There is an old Irish story – used by Connor Cruise O’Brien in an old speech – about a priest with a very forgiving attitude whenever a young Irish man confessed to straying from the path of virtue with an equally-willing young Irish woman. “As long as you took no pleasure in it, my son” was his gentle substitute for penance. The same might be said of Judge Watson’s attitude to the US travel ban: saintly Obama – though he banned Syrian immigrants for longer – took care to sound like a man who took no pleasure in it, whereas deplorable Trump never made the same effort. For much the same reason, Churchill was kept out of the UK government till WWII was actually declared: the ‘happy warrior’ might love peace, might hate Hitler for compelling war, but he never sounded nearly miserable enough about accepting its necessity or having to wage it.
It’s admirable when people admit truths unwelcome to their point of view. Even in such honesty, however, there can be a lingering need to virtue signal – and this matters because it means their instincts are still giving them wrong answers about ‘what to do’.
Dr. Cheryl Benard has realised there’s a problem with Europe’s (especially Austria’s) migrant (especially Afghan) crime-wave (h/t instapundit). Since many others are still in total denial, she deserves credit for this (belated, IIUC) realisation. However she found it necessary to tell us:
This is not an article that has been fun for me to write.
Well, who would! Who would find it fun to write about vicious assaults on women, pensioners, etc. Precisely because that is so very obvious, it is not the reason she wrote that sentence. She would have skipped it in a reversed-context article about Austrians attacking Afghan immigrants. So I’m very grateful for her information, and the evidence that denial is cracking, but I notice when her conclusions are:
– statistically inattentive:
why is this current cohort of Afghans making its mark as sexual predators . . . and inept, stupid ones at that?
‘inept and stupid’ Afghani sexual predators will appear to be a higher percentage of immigrant perpetrators than they truly are. The Rotherham gang were not Afghans.
– politically correct:
… these young men are “ours.” They grew up during the years in which we [the U.S.] were the dominant influence and paymaster in Afghan society. Since 2001, we have spent billions on an Afghan school system that we like to cite as one of our greatest accomplishments. .. And here, now, are our “graduates,” rampaging across Europe like the worst sort of feral beasts.
If that school system took its political tone from the US educational system, then the result is hardly surprising. However, numerous US military personnel report seeing the problem in Afghanistan long before “our graduates” got out of school – and the New York Times agreed, even as it blamed them for fighting the Taliban instead.
Members of the relevant diaspora communities must make very clear to the refugees that they do not approve of and will not assist them
but the article itself explains some of the reasons why they do not and will not.
In “This Is What Winning Looks Like“, The documentary maker Ben Anderson filmed an Afghan police chief who said the following of his police commanders raping young boys in Afghan police barracks of an evening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI&t=3120
These are the sorts of delightful attitudes and pastimes that “cultural enrichment” has foisted upon us, anyone who things these disgusting practices are unusual or related to US intervention in recent decades is delusional, since reports of such practices being commonplace exist from the Victorian era (late 1800’s) all the way back into antiquity.
Pederasty has long been a staple of many sophisticated cultures – see the Romans, the Greeks, and the Japanese – and was entirely accepted amongst peoples who had what we would consider highly developed moral structures.
In those cultures, it tended to be a consensual thing – and, yes, I understand about true consent and minors. The Greeks considered the relationship to be a very high and sublime thing – the best way to educate and cultivate young citizens, according to some authors.
But it still astounds me to see the prevalence of pederasty in Muslim cultures – cultures which toss homosexuals off of tall buildings, but politely look away when the powerful older guy grabs and rapes whatever boy he desires.
I can only conclude that Muslim cultures value raw power over every other thing, and that the very strong prohibition against gay sex takes second place to the exercise of that raw power. And it is that cultural theme that is the danger that Islamic immigration brings to us, more so than the specifics of how it’s expressed.
And that’s not something anyone picked up attending Americanized schools in Afghanistan.
Not sure why you are so surprised. They take their queue from Mohammed, whom they praise as the model of a perfect man…who just so happened to think there was nothing wrong with taking a 6-year old as a wife when he was in his 50’s and raping her when she was only 9-years old.
Sure, they have absolutely oodles of justification for it, but it’s hard to justify harsh punishments for today’s offenders when the founder of your religion thought it was just dandy.
As for the raping of young boys in Afghanistan (pederasty if you want to be polite), it’s not like they try to hide it or are even embarassed about it. An oft-quoted line from a Pashtu song is:
In 2010, in response to Joel Brinkley’s article on the problem one soldier wrote:
Another commentator was an aid worker in Afghanistan:
And this is why The Left will champion pedophilia in about 15-20 years
They’ve championed it in the past, indeed various Labour cabinet ministers have been called out on their support of initiatives supported by PIE (Paedophile Information Exchange) back in the 1970’s and 1980’s as part of their work at the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty)
So I fully expect them to do so again in the future, although hopefully with the same lack of success. After all, the left have already proven that they are shameless, so why should supporting paedophiles be any different?
Dr. Barnard has at least acknowledged that this is a serious problem (although, as far as I can see, she never adequately explains why it seems largely confined to Afghans). It’s a start. And her solution (in part) is:
Hmmm. That sounds suspiciously like what Trump is trying to accomplish. I guess it’s acceptable when coming from a certifiable leftist with all the right credentials but not when it comes from a barbarian like Trump, right? Well, whatever; as long as the end result is to implement his “extreme vetting” I don’t really care who gets the credit.
On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead.
Aside from Afghan immigrants, there’s quite a few Westerners who, despite having lots of enthusiasm for the Western civilisation of their forefathers, can perceive quite a few of the reasons why one might develop a deep and abiding contempt for the Western civilisation of the 21st century.
The situation in 8 words and a pun.
Yes, JG. I know that Pashtu ditty. But hold hands with your girlfriend or boyfriend and it’s the H2SO4. It is essentially the derangement of sexual control. That is always a perverts charter. I recall a case about 2002 in the ‘stan where a girl was abducted and “married” by some warlord or other in a dispute with another warlord over the ownership of a top-end fighting dog. At the time I realised any “nation-building” was a bust flush.
Then a couple of years later seeing an interview with a US Army Captain. He was trying to build a bridge. The “twinkly” tribal elders didn’t want it. In the end the US Army Captain was like “Fuck ’em”. He got to that point quite a while after I would have done. Apart from anything part of the plan was to employ local young men but they were in scarce supply. They were off Talibanning it up and trying to kill this guy’s comrades.
But then I am a Sherlock Holmes fan so via Dr Watson I know what an epic shit-hole the NW frontier was then. I also lived through the ’80s so I know of the torrid time the Russians had.
In short there is no hope for a people who tolerate raping children but will execute you for flying a kite.
I have never had any sexual relations (even in the Bill Clinton manner) with anyone other than a consenting adult. I do though own five kites.
You sick twisted f*ck! I have no idea how you sleep at night. 😯
@Laird – When you say Dr. Barnard, I presume you actually mean Dr. Cheryl Benard, author of “Eurojihad – Patterns of Islamist Radicalization and Terrorism in Europe”?
I sleep with my kites JG.
Correct, John Galt. Please excuse the extraneous “r”.
Cheryl Bernard doesn’t appear to be that much of a lefty?
Laird – is the problem “largely confined to Afghans”?
I wonder: how comparable is comparable? And how many Afghans are actually Afghans? I’ve heard about economic migrants to Australia claiming to be 15-yr old Afghan boys, so perhaps the Afghani dimension of the problem is being overstated.
Also: I take “fewer than 10 percent” to mean “almost 10 percent”, and I assume the Syrian refugee population in Austria isn’t very large. Certainly it’s much smaller than a tenth of Austria’s population. So why are Syrian refugees committing almost a tenth of Austria’s rapes? Even the example by which the author means to illustrate the extraordinary scale of Afghan sex crimes is itself extraordinary.
Plus, we have the same problem with Syrian refugees as we do with Afghans: how many of them are really Syrian, and where are they really from?
Also: I take “fewer than 10 percent” to mean “almost 10 percent”
You can use Old Lee Moore’s Law of Government Statistics for this.
Which is that statistics inimical to government policy will never be released voluntarily, and if the government cannot avoid releasing them, they will be released in the way that is most consistent with government policy.
Solving for x in this case :
1. The Austrian goverment is in favour of admitting lotsa Syrian refugees
2. Therefore Syrian refugees are not a problem
3. Therefore if they are responsible for 9.99% of sexual assaults, the government will say “fewer than 10%” not “fewer than 20%”
4. Likewise if they are responsible for 6.2% of sexual assaults, the government will say “fewer than one in sixteen” not “fewer than 10%”
5. Therefore x (the actual percentage that the Austrian police know but don’t wish to say out loud) must always be the largest number that is smaller than y, where y is the number in the expression “fewer than y”
In the same way, if government statisticians have computed that eight million new jobs would be created by cutting income tax in half, this will be revealed – if it must be revealed – by the expression “at least 15,000 new jobs.”
Incidentally, though I am generally familiar with when one should use “less” and when one should use “fewer” my confidence fails a bit when it comes to percentages. Logic tells me I ought to be saying fewer (cos it’s a count of how many percent) but I still feel like saying “less.”
The argument that Anglo-British statism came from Puritanism is overblown – as most of the leading statists were neither Puritans or really from this tradition (think of the Fabians in Britain, a rather decadent bunch – Wells, Shaw and so, and many of the American leftists were always religion haters) HOWEVER there is a grain of truth in the argument – look at Judge Watson, his P.C. ism may be (second or third hand – I stress that, he has never sat at the feet of any of the Marxist “masters” himself, most likely he has never heard of them) from the Frankfurt School of Marxism – but his culture owes a lot to Puritanism. Someone like Donald Trump just offends him – on a cultural level.
And as most modern judges could not care a fig about the law or the Constitution – Judge Watson (and the rest of them) legislates his cultural bias from the bench. Not his cultural bias against Muslims (oh dear me no) – his cultural bias against New York Property Developers who live a life of luxury and have a big mouth.
Lee, having always been pretty hard-core on the difference between “less” and “fewer,” I have lately been troubled by just the sort of case you cite.
It seems to me that the essential difference lies in the fact that “fewer” is to be used where the size of the group of items or events or phenomena or people or fish, for instance, is accurately expressible as a discrete integer; whereas “less” is used if the metric is a point on a continuum. So, I have four friends who fry fish, which is fewer than the number of people who prefer not to appear starkers in public. But there is less milk in a partially-empty jug of it than is in a full one.
So although you can specify a percentage in a well-defined number, the implication is that you’re not speaking of a count, which is well-defined at all points where it applies, but rather of a named point in what is really a continuum of possible values.
Thus, 20% of 5 gigabytes is less than 80% of 5G, which is the amount of “bandwidth” I have left on my wireless contract for the month.
Matthew M, those are some very good questions.
Dr. Benard comes very close to identifying the root cause of this problem with the “third theory” she offers (attributed to a knowledgable acquaintance and which, to her credit, she describes as “more compelling”):
“Compelling” though she may find this, she can’t quite bring herself to accept it as correct. She is only willing to permit herself to say “I see his point” before opining that “we are still left with a mystery” and launching into an exploration of the supposed commonalities of the victims. By this she betrays her continued unwillingness to go where the facts lead (and thus her utterly leftist worldview, Tomsmith). Because it’s clear that these are not “rapes” (as we in the west understand that crime); they are terrorist attacks. Perpetrating a gang rape on a random victim in the middle of the day in a public park can be nothing else; certainly it is not driven by sexual desire, or misogyny, or a desire for dominance, or any of the factors commonly used to explain the motivations of rapists. It is a lower-grade version of the suicide bomber, with the added advantage that (once our lenient courts get through with the perpetrators) it can be repeated, possibly even more than once. It’s merely another jihadi technique. These “rapists” should not be prosecuted as such, under the ordinary criminal laws, but rather as terrorists.
All of which is yet more evidence (as if any were needed) that most “refugees” from Muslim countries (most of whom aren’t actually “refugees” but, best case, are mere economic migrants) should be refused admission to Europe. Certainly young males (including teenagers) should be absolutely rejected, whatever country they come from. But of course none of this will be done. Europe’s slow suicide will continue apace.
Lee, I agree with Julie on the “less” or “fewer” question. That’s my take on it, too: “less” is used for a quantity (which includes a percentage); “fewer” for a discrete count.
The phrases:
‘a greater percentage of voters now support ‘Brexit’ than in June 2016‘
and ‘a lesser percentage of those wounded died when treated with a combination of antibiotics‘
sound ‘right’ to my ear.
Assisted by Julie’s explanation, and encouraged by Laird and Mr Ed, I have now reached the following conclusion on the vital question of percentages.
First, as Julie explains, the number mentioned in a percentage, ie “20” in the case of 20 per cent is only incidentally an integer. One can happily say “20.3 per cent” which wouldn’t fit “fewer” at all. Thus the number is part of a continuum, and deserves a “less.”
Next, one can view “20 per cent” through the same lens as “three quarters.” There are exactly three (an integer) quarters, and it would be decidedly odd to refer to three and a half quarters. So it looks like three quarters ought to take a “fewer” because three is an integer. But it doesn’t. No one would say fewer than three quarters, and if they did they’d get a punch in the mouth. The reason, I think, is that “three quarters” is no longer a count of the number of quarters, it has become a compound noun, a single concept of three-quarterness. The three in three quarters has lost its independence as an integer. And since three quarters is not an integer, then it must take “less.”
I think the same logic extends to percentages. The 20 in 20 per cent has ceased to be a number in its own right, it has become part of the compound concept 20 per cent. And so takes “less.”