do that recognizing that, at heart, I’m being unfair to those individuals, but I still do it. Percentages. It’s not right, but, statistically, it makes for a safer life.
This contradicts what little I have heard and read of the episode. (But I’m not there, and rely on . . . news.) From what I have thus learned, the outrage specifically is driven by the idea that the front line police and management, and social services, DID treat these offenders differently because of their . . . Asianity. Not so?
I was referring to the issue in general, and comments I’ve seen across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Assuming by “he”, you mean Nullius in Verba, then he isn’t someone who interests me or who I will ever respond to again. And a quick glance through his comments shows he immediately went for whataboutery, then played the racism and sexism cards, and tried to normalise child rape. Doing anything he can to deflect from the issue at hand.
And I believe one of the reasons those on the right – whether conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, or whatever else – get whipped in the culture war is that they engage with the likes of him. Often losing because these people are experts at what they do. Even when they win it doesn’t matter because what should have been the issue has long since been forgotten.
You can’t honestly debate them because they’re not interested in honest debate. The issue is never the issue.
“This contradicts what little I have heard and read of the episode.”
I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on the subject – I’ve read some of the reports. What I said was based on the following except from the Jay report, and a few other bits I can’t locate now.
“From what I have thus learned, the outrage specifically is driven by the idea that the front line police and management, and social services, DID treat these offenders differently because of their . . . Asianity. Not so?”
I get the strong impression from reading reports that it was primarily about lack of resources generally, and not specific to Asians. There was a lot of suspicion higher up that the scale of the rumours were being overblown by the race issue (the BNP running a campaign on it isn’t seen as a strong sign of credibility by most people…), and they probably took it less seriously than they should as a result, but I’ve seen exactly the same sort of complaints directed at the police over every other sort of crime. Burglaries in particular – people call the police because the insurance company expects it, not because they have any expectation of the burglar being caught.
They should have prioritised it more highly and they didn’t. A lot of people, including some of the people working there, have assumed that the race relations issue was a factor in that. But given the way they cut resources on everything, I don’t think it’s the most parsimonious explanation. Never assume malice where incompetence and stupidity will suffice.
“And I believe one of the reasons those on the right – whether conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, or whatever else – get whipped in the culture war is that they engage with the likes of him.”
The reason you get continually whipped in the culture wars is that you always take the bait.
The way the left work is to recognise when society has shifted to sympathise with some new victim group, that they can rely on the right to oppose. They throw their support behind the victims, and claim to need coercive power to defend them. The right, predictably, respond to the infringement on their prerogatives by attacking the victim group, losing all public sympathy, and justifying the left’s power grab in the public’s eyes.
The public don’t like racists, so if the left can portray the right as racist, and the right play along, the left get more power. There’s nothing in Marxist ideology that requires opposing racism – up until 1945 the worst racists and homophobes were on the left. It’s simply a tactic. A trap for the right.
It’s why you’ve got to be super-careful in these situations to get it right. If what you say is untrue, and easily debunked, you lose credibility disproportionately. They point to one example of error or logical fallacy, debunk it, and then tell the public that everything you say is similarly wrong. Which is why I continually argue for doing some basic research on what you say. Quoting Nick Griffin as your go-to authority on Islam will get you laughed at. Quoting Ibn Naqib al-Misri, as endorsed by the Islamic theological college of al Azhar University, is much harder to knock down. When your coin is credibility, it’s much more important to be right (and provably so) than to win every argument.
Which is why, when I argue against something you’ve said, I’m actually trying to help you. You have to earn the public’s respect.
NiV says,
‘”…so I’ll just say that belief systems, being pure products of the mind”
And do you think that means the mind is not real, and physical?”
This is sophistry of the first water. Assuming the brain is the hardware and mind (and by extension products of mind such as culture) the software then it says nothing about the big question, “What software and what configuration?”. Surely a Muslim child groomer, despite having much the same hardware as a classical liberal, agnostic like me is running a very different OS. Some people are clearly still operating with a 640kB limit.
Niall, on January 18, 2020 at 7:08 pm you quoted Nick Griffin:
All I can say is that we Provincials* have the same problem here. Some of our PDs stiffen their spines and put up with all the racist-PC garbage slung their way, praise the Great Frog, but it would seem a lot of them (or their Mayor, or their Police Chief or Sheriff), are in fear of their careers or their jobs before the spectre of being branded “racist” (or some other “opprobrius epithet,” to quote Constable Oates IIRC, such as “Fascist” or “Nazi”).
. . .
*JG, “Provincials” is an in-joke between me and my mother that I have made many times since I started commenting here, around 14 years ago. She skewered the inhabitants of New York City with their assumptions of Higher Enlightened Cosmopolitanism & Sophistication.
[If perchance you were teasing me and I failed to get it, plizz to forgive the density which plagues me. :>( ]
I finally decided to enlighten the populace hereabouts just last month. On Dec. 4, last year, at
https://www.samizdata.net/2019/12/disparate-impact-anti-semitism/#comment-791689 ,
I wrote:
—————————
*Provincials: I know I know, we’re Colonials, which makes us savages as against the settlers from France, who of course represent the apex of civilization and intellectuality, and hold rightful claim to the Provinces. But I have the most delightful memory of my mother, who spent several of the early years of her marriage, living in Worcester, Mass., and travelling with Dad up and down the East Coast. She always said that to N’Yawkers, anybody from west of the Hudson was disdained as a mere Provincial. This prompted her to remark further that New Yorkers were the most provincial people she knew of. 😆
(Please take all that as strictly in the spirit of teasing — although it’s true that Easterners seem to think we all have hay in our hair. Flyover country and all that, still.)
—————————
. . .
Back to the issue of “Asian,” its use & meaning:
Some decades ago, when people were more sensible than they seem to be today, “Asian” was not used in common parlance to refer to the Near East (apparently no longer used at all), the Middle East, India, or the Orient (China, Japan, Indo-China/SE Asia/N.&S.Korea+Cambodia+Thailand+Laos+Sri Lanka; plus, when referring to “Oriental Carpets,” the ‘Stans, Iran (Persia), Turkey (are Turkish carpets considered ‘Oriental’?), and maybe Iraq –not sure about that).
I find myself offended by the use of “Asian” to include that entire territory except N.Africa and maybe Jordan+Lebanon+Israel; in particular, because the usage fails to distinguish among the true Orientals (roughly, China+Taiwan+Hong Kong+Japan), Indians-from-India, and Arabs, Israelis, other Middle-Easterners.
The offense: Orientals (as distinguished above) are, so they say, discriminated against in the admissions policies of many colleges; but when everybody is just referred to as “Asian,” and then people talk about how “Asians” are discriminated against, then logically Arabs and Muslims must also be discriminated against in U.S. college admissions.
But the reason given for the discrimination is that the “Asians” — Orientals and to a degree maybe Indians, I’m beginning to hear — are too smart, so they’ve been snapping up the admissions slots at the better schools, which leaves the Negroes and “Hispanics” discriminated against.
Maybe this bothers no one else, but it irks the heck out of me. Language should aim to clarify, not to murkify. Snarl.
–BTW, it’s awhile since I had 7th-grade geography or even geography discussed in 1980’s terminology. So if my descriptions of the areas covered by my preferred, older terminology are wrong, I’d be happy to be corrected. :>)))
“Surely a Muslim child groomer, despite having much the same hardware as a classical liberal, agnostic like me is running a very different OS.”
Same hardware, same OS, but different applications and data installed.
My point, though, was that software is physical, too. Whether it’s patches of magnetisation on a disk, or electrons sitting around in a bit of silicon, or biochemical potentials in neurones, it’s *physical*.
Distinguishing “belief systems, being pure products of the mind” from something that constitutes “a physical difference” is to accept Cartesian Dualism – Ghosts floating around in machines.
NiV: “No they’re not. The Koran plays the same role in Islamic law as the Constitution does in American law. ”
The US constitution makes no claim to be the word of a supernatural being. The Koran does. It claims to be the eternal word of Allah, as revealed to Islam’s prophet Mohamed (PBUH). Islamic doctrine further claims that the Koran is eternal, and unchanging. A patently incorrect claim, bolstered only by the fact that it has been written down in a pretty inaccessible language.
The US constitution makes no obligations on it’s adherents as to how they should live their daily lives.
The Koran has instructions about the minutiae of a Moslem’s daily life; [1]Praying at specific intervals, [2]giving charity to Moslems less fortunate.[3] A woman should dress is a particular manner, [4] the opinion of a man is worth twice that of a woman, [5] can a woman decline sex? ( ” she is your tilth, you may plough her as you choose ” ) No., [6] inheritance: a male heir gets twice that of a female heir, [7] a divorced woman may only remarry her husband if she first marries another man consummates the union, then divorces the second man, before remarrying her first husband, [8] slave girls* are the sexual property of their Moslem owners, [9] a moslem husband may assault his wife is she is in need of discipline, [10] the subjugation of the Kafir in Islamic societies (topical), [11] the obligation of the Kafir to pay a tax for the privilege of living relatively unmolested in a Moslem society.
*Islam explicitly approves and encourages slavery. The singular thing Hilary Clinton David Cameron managed to achieve after the destruction of the Qaddafi regime was to re-establish slavery in Libya.
Those, but a small subset, but I believe the US constitution is entirely silent on all of them. Except possibly slaves, maybe the founders took their inspiration from Islam on that point.
NiV,
More sophistry! You seem to be stating, inter alia, that information is not separate from its physical form which is utter bollocks. A specific jpeg of Mount Rushmore is the same thing on an SD card as on a HD or a CD or with the 1s and 0s carved into a stone tablet come to that.
APL,
Analogies generally match in some regards, and not in others.
NickM,
Copies of an entity are distinct objects, I’d say.
I’m guessing you’re trying to say that there’s only one informational Platonic ‘form’ uniting all the physical instantiations? Like there’s only one ‘idea of a circle’, that unites all circles?
However, I’d argue that there is both a physical and a logical distinction between multiple copies of the same data. A disk with two copies of your Mt Rushmore jpeg in different folders is logically distinct from only a single jpeg. The content of a file is only a part of the information it embodies – it’s location, metadata, accessibility, encoding, history and so on are also part of the embodied information. You can encode a message in the arrangement of jpeg files, without changing their contents.
But it’s an interesting question! 🙂
Niv,
What the heck?
Screeds of text for justifying what exactly. You clearly disapprove of child rape.
Some current and future child rape victims are vulnerable because the UK government and its agencies were treating a subset of child rapists differently to child rapists generally and noticing is bad?
Some child rapists are clearly part of crime gangs held together by religion and family bonding in disproportionately large numbers.
It’s not racist to insist that that this subset of child rapists ceases to get special treatment from the UK government. You’ve got to use the specifics of the threat to protect the victims.
It’s not racist to protect white kids from child rape by using Knowledge of the conspiracy arraigned against them.
It’s racist to protect the rapists because they aren’t white.
For crying out loud how does your extended sophistry help the actual factual situation? Not a jot, that’s how.
These are not kids. If you dig into who is actually getting arrested it’s mostly men between 35 and 60.
A sick person has effortlessly hijacked this thread and far too many decent and sensible contributors are engaging with him.
It’s entirely up to PDH who he does snd doesn’t allow on here but for heavens sake people stop responding.
NiV: “Analogies generally match in some regards, and not in others.”
Yes, but in no way is there a match between the Koran and the US Constitution.
Not least because the US Constitution sought to restrict the powers of the US Federal government and regulate commerce between the States. The very opposite of the koranic instructions, which as it claims to be dictated by Allah, refutes any restriction on its authority. Consequently it claims the right to interfere in every aspect of an individual Moslems daily life.
The two are not similar.
Eric: “If you dig into who is actually getting arrested it’s mostly men between 35 and 60.”
But you mustn’t do that because you’d become aware not of the heinous crimes against children, but that there is a recognisable pattern of actors.
As soon as that dawns, Bamb!! you are a fully paid up racist. And your voice, like that of the victims must be silenced.
bobby b (January 18, 2020 at 9:39 pm), your impression that Nullius in Verba (January 18, 2020 at 9:33 pm) “contradicts what little I have heard and read of the episode.” is shared by those of us in the UK who have heard and read more. You will recognise the excuses (“not enough resources”, etc.) as the standard boilerplate generated by any public-funded institution under pressure. You can get a more accurate take even from such as Sarah Champion, the long-silent Rotherham Labour MP who did nevertheless make some admissions when the scandal broke and occasionally after, or from Trevor Phillips, Labour’s head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission who introduced the word islamophobia to the UK public domain but has later tried to remedy some of the damage he did, etc., including describing Rotherham occasions when attempts to protect the girls were nullified by precisely what the OP denounces, etc.
You can get information from other and much better sources. Sarah Champion was often later cowed into silenced by Corbyn and others, and Trevor Phillips still has things to learn though I applaud what seems to me an honest start to pulling his mind out of the PC mire. Not their information so much as the fact that even such people would deny Nullius’ denials of the OP’s point can help you avoid the absurdities that Nullius strangely choose to credit. But even without that, I suspect you will recognise
as the kind of euphemisms a certain kind of ‘enquiry’ generates. Although I felt sure from other threads that Nullius was a UK resident, I understood why Natalie speculated an outside-UK location because Nullius appears to have read the report without comprehending it or its context. The same strange not-noticing-the-obvious that you doubtless sometimes see in foreign commenters on the US is evident in Nullius’ contributions to this thread.
On the technicality that when I described the Koran and Hadith as the sayings of Mohammed, and Nullius in Verba (January 18, 2020 at 9:14 pm) replied
it is correct that in muslim belief, though Mohammad said both, he attributed the first to direct dictation of Allah, but that does not contradict what I said since Mohammed’s mouth did indeed utter both.
First off… A key difference between the U.S. Constitution and the Koran is the former is absolutely clear that there ought not to be any established religion. The Koran states quite the reverse.
NiV
The odd thing is I am neither a Platonist nor a Cartesian. I’m not sure here is the place to make a detailed argument (and I’m currently using a Kindle – my other machines are on the blocks). But, OK, my basic point is while obviously I accept that a picture (or whatever) encoded in different forms has differences in terms of accessibility the information contained is the same. Take two identical Lenovos running exactly the same revision of Win 10 and run the same program and you’ll get exactly the same result. As to ghosts in machines – I’m very much a Mysterion (were they in early Dr Who?) and tend towards the belief we will never truly understand consciousness. This isn’t mysticism just an observation that you can’t take something apart with itself.
NiV: “But Islam absolutely forbids sexual immorality of all sorts, including with infidels, .. ”
This is where you are being extremely tricky. More-so than normal.
Aside from claiming divine inspiration, Islam is a code of ethics and rules that Moslem’s adhere to.
So if Islam permits something through a passage of the Koran, or an account in the Hadith, then it’s moral. It may be immoral or criminal behaviour according to Kafir moral codes of ethics, but then Kafir codes and moral standards in Islam are considered inferior to the Koranic moral code. In fact the two as so dissimilar that Westerners don’t recognise what is moral in Islamic doctrine.
We have two distinct moral codes, frequently they conflict.
So, when you write ” Islam forbids sexual immorality of all sorts “, you need to tell us which code of morals and ethics you are using as a guide.
Because you could be correct.
It is permissible to own slaves, buy and sell slaves in the Koranic world view, such behaviour is moral.
It is permissible to take four wives and still have sexual intercourse with your slave girls**. In the Koranic world view, such behaviour is moral.
The Kafir are lesser humans ( the worst of all creatures ). In the Koranic world view, that is an entirely moral position to take.
So, if there is a passage in the Koran or an account in the Hadith where Allah or Mohammed(PBUH) have explicitly permitted a particular behaviour, then that behaviour is moral according to Islamic moral code.
**It is easy to see, that the children that were taken and frequently held against their will, could be considered slaves of Moslem men. In which case their treatment, was/is entirely moral according to Islamic doctrine. Which may go some way to understanding the lack of remorse of the men prosecuted for these crimes.
Niall:
Indeed, this sort of whitewashing would not go down well in cultures that have a healthy skepticism wrt the police. (And bobby comes from one such culture.)
It might be accepted in Sweden, perhaps; and it might even be true there.
But what you have not pointed out is that
A. It is contradicted by the IOPC report mentioned in the OP.
B. The British police find plenty of resources to investigate speech crimes, even arresting schoolchildren for speech crimes. Recently, they have even started to investigate “hate speech” which they recognize as legal.
One thing that i have not seen mentioned (although i have not looked very hard) is that holding Muslim men (or just Pakistani men) above the law, is also a big problem for Muslim/Pakistani women.
The number of British Muslim girls who are cowed into submission by fear of honor killings, has got to be larger than the number of White girls reduced to sexual slavery. (We might discuss which fate is worse, but i’d rather not.)
And that is not to mention the British Muslim girls who are actually honor-killed.
To be clear, I quoted from Natalie’s old pre-Samizdata blogpost from when he was acquitted, which itself quoted reaction to it but not not Nick Griffin’s (as Natalie has remarked on several occasions, she is not a fan (!) though obliged in honesty to point out the many faults of those who imagined they were his enemies.) None of the stuff in my January 18, 2020 at 7:08 pm is the words of Nick Griffin.
Yes, I’m aware the US has the same problem. The current NY bail law is yet another example of diluting policing to propitiate ‘anti-prejudice’ prejudice. And yes, ‘Asian’ in the PC US does not mean what ‘Asian’ means in the PC UK and both PC meanings can be challenged as misuses of the word.
As some comments above have already pointed out – look at how ignorant even this comment from the local police is. It was not “Asians” – there were no Japanese and so on involved in this, nor was it really about “people from the subcontinent” – as how many Sikhs and Hindus were involved in this? And it was not really about “race” – it was not really about some people being “white” (pinkish-gray) and other people being brown.
Sadly an honest discussion of Islam is not really allowed – I am not interested in a discussion where people have to use assumed names for fear of being punished by the Frankfurt School of Marxism influenced institutions of the West (including political parties that are supposed to be the ENEMY of Marxism).
The joke is that the Frankfurt School Marxists actually have no respect for Islam at all (whereas I DO respect Islam – and I am quite prepared to take a lie detector test on that) – they, the Marxists, do not believe that God (Allah) exists, and they think that Muslims are stupid people who they, the Marxists, can USE as a weapon to undermine the West – and then just crush with ease.
Islam is a movement that has existed for 14 centuries – it has had a massive influence on world history and has contained many political and military thinkers of the highest intelligence. And yet a gang of Marxists (who so influence the institutions of the West – the education system, the media, and now even the police) think they can just USE Islam as a weapon against the West – and then crush Islam the moment it is no longer useful to them. They, the Marxists, are “clever fools” – tactically brilliant, but strategically demented.
Normally I make the point that the influence of Marxism is indirect – that people get educated in Marxist ideas without even really knowing what they are being taught. But in this case the situation is simpler – a lot of the “Equality” legislation in Britain was directly influenced by Dr Nandy who was brought in by the Home Office in the 1970s – Dr Nandy never made any secret of being a Marxist, i.e. out to do as much HARM to this country (and the “Capitalist” West in general) as he could. The people who brought him in knew what his belief system was – and it is nothing to do with Islam.
“How should one interpret Islam?” this is a difficult question as, in Islamic law, a translation of the texts has no legal force – only if one can understand Classical Arabic can one, in Islamic law, really state an opinion with any moral authority. And there are tolerant verses in the Koran – the chronologically early “Mecca” verses, which appear (appear) to contradict the less tolerant chronologically later “Medina” verses.
However, Islam has an answer for how one should interpret it – whether one is or is not a Muslim. That answer is “what did Muhammad do?” Muhammad is the “model of conduct” – how he behaved is, with some exceptions (there are some limitations on this rule), how Muslims are supposed to behave.
The difficulty is that in the modern West one can not, without fear of punishment, honestly discuss the life of Muhammad – what he actually did as an historical figure.
Even reading out the words of Prime Minister Gladstone (the central figure of Classical Liberalism) or Winston Churchill on this matter, can get someone into very serious trouble.
Till that changes, till we can openly discuss this historical figure (Muhammad) in a critical way, without fear of punishment, then we are wasting our time here.
I remember Bill Warner (and whatever one thinks of this “Islamophobe” he has a point in the following) DEFENDING a Western academic who brought a book defending Islam and attacking people such as Dr Warner – the defence of the academic went as follows…..
“Imagine that this academic had brought out a book ATTACKING Muhammad and Islam – he would lose his university position (regardless of tenure – a way would be find to remove him) and he would not get another position. He would also lose his friends – who would, to protect themselves, denounce him and verbally spit upon him. His life would be destroyed – and even his family would turn on him. Few people are prepared to pay that sort of price in order to tell the truth”.
And this is in the “Free Speech” United States and in “Conservative Tennessee”. To do this in Britain would require even more courage – as the punishment might be more severe.
By the way I know there are various spellings of the name of the founder of Islam.
The Islamic ‘rule of abrogation’ handles this. If two verses appear to conflict, the later verse rules and the earlier is only to be followed where the later does not abrogate it.
Of course, this universal Islamic rule is unfortunate as Mohammed seems to have evolved very much as many a western leftist leader does. Gerard Winstanley, the digger leader, assured one and all in 1648 that he and his followers would just dig the common lands of England and peacefully preach their socialist-style creed. By 1652, having discovered to his astonishment that the common people of England were so astoundingly stupid and bigoted as not to see the wisdom of his so-obviously-true ideas despite his explaining them repeatedly, he wrote to Oliver Cromwell begging that the dictator use his army to enforce Gerard’s ideas at the point of the sword.
History is full of such people – I’ll resist the temptation to quote Burke’s description of how the French revolutionaries moved from being appalled by the execution of the cruelest murderer to being enthralled by the execution of the mildest dissenter. Early/Mecca Mohammed versus later/Medina Mohammed fits a well-known pattern.
Your point about the evil of resisting free speech on Islam is very true.
Pages upon pages of text and you lot missed my wisdom.
The only response NIV deserves was mine:
Get fucked you horrible wanker.
Flubber: not the wording that i would have used; but short, and to the point.
“What the heck? Screeds of text for justifying what exactly.”
Hardly screeds! I’ve made 15 comments, several of them on the philosophy of ‘information’. For people who preach the merits of public debate on matters of controversy, you’re apparently not very accustomed to actually having one, with a non-strawman opposition, are you?
This one’s going to be a bit big, though. 🙂
“Some current and future child rape victims are vulnerable because the UK government and its agencies were treating a subset of child rapists differently to child rapists generally and noticing is bad?”
I’ve seen no evidence they were treating them any differently. They might have been, and there’s a lot of people (even among the services involved) assuming they did, or who have got that impression. But nobody has presented any statistics, or examples of specific policy decisions made to demonstrate that. People see whatever they *want* to see, or what they expect to see.
“Some child rapists are clearly part of crime gangs held together by religion and family bonding in disproportionately large numbers.”
Correlation does not imply causation. People’s intuition is really bad at statistics.
A significant number of crime gangs have been caught, (following a BNP campaign to publicise the issue,) who have many shared characteristics, which includes race, ethnicity, and religion. But there are a whole load of other undocumented factors that we can’t see, and it is a constant problem in statistics and logic that people forget about all the stuff they don’t know about and that haven’t been mentioned, and forget that just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect, or cause the thing you’re looking at.
We’re looking at a heavily biased sample of data, and that can be deceptive. If you take a set of random numbers, go searching through them for a subset that proves the point you want to make, and publish just those numbers, you can ‘prove’ anything you want. Such methods can be very persuasive.
This is especially hard to spot when the spurious statistics support a conclusion that you *desperately* want to be true, because it supports your political worldview. Politics and ideology distort everybody’s judgement.
It’s a dangerous tendency, because when you’re arguing for something that is outside the mainstream, you start off with a credibility problem. Most people come to the argument assuming that the racists are *wrong*, and so it takes *extremely* solid and well-backed-up evidence to change their mind. You have to be right. You have to have hard evidence and credible references. You can’t handwave the logic, or cite sources they don’t believe, or miss out huge chunks of essential background, because their ideology biases them to want to find your conclusions false, and they’re going to go through them with a microscope. And if they find anything, they’ll shout “Aha! I told you so!” and your credibility will drop even deeper into the crapper.
If all you want to do is ‘preach to the choir’, and stay in your political bubble, that’s fine. Everyone else will dismiss you.
But if you’re outside the political mainstream and you want people to pay attention to what you say, then you have to take more care to be right, and pay careful attention when people tell you there are holes in your argument. They’re sometimes trying to help you.
—
“A sick person has effortlessly hijacked this thread and far too many decent and sensible contributors are engaging with him.”
Do you think society should tolerate people who disagree with it? Should they try to shut them down or kick them out? Or should they listen and debate?
Bear in mind that this is exactly the attitude that most people in society have to racists, and anyone perceived as being one. What example do you want to set?
—
“Yes, but in no way is there a match between the Koran and the US Constitution. Not least because the US Constitution sought to restrict the powers of the US Federal government and regulate commerce between the States. The very opposite of the koranic instructions, which as it claims to be dictated by Allah, refutes any restriction on its authority. Consequently it claims the right to interfere in every aspect of an individual Moslems daily life.”
-sigh- All I meant was that it holds the same position in the hierarchy of laws. The Constitution is top, then federal law, then international treaties, then state law. All of which has to be interpreted in light of previous case law by the courts. The Constitution is supreme, and trumps federal law if they come into conflict, but federal law is needed to fill in the details because the Constitution leaves a lot of stuff vague and ambiguous, or doesn’t discuss it. Like, where in the constitution does it specify the maximum speed you’re allowed to drive on the roads? To say that to understand Sharia you only have to look at the Koran is like saying to understand US law all you have to look at is the Constitution. It’s not true.
—
“You will recognise the excuses (“not enough resources”, etc.) as the standard boilerplate generated by any public-funded institution under pressure.”
It’s also often the truth.
—
“The odd thing is I am neither a Platonist nor a Cartesian.”
Fair enough. I was only guessing at what you was getting at.
“I’m not sure here is the place to make a detailed argument”
It’s a bit off topic, but it’s a more pleasant conversation than the other one, so I’m happy to go along.
“Take two identical Lenovos running exactly the same revision of Win 10 and run the same program and you’ll get exactly the same result.”
There’s an equivalence relation between the two outputs, that for many purposes can be treated as equality, but which can’t actually be identity because there are other equivalence relations that treat them as different.
Consider your Mt Rushmore jpeg file and an encrypted version of the same. The 1’s and 0’s are different, but there’s an equivalence relation we can define that considers them to be ‘the same’ information. Technically, you can say that the probability distribution of each n-bit file contains n bits of information about the other, which is an equivalence relation.
‘Information’ and ‘semantic meaning’ are tricky concepts to define, and it would take a lot more space and time than I’ve got here to go into details.
—
“This is where you are being extremely tricky. More-so than normal.”
This is normal. You don’t always notice it.
“So, when you write ” Islam forbids sexual immorality of all sorts “, you need to tell us which code of morals and ethics you are using as a guide.”
In this case the code of morals I’m describing is the Islamic one, as you correctly deduced.
—
“But what you have not pointed out is that A. It is contradicted by the IOPC report mentioned in the OP. B. The British police find plenty of resources to investigate speech crimes, even arresting schoolchildren for speech crimes. Recently, they have even started to investigate “hate speech” which they recognize as legal.”
On A. all we’ve got are some leaked quotes from an unpublished report. When the report is published, we’ll see.
On B. the same issue applies. The internet contains a ***huge*** volume of speech, much of it politically incorrect hate speech, and the police investigate only a tiny, tiny fraction of it. They don’t have the resources to do so. So all the politically incorrect comments being made on this blog – just as one example – entirely pass them by. We’ve been operating for decades without the police doing anything about it.
And this is what I mean about the statistics of what is not being reported. (Or as Bastiat put it: ‘That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen’.) We have a huge volume of ‘crimes’ going on under the surface, that the police are totally failing to stop. They’ve not got the resources to address more than the tiniest fraction of them, so they only do so when somebody pushes them into it. If someone runs a huge public campaign into the ‘hate speech’ of some particular minority they don’t like, like Samizdata libertarians, and senior people in the government start asking questions about it, the police will be prodded into action, and likely go and make a few arrests. And then when you look at the arrest statistics on hate speech, you’ll see a huge spike of Samizdatistas getting arrested for it. And the campaign who started it all will say “We told you so!” Why, people will ask, did it take so long for the police to take action? Because of political pressure from the free speech lobby, and lack of resources they’ll say. But what you’re not seeing is all the rest of the politically incorrect speech going on, that both the police and the campaigners ignore. So if it’s really politically incorrect hate speech you’re worried about, it’s a total failure. If it’s Samizdata libertarians you want to get put in prison, and get the public riled up about, it’s been a roaring success.
Politically incorrect speech is, of course, not in the same moral category as child rape. But the problem with all the bits of the picture you can’t see is much the same. It’s a feature of the brain that it automatically fills in any blind spots with what it expects to be there. There are plenty of optical ilusions based on the effect. The problem is that people with different expectations can look at the same data and see something different, and can’t understand why you see what you do.
—
In 2015/16 there were 6200 cases prosecuted for sex offences flagged as related to child abuse. 67% were identified as white, 4% Asian, 3% were black, 1% were mixed race and 1% were other. For 24% of defendant’s there was no information on their ethnicity.
Data from 2011 on those convicted of sexual activity with a minor found 85% white, 3% black, 4% Asian and the rest were either listed as ‘other’ or unknown.
Data from 2014 of those convicted of rape of a minor (a different category) found 81% white, 7% black and 9% Asian.
Overall, child rape perpetrators appear to be pretty representative of the racial mix nationally. (86% white, 8% Asian, 3% black.)
Only when you zoom in on the small fraction of cases of perpetrators prosecuted for street grooming and child sexual exploitation by large gangs do you find a disparity. In a large sample of those cases, 38% were white, 32% were unknown, 26% were Asian and 3% were black. The question for the statistician is, why did we decide to zoom in? What about all the rest?
“Flubber: not the wording that i would have used; but short, and to the point.”
And that’s how you want to present your policy on free speech and the freedom to disagree with the mainstream, is it?
The politically-correct left would love to quote you on that.
Indeed so (and yet more revealing, they had resources to arrest two fathers who attempted to rescue their daughters), though fortunately their interest in twitter and suchlike seems to leave them without time to trawl for suspects in the murky depths of samizdata comment threads. (I was more focussed on the report itself, which did not give me the impression that the Rotherham rank and file were in the least ‘confused’ about what higher management policy was.)
FWIW, my 0.02p on this analysis is that it is the confabulation of someone who does not comprehend the true relationship between the ‘mascots of the anointed’ and their self-appointed patrons. (In any case, it may be interesting to explore the point.)
The issue is unusually clear in this particular case because it is peculiarly obviously that ordinary western society on 9/10 was not naturally shifting to become more sympathetic towards muslims. And on the other side of the social divide (although pre-existing anti-Israeli feeling had already brought sympathetic coverage from Western PC intellectuals to Arab regimes and groups), it was not especially natural in terms of their proclaimed public attitudes that western PC intellectuals would become defenders of the dignity of islam. In the same way, it was not obvious in Spring of 1939 that Spring of 1940 would see the British hard left wailing that ‘this is a capitalist war … British Imperialism is fighting for loot’ and make Mr Hitler a victim (as noted in Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’). A certain kind of PC intellectual hates western civilisation for real, but hates the abuses they accuse it off only for show.
writes Kravchenkp (I Chose Freedom) of communists he worked with. Sometimes this attitude may arise slowly and imperceptibly; at other times, it is the very reason for deciding to become a social justice warrior in the first place. Either way, the mascots are chosen to demonstrate the superiority of the anointed over the common herd – which is why “Your help is hurting” is so often the mascots’ fate. Long ago, Natalie wrote posts pointing out that if free speech had been allowed free rein after 9/11, western-resident muslims would have experienced much criticism in a free speech culture, motivating Islam in the west to
which, as she correctly says in that comment, it needs to do so very much more than Nullius’ attempted contrasting example. Instead, it has been encouraged to feel entitled to a kind of blasphemy-law-style protection – encouragement it did not need and will be less easily weaned off than it was got on. I and Natalie have comment-quoted above on the side-effects:
– increasing the desire to criticise Islam by restricting the ability
– making such as Nick Griffin the voice of truth on the subject (better alternatives have since emerged, no thanks to the PC who fought very hard to prevent it)
and of course the predicted-from-the-start effect the OP is about.
Some of the PC anointeds’ mascots’ official beliefs are more compatible with the official beliefs of the PC themselves than is Islam (or than was National Socialism in 1940 – when Hitler attacked Stalin in 1941 the hard left switched to backing the latter exclusively with some feelings of relief). And others deserve a sympathy that is more genuine, less virtue-signalling. But while the mascots’ purpose is to show how elevated the anointed are above the common herd, “Your help is hurting” will be a frequent effect (not side-effect). And while PC control of the MSM means it will often appear that society has shifted to sympathise with them, the reality will be more complex.
Anyone who fails to allow for the importance of virtue-signalling in PC culture, and the degree to which the public domain outcome is fixed, may confabulate strange explanations for why others oppose and for why they lose or, for a time, appear to.
Niall, good comment, to go along with others of yours here and elsewhere. :>)
Also, yours addressed to me way above: Noted. :>)
Natalie, good posting and good comments (unsurprisingly). :>)
Which is not to deny or disparage the good comments from others herein.
🙂
@Julie near Chicago: January 18, 2020 at 2:43 am
I agree with the point you seem to be making there (about statistical veracity), but, to be mathematically correct, anything over 100% is absurd. If you were suggesting checking the veracity of all of the female respondents’ apparent claims to having been raped, then that would be 100%. If you were suggesting doing that 10 times over, then that would seem to be pointlessly repetitive, unless there had been errors in the first and subsequent checks – i.e., a failure in the checking process.
If there were variously (say) errors in interpretation, or deliberately loaded/biased questions in the survey itself, or the data had been “massaged” to fraudulently “normalise” it according to some preferred or secret/undeclared method/hypothesis, or the population sample size was too small, then the survey would presumably be statistically invalid/unreliable from the outset and one could not, with any certainty, draw any valid statistically significant conclusions from the results of the survey (which was apparently what happened to the NASA global climate temps data and the fake “hockeystick” graph of temps, according to some of the people involved in promulgating same or who have been exposed – e.g., Top NASA Climate ‘Data Fraudster’ Named & Shamed).
As they say:
IIRC, three years later, Schmidt remains at NASA.
Which is 110% disappointing!
I have to ask: When was “Asian” redefined as “a race”?
Political correctness and Euro-centrism seem to have confused this issue (probably deliberately, to hide the pea) about classifying race in Asia – simply by conflating many races into the blanket label “Asians” (this in itself would seem to be classic white supremacist or apartheid racism), thus seemingly ignoring the reality that Asia is the largest continent with multiple cultures, ethnic groups and different races. So it would not be correct to call an Arab from Syria “a Malay”, nor would it be correct to call an Indonesian “a Eurasian” or “an Arab”.
In the case of the UK grooming gangs, it’s the religio-political ideology that’s important, stupid – i.e., not the “race” (however one chooses to define the latter).
I’ve spelled it out before on this forum: Muslims are directed by Allah to ensure that Islam (means “Submit”) is the pre-eminent (i.e., dominant, surpassing all others) religio-political ideology in any society where they find themselves. That’s a really simple and straightforward directive. No other religion has the infallible and absolute word of Allah directing them so clearly.
All good Muslims are told by Allah that their faith must be the dominant religion in any society where where they find themselves – Allah has said so (it is in the Koran). The unbelievers in dar al-harb must come to understand this, or suffer the punishment that Allah will give them through his servants in Islam. There is no “middle ground” or compromise with the word of Allah – it is absolute. It is forbidden by Allah to commit violence or mayhem on people for the sake of it, but Muslims feel compelled to do this where Allah’s word commands it – because Allah commands that the unbelievers are not to be spared excepting if they come into the Islamic faith and obey the will of Allah in truth, whereupon Allah will save them and they will become pArt of the Caliphate. This way, there shall be peace.
The unbelievers live in decadence and corruption, with belief in blasphemies such as the Christian Holy Trinity (Nicene Creed), or in no god at all but man-made concepts such as “human conscience”, “freedom”, or “human rights”. These are nothing to do with Allah and must all be swept away by Islam and governance under the Shariah law. Great is the wisdom of Allah.
Islamism remains (as I have detailed previously on this forum, and no-one has yet been able to refute this) the pre-eminent religio-political ideology on the planet, bar none. Why? Because it stems from the actual, unabridged word of Allah, spoken by the archangel Gabriel in visions to the last true prophet of Allah (after Christ), Mohammed (pbuh).
Any student of the Quran/Koran would know this, and would know that, in the UK, they are in the world of the unbelievers – in dar al-harb. In this context, Islamists are arguably entirely within their rights to treat the infidels as slaves – “What your right hand owns”.
So get over it and accept it. They’re targeting non-Muslim girls, and it is a deliberate and a very effective strategy. It’s not “abuse of children” or “pedophilia”, because, under Shariah law it’s allowable treatment of slaves of marriageable age.
How to fix it? Submit to Islam – making the children Muslims – and social cohesion and peace will be restored PDQ. It’s really that simple.
Don’t want to submit? OK, fine; you’ve had your offer and your chance and made your choice; now accept the consequences.
The UK is a godless society and the best thing that could happen to it – what it needs – is to be brought into Islam. End of.
Slarti, talking about “1000%” is a well-established way of wildly exaggerating in English.
But given your final quote, perhaps I am being even denser than usual and not getting that you’re teasing me. Snorri tried teasing me once, and I actually got it.
Further evidence against my interpretation is bobby’s comment just above.
And I still haven’t gotten my supper!
If I starve to death, maybe I can sue Perry. 😈
@julie: Some people (not me, you understand) might say that I’m a serious and highly accurate (always right) pedant 99.9% of the time, an escape artist 0.01% percent of the time, but tend to make tongue-in-cheek comments 152.8% of the time, however I couldn’t possibly comment.
In my defence (should I need one), I would explain that I have been diagnosed as having Aspergers syndrome (amongst other things) and that may sometimes lead me to become confused by the harsh reality of the world around me. This is despite my religio-political ideological position – being a confirmed Yorkshire-Welsh Muslim-Christian Jew – and my not inconsiderable practical and educational achievements, with a Black Belt in the ancient Welsh art of self-defence called Llap Goch and fluency in Welsh and a couple of other languages, with a PhD in Throat Clearing and Spitting to boot.
Understood, Slarti. Thanks. :>)
As it happens I am a fan of your Muslim-Jewish-Christian-Black-belted-Unattached comments, in whichever dress they choose to appear.
This latest being one of your best and hilariously put besides. 😆
P.S. When are you going to start teaching us Welsh?
(I’m on my 2nd
cancourse of supper. Hoo-ray for me!)I think one point that this head line neatly dips round.
Child grooming and child rape are bad, but we are missing a part of the headline, it’s “Government approved” ‘asian’ paedophile rape gangs.
The Catholic and COE scandals had to wear the name in the headline as it were.
The Police, Council, Home Office, Jackie Smith, Tony Blair etc persons in authority who let this all happen are completely avoiding the institutional blame that previous child rape scandals got strung with.
The biggest sin is those colluding to cover it up and ensure more victims.
@Itellyounothing:
Yep. Nail apparently hit on head with no thumbs intervening.
“The biggest sin is those colluding to cover it up and ensure more victims.”
Boy cries ‘Wolf!’ once too often.
Villagers stop believing him.
Wolf eats sheep, while boy shouts for help.
Boy blames villagers.
It’s an old story.
NiV: Boy cries ‘Wolf!’ once too often.
Villagers stop believing him.
Wolf eats sheep, while boy shouts for help.
Boy blames villagers.”
Apart from an astonishingly trite response it doesn’t bear any resemblance the actualities.
Well, maybe there were Wolves. The children who were being assaulted and raped and on one or two occasions murdered had begged for help.
Any ‘boy’ who raised the alarm, Griffin or Robinson, were vilified by the media and slandered as racists and the huge resources of the State broadcaster brought to bear to maintain the lie. A very similar tactic one or two have attempted here.
Here is an interesting news item.
Observation: The BBC is a little timid, but eventually holds its nose identifying the victims sectarian group, within about three sentences. One might think one or other BBC news editor might be reading Samizdata. On the other hand, those wallahs don’t belong to the sectarian group that must not be named.
But then, according to some, such information is irrelevant. Huh! maybe the BBC is institutionally racist.
And again Nullius in Verba (January 21, 2020 at 6:14 am), demonstrates how not understanding prompts confabulation – I should be grateful for so swift a complementary if not complimentary example of my prior post. 🙂
Nullius suggests that Mr Griffin is The Boy Who Cried Wolf, so was understandably ignored (for the reasons that fable explains). Nullius fails to grasp that the relevant fable is The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone was terrified to point out the obvious for fear of being called islamophobic, racist, and etc. Just as the small boy is first to point out that the emperor has no clothes, though the boy is not in general wiser than the grown-ups (quite the reverse: more ignorant, and doubtless often justly told he was stupid and naughty by his elders), so Mr Griffin, having already often been called a racist islamophobe (not without cause), had not that to worry about when he pointed out the obvious truth that others feared to say. (To be fair, Mr Griffin did have something to fear: as he said after the acquittal, “I don’t want to go to jail.”)
If you fail to grasp how the left’s calling all and any dissent an *ism or a *phobia necessarily restricts the pool of public domain truth-tellers to people with good or bad reasons for enduring such accusations, then you will confabulate strange explanations for who is the first well-known denouncer.
This is even more the case for anyone who fails to understand “the degree to which the public domain outcome is fixed”. The BBC were not obliged to spend our licence fee secretly filming Mr Griffin instead of secretly filming events in Rotherham. Blair and Straw were not obliged to spend police and court resources prosecuting him instead of prosecuting a Rotherham rapist. They chose to do that. Their choice, not his eloquence, is why Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, became the public face of warning that such behaviour was happening. They did not want his acquittal – Straw (the Home Secretary) was furious and demanded legal changes so there’d be no more such acquittals – but everything else about it they did want. Anyone who fails to see that very obvious fact will confabulate strange explanations for why “So you’re a BNP supporter, eh?” was one of the “Shut up, the PC explained” responses to the OP situation.
(In today’s world, The Emperors New Clothes should include a passage in which the emperor’s court heralds shout to the crowd to ignore the stupid words of a naughty small boy. 🙂 And I’ve already posted on The Boy Who Cried Wolf.)
Last night I watched a BBC television programme called the “Betrayed Girls”.
The television programme just assumed that the behaviour of these men was “unIslamic” as Islam “forbids” such conduct – anyone who might have possibly raised any questions about Islamic theology and jurisprudence and the personal conduct of Muhammad (the founder of the Islamic religion and the “model of conduct”) towards females (especially infidel females) was dismissed as “far right”, they were not invited on the programme (let alone allowed to present their case).
There were just old clips of BNP types (who are indeed bad – and thus are used to DISCREDIT any anti Islamic position) – and the clips did not contain anything about the Koran, the Hadiths or the life of Muhammad.
So that is settled then – anyone who raises doubts about Islamic theology and jurisprudence in this area (or other areas) or who raises the possibility (the possibility) that Muhammad (the “model of conduct”) behaved badly – will be punished.
The “Betrayed Girls” will continue to be betrayed.
That is redundant, and not entirely correct.
It would be better to say:
Government-approved underage-prostitution rackets.
There is no need for “”Asian””. Except for the NiV’s, everybody knows that all government-approved rackets are “”Asian””; although probably not all “”Asian”” rackets are government-approved.
It took a long time before that came to light, though. To what extent it was government-approved, i am not sure. It is correct that, once it came out, the media used the word ‘Catholic’, as they should.
That’s because the NiV’s effectively use innocent “”Asians”” (not the guilty) as human shields for the ruling class.
But it is a bit unfair to name only Smith and Blair if this has been going on for over 30 years.
Paul is utterly correct in his “betrayed girls” comment. I assume the TV show never mentioned that Muhammad was betrothed to Alisha when she was six but – being the great guy he was – waited until she was nine until he consummated the marriage. What a lovely bloke and that is according to Islamic sources. The same Islamic sources that portray Muhammad as the most perfect man who ever lived. To suggest these rape gangs had nothing to do with Islam is to suggest my physics degree had nothing to do with calculus.
Snorting, Politicians and civil servants almost all get away.
Smith and Blair are recent enough to punish and prevent more failure by encouraging the current ones.
Better some guilty people get prison than none at all.
“Everyone was terrified to point out the obvious for fear of being called islamophobic, racist, and etc.”
No. Everyone was trying to avoid pointing it out because they feared it would give the racists the means to cause more trouble, to stir up hatred and conflict between the races.
“If you fail to grasp how the left’s calling all and any dissent an *ism or a *phobia necessarily restricts the pool of public domain truth-tellers to people with good or bad reasons for enduring such accusations, then you will confabulate strange explanations for who is the first well-known denouncer.”
And if you fail to realise the left don’t give a damn about truth-telling on race, you miss entirely where the stigma associated with racism and islamophobia comes from.
Racism was a prominent feature of the politics of the left in the 1930s and 40s. It was generally popular across the political spectrum, but the left exploited that popularity with all the stuff about eugenics and racial purity and the Aryan master race, and so on. The revolting behaviour of the Nazis was so appalling, though, that it put Western populations off racism entirely. Starting in the 1950s, by 1965 it was unfashionable enough for the Race Relations Act to outlaw it. By the 1980s, public disgust at left-wing racism policies was general. So much so, that the Marxist historians in universities rewrote history to make the Nazis, Fascists, and racists right wing.
The remnants of Nazism were just a small bunch of stupid left-wing thugs, many of them educationally subnormal, who adopted it as a psychological reaction to their own inadequacies. Partly because it was the only way they could connect themselves to any form of achievement (white civilisation is superior, they are white, therefore they are superior), partly because immigrants were the main competition for the gutter-level jobs that were all they were capable of, and partly as a rejection of the society that had labelled them as the dregs, and treated them as such. Many of their policies were socialist/protectionist, but since most of them had a reading age of about seven, many came to believe they were right-wing, since that’s what the media said and none of the neo-Nazis were bright enough to realise that Nazis were socialists. They shaved all the hair off their heads and tattooed themselves with swastikas and skulls and stuff, and held riots.
This is the public’s image of racists. They’re knuckle-dragging morons who hunt out every rumour and conspiracy theory and every misapplied statistical fallacy to try to find evidence to support their revolting socialist/fascist worldview, and then use it as justification to beat people up for the colour of their skin. And when you look into it, virtually none of what they say turns out to be true, to the point that people started assuming it.
This is the social background that we start from when we consider the left’s tactics in using racism as a stick to beat the right with. The first step was already achieved, when they relabelled their former left-wing policies as right wing. Now they use the danger posed by the ‘far right’ as a hobgoblin to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety). They need coercive powers to shut down ‘hate speech’ and ‘discrimination’. The public are not normally happy about granting such powers, but the example set by the racists is enough for them to say “Oh, go on then.” And when the right leap to their defence, seeing the left targeting a group that even they have been persuaded are ‘far right’, it allows the left to shut down the right, too. And that, of course, makes the right angrier and ever more determined to defend the position, further reinforcing the power and influence of the left.
Racism has a credibility problem. Because they seize on absolutely anything that supports their worldview, some of what they believe is right, but a lot of it is wrong. (Like all the stuff about eugenics and the ‘master race’ was wrong.) Everything they get wrong further smears their reputation, and the result is that the few things they get right get tarred with the same brush if they become associated with the beliefs and claims of racists. Nobody believes it because it is racists saying it. And so when the BNP started saying that the Pakis were raping all the white girls in Rotherham, everybody assumed it was just the BNP’s usual line of slander, crying ‘Wolf!’ again, and nobody wanted to give it credence because it would just be used to justify attacking the Pakistani community in Rotherham generally. The police continued to do their usual lacklustre job – they pursued cases where they got sufficient evidence to proceed, but they allocated no extra resources to getting that evidence, and they were careful not to make a big deal of the race aspect, because of what the BNP would do with such an admission.
Eventually they did take action. Whether that was because they got pushed into allocating more resources, or whether it was because the BNP campaign led to the girls getting the confidence they would be believed to complain, I don’t know. But it’s true that after a BNP campaign to get the police to chase Pakistani child abusers, the police arrested a lot of Pakistani child abusers, and thus the statistics show a lot of Pakistani child abusers being arrested. That tells us nothing at all about how many abusers in general are Pakistani, because nobody collates statistics on all the child abusers that were never caught.
This has acquired huge political significance for the racist ‘right’, since it appears they have finally been proved right! It’s a huge propaganda coup for the BNP. And that’s why people are getting so upset at anyone poking holes in the narrative.
You can tell what aspect they really care about if you ask them about their opinion on other cases of child sexual assault. If you mention, say, the number of abuse cases within families, or the Catholic thing. They dismiss that as a distraction, a deflection, as “what-about-ary”, as an implicit defence of child abusers. How, one might ask, can asking people to also condemn child abuse within families or in the church with force proportionate to the numbers be a ‘defence’ of child abuse?
Answer – it can’t. It’s a defence of Muslims/Asians, not a defence of child abusers. But because they have equated the two groups in their minds, they cannot distinguish the two. (And in any case, for them, defending Muslims/Asians is worse.)
Yes, there are some issues on which foreigners and their religions can legitimately be criticised. But all such genuine issues get dismissed by the public as racists telling lies because racists are so undiscriminating about what they believe. I’m saying that if you want to be believed, you have to make sure everything you say is true. And that means checking it, and paying attention to logic and statistics, and listening when people argue.
But clearly, nobody is listening. So the left are going to win yet again.
—
“There were just old clips of BNP types (who are indeed bad – and thus are used to DISCREDIT any anti Islamic position) – and the clips did not contain anything about the Koran, the Hadiths or the life of Muhammad.”
Yes! Exactly!
“The television programme just assumed that the behaviour of these men was “unIslamic” as Islam “forbids” such conduct – anyone who might have possibly raised any questions about Islamic theology and jurisprudence and the personal conduct of Muhammad (the founder of the Islamic religion and the “model of conduct”) towards females (especially infidel females) was dismissed as “far right””
There is a tendency to believe that because they don’t follow *our* rules on morality, that they have *no* rules. This is not so. Muslim law allows plenty of behaviours we consider deeply immoral, but there are lots of other behaviours we are not bothered about that *they* consider extremely immoral. It’s not that they have *no* rules, it’s that they have *different* ones.
So in order to criticise them properly (and thus maintain credibility), you have to know what their rules actually *are*. The rule is no sex outside marriage (or slavery). There’s no rule forbidding sex with 9 year olds (actually, the rule is ‘post-menstruation’ for penetrative sex, which is biologically logical), but there *is* a rule forbidding sex with 9 year olds you’re not married to. Mohammad having sex with Aisha was perfectly OK, in Islamic morality, because she was his wife.
It’s a bit like the way Shakespeare’s play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is considered a bit icky today, since Juliet was 13. (And lots more classical literature…) In England, The Statute of Westminster 1275 set the age of consent at 12, and English Common law generally used 10-12 until 1875 when it was raised to 13. It was the feminists fighting child prostitution in London who got it raised as recently as 1885 to 16. (Have you read ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’?) Moral standards differ between times and places.
NiV: “Everyone was trying to avoid pointing it out because they feared it would give the racists the means to cause more trouble, to stir up hatred and conflict between the races.”
No, not everyone. Some people were trying to get the authorities to take notice of the plight of their children.
But what you actually mean: The middle class, the affluent, those in control at the BBC and the Print media in the ’80s, ’90s, oughties and ’10s, were happy to sacrifice working class children – so long as the middle classes could feel smug.
Apparently, you endorse that position, if that’s the case, I’m not yet ready to endorse Flubbers comment @ Jan 18th at 3:55 am, but we’re well on the way.
NiV “It’s a bit like the way Shakespeare’s play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is considered a bit icky today, since Juliet was 13.”
Honestly, I’m wondering if you may have taken leave of your senses. I’m also worried that you may be right, and there may be people out there who find Romeo & Juliet, ‘icky’!
We don’t have an age for Romeo, but it’s likely the fictional character of Romeo, could be anywhere between 13 and his early twenties.
Anyone who thinks Romeo and Juliet ‘icky’ because two teenagers are trying to get it on?
Two teenagers attempting to engage in a mutually consensual relationship, it’s not the same as a fifty eight year old man in a coercive relationship with a 9 year old child, is it?
“Apparently, you endorse that position…”
Like I said: “They dismiss that as a distraction, a deflection, as “what-about-ary”, as an implicit defence of child abusers. How, one might ask, can asking people to also condemn child abuse within families or in the church with force proportionate to the numbers be a ‘defence’ of child abuse?”
To be clear – no I don’t endorse that position, because that’s not how it was. Most people nowadays (including working class people) regard racists as on roughly the same moral level as paedophiles. Which is why decent people didn’t believe them, and nobody wanted to do anything to help their cause. The assumption wasn’t that the children were ‘an acceptable sacrifice’, it was that the stories were a racist lie, a distortion, an exageration, like all the other racist lies.
The question is, what about the much larger number of children who get abused, but don’t get the attention because their assaulter happens to be white and ‘Christian’? Are you ‘happy to sacrifice them’ to your cause?
“Anyone who thinks Romeo and Juliet ‘icky’ because two teenagers are trying to get it on?”
Are you telling me you don’t?!
The law today sets the age of consent at 16, and there’s no exception to that law based on the rapist’s age. Are you defending the statutory rape of a 13 year old here?
“We don’t have an age for Romeo, but it’s likely the fictional character of Romeo…”
Why make a point of the character being fictional? As I had gone on to say, the English common law set the age of consent at 10-12, i.e. puberty, up until 1875 in reality. And marriages and betrothals between older men and young women were far from unknown. Queen Isabella married Richard II when she was 8 and he was 22 years older. Shakespeare wasn’t writing a play about child abuse, he made Juliet 13 because that was considered legal/normal. Different times and different places have different moral rules.
NiV: “Are you telling me you don’t?!”
No, it a fiction, its a play put on a stage to pretend the events we are observing are actually happening. I’m going to break this to you gently. Romeo doesn’t die from poisoning, nor does Juliet stab herself to death. The cast of actors, and this may surprise to you, end up after the performance in the Dog and Duck for a pint.
In other news, Hans Gruber ( not his real name otherwise known as Alan Rickman ) wasn’t really a German, and didn’t fall to his death from the eighty seventh window of a skyscraper. Die Hard was also a fiction, a film, with actors.
Now it seems to me, you are protecting racist white people who turned a blind eye to Racist Asians ( Pakistani men, if you prefer ), and you condone that conspiracy and that form of racism and sectarianism, the men selected their victims largely outside their racial and religious group. And that, it seems to me, makes you a facilitator and apologist of racism and child abuse.
But, that’s just my opinion.
You continue to comment in ways that let me understand (though disagreeing) why Natalie wondered if you lived abroad and knew little of the UK (or the anglosphere generally).
The Rotherham staffers who were ordered to be quiet, and their colleagues who knew they would be wise to do likewise, were afraid of being themselves called racist – of being themselves accused. Cancel culture does not work by saying, “I know you’re not a racist, but do you see how making this known could empower racists, so had better not be said.” Cancel culture works the way left-wing delation always works – by accusing the dissenter of all the sins in the PC calendar. You ascribe an absurd and implausible high-mindedness by imagining those told-to-look-away people and their knew-to-look-away colleagues were just concerned for others and felt no fear of ill-consequences for themselves. (Like Havel’s Czech greengrocer who puts a ‘Workers of the World Unit’ sign amongst his cabbages, the ideology helps them reduce a bit of the embarrassment they might otherwise feel but – again, like the greengrocer – it starts with them knowing it’s not safe for themselves.)
What is the word ‘lie’ doing in that sentence? The Rotherham staffers who were told to be quiet knew perfectly well that the things they were not to discuss were factual – they would not otherwise have felt the least urge to discuss them. Likewise the specific orders the enquiry reported would never have been issued if higher management could not see that the accumulating statistics required going beyond what everyone already knew to avoid sounding like anyway.
The jury acquitted Nick Griffin – to Jack Straw’s fury. Maybe you don’t know the people of Britain as well as you think. Outside the bubble, most people know that accusations of racism are cheap as chips these days. They regard Adolf as vile, but not Churchill. And beyond even that, they are quite capable of seeing perfectly well both that Griffin was an actual racist and that he was likely to be factual in this particular matter.
I guess that establishes what you think of Natalie, myself and others on this blog and off it who did believe. Was it indecent of Natalie, way back then, to blog that if you wanted people to ignore Nick Griffin, stop proving him right; stop being so viciously absurd with the accusations of racism that people with nothing to lose in that line become prominent?
No, the question is: what is wrong with you that you can think such a silly sentence has any place in this thread? The OP title quote is quite clear: “With it being Asians [euphemism for ‘Muslims’], we can’t afford for this to be coming out.” The idea of any powerful state figure in Rotherham or any other part of the UK saying, “With it being White Christians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.” is beneath contempt stupid. That is the point of the OP. The narrative decided whose crimes were to be pursued with the usual sad ineptness and weakness of the current state (to the great annoyance of the majority of voters, who want crimes more severely punished) and whose crimes were, over and above that, to get the extra protection of having their concealment be treated as more important than their effective pursuit.
On another point (Nullius in Verba, January 21, 2020 at 10:34 pm), I agree of course that the left have rewritten history to hide their own involvement in racism, eugenics etc., but where you say
I would say that (much, much earlier than the 1980s), they rewrote it to be only right wing – to make the National Socialist German Workers Party into the National (cough) German (cough) Party. You're remarks could be read as saying you thought it was the (cough) Socialist (cough) Workers Party. I think it was both.
“You continue to comment in ways that let me understand (though disagreeing) why Natalie wondered if you lived abroad and knew little of the UK (or the anglosphere generally).”
Perhaps I don’t know your bit of it? Because I know a lot of Brits, and I don’t know many who have any sympathy at all for racists.
“You ascribe an absurd and implausible high-mindedness by imagining those told-to-look-away people and their knew-to-look-away colleagues were just concerned for others and felt no fear of ill-consequences for themselves.”
And you ascribe an absurd low-mindedness and selfishness to them, as if they themselves were supportive of racism, but only kept quiet about it because they were told to.
And they weren’t told to “look away”. They were to deal with the victims of Asians in exactly the same way they were to deal with the victims of white abusers, and not to make an issue of the perpetrator’s race. Which if you care about the victims, is what you should be doing.
“What is the word ‘lie’ doing in that sentence? The Rotherham staffers who were told to be quiet knew perfectly well that the things they were not to discuss were factual”
Because here I’m talking about the people telling them, not the people on the frontline who were told.
The assumption on the part of the upper management was that the stories were not credible, and were the result of a BNP campaign to stir up racial hatred. People of all races commit crimes. The belief was that the subset committed by Asians was being picked out and the numbers and stories exaggerated.
“Likewise the specific orders the enquiry reported would never have been issued if higher management could not see that the accumulating statistics required going beyond what everyone already knew to avoid sounding like anyway.”
You think they were accumulating statistics? As I’ve just been arguing, the statistics don’t back the claims up, unless you zoom in on some pretty specific subsets of the data. Data from 2011 on those convicted of sexual activity with a minor found 85% white, 3% black, 4% Asian and the rest were either listed as ‘other’ or unknown. Data from 2014 of those convicted of rape of a minor (a different category) found 81% white, 7% black and 9% Asian. You have to deliberately go looking for it to find it, and if you look for something else, what else might you find?
“Maybe you don’t know the people of Britain as well as you think. Outside the bubble, most people know that accusations of racism are cheap as chips these days.”
There are two bubbles, one at either end of the argument, and most of the people in the middle think “A plague on *both* your houses!” They don’t like people who would accuse Churchill, and they don’t like people who would use the example of Churchill to defend Hitler. People don’t like either fringe.
“I guess that establishes what you think of Natalie, myself and others on this blog and off it who did believe.”
Everyone regards their own cultural norms as “decent”, and those of the other tribe as indecent. It’s a relative term.
I think you’re too stuck in your tribal mindset, and insufficiently sceptical about your own tribal dogmas. It’s not unreasonable to find the story initially plausible. I did too, although for other reasons. But you have to keep an open mind, even on beliefs that fit your worldview. Some would say *especially* on beliefs that fit your worldview.
“The OP title quote is quite clear: “With it being Asians [euphemism for ‘Muslims’], we can’t afford for this to be coming out.””
What does it mean by “coming out”? Does it mean that they want all the cases to go to court, the perpetrators to be jailed, for the crimes to come out, but for the press to keep quiet about the (irrelevant) race/religion of the perpetrators? Or do they mean that the world shouldn’t find out about the crimes at all? That they shouldn’t be investigated?
My interpretation is that he meant the former. There’s no question child abusers should all be prosecuted, but he doesn’t want it to turn into a race war. You seem to be interpreting it as the latter. Maybe it is the latter. And maybe it was one copper shooting his mouth off, about his own opinion, and says nothing about what actually happened? Who knows? Maybe we’ll see when the full report is published.
“The idea of any powerful state figure in Rotherham or any other part of the UK saying, “With it being White Christians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.” is beneath contempt stupid.”
That’s pretty much what the Pope actually did.
“I would say that (much, much earlier than the 1980s), they rewrote it to be only right wing”
Agreed.
I’m glad we could agree on something! 🙂
That is a trebly-revealing non-sequitur.
Firstly, if Nullius’ argument followed, then I (and Vaclav Havel) would also be ascribing absurd capitalist selfishness to the Czech greengrocer with the ‘Workers of the World Unite’ sign in his window (that I mentioned above precisely to help Nullius avoid that absurd misunderstanding) – as if the greengrocer longed to supply rotten cabbages at obscenely inflated prices and only refrained at the Party’s orders. There is a sane middle ground between communism and communism’s caricature of its enemies:
and likewise between other forms of political-correctness and their caricatures of their enemies.
The Havel essay also explains Nullius’ second, related absurdity – not seeing the two-sided function of such ideologies (as Hannah Arendt says, they intimidate and direct – they prepare followers for a two-sided role as perpetrator and/or victim). The greengrocer would have felt embarrassed to display a sign saying, “I fear the Party, so will inform on any ‘dangerous’ conversations in my shop”, and likewise, the Rotherham higher-ups would have felt embarrassed to utter, let alone their juniors to obey, any “Betray those girls” command that anticipated the BBC documentary’s title.
And this leads naturally to Nullius’ third and grossest absurdity. Natalie, I and others have been spelling out in the plainest terms that PC intimidation (a little by conscious intent and a lot by witless side-effect) makes those who have least to lose from it louder in the public domain. Except for the trial itself, Nick Griffin had no cause to fear: no accusation of racism could further hurt his public persona. If various Rotherham institutions had been staffed by BNP sympathisers, they – like Nick – would have had less to lose so less to fear. In asserting that they were intimidated, I was incidentally asserting my belief in their lack of any actual old-style racism. This point of PC hitting its own sympathisers hardest has been so repeatedly emphasised in my and others’ arguments that for Nullius to come up with the travesty I quote above suggests a breathtaking level of misreading the OP and thread, never mind that particular comment.
I have a day job so will leave critiquing the rest of Nullius’ comment above to any others interested, or another time, or let Nullius have the last word (actually, I suspect that is pretty well guaranteed to happen anyway 🙂 ).
BTW, I learnt here that the late Sir Roger Scruton also wrote novels, his last being
That one sounded relevant to the OP. Anyone read it, or any of them?
You’re still missing the point.
There is a difference between:
(a) Not wanting to be associated with X because you are afraid of the consequences – to your reputation, to the way people treat you, or getting into trouble with the authorities.
(b) Not wanting to be associated with X because it is a horrible, morally reprehensible thing to do or be.
Take paedophiles, for example. Do you not practice or support paedophilia because you are afraid of the consequences to yourself should the authorities or the rest of society catch you doing it? Or because it’s morally reprehensible, and something you personally dislike, oppose, and want to prevent?
For a lot of society, racism is in the same category of the morally reprehensible as paedophilia. It’s not that people shun racism because they fear the personal consequences from the PC, they shun it because it’s historically associated with Hitler and the neo-Nazis, and feels disgusting and wrong.
I’m getting the impression from the way you’ve been responding that you yourself don’t experience that moral distaste; that on racism you’re firmly in camp (a) rather than (b). Well, some people just are – that’s freedom of belief. But what intrigues me is that you don’t seem to even understand that other people can be in camp (b) on the subject, let alone that the majority of normal people are.
In a totalitarian dictatorship there are a lot of things outlawed that are in category (a). Most people are not morally repelled by it, but avoid or deny it because it’s illegal. But we don’t live in a dictatorship, so if you want to introduce laws to impose consequences, it generally takes a significant pre-existing body of moral opposition to justify it.
“or let Nullius have the last word (actually, I suspect that is pretty well guaranteed to happen anyway 🙂 ).”
I’m sure the subject is going to come up again, (unfortunately). It’s one way to get a lively debate going! So it’s only until next time…
Up to this, you were doing so well!
(The arguments against are irrelevant, you were right)
Which racism?
The racism that lynches blacks for looking at white women?
Or the “racism” that drives a Scandinavian to make a taco?
The term “racism” has become so meaningless as to make your statement – which is facially proper – overbroad. And I think that that’s where much of the ambiguity comes in.
Once “racism” loses any definite meaning, one is left to wonder why it ought to be avoided. The taco, I mean, not the lynching. Perhaps we need a new word for “real racism.”
LBC 21 January 2020
Maajid Nawaz: “One of the main defendants in trial, argued that it is his religious right to have sex with under age girls, and that was his defence”
All of a part with, we need to understand the Islamic system of ethnics because these tenets are equally valid. Yea, uh, No!
If that were true, then an old post of Natalie’s would illustrate one of several reasons for being cautious about accusing someone of racism. Instead, accusations of racism are about as dear as ditchwater today, and while antifa types do their thuggish best, mere random neighbours are less dangerous to those so accused than to the alleged paedophile of Natalie’s post.
To take one recent example amongst ourselves, neonsnake flat-out accused APL of racism and Nullius agreed. Since neonsnake said that anyone who defended APL was racist too, and I did, it seems he accused me of racism also. (I said APL’s original guess was a poor bet but the accusation’s grounds were wildly inadequate.) Does Nullius think neonsnake would accuse APL or me of paedophilia on no better grounds? (On equally silly grounds!) Neonsnake’s view of racism is not so leavened as bobby b’s or mine by awareness of how much PC has cheapened the term, but would neonsnake continue to debate with me (critically, but with no hint of screaming rage) if he truly regarded all defenders of APL (more accurately, all critics of his, neonsnake’s, ability to identify racists) as on the same moral level with paedophiles?
I prefer to think that Nullius and neonsnake did not, in that recent thread, act as believers in the moral equivalence asserted above.
bobby b (January 23, 2020 at 9:20 pm) has already made the point about accusations of racism that are flat-out PC-fakes, but it goes further. I think the perpetrators of the final solution were very evil (and as far as comparison with paedophiles goes, Julius Streicher combined the two roles). I also think it’s wrong for a young lefty activist to blame Israel for acts tolerated in Arab countries – but I don’t think the two are equally wrong. It would be a long search to find a Brit who did (even longer if you confined the search to members of Momentum and/or a certain immigrant group, since they would rather signal their anti-racist virtue with some other minority group than Jews).
‘Politically-correct’ and ‘actually-correct’ can precede ‘racism’, as other words. Any new word would be misused as soon as it was made.
(Have you see the Yes, Minister episode where Sir Humphrey tells Hacker the Foreign Office phrase that will be introduced when the current polite phrase for Trump’s – perhaps apocryphal – ‘s**hole country’ gets denounced by the PC as racist, and the further phrase the FO are reviewing to be introduced a while after that when that next one is in turn so denounced?)
Hannah Arendt (‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’) distinguishes ‘race-thinking’ from ‘racism’, where by ‘racism’ she means totalitarian use of race as an overarching explanation, and by ‘race-thinking’ she means willingness to consider race as one explanatory factor among others. But that would not match your distinction since, in one sense, you could say both are (real/actual) racists, though of importantly-different kinds as regards Hannah’s subject.
“Does Nullius think neonsnake would accuse APL or me of paedophilia on no better grounds?”
Do you think anyone would accuse me of supporting or defending paedophilia on no better grounds?
“but would neonsnake continue to debate with me (critically, but with no hint of screaming rage) if he truly regarded all defenders of APL (more accurately, all critics of his, neonsnake’s, ability to identify racists) as on the same moral level with paedophiles?”
I can’t speak for neonsnake, but personally I’d debate with paedophiles in the same way.
I’ve managed to debate reasonably politely with Muslims arguing for jihad, with religious extremists pushing Old Testament intolerance, with socialists arguing for revolution and enslaving the rich, with eco-extremists who think we need to depopulate or even wipe out humanity, and with global warming believers who consider climate denial on a par with holocaust denial, and who want to bring in laws to suppress dissent from their orthodoxy by force. Racists and homophobes (and SJWs) are just one more category of the same ‘us’ versus ‘them’ aspect of humanity.
The arguments and justifications for civilised debate, as set out in JS Mill’s ‘Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion‘, stand just as strongly when the topic is one we feel passionately about, and when those we disagree with we feel passionately are dangerous and evil – just as those people feel the same about me. Those arguments and justifications would say it is even more important to keep lines of communication open in such cases. There is no greater danger to morality than ‘us’ versus ‘them’ thinking – it’s a dehumanising mechanism capable of shutting off normal moral considerations entirely, creating implacable polarisation and endless cycles of atrocity and blood feud.
Yes, I’ve actually had polite debates with people who many would class as paedophiles-by-inclination – for example, on the question of the legality/censorship of pornographic cartoons and computer-generated imagery. My view on them is that they usually can’t help who or what they’re attracted to – what matters is whether how they act on it harms others without informed consent. I might not like what they do, but I can’t interfere with their freedom without justification by the ‘Harm Principle’. But for a lot of people, the idea of it evokes a visceral disgust that has resulted in even CGI porn that harms no one being made illegal. My view on racism and homophobia is much the same. Racists and homophobes can’t help how they feel, and are entitled to their beliefs – but not when it harms others without their consent.
So don’t assume that just because I’m relatively polite about it, I don’t feel the same way. Judging from some of the comments here, I’m fairly sure some of you feel the same way about me! But with very few exceptions, Samizdata does practice the culture of polite debate, even with people you hate, for which it, and all of you, deserve the highest praise.
Not quite prepared to go that far, in your case, Niall. I’ll explain why in a bit…
Yes, I flat out accused APL of racism. If the Daily Mail, who are not exactly the most PC of our newspapers, were not able to make a reference to skin colour, then I find the assumption that the perps were non-white to be racist. In a country that’s, what, 85% white (?) statistically, the perps were most likely to be white. I made a joke (which I didn’t make clear was a joke) that if the Mail didn’t find an excuse to specify skin colour, then they were certainly white.
Which left me in a position of someone assuming, in an 85% white country, that a violent criminal is non-white. Is that racist? I say yes.
NiV’s point, on this thread, as I read it, is that “we” (whoever “we” are) are very prone to highlighting miscarriages of justice when they pertain to people of colour or of other religions, particularly and (I think) limited to Islam, and ascribing those miscarriages to PC.
(NiV, correct me if I have that wrong)
This leaves an overall impression that it’s not the miscarriage that bothers “us”, it’s the miscarriage only when applied to people of colour or of Islamic faith.
It’s why I’ve been more-or-less absent recently. I don’t have a lot of interest in those debates, nor do I have the debating skills to change minds.
Niall, as to why I will continue to debate with civility, in your case, it has not gone unnoticed by *me* that you’ve recently become visibly and vocally concerned with separating what you refer to as “mascots” from what you refer to as “the anointed” (not sure if that’s the words you used, but I trust you understand. It’s late and I have other stuff on my mind, and I don’t have the energy to look up the exact wording)
I don’t really think you’re racist, or bigoted, but I have to say, with some sadness, that I’ve read a number of anti-PC threads that could be viewed as racist. *I* may not think you’re racist, but that’s because I have an impression built up over several months. The offer of a beer stands.
A well-meaning left-leaning chap might look at a thread where we discuss how much better off the descendents of black slaves in the US are vs someone who wasn’t enslaved and is still living in poverty in Nigeria (ergo descendents of slaves should be grateful and shut up about reparations), and form a different opinion.
A well-meaning left-leaning chap might look at this thread, and conclude that we hate Muslims, and believe all of them to be pedophiles-in-waiting. But the focus is not on pedophiles (which Nullis absolutely has not defended), but on Muslim pedophiles. So the impression isn’t that we hate pedophilia, but that we hate Muslims (the libertarian trope of “pedophilia vs ephebophilia” is surely not unknown?)
*My* libertarianism is essentially well-meaning left-leaning. I just think that the left ideals of less inequality, less racism, less bigotry, more representation (all of which I agree with) etc etc are far more achievable through free-market means than through Big Daddy Government.
But I can’t make that case when people are going “no mention of skin colour? Must be coloured then!”
Hence my focusing elsewhere for now, and my recent absence.
I assume, incidently, that APL’s flat-out statement that I’m a fascist because I once stopped a guy from being objectively and violently racist to my girlfriend’s sister doesn’t bother anyone?
I mean, no one at the time appeared to say “hold on, mate, not sure that stacks up”, but I’m sure everyone was thinking it, right?
That is disingenuous, neonsnake: that is not the reason why APL called you fascist*. The reason was that you wrote:
The implication of that quote is that violence is justified even in reaction to speech that most people at Samizdata would characterize as “simply a different point of view”.
That the British police would agree with that quote, does not excuse you.
You might reasonably argue that APL took the above quote out of context. Reading your original comment in its entirety, however, it seems to me that APL did not misrepresent what you said any more than you are now misrepresenting what you had said.
* and APL called you only “a bit of a fascist”, anyway 🙂
neonsnake (January 26, 2020 at 9:43 pm), your question prompts an interesting ‘forensic’ discussion – alas, ridiculously long because of necessary quoting, so this may be my last in this thread (and about time I here everyone cry 🙂 ).
APL said Huh in:
In a later thread, you called him an (unqualified) racist. He responded by embroidering “Huh” with “a bit of a fascist.”
Though APL commented in its follow-up thread, he did not comment in the origin thread where you presented the ideas he quoted from, but I and others did, including:
(See also comments in the first part of that thread from me, bobby b, etc.)
Way down that thread, after you had given sundry hostages to debating fortune, you explained you had “acted so” against a particular maker of a racist remark who had presented a degree of clear-and-present-danger. You knew the scenario you had in mind from the start but you took your own sweet time letting Nullius, bobby b or I, never mind any suspicious listener such as APL, into the secret that it was a defensibly imminent-threat context, not
to which you would in practice restrict your DIY hate-speech-law enthusiasm.
So what did I think when you called APL a racist and he replied you were a bit of a fascist?
a) Offer insult, get insult back: unhelpful but unsurprising.
b) The same explanation I saw for APL’s argument, that you called racist, explains the difference between APL’s and my assessments of your earlier remarks.
– Once you explained the “acted so” context, I looked back at your earlier comments and diagnosed a typical writer’s error: it is easy to overlook that, while you know what you mean, the readers only know what you’ve told them so far and it’s easy to omit crucial details.
– Tthe more suspicious APL is (too) ready to diagnose well-known PC patterns in less-obvious locations like the Daily Mail (so more likely, as I said from the first, to lose than to win that particular £10 bet he made – if you had taken it, which would have been a more helpful response than accusing him of racism). That same (excessive IMHO) suspicion of all that savours of PC made him ready to see a deceitful PC pattern in your late-in-thread limiting of your early-in-thread comments, where I just saw an equally well-known pattern of poor writing.
c) The accusation ‘fascist’ (let alone ‘a bit of’) is even cheaper than the accusation ‘racist’ today – and that is saying something. Orwell was complaining about the left-caused meaninglessness of ‘fascist’ in the 40s and by the time my innocent political eyes first opened on the scene long after, “the fascist left” were tediously familiar as accusers and as accused. Had you defended your self against APL’s response, I would have presented my thoughts in (b), but you ignored the ‘racist’ in the rest of the thread so no natural occasion arose.
Hopefully, this answers your question AFAIAC. The maintained offer of a beer is appreciated but be warned – I drink whisky (of very good quality), not beer. 🙂
Fair.
I struggle with the paradox of intolerance, likely to my detriment.
I’ll limit my comment to that, and to note that I’ll buy you very good quality whisky if I’m your neck of the woods; but in London, at London prices, you’re gonna have to think again 😉
(I’m currently half way through a pint that cost me £6. No idea how that scales for quality whisky)
neosnake: “I assume, incidently, that APL’s flat-out statement that I’m a fascist because I once stopped a guy from being objectively and violently racist to my girlfriend’s sister doesn’t bother anyone?”
Well, as others have pointed out, that wasn’t what I was replying to. I really don’t know how you could think it was, since I quoted you directly.
This was the quote I was replying to:- “Some of you are going to say that one should not threaten, nor perform, violence upon people expressing a “simply different point of view”, no matter that it is expressed in public. That’s fine, but I’m still going to, while you pretend that hate crime doesn’t exist.”
I would agree with the fist clause, it’s the second I take issue with.
You have an ideology, which I will paraphrase as, ‘hate crime’ does exist. and you justify assault, bullying and intimidation on the basis that you intend to root it out where ever you encounter it’.
So, there you have it. An ideology which you intend to prosecute, with violence and intimidation and intolerance.
You have articulated an aspect of your worldview which corresponds closely to aspects of fascism ( or any other intolerant ideology, Communism for example ). If I’d chosen to be precise, I might have said, you displayed fascistic tendencies. But, ‘a bit of a fascist’ was good enough shorthand.
Sometimes the unintentional ones are the best.
😉