Exactly. This should be so incredibly obvious from even casually observing the BAPsphere. Is this guy really so stupid and unable to understand people that he thinks BAPists and right wingers are colourblind individualist libertarians who don't care about their kith and kin? He thinks BAPists and RWers like people from all nations equally? I thought he was meant to be a gigabrained psychologist?
> As a practicing Christian, I invite all off he vitalists to practice one of the most universal pagan traditions and convert to Christianity.
...I really don't think that's a good idea, unless you want crusades and inquisitions to make a comeback. Converting to a religion doesn't actually change one's morality, it only changes how they frame their actions.
But what if you could allow a billion shrimp to reach sexual maturity at a cost of not providing a human child with an extra 1/2 hours of life (which would actually be a much more tortured 30 minutes due to the extension)? \S
Turkish and Persian Gulf altruism is not exactly universalist. Erdogan, the same guy who took in (Middle Eastern, mostly Muslim) refugees, calls for Turks in Europe to out-breed and take over the west. Turks in Europe vote for him. Real grateful people. Just don't look at their crime rates.
I think China's economic imperialism is already well-debated so let's leave that out.
Japan, is losing WW2 what makes them a loser? What about being invaded in a war but ultimately not being on the losing side? Some of the top foreign aid countries in percentage terms(which Japan and China are not) like Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark are like that, but I haven't heard them considered loser countries before. Sweden is also up there, but not a loser in that way. So are loser countries the most generous? Nah.
Oh and there's a big selection effect when you talk about people who grew up poor and became rich, that doesn't mean the average poor person would behave like that if they magically became rich.
"most Americans’ donations are...basically for community-building purposes not altruistic helping of poor people who can’t help you back. "
I don't know to what degree that's the case in other countries, but the disparity would have to be extreme to explain some of these gaps.
Charitable donations as percentage of GDP:
US 1.44%
New Zealand 0.79%
Canada 0.77%
United Kingdom 0.54%
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Japan 0.12%
Norway 0.11%
Switzerland 0.09%
China 0.03%
Mexico 0.03%
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"If anything they’d probably be self-selected against being altruistic since they’d be more ambitious."
Maybe, maybe not, I'm just saying it's pretty weak evidence either way unless one can control for that. More intelligent people are more cooperative, but probably also more careful with money in general. And that's just one trait complicating things.
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" Most people have a point where they are satisfied and they become progressively more altruistic as their wealth exceeds this satisfaction point. The satisfaction point generally being lower for people who are used to being poorer."
Ok, but that doesn't necessarily mean their altruism would extend to their outgroup, that's the "if your situations were reversed" part of the claim. And I'm not claiming the outgroup for Chinese people is the odd western guest worker, a curiosity more than anything.
The Pakistanis in Britain have practically won the lottery and had their wealth massively increased by being allowed into Britain. But do they behave altruistically towards native British people? And of course it's not just Pakistani immigrants who show this hostility.
Don't be pedantic, you can tell we're talking about group level comparisons here. There's an asymmetry of altruism that doesn't go in the direction that Lowmad's theory predicts.
> It’s likely that if it could happen there, it will eventually happen here, unless you fight it at its source
This seems to misunderstand the modern state of the world. The US is the source. This isn't a bad idea from England that we want to prevent from spreading to America. It's a bad idea from America that has spread to England.
This is a worthy sense of responsibility, but I think the facts are incorrect.
It is not clear that the rationale that “we should be careful not to disproportionately publicize bad actions by members of certain groups because other minorities hate said groups and will grab at *anything* to tar all of their members with the same brush, and will go up to physical violence if properly excited (and yes we know it’s a tough act to balance and we’ll likely mess up in creative and exciting ways, now go away and leave us in peace so that we can try not to suck too much at this)” emanates from America.
(Nor is the failure mode “yes, these actions are wrong, but what *I* *actually* know does not suggest a pattern of badness on *that* scale.”)
The US is the chief source of wokeness, not disputed. But maybe there's some confusion over whether the chief evil here is wokeness or Islam, or the mix of both?
The UK has far more Muslims (as a % of population) than the US.
It's not even that. Most of the people Scott's talking about are overtly racist. From their perspective British people and Americans are the equivalent of North and South Koreans, separated by politics but not ethnicity. They care more about them than starving children in Africa because of their commitment to [White? Anglo-Saxon?] nationalism. It's juicy because it's tribal and in-group/out-group, not because they've suddenly discovered a hole in their politics through which the well-spring of altruism can gush forth.
It strikes me that it's far more likely to be a cultural affinity than some kind of ugly racial one. You guys are absolutely determined to see racism wherever it could plausibly lurk and it's just so much rarer than you'd like to admit.
Why are you reluctant to accept that they're racists? Do you have pedantic objections? If you look at the bulk of the discourse among those with strong "cultural affinities", the slippage between culture and race as proxies for each other is very common, and even the ones that talk about culture rarely denounce outright racists. On the contrary, they nonchalantly co-mingle with them. There is a general "no enemies to the right" attitude on the far right.
At risk of nutpicking, I’ve seen the same person 1) outraged about Rotherham, 2) pushing the circle-of-concern thing, and 3) insisting that Hamas was totally justified in butchering Israelis. Clearly time spent as an English colony isn’t sufficient.
I don't know if that's the case... While these people would be perfectly happy to do unspeakable things to minorities, I don't think most people care about Jews enough to want them dead. Antisemitism just isn't as relevant as it once was, at least on the right. Most people on the right hate the races that hate Jews more than they themselves hate Jews. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so forth.
Any specific examples of such people? The first example of "based post-Christian vitalist" that came to mind was Richard Hanania. The next examples were Curtis Yarvin and Nathan Cofnas. I don't think any of them tweeted any red meat about the grooming gangs.
I'm thinking of commenters here and on X more than public intellectuals. I realize that's a copout but don't want to name names. I predict at least a few people in the comments here will identify as such people and give better or worse justifications for their actions; if not, I'll admit I was overestimating the size of this demographic.
This isn't really a strong argument against addressing it when you're far enough down the subculture rabbit hole to be in the Scott Alexander comment section or in tpot
I'm not pointing at any individuals, mainly because I'm terrible at remembering names, but in - for example - discussions on Nietzsche/slave morality here and over on TheMotte, there's a few who are all "ha ha your slave morality is for losers, you losers" and proudly boast of being masters who don't care if all the trash and riff-raff live or die.
And these people also never seem to consider that someone in charge of their own morality and mind and body doesn't care what they think, and decides for themselves what is worth caring about.
The pessimistic side of my brain expects this is how the rich tech folks think. They're excited for AI & robots so they can be supermen standing above the starving hordes of now-useless people.
Yes, but that is precisely what happened. The girls were seen to have been making an informed choice. There is a BBC news report (shared by Elon) where the the girl is cast as though she was the one taking advantage of the adult! Including an interview with the mother of the accused male who is claiming her son is the victim.
The specific example he had in mind are almost certainly a very small niche. But the general reaction pattern is widely observable. I think it's usually invisible to the person exhibiting it, though.
Personally, my choice is to focus on areas I'm interested in, and to assume that someone else will focus on the areas I "approve of" but am not that interested in. And to insist that everyone be interested in an area because I'm interested in it seems immoral. (E.g., I've never heard about "grooming gangs", though I've heard about the topic sufficiently to guess what they are about...though I thought the idea of grooming was to encourage consensual behavior that was illegal among the young, so "rape" was a surprise. [I assume he didn't mean statutory rape.])
So I'm all in favor of the problem being addressed, but feel no compulsion to address it personally.
The gang busted in Rotheram 10 years ago were busted for grooming/statutory rape exactly as you suspect. The accusation is that there are other gangs engaging in the kidnapping/violent rape, which police/prosecutors/courts are also turning a blind eye to for fear of looking racist.
(I don't know if this is true. The BBC continues to insist that there were purely historic problems, that it was purely grooming, and that Musk et al are being confused by misinformation. The misinformation in question appears to be British court transcripts, which one would usually label 'information'. To add to my confusion, a national enquiry is usually a way of making something you don't want to deal with go away for a few years while appearing to care about it. I don't know why the press aren't delightedly sticking a scandal to the government. I'm pretty confused.)
They literally had sentencing for more gangs just yesterday. Some men got as short a sentence as 3 years. One of the notorious gang leaders in Rotherham is out & working as an Uber driver.
Why don't you do an ounce of research on this before rambling about it? I recommend reading "Broken and Betrayed" by Jayne Senior, one of the whistleblowers, to understand exactly how bad it was and is.
With all due respect to Scott, a handful of his posts (including this one) remind me of a conversation I once had with my mom, regarding a childhood friend of mine who moved to San Francisco:
My mom: He's hanging out with the weirdos over there.
Me: What weirdos?
My mom: Oh, you know, those weirdos in San Francisco.
Me: It definitely wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are weirdos in San Francisco, but I've got no idea what weirdos you're talking about.
Andrew Tate, Bronze Age Pervert, Walt Bismark, Kristi Noem.
There is huge slice of the right wing that use Nietzschean rhetoric to sound tough. "Niche Demographic", man it seems very much a "Trump Base Demographic", "Republican Free Market Religion Demographic".
A lot of those commenters are pretty dumb people. There's a reason why public *intellectuals* don't hold the position of "helping distant people is *never* a priority".
You are something of a magnet for that particular flavour of dumb.
Mostly because you're willing to listen to and debate some pretty crazy ideas. And partly because your nerdy logic-above-all approach is conducive to questioning the basic foundations of morality. But also because, I think, they see you as a fellow traveler. Some of the people they hate most accuse you of being like them.
Plus they can use engagement on ACX to funnel traffic to their brands and Substacks. It's useful to have the famous blogger use his valuable time to debate you. Throws a welcome spotlight.
The rationalist willingness to share social space with people whose ideas they absolutely abhor: something I have incredibly mixed feelings about. I'm for social tolerance in general but humans are social animals and socialization works to change our beliefs. It's a constant process going on in the background, whether you know about it or not. So there's a very rational reason to worry about total social tolerance, and to look askance at people who are totally socially tolerant of others. The rot has to be stopped somewhere.
If you feel immune to social conditioning, congratulations. Almost everybody feels that way, and almost everyone is wrong.
The next two famous people I thought of were Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor. Of course they talked about the rape scandal but they didn't say anything so hotheaded. Neither one is really a "based post-Christian nationalist", Steve Sailer is an old-school paleoconservative, and Jared Taylor is a white nationalist.
Yeah, you talked about it, but didn’t say anything so hotheaded, as I said. You rightly criticized the UK government’s response but didn’t obsess about it.
Pace your article, it has long been apparent that the rebels, the rulebreakers, the class clowns. The Roasters of Sacred Cows and Tellers Of Forbidden Truths are found on the Alt-right (and, to a lesser extent, the Dirtbag Left), while liberals have morphed into prissy schoolmarmish scolds so humorless and smug, they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison (Johnny Rotten himself in fact recently made this observation).
This is not because of any inherent love of liberty on the right, nor any innate censoriousness on the left, but is an artifact of their respective relationships with power.
> while liberals have morphed into prissy schoolmarmish scolds so humorless and smug, they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison
An eloquent and incisive articulation of something I think many of us are reacting to without putting it in quite these words, kudos for a great encapsulation of the dynamic.
What do you think is the relevant relationship with power here? It can’t be anything simplistic like “the alt right has power and liberals don’t” or “liberals have power and the alt right doesn’t” because both of those are trivially false - both groups have some sorts of power and lack other sorts of power, and you have to squint really hard to miss all the ways that one of these groups has power.
The PMC is a postmodern attempt to rehabilitate Marxism for the Information Age.
I don’t find it very convincing. Yes, it’s now easier to accumulate prestige without controlling capital. That doesn’t translate into the same kind of class interest. Nor does it allow the kind of hegemony which proponents like to assert.
I think this is an appealing narrative, but not a correct one.
If you draw one box around mainstream liberals, and another around young and hungry Twitter hustlers, is it any surprise if the former looks more stodgy? The correct comparison for mainstream liberalism is mainstream conservatism. I think that will prove to be just as humorless.
Counterparts to this article exist, but are a lot harder to find in the comments section of a technolibertarian blog.
I had a similar wonder, although I think it's fine to not pick on specific people especially if they're smaller accounts.
That being said, I do always wonder how I should evaluate claims that X group was saying A, and now they are saying B, contradicting their earlier statements. This has very different implications for what I should think if the people saying A and B just both happen to be in semi-overlapping spheres vs being the literal same person.
In the former case, it's more of a Motte and Bailey doctrine where the people saying reasonable thing A are providing cover for different people saying B. The annoying thing about that version is that the motte and the bailey can both be fully staffed at all times, but no one involved is actually contradicting themselves.
They'll show when they see this. An irresistible branding opportunity. I'd wager they get a lot more out of this than you do, simply though attention share capture. Not everyone engages in good faith, Scott.
I think most of the really extreme commenters of this school have been internet ferals swinging through. I have definitely read rants on here, mostly from passing ferals, saying that while some poor people are poor because of circumstance, on average the poor are weak, sickly and dumb, and we should let them die to strengthen the species.
I do remember an exchange on here where someone, maybe Scott, maybe a commenter, said that a certain thing would greatly help the world's poor, and someone who comments here quite regularly posted "yeah, but what do I get out of it?"
Catgirl Kulak. His whole schtick on Twitter is how only losers care about anything other than their own tribe, and also everyone should be making the streets of London run red with blood right now.
He (and yes it's a he) is a white identitarian, right? So he would view the white grooming gang girls as part of his own tribe and the Pakistani rapists as the outgroup.
Yes, but he's also Canadian, and the lower-class English girls who were the primary victims of Pakistani grooming gangs would be exactly the sort of girls he considers to be rightful spoils of war.
His thinking is simple: white people good, non-white people bad. He also dislikes Jews, and not consider them to be white. He also dislikes Indians and East Asians.
Richard Hanania is the canonical example of a "based post-Christian Nietzchean vitalist". He is a hereditarian and hardcore first-worlders who strongly supports civilizational progress. He likes Jews and Asians, is a big fan of Israel, is a big fans of Singapore (though perhaps they don't like Singapore's low TFR and conformism), likes LKY, likes Milei, likes Bukele, want lots of high-skill immigration etc.
People whose #1 issue is the grooming gangs tend to be hardcore white nationalists or some such and tend to have a lot of sympathy for the white working-class. Richard Hanania makes fun of these people and looks down on them. In fact this article by Scott is in some sense basically a more gentle version of a bunch of Richard Hanania tweets attacking white nationalists.
> His thinking is simple: white people good, non-white people bad. He also dislikes Jews, and not consider them to be white. He also dislikes Indians and East Asians.
wow Im sure those quotes would be interesting, Id be interested in a primary source
Consistent pattern of negative comments toward non-white groups, Jews, Indians, etc. And he literally has "kulak" in the name so of course he is a fan of the white working class.
Are you really this clueless? RWers don't consider all foreign countries the same. They care more about people who are more genetiically similar to them, which is a natural human instinct because it is a successful evolutionary strategy and is why you love your relatives more than strangers.
So of course they care much more when indigenous brits whom are their fellow people of European descent get mass raped than when for example Boko Haram mass rapes nigerians.
nothing about htis contradicts BAPism or online RW, NRx or dissident right thought.
Yeah, I don't know why Scott finds this behavioural pattern to be especially mysterious. The based post-christian vitalist (whoever that is) could easily consider the english working class to be broadly part of their extended genetic and cultural in-group, and hence included in their sphere of moral concern.
Who, Walt Bismarck? Walt was a leader in the alt-right famous for making what he calls "racist Disney parodies" and now runs this job stacking thing with the goal of "making white boys rich". While he is no longer a white nationalist and is no longer part of the "alt-right", he continues to self identify proudly as "pro white". He says that white people need to develop business networks and become rich and that this is the goal of his "Tortuga Society". Of course he cares much about white girls getting raped by gangs of Pakistani rapists than black people dying in the third world. I don't think this is a great mystery.
John Arcto and Johaan Kurtz talked a lot about them, but they’re both British, so I’m not exactly surprised they care about their fellow countrymen being raped by immigrants they didn’t want in the country. I can’t think of any Americans wanting an invasion, and I’m definitely in the circles for this. Even Walt Bismark isn’t calling for an invasion.
John Arcto is a 20ish year old British nationalist who like most 20 year olds interested in politics often says some hotheaded things, like go and arrest all of the people involved in gender ideology, cancel all the wokes, we need remigration etc etc, but if you DM him and ask him about his policy proposals they are just normal nationalist proposals within the Overton window, and he’ll be nice to you even if you disagree with him politically.
a. This is a salient issue now for media focus reasons, and will stop being salient again in a couple weeks.
b. It's easier for me to see being very worked up about this if you're British than if you're American.
c. It's worthwhile to point out the pathology of policemen not investigating some crimes for fear of being accused of racism, because that's a way you could end up with your police tolerating a lot of crime.
Point conceded. There are various forms of remigration which vary widely in how reasonable they are. On substack Arcto often sounds like he wants some kind of white ethnostate with crazy remigration where you deport the grandchildren of immigrants, but if you ask him what policy he wants in a DM you get something that is more reasonable like Sweden.
When I said remigration I meant some extreme forms of it, I would consider Swedish style remigration to be a normal nationalist policy within the Overton window.
You know, I have to say Walt Bismarck's conversations with Robert Stark and John Arcto are one of the funniest things I've heard lately. A long day of kissing ass at work and then you hear guys arguing over whether cunnilingus is mystical or not. I spewed my soda all over the screen.
I’m pretty sure Yarvin thinks that EA is good. I think he just criticizes it because he thinks it does not address the fundamental political and institutional problems of governance which he views as much more important, and he would say a movement by a bunch of naive rationalist autists who doesn’t understand how the world works. I can’t imagine he thinks that bed nets are a particularly bad use of money, given the kind of rationalist adjacent company he keeps.
Walt Bismarck is a former alt right white nationalist figure and is still a practitioner of white identity politics who always emphasizes that he is “pro white” is running the Tortuga job stacking operation (or if you’re cynical, the Tortuga scam) to “make white boys rich”, so of course he is especially worked up about crimes committed against white girls by Pakistani rapists.
To be on the same page, the "based post-Christian vitalist" ethic is an attempt in the West to assert emotional and practical limits to in-group treatment. Non-Western cultures have no such difficulty.
Let's not forget Christianity's previous in-group limits of looking out for Christian converts were superceded by Progressivism's assertion of universal human rights which have been a moral and practical failure (i.e., the 20-year American war in Afghanistan).
The popularization of anything (Nietzsche included) will necessarily be inconsistent and ham-fisted. Insofar as the article is addressing this popularization, its characterization of the vitalist is a straw man. Hanania, at least, is not that simplistic.
Or at least I have no idea what I've ever written that would give him the impression that I feel *No* moral duty to the suffering around the world. What I feel is *far less* of one than to people more like me. This isn't just about poverty or IQ; though I bet you the avg IQ of a white kid born in Rotherham is higher than that of Pakistan's top half.
Pakistani elites still do their cousins in a way lower class Britons do not. Pakistani elites were pro-Osama, lower-class Britons are not. Pakistani Elites would kill me for my atheism (if I were born a muslim), lower class Britons would not. Kill every upper class Briton tomorrow, and the emerging society would still within a generation look more like one in which I would want to live in than Pakistan.
So I care about the British lower-class more than I do Pakistanis... generally. This isn't even racism, and I'm an open (soft-white-man's-burden) racist. I felt this way long before I was at all racist. I don't know how to explain these sentiments to someone who lacks them.
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* My response post will include comments on and maybe from Catgirl Kulak, Covfefe, and Walt Bismarck, Bronze Age Pervert and their views. While I have my disagreements with all, I suppose this post reveals just how much closer we are to each other than Scott Alexander's worldview.
The Hanania camp and the white nationalist camp. I would say you're a mix of them, mostly in the Hanania camp talking about progress and scientific achievements and all of those good things but there is a bit of white nationalism, thinking that Hitler salutes are funny because they own the libs, getting extremely angry over Roterham in a way Hanania wouldn't, saying HBD demands racism against blacks etc.
I guess Walt would also fall into this category, and perhaps so would Richard Hoste.
I mean Hanania is a strong opponent of black nationalism, but this is not the same as “racism against blacks”. Black people are human beings. Opposition to black nationalism is not “racism against blacks”.
Go to PoliticalCompassMemes on reddit, you'll see what type of people ussually don't care about foreign kids suffering, but suddenly get obsessed with the topic when there's an accusation that Muslims are responsible.
Even the most pro capitalist, libertarian “better rape whistle” advocate believes in a Night Watchman state which would prosecute rapists with zeal. I’m not sure I see so much contradiction here…
I think once you have acknowledged that you can care about the inhabitants of other countries that are incompetent at their core night watchman duties, you have opened yourself up to caring about the inhabitants of lots of kleptocratic and genocidal states.
Pro capitalists have always included extreme anti government types as well.as moderate smaller government types...even if the no-government position doesn't make sense to you. It doesn't make much sense to me , either.
It's not that they care about the inhabitants, it's that they want to see evil destroyed. Thus, such desire is compatible with not actually trying to help people.
The solution to that is imperialist war. That's not an option, so people don't bother spending energy on it.
The reason people are outraged at the Pakistani rape syndicates is because the UK government, was locking people up for saying mean things about Pakistanis (and others) while at the same time looking at 12 year-olds reporting rapes and responding that they were little whores trying to stoke racial hatred, and then call their "boyfriends" (the middle-aged Pakistani men running the rape cartel) to pick them up.
It was literally treason, siding with foreigners, who live in foreign enclaves, against the natives that they ostensibly represent and are part of.
The desire to set up a British style governorship and the impulse to sent mosquito nets to Congo are two completely different impulses. Not understanding this is why you are conflating them. Both the desire to send mosquito nets to Africa and the desire to ignore/coverup immigrant rape gangs comes from the same impulse: Aversion to responsibility, in two forms. First an aversion to holding people responsible for their own conditions and choices, and second an aversion to taking responsibility yourself.
For all his faults, a dictatorial colonizer who sets up courts and police in a disorganized country is doing real, sustainable (so long as western progressives dont butt in) good for the populace. In ways mosquito net guy can never get close to (who knows, our colonizer might get his country to the place where they can actually manufacture their own nets!). But this isn't the fun kind of charity that makes you feel good. You have to be able to put criminals in prison, you have to let some beggars starve to death, etc. But that is how you do real good.
Its just like prosecuting Pakistanis in England. Doing whats right isn't what is easy or what feels good (if you buy into some of the leftist talking points regarding racism/other isms).
India's per-capita GDP was basically stable under the British Raj, at the same time the population roughly doubled, which is actually not what you would expect under pre-industrial malthusian assumptions. The per-capita risk of death by famine also dropped by about a factor of 4, and was concentrated in regions outside of British control.
There are plenty of examples of African countries whose economies and per-capita incomes expanded substantially under colonialism, although the data suggests they were statistically above subsistence level even prior to this period.
Honestly, no you haven't necessarily opened yourself up to that. I mean, if you accept your universalist premises, then yes. If all lives are of equal worth, then if you care about white English children, you should care about Pakistani children.
But these people don't accept that all lives are of equal worth. If you're broadly pro-white (and this extends beyond outright 1488-style white nationalists), you care about white people more than others. English Rotherham kids yes, African malaria sufferers no. I doubt you've run into many white nationalists in your everyday life for obvious reasons, but I'm sure you've run into rabbis who seem much more exercised about Jewish suffering than other types.
Frankly, this is the default, normal human position, and universalism is a late development by post-Axial Age religions like Christianity and Buddhism (I will let you comment on Judaism), just as the use of reason to understand the universe with things like science and philosophy is a hack of a tool designed for persuasion. Most people care more about people like them. The Greco-Roman gods were supposed to keep the polis or empire going; elsewhere in the world you'd pray for rain for your tribe. Confucianism prescribes concentric loyalties to family and state, (EDIT: though you do owe things to humanity as well) . Even older (and the modern more aggressive) forms of Islam have a House of Islam and a House of War that would have been recognizable to any medieval crusader (with the positions flipped, of course). (And there was a House of Treaty too, which people conveniently forget.)
This is where the 'post-Christian' bit comes in, I think. It's been said, by both Christian conservative and leftist commentators, that if you remove Christianity from conservatism you get vitalism or tribalism, which in the modern world manifests most easily as simple racism of the sort Ibram Kendi's always talking about.
Immigration policy's a separate, related issue, but this comment's long enough already. I think you can see how the same logic holds.
Yeah, I agree a lot with your argument. I also consider myself to be somewhat of a "tribalist" in terms of preferring Western/European culture to others for the most part, even though I am also a "globalist" in many aspects. But I fully understand why White Americans would care more about the children in England than about those in Pakistan. Interestingly, I feel like if the same situation were to happen in the USA as in England, I'm not sure that the reaction by European Nationalists would be the same. Overall, I feel like the "Whites as in-group" phenomenon is mostly a US-specific one, because of the history of racial dynamics there, and doesn't apply that much in Europe (though the internet is changing that a bit I guess).
My guess is that during the time when the worst of the Rotherdam stuff was going on, it was still better to be a poor English girl in that town than a poor Haitian girl in Port Au Prince.
I think you're misinterpreting the concerns as purely altruistic rather than being more fear-driven. If institutions in a culturally similar country are abandoning their core "night watchman" duties for ideological reasons that are also prevalent in your own country, it's reasonable to worry about those trends spreading if left unchecked.
If one believes the engine of progress is "The West", it's important that the engine doesn't break down.
This. People talk about the grooming gangs story because it has a political moral relevant to any country in the Western world: similar stuff could happen in your town too, if not right now, then after only a slight further shift towards looser immigration policy and more political correctness and reflexive anti-racism. That's unlike extreme poverty in poor countries, which there isn't a risk of happening in your town.
There's also what many others said, that many Westerners feel closer to other Westerners. But even without that, if something makes a talking point relevant to domestic hot button issues, it's going to be talked about.
We know that Britain, once upon a time, was perfectly capable of being a competent night-watchman, and in principle could be so again with the appropriate political, legal, and/or demographic adjustments.
A lot of other kleptocratic/genocidal states could have rather more limited potential for reform, for HBD reasons that you are perfectly well aware of. I don't know if I'm *personally* that pessimistic, but I don't find the 'double standard' here incomprehensible.
What about immigration policy? Are you trying to say that letting millions of people per year into the country is a moral obligation on the level of prosecuting child rape?
You of all people should understand that morality is not a matter of "always do the virtuous thing without worrying about the consequences." Every action has harms and benefits. It is much less clear that the benefits outweigh the harms for "let anyone who wants to immigrate anytime they want to" than for "stop child rapers". Are you not a consequentialist?
Caring about helping foreign people is not the same as caring about *villainizing* racial groups and using foreign examples to do it.
When the right calls for a Muslim ban and uses examples of ISIS brutalizing women in the Middle East to justify it, that doesn't mean they want to do anything to help women in the Middle East.
Would you? Why, exactly, would the privately-funded police be working for the victims instead of the gangsters? The whole point of "privately-funded" is that they work for whoever pays them. Heck, gangs and organized crime families are more-or-less private, self-funding police forces already.
Mostly not the families of the girls who were forced into prostitution by those pimps, and certainly not the girls themselves--they had nothing, not even the earnings from their prostitution, since that went to the pimps.
I don't really know about the people you're talking about, but how do they square the idea of loving the strong people with only helping family and friends?
It's the same as all the Leopards Eating Faces victims you see around.
"I voted for the candidate who's position on anyone who isn't straight is that they are a pervert degen child predator " Followed by "but it's okay because I'm one of the special good ones".
The problem here is not Christian or Nietzschean morality. Imagine if the scandal happened in the Britain of the 19th or 18th or at the beginning of the 20th. Far away from an ultra-based Nietzschean society, but the reaction would have been probably grim and bloody. Ditto for all European countries, massacres happened for way less.
The problem is that we had a mix of old population, media control, and literal anti-European ethnic propaganda that see basic Nationalism as evil. I think that we can agree that LARPing is stupid, but we have a growing situation of "if you get killed maybe you deserve it"
Another loss caused by the new morality of the 1968.
And I think that often people take the wrong approach regarding empathy towards the outgroup. Charity is a creation of the European morality, because opennes and anti-tribalism are good and positive for the flourishing of a stable civilization. The problem is, again, use it as an hammer to smash the nail, and that nail is Europe.
Is it? I can think of a least one dude whose shtick was being big on charity and who was living in the middle east. Or was he European because the land he lived was part of the Roman Empire? Or because the modern state who controls that land is allowed to participate in the ESC?
Nor do I think that charity is uniquely Christian.
Charity may not be uniquely Christian, but it is uniquely monotheistic (in the West, at least). Jews, Christians, and Muslims do charity. The polytheistic pagans they replaced in Europe and the Middle East did not.
I don't know enough about Buddhism to say. In the West (read, Europe+Middle East) nobody was doing what we would recognize as charity. You might donate your money to build public baths or something, but the point of that wasn't to help commoners who were suffering it was explicitly to glorify your family name.
Sounds like you don't actually know much about what non-monotheistic cultures do in general, so maybe generalizing about them isn't a very safe thing to do until you learn more? I think it's perfectly fair to say that the early Christians were substantially *more* charitable than the culture that surrounded them: it does not therefore follow that no polytheistic cultures in any time or place had any notion of charity.
> nobody was doing what we would recognize as charity. You might donate your money to build public baths or something, but the point of that wasn't to help commoners who were suffering it was explicitly to glorify your family name.
That's normal charity. Where do you imagine the glory comes from?
This is pretty overstated. The Greco-Roman world had no *organized poverty relief*; it absolutely had a notion of charity. He's Cicero, for instance, in de Officiis:
"The case of the man who is overwhelmed by misfortune is different from that of the one who is seeking to better his condition, though he suffers from no actual distress. It will be the duty of charity to incline more to the unfortunate, unless, perchance, they deserve their misfortune."
And here's Seneca the Elder reporting a speech of Gallio, in the Controversiae:
"Some laws are unwritten—but more immutable than all written ones. I may be a son, dependent on my father; yet I can hand alms to a beggar, throw dust on a corpse. It is wrong not to stretch out a hand to the prostrate: this is the common right of humanity. "
Sikhs have been doing organized charity since the days of Guru Nanak (six hundred years). During the NorCal fires a few years ago, they set up food kitchens and shelter for the displaced fire victims. I'm sure they're active in SoCal this fire season.
Well, Sikhs *are* monotheists, and technically FLWAB only said "monotheistic" not "Abrahamic" (though he possibly only had the latter in mind as all his examples are the latter)
One could argue that the moral circle is largest in western Christian societies though, even amongst secular ppl in those societies. There are few charities for poverty in other continents originating in, say, Singapore or Taiwan despite relatively high levels of wealthy by global standards.
Culture matters in terms of expression of charitable impulse, and how non-ingroup restrained western charity is is an anomalous aspect of W.E.I.R.D. countries world-historically, emphasis on the W & D.
At least that's the weaker position I think is more strongly defensible.
I would say Trump's platform is that we should stop treating foreigners and minorities as a protected/privileged class immune to the normal processes of law enforcement and granted special access to jobs, loans, and financial relief, which in many ways they do enjoy.
Non-ingroup charity is a social technology that has been discovered multiple times, most of them not even in Europe. Even Europe's version of it was mostly discovered by early Christians, who were mostly Middle Eastern.
Yeah, I'm not sure about this either. A lot of European "White" Nationalists tend to think that Europeans are uniquely out-group oriented, but if that's the case, why did nation-states arise in Europe first, and why are some physical features unique to parts of Europe (eye/hair colors etc.)? Also, Muslim Arabs for example, seemed to have no problems mingling with the local population in their expansion.
No, it's really simpler than that: In the early 2000s, the British authorities did not see rape, even of young children, as very serious at all. Several major BBC celebrities have since been outed as rapists, pedophiles, or both. This was an era with an absolutely insane problem with pedophiles.
Wealthy elites get away with a lot of things worldwide. Always has been the case. Whats usually not common is for a lot of poorer immigrants to get away raping the children of the native majority. Like Pakistani elites probably rape Pakistanis kids all the time. But I can't imagine a gang of British taxi drivers who arrived in the country yesterday and raping Muslim kids for decades getting away from it. No(non-Muslim) immigrates to Pakistan so its not a fair comparison but still. Maybe switch it with a reasonably wealthy non-Western country.
Maybe this just shows how advanced Britain and Western liberal democracies really are. Justice is so color blind in Britain than both the native elites and Muslim immigrants can rape local kids for decades without any consequence!
No; this was a pervasive issue across the entirety of British society. The elite cases are just the most brazen and high-profile.
The distinction is that people assume "The UK lets foreigners rape without consequence" when British natives also faced fairly lax standards of prosecution and could also rape children with relative impunity. Obviously this did play a factor, but the bigger factor is that they just didn't see it as a big problem, which is reflective of the attitude of the era.
Idk man, and maybe its just a third world mentality but reflexively it just seems weird that poor immigrants can get away with things, just like the natives. Like I expect wealthy native elites to never face any consequence, poor natives to get away some but not all the time, and poor immigrants to never really get away with crime but I guess in Britain all three groups equally never face any consequences. Very strange country to me at least.
They didn't face any consequences for raping children because at the time this was just not seen as a serious offense in the same way that murder would have been.
What are you talking about? Paedophilia was a huge tabloid issue in the UK in the early 2000s!
'Following the abduction and killing of Sarah Payne in July 2000, News of the World began campaigning for laws that publicly disclosed personal details of people convicted of sex offenses. After the government stated that it had no plans to implement such laws, the newspaper, edited by Rebekah Brooks, began publishing names of sex offenders itself in name and shame on July 23, 2000.[8][6]
After the first issue was published, several lynch mobs and protestors gathered in several parts of the United Kingdom. A group of mothers from Hampshire organized nightly marches and held "vigils" near homes of people convicted of sex offenders. In Paulsgrove, a life-size doll was hanged while protestors chanted "we'll lynch the pervs". A Greater Manchester man had his home surrounded by a mob of 300 people, who shouted "pedophile, rapist, beast, pervert" at him and dragged a six-year-old child to his door while asking "do you want this one?".'
>British natives also faced fairly lax standards of prosecution and could also rape children with relative impunity.
Is this a UK/USA difference? Writing from the USA, at least the impression that I get (admittedly online) is that popular sentiment here about rapists of children is pretty close to "burn them at the stake" - though I don't know how well this correlates with law enforcement's actions.
Sex tourism similarity is very weak, it's sex between older man/younger woman of different ethnicity ok but
- economic/class power is reversed
- rape is not common in sex tourism, except with quite broad definition of rape
- the broken laws (and, more important, the typical application of those laws) are (very) different in the country where it happen.
So yeah, comparing the 2 muddle the issue more that it clarify it. Same as Scott's number 2: it ignores the very simple criterium of victim in ingroup/perpetror in outgroup. There is nothing mysterious about it, this is a trigger in all cultures, a trigger of nuclear magnitude...Just discover (and admit) who is your ingroup/outgroup for the matter at hand, and the difference in outrage and preferred actions becomes very easy to understand.
Scott ignoring this, while he introduced ingroups/outgroups and have discussed how import they are seems...strangely myopic.
Prostitution debate is full of equivocation, strawmans, motte and bailey and goalpost shifting, from both sides. Well, most discussions have large doses of this, those fallacies are always the most popular I think, but this topic is a specially rich source of those gems.
Opposition will use nastier and nastier form of exploitation (they have no choice), less and less control of the prostitute regarding the term of contract (it's rape) and larger and larger age differences (they are childs), until they get the support they want. Reality is they oppose any element of transaction in sex (or, more precisely, they insist any element of transaction is enough to legally ban the kind of sex they do not like. Because else it would ban almost all sex, because like almost all activities it contains transaction - if only of your time (which I guess is the real position of some prostitution opponents, but they are fringe - I hope ;-) ).
On the other side, any sex is OK as long as there is a contract, even implicit. And to support this, they will attack all form of constraints that may make the explicit contract look more forced than other types of contracts, typically employment contract: economic distress, black mail, power imbalance,.... They systematically show examples where the contract is troublefree (happy participants, participants clearly able to form contracts in general (legal age, no dependence,...), no lasting consequences, no obstacle to stop recurrence,....Until basically the only opponents left are those opposing classic work contracts.
Still, I have far more sympathy with the later (not a hard guess looking at how I exposed the sides. At least they will agree to roughly say what kind of prostitution is OK and what kind is not if you insist being accurate, without shifting the goalposts almost immediately.
Thank you for your elaborate response. I agree with you on most your points, I erroneously replied to your comment instead of the grand-parent. Apologies.
I am under the impression that a lot of sex tourism involves sex with girls who are 13 years old or younger. I do pretty much equate this with rape. I imagine many, possibly even most, sex tourists, are not attempting to have sex with adolescents, they're just trying to get a better deal. This is still a sin but not even close to as bad as trying to have sex with a 12 year old for money.
Your impression is 99.9% wrong, except if you define sex tourism as people going abroad to have sex with girls less than 13. In this case it's trivially true but then sex tourism is not a mass phenomenon, just like pedophilia with girl this young is also completely fringe.
I guess your impression is precisely linked to constant motte and Bailey: the girls are always underage in the anti-prostitution discourse, but underage can mean anything between less than 13yo to younger that the guy.
The bulk of sex tourism is just what the name imply: guy going abroad to have sex because they get it easier than home. Easier means cheaper, or better quality for the same price, or less risky depending on the laws at home....could even mean pickup is easier, no prostitution aspect... Although this is also less commonly referred as sex tourism because it would include the typical adolescent Holliday couples. Still, when travelling to countries of different cultures and lower wealth, some people will use sex tourism even in the (rare) non-prostitution case...
I would have been skeptical about what @neco-artic wrote prior to reading large sections of the Jay Report. Having read those sections, I can't help but agree with him.
The report makes clear that racial issues played *a* role in causing this issue to be swept under the rug. But comparatively, they played much less of a role than the fact that
a. the victims were nearly all lower-class girls with psychiatric problems who were in and out of social housing, and
b. the local police basically didn't care when the families of girls in that demographic claimed their daughters were being raped -- not because the perpetrators were British Muslims, but because they simply weren't exercised about sexual assault against minors.
What I expected going into the report was that the police would start off upset about reported sexual assaults, but then moderate their response when they learned the ethnic identity of the perpetrators. That's not what happened at all. In fact, from the moment of reporting, police would downplay victim complaints and come up with excuses to avoid looking into allegations. Their basic assumption was that these girls and their families were white trash prone to fits of drama, whose mission in life was to waste police time. When a family came in and said that their daughter had been abducted by Pakistani cab drivers, they'd say, "Lots of girls have older boyfriends." When the parents would say their daughter was missing, they'd say, "She'll turn up."
This is all before race enters the equation. The role of the British police's tolerance for both childhood sexual abuse and apathy towards the well-being of poor children (irrespective of the race of their perpetrators) is by now extremely under-discussed as a factor underlying the Rotherham scandal.
To be clear, race *was* relevant to the events, but often not in the ways people imagine it being so. In terms of the police response, it seemed to operate at a higher level of the bureaucracy -- senior police pressuring their subordinates not to mention the racial angle to the press. It was also relevant in the sense that British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were *probably* more likely than average to commit these crimes in the first place (I say "probably" here because the data here isn't great, but I think it's highly suggestive that a significant disparity exists).
No, the phenomena is replicated across European countries. Everytime a non-European kill, maim or brutally massacre an European, the reaction is way more calm than when the opposite happens.
That's really not the case. It tends to be deeply politicised. The anti-immigrants faction uses it to make the case that all immigrants are nothing but brutal barely restrained berserkers waiting to unleash their fury on the poor civilized locals. The maybe-don't-lynch-the-immigrants faction falls for the classic blunder of "if conceding that this has happened gives even 1 cm of territory to our opponents, even if the deranged conclusions they draw are the real problem, let's just pretend this has not happened at all" and beclowns itself in the process.
This explanation doesn't really work with the official statements that investigations shouldn't be done because that might stigmatize the Pakistanis. You are instead saying that investigation wouldn't have stigmatized the Pakistanis because they weren't doing anything wrong.
I agree. Liberals took the old antiracist injunction too far, and wound up overcorrecting to be racist against their own group. The only people to care were of course people who were racist in the old fashion.
From the prewoke liberal point of view, there are no good guys here.
Yeah, exactly. Steve Sailer had a point when he wrote that gang-rapists seem to assume the larger British society doesn't really mind their activities, since no mobs attempted to burn down their neighborhoods, which, where they came from, would happen for far less.
We rightly understand that "tribalism" and "racism" can be ugly and the cause of much evil... But humans are both naturally tribal, and responsive to incentives. In the past, ethnic minorities kept their own people in line, in part because they knew transgressions against the majority could bring retribution down on them all.
On one hand we have this belief that there are only individuals, and to acknowledge that there are groups and that humans often act in groupish ways is a moral failing (classical liberalism)...OTOH the (incompatible) notion that one race is the source of all evil, so it is virtuous to give preference to other races (wokism)... Both are turning out to be delusional and threats to survival on the individual and collective level.
I don't want pogroms or anything, yet, but by the point at which they are systemically gang-raping and torturing your female children with impunity... For f***s sake, there worse things in the world than "racism". Cry me a bloody river about how they had to hear people use unflattering words about them, or how they aren't positively depicted often enough in the movies that they themselves don't have the talent or infrastructure to make. No one has an intrinsic right to live anywhere they please, much less to form ethnic enclaves in the territory of another.
Imagine if I opened a white-only frat house on an Indian reservation, encouraged other white college bros to move in, we started routinely and systematically gang-raping the little Indian girls. Can you imagine the response? Would the locals be justified in responding with possibly lethal violence, burning our frat house to the ground and driving us (including even those of us who may not have participated personally?) out of town on the points of pitchforks? Especially if the authorities ignored complaints and protected us, leaving them with no recourse other than just accepting that we rape their children and that's just the way it is? I would say abso-f***ing-lutely.
The Catholic Church kinda did that, at small scale, in isolated places. Put the known child rapists as priests in remote Alaskan areas with no police and access to kids...
Strikingly, the Pakistani pimps and johns seem astonished that anybody would object to their behavior. If the girls’ parents cared about protecting their daughters, in their view, they would keep them locked up at home like good Muslims do.
The pimps seemed convinced that since their victims’ families haven’t organized lethal vendettas against them like any honorable Pakistani family would, they must not have cared.
Moreover, since the English people hadn’t carried out mass communal violence, such as burning down Pakistani neighborhoods in the time-honored South Asian manner, clearly they didn’t mind.
And if the English government didn’t want Pakistanis to act Pakistani, they wouldn’t let them into England, now would they?
And that was a good thing. It ensured that they never would have dared, or if they did, they would very swiftly be incapable of continuing. I'm not a WN; if I was I would happily admit it. I lived in a non-white country for 10 years and my wife is only partially white. Oh, and I happen to live in an all black neighborhood. It's a decent neighborhood. I really don't care. But when racially/ethnically/culturally distinct foreigners have formed enclaves and are literally gang-raping thousands of girls, targeting them specifically by race, and still you're greatest concern is "oh no, someone might have negative feelings about these people"... This is a kind of brain damage only W.E.I.R.D. white liberals seem capable of. It takes it to an extreme that even at my most right-wing, I would have taken to be over-the-top hyperbolic satire, not reality. Sometimes there really is an us and a them. The "primitive" "tribal" impulses we have exist for a reason.
This is a society that massively rioted when official discrimination against British(not even Irish) Catholics was somewhat reduced. I can't even imagine what the response would have been if a hundreds of "Mohemmedans" were found to be raping Protestant girls for decades.
No it hasn't. The Gordon Riots had a body count of several hundred. We haven't gotten to the point where people are razing Pakistani communities to the ground yet.
"In case you’ve been under a rock recently, in the early 2010s, several organized child sexual assault rings got busted in Britain - but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Muslim and busting them might seem racist."
I find it hard to believe that that was the real reason. I know the police claim that, and it's a very convenient reason for them, but the British police otherwise don't seem terribly worried about looking racist.
And it's not like they did anything about Jimmy Savile either. Say what you will about the American handling of Epstein, he went to prison twice and died there. I think maybe the police in the UK are just really bad on sex crimes.
I mean, plenty of hard failures in the US to investigate sexual predators. Epstein's original plea deal was fuckin' bananas.
But also, I share your skepticism that the story is literally this simple. It sounds like something out of a Breitbart fever dream about DEI. I welcome more in-depth reporting about it that hopefully clarifies things.
Multiple components I guess? You had resistance against looking into this deeply at each stage. The local councils in question were often corrupt, the thing mostly happened within working class and so it was ignored by other social classes, the state didn't want to look closely because of the fear of riots, respectable media didn't want to raise it too much because it didn't really fit, and then the people largely didn't want to read up on it either because it sounds too much like a racist wet dream.
or something like that, I didn't phrase everything perfectly
I do sort of want to point out that it was ultimately the most establishment media of all, The Times, that exposed the whole scandal. Not the most important aspect but there’s even a little ‘blame “the media” as if it’s just one thing’ from Scott above and I think it’s important to acknowledge we wouldn’t know about this at all if it wasn’t for a journalist called Andrew Norfolk.
People have been reporting about this for years. The original investigative journalism of Andrew Norfolk and Julie Bindel is still there. Knock yourself out.
Obviously if you only read what Elon Musk has tweeted about it, you're going to have read an oversimplified narrative, because Musk isn't an investigative journalist, he's the world's richest keyboard warrior.
The police get a lot of criticism (rightfully) but the problem was the social workers/local government officials who *should* have been protecting the girls, but instead were all hands-off, let's not impose our values, twelve year olds can consent to sex, let's not be racist, and who set policy about "let's not do anything that could be seen as oppressing brown people". A lot of those heads should have rolled, but instead went on to similar jobs in local government elsewhere.
"After five men were jailed this month for a string of sexual offences against four girls aged 12-16, Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham council’s children and young people’s services, told the post-trial press conference of fears that one or all of the girls could have been killed.
“I think they were in very serious danger, possibly of death,” she said, adding that she was glad “we got to the root of this before a fatality happened”. The families of the 12-year-old, two 13-year-olds and the 16-year-old who were raped may well ask why social workers didn’t get to the “root” of what was happening well before police moved in.
Ms Thacker let it slip that the girls were already under “child protection” plans, supposedly under the protection of soical services, while the gang were “grooming” and abusing them. She said: “When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move those girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham”. But she admitted social workers knew something of the abuse in the late summer of 2008, months before police acted in December of that year.
The Eye asked Rotherham how long the girls had been “known” to social services before the sexual abuse came to light. As we went to press, no answer was forthcoming.
Ms Thacker, meanwhile, blames the parents: “At the end of the day I would put the responsibility back on the parents. They need to realise these are their children. Parents do have a duty.” That’s social services off the hook, then!"
That later became 1,400 and not 4 girls who turned out to have been abused by the grooming and rape gang.
Yet there was no problem taking back children in care because their foster parents belonged to the wrong political party, then giving them back to allegedly abusive parents because the argument over culture was accepted by a judge:
"Joyce Thacker, the council's director of children and young people's services, was criticised last weekend when she appeared to admit that Ukip members might not be suitable foster parents for non-British children. "These children are not UK children and we were not aware of the foster parents having strong political views. There are some strong views in the Ukip party and we have to think of the future of the children," she said last weekend."
That one is tough, but you see even in 2012 the problems faced: social workers claim father is sexually and physically abusive and family is living in overcrowded and bad conditions. Children are taken into care. Then the foster parents are claimed to be anti-immigrant because of UKIP membership, parents go to court, and children are placed back in the alleged abusive situation since a judge accepts that "the birth parents successfully argued that the council had failed in their duty to ensure the children enjoyed the linguistic right to learn and speak the language of their birth".
Who's right here, who's wrong? Ms. Thacker was the one who said in 2010 (pace "Private Eye") that it was the parents' responsibility to ensure their children were safe. She was eventually forced to resign in 2014, but not without getting a nice payout:
"Rotherham Council's director of children's services was paid £40,000 to leave in the wake of the child sex abuse scandal, it has been revealed.
Joyce Thacker resigned last month after weeks of pressure following the publication of the Jay Report., external
It was discovered shortly before she quit that she had been on sick leave.
The council told BBC Radio Sheffield the amount paid to Mrs Thacker was less than the contractual notice entitlement.
The payout came to light following an Freedom Of Information request, external from the Sheffield Star.
Mrs Thacker left her post by "mutual agreement" in the wake of the report, which detailed the sexual abuse of 1,400 children in the town, mainly by gangs of men of Pakistani heritage, from 1997 to 2013."
It does seem to have been that simple: a combination of "these girls are low-class, they're naturally whores and liars", fears of seeming to be racist, and a wish that by sweeping it under the carpet it would all go away on the part of local councillors and police. Before it all blew up, there had been *three* different reports that were ignored or suppressed:
"An estimate that 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 is among the key findings of an independent report by Professor Alexis Jay, external into the handling of child sexual exploitation (CSE) by social services and police in the South Yorkshire town.
Prof Jay's report describes the abuse as "appalling" and says it included the rape of girls as young as 11 by "large numbers of male perpetrators".
Children were raped by multiple attackers, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated, the report revealed.
Some were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, while others were threatened with guns, made to watch "brutally violent rapes" and warned they would be next if they told anyone.
The report said the "collective failures" of political and officer leadership were "blatant" over the first 12 years covered by the inquiry.
Senior managers within social care were said to have "underplayed" the scale and seriousness of the problem.
Police were said to have given CSE no priority, regarding many child victims "with contempt" and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.
The report found that three other publications in 2002, 2003 and 2006 provided "stark evidence" to the police and council.
The first of these was suppressed, which the report said had led to suggestions of a cover-up, while the other two were ignored.
Staff were said to have believed the extent of CSE had been exaggerated, while some were "overwhelmed" by the numbers of cases involved.
The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the victims were young white girls.
Yet the report found that councillors failed to engage with the town's Pakistani-heritage community during the inquiry period.
Some councillors were said to have hoped the issue would "go away", thinking it was a "one-off problem".
The report said several staff members were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so.
Several councillors interviewed believed highlighting the race element would "give oxygen" to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion."
The Jay Report is here. It's very even-handed and describes the difficulty that all the services were working under: too many cases, not enough staff and funding, crossed wires, lack of emphasis by the police on child sex abuse crime in relation to other crimes, and the likes.
But then you read this - fathers who went to get their daughters being arrested instead and you have to ask "what the hell was going on there?":
"Experiences of Exploited Children
5.6 It is difficult to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that the victims of sexual exploitation in Rotherham have endured over the years. Victims were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the North of England,
5.7 abducted, beaten and intimidated. Some of their experiences were described in 36 national media reports. We read three case files that had been covered by the media, and considered the reporting to be accurate.
5.8 We read cases where a child was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, children who were threatened with guns, children who witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other.
5.9 In two of the cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene. In a small number of cases (which have already received media attention) the victims were arrested for offences such as breach of the peace or being drunk and disorderly, with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children.
5.10 There are numerous historic examples (up to the mid-2000s) of children being stalked by their abusers, and some extreme cases of violent threats or actual assaults on the victims and their families.
5.11 One parent, who agreed to her child being placed in a residential unit in order to protect her, wrote to children’s social care expressing her fears for her daughter’s safety. She described her despair that instead of being protected, her child was being exposed to even worse abuse than when she was at home:
“My child (age 13) may appear to be a mature child, yet some of her actions and the risks to which she constantly puts herself are those of a very immature and naïve person. She constantly stays out all night getting drunk, mixing with older mature adults, and refuses to be bound by any rules.”
5.12 One child who was being prepared to give evidence received a text saying the perpetrator had her younger sister and the choice of what happened next was up to her. She withdrew her statements. At least two other families were terrorised by groups of perpetrators, sitting in cars outside the family home, smashing windows, making abusive and threatening phone calls. On some occasions child victims went back to perpetrators in the belief that this was the only way their parents and other children in the family would be safe. In the most extreme cases, no one in the family believed that the authorities could protect them.
...5.17 Schools raised the alert over the years about children as young as 11, 12 and 13 being picked up outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown males in Rotherham, other local towns and cities, and further afield. Typically, children were courted by a young man whom they believed to be their boyfriend. Over a period of time, the child would be introduced to older men who cultivated them and supplied them with gifts, free alcohol and sometimes drugs. Children were initially flattered by the attention paid to them, and impressed by the apparent wealth and sophistication of those grooming them."
EDIT: You read this, and you come away wanting heads on pikes. And if it didn't happen then, it should happen now.
Oh, and charming examples of acts by the authorities such as this:
"5.21 Child A (2000) was 12 when the risk of sexual exploitation became known. She was associating with a group of older Asian men and possibly taking drugs. She disclosed having had intercourse with 5 adults. Two of the adults received police cautions after admitting to the Police that they had intercourse with Child A. Child A continued to go missing and was at high risk of sexual exploitation. A child protection case conference was held. It was agreed by all at the conference that Child A should be registered. However, the CID representative argued against the category of sexual abuse being used because he thought that Child A had been ‘100% consensual in every incident’. This was overruled, with all others at the case conference demonstrating a clear understanding that this was a crime and a young child was not capable of consenting to the abuse she had suffered. She was supported appropriately once she was placed on the child protection register."
"In my professional opinion as a police officer, this 12 year old consented and was able to consent to sex with adult men, so you can't call it sexual abuse".
"5.23 Child C (2002) was 14 when sexual exploitation was identified. She was referred several times to children’s social care between 2002 and 2004 because of family breakdown. She was described as being out of control. Her mother voiced her concerns about Child C being sexually active, going missing and repeated incidents of severe intoxication when she had been plied with drink by older males. Several initial assessments were carried out and some family support was offered. The case was then closed. The social worker’s assessment was that Child C’s mother was not able to accept her growing up. In fact, she was displaying what are now known to be classic indicators of child sexual exploitation from the age of 11. By the age of 13, she was at risk from violent perpetrators, associating with other victims of sexual exploitation, misusing drugs, and at high risk. She was referred to Risky Business whose staff identified these risk factors and addressed them through a planned programme of preventive work."
"Your 14 year old is drinking, getting drunk, and having sex with older guys? Sounds like a you problem, just accept she's growing up!"
"5.24 Child D (2003) was 13 when she was groomed by a violent sexual predator who raped and trafficked her. Her parents, Risky Business and Child D herself all
understood the seriousness of the abuse, violence and intimidation she suffered.
Police and children’s social care were ineffective and seemed to blame the child. A core assessment was done but could not be traced on the file. An initial assessment accurately described the risks to Child D but appeared to blame her for ‘placing herself at risk of sexual exploitation and danger’. Other than Risky Business, agencies showed no comprehension that she had been groomed at 13, that she was terrified of the perpetrators, and that her attempts to placate them were themselves a symptom of the serious emotional harm that CSE had caused her. Risky Business worked very hard with Child D and her parents. None of the other agencies intervened effectively to protect her, and she and her parents understandably had no confidence in them."
"If she doesn't want to be raped, then she shouldn't be rapeable, it's her own fault!"
"5.30 Child H (2008) was 11 years old when she came to the attention of the Police. She disclosed that she and another child had been sexually assaulted by adult males. When she was 12, she was found drunk in the back of a car with a suspected CSE perpetrator, who had indecent photos of her on his phone. Risky Business became involved and the Locality Team did an initial assessment and closed the case. Her father provided Risky Business with all the information he had been able to obtain about the details of how and where his daughter had been exploited and abused, and who the perpetrators were. This information was passed on to the authorities. Around this time, there were further concerns about her being a victim of sexual exploitation. She was identified as one of a group of nine children associating with a suspected CSE perpetrator. Her case had not been allocated by children’s social care. The Chair of the Strategy meeting expressed concern about her and considered she needed a child protection case conference. This does not appear to have been held. Three months later, the social care manager recorded on the file that Child H had been assessed as at no risk of sexual exploitation, and the case was closed. Less than a month later, she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested. Child H was at this point identified as being at high risk of CSE. Risky Business, social care workers and the Police worked to support Child H and her father and she was looked after for a period. She suffered a miscarriage while with foster carers. Her family moved out of the area and Child H returned home. Some of the perpetrators were subsequently convicted."
"Okay, so she's 12, her family are concerned about her, she's been found drunk and had indecent photos taken of her, but nah - she's okay! Probably!"
To be fair, there are other cases where all the authorities tried their best but the children involved wee angry, groomed into compliance, and did not want to hear or engage with efforts to help them. But I don't know, there were an awful lot of gaps and an awful lot of slipping through them.
8.1 We deal with the response of South Yorkshire Police at some length throughout this report. While there was close liaison between the Police, Risky Business and children’s social care from the early days of the Risky Business project, there were very many historic cases where the operational response of the Police fell far short of what could be expected. The reasons for this are not entirely clear. The Police had excellent procedures from 1998, but in practice these appear to have been widely disregarded. Certainly there is evidence that police officers on the ground in the 1990s and well beyond displayed attitudes that conveyed a lack of understanding of the problem of CSE and the nature of grooming. We have already seen that children as young as 11 were deemed to be having consensual sexual intercourse when in fact they were being raped and abused by adults.
8.2 We were contacted by someone who worked at the Rotherham
interchange in the early 2000s. He described how the Police refused to intervene when young girls who were thought to be victims of CSE were being beaten up and abused by perpetrators. According to him, the attitude of the Police at that time seemed to be that they were all ‘undesirables’ and the young women were not worthy of police protection.
8.3 By 2007, there was evidence that the Police were more pro-active in tackling CSE. Senior police officers had established good liaison arrangements with Risky Business and progress was being made in protecting the children and investigating the perpetrators.
8.4 The Police were commended by the trial judge, along with children’s social care, for their handling of a successful prosecution in 2007. Shortly thereafter, work began on what would eventually lead to the successful prosecution of five offenders in 2009 as part of Operation Central, brought about by excellent joint working between the Police, Risky Business and children’s social care."
Taxi drivers and the police:
"Taxis and Licensing
8.16 One of the common threads running through child sexual exploitation across England has been the prominent role of taxi drivers in being directly linked to children who were abused. This was the case in Rotherham from a very early stage, when residential care home heads met in the nineties to share intelligence about taxis and other cars which picked up girls from outside their units. In the early 2000s some secondary school heads were reporting girls being picked up at lunchtime at the school gates and being taken away to provide oral sex to men in the lunch break.
8.17 A diagram and backing papers supplied to the Police in 2001 by Risky Business linked alleged perpetrators with victims, taxi companies and individual drivers.
...8.21 The Safeguarding Unit convened Strategy meetings from time to time on allegations involving taxi drivers. We read some of the most serious, from 2010, and were struck by the sense of exasperation, even hopelessness, recorded as the professionals in attendance tried to find ways of disrupting the suspected activity. Strategy meetings about one specific taxi firm had been held on four occasions in a seven week period. The minutes of one meeting record a total of ten girls and young women, three of whom were involved in three separate incidents of alleged attempted abduction by taxi drivers. The seven other girls had alleged that they were being sexually exploited in exchange for free taxi rides and goods. Two of the girls involved were looked after children. The Licensing Enforcement Officer took the step of formally writing to the Police following the incidents of alleged attempted abductions by drivers, complaining about the Police failure to act. In one incident, a driver accosted a 13-year-old girl. She refused to do what he asked and reported this to her parents who followed the taxi through the town, where they managed to identify the driver and dialled 999 for assistance. According to the Licensing Enforcement Officer, the Police did not attend until later and took no action. In his email to the Police he stated that 'a simple check would have revealed that the driver had been arrested a week previously in Bradford for a successful kidnapping of a lone female.' He concluded by acknowledging that police priorities were not the same as Licensing, but he 'should not be holding this together on his own'.
...8.25 In a number of different meetings, the Inquiry talked to 24 young people, aged 14-25, who lived in the Council area. One of the main items for discussion with them was safe transport. When asked about taxis, there was an immediate and consistent response from the young women and men on every occasion. All avoided the use of taxis if at all possible. Their parents and partners strongly discouraged, even forbade, them from being on their own at night in a taxi, unless it was a company they personally knew. The girls described how on occasions they would be taken on the longest, darkest route home. One said the driver's first question would be 'How old are you, love?'. All talked about the content of their conversation quickly turning flirtatious or suggestive, including references to sex.
8.26 All the young people we met preferred to use the bus, despite their nervousness and dislike of the Rotherham Interchange, which they described as attracting drug dealers, addicts and people involved in a range of criminal activity. Many of these people congregated outside the Bus Station. The young people described their sense of intimidation and 'running the gauntlet' to get to their buses."
The Crown Prosecution Service and (yet again) the police:
8.36 In October 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions at that time, Keir Starmer, revised the CPS guidance on child sexual exploitation to set out a clear, agreed approach which prosecutors would take to tackle cases of child sexual abuse. A list of stereotypical behaviours previously thought to undermine the credibility of young victims was included to dispel the associated myths when bringing a prosecution. These included:
• The victim invited sex by the way they dressed or acted
• The victim used alcohol or drugs and was therefore sexually available
• The victim didn't scream, fight or protest so they must have been consenting
• The victim didn't complain immediately, so it can't have been a sexual assault
• The victim is in a relationship with the alleged offender and is therefore a willing partner
• A victim should remember events consistently
• Children can consent to their own sexual exploitation
• CSE is only a problem in certain ethnic/cultural communities
• Only girls and young women are victims of child sexual abuse
• Children from BME backgrounds are not abused
• There will be physical evidence of abuse.
8.37 All of the above elements have been referred to at some point in historic files we read, usually as reasons given by the Police or the CPS for not pursuing suspected perpetrators. This guidance was welcomed by many of the main organisations, both statutory and voluntary, dealing with CSE."
Now, some of this may fall into "he said/she said" territory if we're talking about adult men and women, but remember: we're talking about attitudes that "11 and 12 year olds can consent to sex with adult men, 14 year olds going out drinking and getting drunk and having sex are only growing up", so yeah.
What about those earlier reports, were they indeed ignored? And the answer seems to be "pretty much, yeah":
"10. Three Early Reports A chapter of a draft report on research into CSE in Rotherham, often referred to as 'The Home Office Report', was written by a researcher in 2002. It contained severe criticisms of the agencies in Rotherham involved with CSE. The most serious concerned alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers. The report also stated that responsibility was continuously placed on young people's shoulders, rather than with the suspected abusers. It presented a clear picture of a 'high prevalence of young women being coerced and abused through prostitution.' Senior officers in the Police and the Council were deeply unhappy about the data and evidence that underpinned the report. There was a suggestion that facts had been fabricated or exaggerated. Several sources reported that the researcher was subjected to personalised hostility at the hands of officials. She was unable to complete the last part of the research. The content which senior officers objected to has been shown with hindsight to be largely accurate. Had this report been treated with the seriousness it merited at the time by both the Police and the Council, the children involved then and later would have been better protected and abusers brought to justice. These events have led to suspicions of collusion and cover up.
Dr Heal's reports present a vivid and alarming picture of the links between sexual exploitation, drugs, gangs and violent crime in Rotherham from 2002 to 2006. They were widely distributed to middle and senior managers in all key agencies. There is no record of any formal, specific discussion of these reports in Council papers, in ACPC minutes or in the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board minutes made available to the Inquiry.
...10.8 The examples of poor practice and negative attitudes were far more prevalent. These included:
a) Awareness of CSE and interest in it were not widespread. Effective interventions were lacking;
b) Some professionals were working as individuals rather than seeking interagency solutions;
c) Information was not being shared with the Police, and Strategy meetings were not being called by children’s social care;
d) The 'mapping exercise' devised by Risky Business that cross-referenced a large amount of data on victims and perpetrators was not well received by the Police. No charges were brought against alleged perpetrators, nor was any investigation undertaken.
e) The Police had responded reluctantly to missing person reports, as a 'waste of time'. Some young women had been threatened with arrest for wasting police time;
f) The young women concerned were often seen by the Police as being deviant or promiscuous. The adult men with whom they were found were not questioned;
g) A database was developed to provide consistent recording of CSE-related information across agencies. Owing to a dispute between these agencies, it was not used;
h) Possibly as a result of their experience, parents were often not reporting a missing child since they saw it as a waste of time;
i) Professionals were reluctant to be named as a source of information in prosecution, fearing for their safety. Some Police said that if young people were not prepared to help themselves by making complaints against their abusers and giving evidence, they would take no further action on the case;
j) Despite ACPC procedures, there was no consistent way of addressing the issue of CSE. Many professionals were unaware of it; and
k) Some professionals were cautious about working together and sharing information. Some feared an increase in workload. Some, especially the Police, made personal judgements about the young women involved.
10.9 According to the researcher, attempts to raise many of the concerns described above with senior personnel were met with defensiveness and hostility.
…10.11 She described a particular case that was 'the final straw'*. In 2001, a young girl who had been repeatedly raped had tried to escape her perpetrators but was terrified of reprisals. They had allegedly put all the windows in at the parental home and broken both of her brother's legs 'to send a message'. At that point, the child agreed to make a complaint to the Police. The researcher took her to the police station office where she would be interviewed in advance in order to familiarise her with the place and the officer who would be conducting the interview. Whilst there, the girl received a text from the main perpetrator. He had with him her 11-year old sister. He said repeatedly to her 'your choice…'. The girl did not proceed with the complaint. She disengaged from the pilot and project and is quoted by the researcher as saying 'you can't protect me'. This incident raised questions about how the perpetrator knew where the young woman was and what she was doing.
10.12 Following this incident, the researcher described how she discussed what to do next with her manager and others in the project and pilot’s Steering Committee. It was agreed that she should put her concerns in writing to the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police and the Rotherham District Commander of Police. This letter was approved by her manager and the steering group before being hand-delivered to Rotherham Police Station. The Inquiry had access to this letter. According to the researcher, this resulted in a meeting with the District Commander and senior Council officials at which she was instructed never to do such a thing again. The content of her letter was not discussed.
*This case is also mentioned in Chapter 5. It was one of the case files read independently by the Inquiry team, and the details given by the researcher were found to be accurate."
Just going by first principles, "my enemies would want this to be true, therefore it can't *really* be true" seems like a very dangerous sort of trapped prior.
Agreed - I think it was Kelsey Piper (but I might be wrong) that listed out dozens of cases of police in the US and abroad just sitting on their hands for years, decades sometimes, about obvious child sexual abuse crimes - just generally out of bureaucratic apathy (and a dozen other reason ofc), aided by the victims generally being unable to really pressure them. It is in fact something of a default state! The idea that "police fucked up" requires any explanation at all is an intense special plead. I am happy to amid that PC dynamics played a role here, it was The Vibes at the time; but it was lifting, at the very most, 10% of the weight.
That might be true, I agree the world is heterogeneous! I have also heard good things, I expect they are better on average. But I will say - do you live in Singapore? How many newspapers and bloggers on Singaporean crime do you regularly read? Maybe you do, I don’t know you! But we should also acknowledge Singapore, like all societies, is a distant place that brands itself, both passively and actively. Some of that reputation is just vibes that we lack the expertise to judge.
I've lived there, and still have good friends there. Singapore really is about 10x better run than the US, UK, and most of Europe, and you definitely live and feel that when you're there.
It's not ethnically or linguistically homogenous either - the metro announces in 4 different languages, and there are clear class-based ethnic divides (Malays do all the construction and infrastructure work, for example), but even with those pressures, it remains better run than pretty much everywhere else.
City states for the win, I suppose (though Singapore is better than Hong Kong too).
Depressingly also a lot of people are opposed to child sexual abuse in the abstract, when they are thinking of predators grabbing preteens. But when it comes to teenage girls who are part of the wrong social groups, drink, take drugs, dress revealingly etc. (or can be characterized as such) they switch into victim blaming mode instead
That was actually my conclusion, or feeling, from the extensive quotes Deiseach shared above. As the attitudes of the police (toward the girls specifically) were described, a strong picture of these girls grew in my mind: in a word, young girls whose appearance said "trashy" to the police. That would mean both low-class (and I believe class played a HUGE part here) and overly sexualized in clothing & mannerisms for their age. There were reports of girls of 11, 12 & 13 being deemed (by the police) capable to consent to sex with adult men--& this wasn't a general statement "we believe 12-year-olds to be capable of sexual consent" it was "THIS 12-year-old was capable of sexual consent." How does a cop get to that conclusion?? B/c he looks at the 12-year-old and she *looks* like a woman to him, whether because she's that far into puberty and/or because she dresses and acts as though she is.
It's an extremely foolish way of thinking. Has it never occurred to them that the way the child dresses & their mannerisms could actually have been initiated and encouraged by the abuser? Or that puberty and maturity are 2 different things? I've met a handful of very young teenagers who had essentially the bodies of adults, in such a striking way that one instinctively treated them as such--and I found that instinct to be a mistake. (My mistake was no more than an expectation of a higher standard of behavior, but the behavior I did see was in fact child behavior, not even teen behavior.) I believe they looked at the girls' appearance, consulted their instinct that "oh, this is an adult interested in sex," consulted their cultural prejudice that "these low-class girls are sluts and whores anyhow," and judged the matter to be no big deal.
>The idea that "police fucked up" requires any explanation at all is an intense special plead.
"My Lords, do the Government accept that if we extrapolate nationally the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford, there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years? What is the Government’s answer to the chief constable of Northumbria Police, who has just said that there is every likelihood that these grooming gangs are operating in every one of our major cities?"
Sure, police forces f-up all the time. But there's police forces f-ing up, and then there's police forces letting *more than a quarter of a million* schoolgirls get raped over a period of several decades. I don't think that can really be brushed off as just normal intertia and incompetence.
Seriously, holy hell. That's not just an oopsie. That is the state complicit in war crimes against their own people. Is a quarter million really accurate? Under those circumstances, those people would be absolutely justified in organizing themselves and using whatever deadly force is necessary to defend themselves and overthrowing the treasonous regime.
i think the likelihood that a quarter million brits were being raped daily for years and somehow kept it covered, is far far lower than the likelihood that this doesn't actually extrapolate nationally...
250,000 is actually on the low end of the estimates; I've seen others suggest there were at least a million victims. Although I'll admit that even 250,000 seems like a surprisingly high number. If only there were some kind of process whereby the national government could inquire into the whole scandal, to try and get more accurate data...
> nything about Jimmy Savile either. Say what you will about the American handling of Epstein, he went to prison twice and died there
If you think that Epstein was running a one man show without any participation from his visitors, who continued to visit after he was found guilty of abuse, then you are very naive indeed.
Saville wasn’t anywhere near as important in Britain as were most visitors to the island, and there’s very little investigation about that.
The truth is probably much simpler - it's not just that they were afraid of being seen as racist, it's that the police were afraid of these communities and afraid of enforcing the laws in what are basically parallel societies within Britain
That strikes me as extremely unlikely. Online right-wingers often claim that there are "no-go zones" and parallel societies, but when they present evidence it always seems to be terribly weak or outright fake.
> when they present evidence it always seems to be terribly weak
To some extent isn't that what you'd expect to see if it were true, though, given that the core claim involves people who'd normally be responsible for collecting stronger evidence being deliberately excluded and/or complicit?
There's a difference between "absence of strong supporting evidence" and "presence of strong conflicting evidence" or "unfalsifiable even in principle."
In peacetime, that lumpy roadside shrub with a black plastic rod sticking out, which doesn't seem to be in quite the same spot as you remember it being when you looked that way before... is probably just bad gardening, wind-blown trash, and deja vu.
During a war, though, that's not safe to disregard - gotta seriously consider the hypothesis it's an unfriendly man with a rifle, wearing camouflage. Constantly dealing with those sorts of questions is hard work, which is why most people prefer to avoid war zones when given a reasonable alternative.
I'm not saying the right-wingers stuck in a siege mentality are correct, or even necessarily worth listening to, but if you're going to ignore that boy for crying wolf too often, claiming wolves don't really exist is still a step too far.
If I seem trollish to you, then you are very thoroughly bubbled.
And you have to understand that "according to Wikipedia, some random scholar said so ten years ago" is the kind of thing I had in mind when I said "terribly weak". The well-supported parts of those articles are not surprising (like the existence of bad neighbourhoods) and the surprising parts (like "mini-Islamic States") are not well-supported.
Also, your own articles take pains to point out that so-called "no-go zones" aren't. The police do go there; in fact, they go there in greater force.
I will give you points for introducing me to more serious uses of the phrase parallel society, though; previously I'd only really heard it from cranks.
I understand it was the distributed aspect that was key. Several local administrations had the same biases (including wokeness, but also dislike of the victims and general incompetence).
It's like the difference between random error and bias. Random error evens out - sometimes you let things slide, sometimes you throw the book at them. But in this case the systemic tendency allowed for more and more organized and daring "gangs", and when the rock was finally lifted it turned out that the end result was pretty horrific.
From the level of sheer malfeasance it also seems to me that likely to me that at least some of the police departments in cities with notable grooming gang cases are directly connected in corrupt ways to organized crime enterprises running the grooming networks.
It's worth putting it in the context of it being at a time of major cuts to police budgets in the UK under the Conservative government's austerity program. Blaming it on wokeness (or i guess political correctness back then) was a politically convenient way of avoiding blame
Oh, it goes back at least to the 1980s, if not earlier (there are newspaper reports from the '60s which with hindsight look like they could be referring to grooming gangs, although it's hard to be sure from this distance).
Yeah from what I’ve read it seems the bigger problem than “let’s not look racist” was (ironically for Scott’s argument) is that people just didn’t care about these kids. Even those who were supposed to be looking after them thought they were just making a lifestyle choice. Add to that “the police's universal general reluctance to prosecute any sex crime where the victim is less sympathetic than a nun getting stranger-raped in broad daylight with 15 witnesses” (h/t Helen Lewis, who has a great Substack).
I also read on another Substack by some academic whose name I’ve forgotten that in the 90s hundreds of underage girls were prosecuted for solicitation. So it’s part of a wider pattern/history of society and the authorities just not taking child sexual exploitation seriously. Grim, but not something Musk/Robinson et al would address
The first is that the UK has a class system, the girls were either in care (meaning they'd been taken away from their parents by the state) or living in council estates (public housing projects). There was a pervasive view that would translate into American as "they're white trash, they're all crawling all over each other like a box of hamsters anyway, who cares," sometimes also framed in terms of relativism and different groups having different values. I can personally remember when the story broke in the Times, my initial reaction was, "Wait, what the fuck?" Then on the inside there were pictures of one of the victims and her parents, the other shoe dropped, and I went back to not caring. That then led to soul-searching etc down the line which is why I remember it. Thus for a lot of people in Britain, it gets filed in the Darfur/malaria/textile industry drawer of bad things that happen to the sort of people bad things happen to but which don't really matter. No-one on either side can address this head on (the British right has a de facto omertà on discussing the class system because maintaining it is secretly the point of the Tory party, but they need the votes of more than 2% of the population; the British left can only talk about class in a very specific Marxism-inspired scheme that ceased to function 50 years ago, as without it their political formula could no longer explain their actions (the heart of their coalition is public sector workers, a handful of specific racial minorities and a smattering of second-tier metropolitan liberals; most of what they do is designed to funnel money and sinecures to the first two groups).
The second missing part is that most Midlands/Northern England urban borough councils (local government) were controlled by the Labour Party to a far greater extent than today (where they still hold most of them). But Labour in somewhere like Rotherham isn't a bunch of metropolitan liberal elites. It's a smattering of white trade unionists* and a lot of Pakistanis. The result of this was a lot of internal pressure to look the other way came from base practical motives and patronage, rather than white upper-middle-class handwringing (the places where this happened don't have much of an upper-middle-class; they're the UK's answer to the Rust Belt). A standard example would be: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/rotherham-grooming-trial-victim-claims-she-was-raped-by-town-councillor . This aspect can't be addressed because it doesn't have palatable solutions, so gets ignored.
*In the UK, unions only meaningfully exist in the public and quasi-public sector; the result is that Labour councils are often made up of people who are employed by a different council.
Sure, it’s definitely a complicated mix of societal and local factors at play. You could also count in the death of local journalism which is at least supposed to scrutinise local authorities. But I guess we both agree that it’s not simply what Scott said ( authorities afraid to look racist).
"I was worried about being called a racist" is probably a wiser explanation for why you didn't investigate some crime than "I didn't give a f--k and wanted to get back to the donut shop" or "I was on the take and didn't want to lose my weekly bribe money."
UK is bad on crime in general. AFAIK the real story here is that many decades of austerity policy has hollowed out state capacity to the point where they can barely keep any public services running, and police are underfunded to the point where they barely do anything to begin with.
I feel like anything other than option 1 is a hallmark Isolated Demand for Rigour. Actually just having opinions about things is a fine and normal thing to do.
Ugly knots and exploitable flaws are what you get when that reconciliation process is put off until the last minute. Integrity thinks ahead. Exercise those moral and tactical intuitions across a wide enough variety of impossible, fantastical situations, and the merely unlikely scenarios become easy.
Regarding option no.5 here, say I have a friend who, when considering the repugnant conclusion, opts to "hit the bricks." Any advice on how I can get him to do more testing against his values?
> all the people who claim a principled commitment to not caring about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries suddenly care a lot about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries.
The uk is an american vassal and I hear in theory related to my blood line(... tho Im confused are the red coats or black and tans?)
I agree with the contents but also it feels mildly bizarre to read such a rebuttal of a position I don't see anyone serious hold... Makes me wonder what kind of circles Scott is reading nowadays
It's kind of as if I saw a post titled "Everyone is a Based Post-Sleep Awakeist till Drowsiness shows up"; sure, but also what kind of circles are those?
One of the reactions to effective altruism and third world charity in general is this position, I think it's more common on the right among younger people than it would seem because it's the kind of opinion to get no visibility in the MSM, even to disagree with it. It's just too perpendicular
I think you are making a rhetorical trick when talking about "thinly sliced differences". I and most people care aboit people more the closer they are to us on multiple dimensions.
Geographically, Culturally and even over time. (me now vs me in 10 years).
You mentioned the grooming gangs case burst open in 2013. That's eleven years ago, and it made a lot of noise at the time in Europe. Europeans collectively understood the ins and outs of the case, as far as a group of people can when it's discussed for a few weeks. It was used, predictably, by those opposed to muslim immigration. It was used, also predictably, to further anti-anti-muslim rhetoric, because in Europe, anytime a prominent political figure said something that resembled a harmful religious or ethnic stereotype, typically based on a dreadful case, what you'd now call the "woke" crowd would drown out the chat about the dreadful case by making the political figure another villain of the story. A few weeks on, everyone kinda got back to what they were doing, and people conveniently turned their anger at newer, shinier horrible things.
Anyways, as far as Europe goes, this is a bit of a cold case. Pretty much everyone collectively acknowledged the crimes were horrid and the accused, monsters. Almost everyone felt somewhat disgusted by the fact that the crimes were unreported for so long due to fears of being called systemically racist or whatever.
And then, eleven years later, Elon takes an interest in British politics, obviously supporting someone who's highly controversial (what's the fun in doing anything else as the richest man on the planet?) and brings back this case in the open to an audience who is ready to, like you said in your post, suddenly care about the suffering of people overseas.
Let's be real. The reason so many people care about these cases is because 1. the attackers are muslim and 2. the attacked are young girls in Britain.
This doesn't mean it's wrong to point out that number 1 and number 2 might have links beyond random noise. But it means the “based post-Christian vitalist” you're describing most likely does not care about the victims in this case. They see the case as a convenient political weapon and wield it using huge amounts of misinformation (I've stopped counting the number of times people on X have claimed upwards of a million British girls were raped by the grooming gang, which is a fake I've had to disprove for people close to me). They're not going to care about the case once it gets off their feed, and they're not going to donate or fight for the girls in any way, shape or form. They'll continue saying you're a weakling for giving away money to save people you can't see or meet or who can't otherwise make you a more powerful or richer person.
In that sense, they're being faithful to their based vitalism and only pretending to care in order to further their own designs.
> In that sense, they're being faithful to their based vitalism and only pretending to care in order to further their own designs.
Well, if you suspect your opponents are faking outrage in order to score cheap political points, pointing out that by their self-professed moral values, they should not care about that is a valid counter-strategy, which Scott employs here.
Oh but they're not faking the outrage part. They are politically outraged, which I think goes way beyond the outrage they feel for the actual victims. I think it's easily discernable when looking at the amount of disinformation being shared on the number of victims, for example. Say you care deeply about the civilian deaths in Gaza. Your political outrage and your empathy are both on high alert, and since you care deeply (you're not faking it), you've hopefully done the tiniest amount of research beyond X retweets and dubious news websites' headlines. Then, you see a tweet in your feed purporting that "The situation in Gaza is absolutely horrible. There could be as many as 1,500,000 dead, according to [random name of low level politician]." Since you KNOW through your at-least-tiny-amount-of-research that the number of deaths is blurry, yes, but closer to 40000-60000, I hope you wouldn't share the tweet that multiplies that number by 30, because it's misinformation.
Again, the outrage is real. But I believe the vitalist archetype described in the article cares more about the political ramifications than about the victims - therefore the emphasis is placed on policy (immigration control for example) rather than on empathy for the sufferers.
It's important to remember that how much outrage someone feels isn't correlated with the actual harm or insult done. People can and do get outraged over stuff that never even happened.
Which is precisely what’s going on in this case. This is exactly what a Mossad operation would look like: Muslim cabbies raping your brainwashed and trafficked daughters, yet everyone’s daughter YOU know is accounted for, somehow.
I mean, the Rotherdam stuff really did happen and really was bad. It's just a terrible thing that happened in another country about a decade ago, and it was widely reported in the news then.
So is every "altruist" including Effective Altruists. No rich person puts the lives of people in a poor backward country above their own status and goals. Most philanthropists, if not all of them just want to virtue signal and get tax breaks. True altruism is a myth.
Whether "true" altruism is a myth doesn't really come into play in my message because I'm not making a defense of "true" altruism, or even altruism itself. But if you're going there, the mere fact that "no rich person puts the lives of people in a poor backward country above their own status and goals" does not mean "there aren't varying degrees of caring primarily about (1) the political aspects of a dreadful case or about (2) the victims and their suffering.
If (1), seems unlikely this person would care about massive suffering across the world (even in non-"backward" countries) if it didn't involve a political aspect that stirred their outrage further. If (2), whether the person is truly altruistic or not, they'd be more likely to care about *any* massive suffering across the globe, since the political aspect wasn't the main draw to caring about it in the first place.
Or have the moral sense to understand that they are not fully living up to their ideals, and can try better, but probably still aren’t going to live up to their ideals, but shouldn’t take that as a reason to deny that anything matters.
I’d nitpick the word “sacrifice”, but otherwise I find that admirable. I know you’re not doing it for anyone else’s approval, but we should absolutely praise behavior that we want to encourage!
Well, yeah. That's kind of the whole point of the movement, that most Westerners can live quite comfortably on a smaller income, and save some lives. For me that trade-off is a no-brainer.
I think the problem discussing altruism is that most people just generalize from one example -- themselves.
So on one hand we get people believing that deep down everyone wants to help others, and the only thing that could possibly prevent them from doing so is that they are currently fighting their own emotional trauma or something, but as soon as that problem is solved, they will be free to go and do nice things for others.
On the other hand, we get people believing that everyone who does something seemingly nice is just doing it as a part of some scam, because why the hell would anyone care about other people.
No, I think a lot of EA people actually believe in it. The fact that SBF was FOS doesn't mean the rest of the EAs are. Professional philanthropists, yeah, they're trying to look good, and to some degree it's part of the job--your whole shtick is to get rich people to give you money after all. But the people who post here about shrimp suffering? They're honest.
I'm on the left-hand path myself, but I can tell you many people are not.
This kind of reply makes me think of the reaction of some people who, upon learning that other people claim to have a visual imagination, and noting that they themselves do not, simply claim other people are faking it, or confused.
There's a very good reason the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer (director of public prosecutions for a significant portion of the period under discussion) is widely referred to as "Two-Tier Kier".
Citing my own comment: "Anyways, as far as Europe goes, this is a bit of a cold case. Pretty much everyone collectively acknowledged the crimes were horrid and the accused, monsters. Almost everyone felt somewhat disgusted by the fact that the crimes were unreported for so long due to fears of being called systemically racist or whatever."
What you listed were concerns for British and European people at the time. I'm sure it made the news in the US, too, but I wasn't following US politics at the time.
I should have been clearer. I should have written "The reason so many people care about these cases [all of a sudden in late 2024, eleven years after the fact, outside of mainland Europe] is..."
This is not a cold case. They have been raping native girls for decades, and they will continue until the police stop worrying about 'community relations' and start doing their job.
Looking at the dates, Starmer took charge of British prosecution offices the year after the case you refer to. And if anything, he seems responsible for the prosecutors starting to get more serious about this kind of cases, even when the police recommended not to proceed. Blaming him is mostly political opportunism.
Also the tweet is wrong, the rapist got six years not three (still looks too little, indeed the prosecution appealed asking for a longer sentence).
I think Scott is not aiming to convince the people he ostensibly addresses here. (This is basically a corollary of the old "you convince the audience, not the opponent" rule of debating.) He's aiming to convince people who actually do care, but, due to unfamiliarity with the case, might be swayed by their arguments.
This is, of course, the correct thing to do, much better than the recently depressingly common "those people are just wrong and evil and you shouldn't even consider they could ever be right", because that, well, ends up giving us things like Rotterham.
It’s flat out wrong to describe this as a cold case, and deeply misleading to act as if the problem is an old one that has been solved.
It’s an ongoing major problem that has more attention and resources now than it used to, but is still under resourced and unresolved. The scale of ongoing abuse is genuinely disturbing.
This is not a “cold case”! There were *hundreds* of arrests in 2023 (and more of them since) with the newest grooming gang task force, and even the ex head of one first major grooming gang task task forces says that it is "obvious" grooming is still "happening in every city around the country", and highlights how hard it is to get convictions when victims are terrified and unwilling to testify.
This is a major ongoing issue, not a cold case. Even if the level of suppression of information about it has reduced, the problem itself is still there and is worthy of attention.
As an aside, I believe no one has so far been prosecuted for failing to do their job and protect these girls, which is a strong signal that real incentives in the police and councils have not changed, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
This is a big, nasty, ingrained problem that people are rightfully upset about even today.
Scott argues that the fact that Based post-Christian vitalists want to save Children from grooming gangs in the UK shows that they do, after all, care about defending the unfortunate and weak in at least some circumstances. Here's a thought. For some of the cynical actors involved in this (e.g. BAP) this needn't be motivated by compassion for the victims at all, but concern about racial struggle, which is entirely consistent with based-pseudo-Nietzschean-vitalism. Possible motivations:
1. Preserving "racial stock"
2. Giving a causus belli to attack Islam, providing an opportunity to sweep up naive Christians who do care about compassion in a vitalist racial war.
Supporting evidence. It's very clear that the vitalists here are fishing for certain kinds of solutions. They don't want to stop grooming gangs in the most efficient and effective ways, they want racial resentment.
Many of the leaders of this movement are absolutely cynical enough to think in these terms. Perhaps I've missed something though. I agree that deep down almost everyone has the same moral obligations (with the possible exception of psychopaths, if they turn out to be qualitatively and not merely quantitatively distinct) but that doesn't mean some people aren't very successfully suppressing some of these motivations.
Instinct? Yes, I suspect the urge to protect one's family, village, tribe, nation in that order is instinctive and universal to all humans. It may be disguised by religious, political, or ethical philosophical constructs, but the instinct to protect our own is there. Depending on who's doing the motivating, those constructs can be used to manipulate the instincts of others into acting beyond the identity of their family-village-tribe-nation to help or harm others.
Someone else replied in another comment that if you suspect that the morality framing is insincere, it’s especially valid to attack it and prove it inconsistent with other beliefs your opponent has claimed to have.
Yeah but Scott's not even doing that a little bit, he's saying 'secretly you're good people who do care about foreign victims, no matter how much you try to conceal it.'
I think the analogy to "wait for capitalism to solve the Third World's problems" would be "wait for police to solve the grooming gang issue". Great idea, as long as Third World countries are capitalist and the police aren't corrupt.
I don't agree with this analogy in my steelman framing. Democracies are (supposed to be) responsive to the will of the people. Hypothetically, making the police un-corrupt is a one-time solution, whereas giving people in the 3rd world helps them now, but doesn't help them in the future.
> Hypothetically, making the police un-corrupt is a one-time solution
Why on earth would that be guaranteed? The police got corrupt in the first place somehow, after all. Maybe conditions are different now, but in the absence of evidence your prior should be that they're not.
Why would it not help them in the future? Direct money transfers are extremely well studied in economic experiments and have been shown to help people get out of poverty traps. On a societal scale lower child mortality/sickness has many positive effects on for instance birthrate and population health.
You say these things, but why do you think they're true?
Making the police un-corrupt once could just work until those police retire and are replaced by new ones, or until corrupting influences find new holes in your updated systems.
If the savior of third world countries is going to be capitalism, then they need to do capital accumulation in order to have something to invest and spend to get the process started. Someone handing you a bunch of money once is a very efficient form of capital accumulation, it lets you start businesses and create a fluid marketplace.
Almost 100% of those third-world countries *are already capitalist*, and have been for hundreds of years in many cases.
People have to get over the idea that capitalism is magic. If a country has been capitalist for a hundred years and is still poor and dysfunctional, that mean capitalism produces poor and dysfunctional countries as well as modern rich countries.
Capitalism isn't magic, other factors determine the outcome of societies and capitalism won't magically overwhelm all those other factors someday. capitalism isn't unitary, it takes a wide variety of forms and produces a wide variety of outcomes, some of those are observably good and some of those are observably bad.
> So it was revealing to watch some of these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.
> Now the entire Right is demanding investigations, heads on pikes, and (in some cases) the American invasion of Britain.
Local man picks nuts, discovers logical inconsistencies.
But first, our investigators reveal what happens after items that were dry are submerged in water. Are they still dry when removed? The answer may surprise you.
You're missing the key point here! The British were based and Empire-Pilled a century ago, and although the poor British who were raped are poor children suffering in a foreign nation (who we should not care about), they are only not rich and powerful (who we should care about) because of a century of LIBERALISM and decay. In their essence, the British are Ubermensch, like all of us Vitalists, who are only kept from their greatness due to WOKE ideology and MORALS. In the same way that most of us vitalists are just average people (with no especially "vital" achievements) who are kept down by your stupid morals and """society""", the British spirit (as proven by their awesome Empire) are vitalists who have been poisoned by YOUR charitable ideology.
Thus, it's totally self-consistent to care about the grooming gangs, who are a symptom of altruistic ideology allowing grooming gangs to even exist in the first place, while not caring about poor Africans dying of Malaria, who weren't going to be based empire builders in the first place.
At least that's my attempt to half-steelman, half-satirize what I think a Vitalist might say.
As a sorta-vitalist I agree that this is basically about wokeness. Cucked Brits don't really deserve sympathy, but since they are similar enough culturally, their failure is a canary in the mine, which needs to be taken seriously and dealt with resolutely, because The Same Can Happen Here due to malign memetic viruses.
The reconciliation I would propose here is that the post-Christian vitalist is not primarily focused on reducing suffering of the innocent for the sake of reducing suffering. It is that they see a clash of cultures where what they deem to be an inferior culture is having its way with a weakened (formerly?) superior culture, and like good Nietzscheans they want the better culture to thrive and the rascals to be cast out or forced to assimilate into the better way.
I don't think vitalists are this victim-centered in their opposition to grooming gangs. It's not about "helping poor people with no particular skills", it's about protecting orderly society, which, in their view, requires purging these kinds of people. Third-world countries don't have much of an orderly society in the first place, so there's nothing worth defending.
I don't know - if this were all, I would expect them to be sympathetic to the government's attempts to sweep things under the rug, which kept things very orderly for everyone except the victims (who, on this line of reasoning, don't matter). You'd also think they'd be more against Tommy Robinson violating a bunch of laws in his crusade to spread awareness, or concerned about the possibility about causing some kind of freak BNP election victory.
I think if you read the posts, they're at least claiming to be angry for the sake of the kids.
Sweeping things under the rug isn't orderly, it's just more disorder. Then you don't just have rape gangs, you have the government messing with the feedback process that's supposed to deal with problems like rape gangs.
Order isn't just peace and quiet, it's also people doing what they're supposed to do and refraining from egregiously improper behavior, and sometimes you have to be more assertive and less cooperative if you want to protect well-functioning society.
> they're at least claiming to be angry for the sake of the kids
I think that's mainly because the victims being kids make it particularly egregious disorder - there's rarely any good reason to harm children, so you're probably really deviant if you do.
On what grounds are they supposed to though? I have an easy answer - because rape gangs are bad for their victims - but that's because I am not a based post christian vitalist. In the absence of any concern for the welfare of others, it's not clear to me how you're supposed to arrive at the claim that the state has duties towards them.
Playing the devil's advocate for a moment, even if the vitalist doesn't care about the victim, cops certainly claim to, and if the cops are being grossly negligent with regard to this particular duty, they're likely misbehaving in other ways too, less overtly horrific but more relevant to vitalist interests.
I think you can note the disconnect between their actions and their stated motivations when assessing how sincere they are.
I've yet to see Musk or any of the x people suddenly interested in the case talk about implementing the recommendations of the national inquiry into grooming gangs, which the conservative government refused to. But instead they're using it to attack the current left wing government on spurious guilt by association grounds.
Well no, Musk backs Tommy Robinson and Reform UK who have faced ostracism from polite society and in the case of Tommy imprisonment for not toeing the line
The left are awful everywhere in the West, although in the UK it is true that the right are almost as bad
When you say he was imprisoned for not toeing the line do you mean the time he was imprisoned in 2005 for assault, in 2012 for using false travel documents, or in 2014 for mortgage fraud? The two 2018 contempt of court cases where he almost invalidated grooming trials? Or the 2021 case where he falsely accused a child of sexual assault, causing him and his family to need to flee their home? Which was a civil libel case. It's a bit hard to keep track
Hm. I hear what you’re saying here, but I think you’ll be talking past the target audience in a way liable to frustrate them more than to clarify. If I can be at once more and less charitable to them:
They care about grooming gangs in Britain because they believe Western Civilization will fall with too much immigration from incompatible cultures, and the grooming gangs are one particularly salient example of that. It’s not “defending poor kids in a foreign country,” per se—although they’re sincerely concerned!—it’s “here is a highly salient evil caused by something that touches on all my core concerns, so blatant that you all cannot ignore it.”
For them, it’s not distant children in a foreign country, it’s a proximate people in a proximate country with potential to be like them that they see being undone by what they’d call suicidal empathy to the foreign.
Put in crude racial terms: they care because the kids are white, and therefore in their circle of concern. They don’t care about kids in Africa because those kids are (if they want to be crude about it) low-IQ brown biotrash that’s probably unfit for civilization, destined to hover around Malthusian limits and suck up the resources of suicidally empathetic white people, and regardless not in their circle of moral concern because their own people can take care of them.
This is an oversimplification but you could do much worse as a predictor.
In other words, they’re not going to read your article and think “oh yeah, I care about the foreign here so I should care about it elsewhere,” they’ll think “this man’s definition of foreign is so distant from ours that he’s not even in the same moral universe.” Very little could be more consistent in their frame than caring about Rotherham but not Africa.
> it's often a prelude to either asking for money or some kind of repugnant conclusion rug pull where they get shamed and humiliated if they don't go along with something their interlocutor wants after having committed to the moral priors which demand it.
Asking for money seems like a strict subset of that second thing, albeit usually less intense.
I think these people wouldn't be especially interested in helping poor kids in Moldova, even if they are white, or even poor kids in Britain suffering from the usual kinds of poverty-related problems.
Neither of those examples carries the same “save civilization from the incoming hordes” salience for them. I’m not saying they don’t care about the kids—they absolutely, sincerely do—but their prioritization of the topic ties directly into its salience to their fundamental overriding issue. Moldova is further from their sphere of concern, but they’d care about the same fact pattern there and they care about immigration from developing countries to Moldova. See eg reactions to Hungary and Poland.
I basically agree with you on this, but I would describe this as something like "the path of your moral impulses is smoothed by congruent politics and blocked by contradictory politics". People don't want to hear about saving African kids because it has too many unpleasant political implications. Then they say "I don't care about foreign kids". But if we can think of a way of saving foreign kids that has friendly pro-ingroup political implications, then you become in favor of saving foreign kids. That gives you a heads-up that you are capable of moral impulses, and gives you a chance to do moral philosophy with it and see where it takes you.
I'm hoping that some people, seeking reflective equilibrium, won't want to endorse "I genuinely, under reflection, care about the lives of kids when it's convenient for my politics, but not when it's inconvenient for my politics" and will decide to smooth themselves off to "I always care about the lives of kids" rather than "I never do".
Is this a mystery? Isn't this just what I said? They view white people as in the ingroup and non-whites as the outgroup, so they are especially enraged about the rape of white girls by Pakistani rape gangs.
That's a nice hope, but in practice anyone far enough down the rabbit hole to be defending these positions online has already rounded things off to "I care about things with pro-ingroup political implications" explicitly. Some of them aren't real enough Nietzscheans to handle that, so they construct these various metaphysical morning glory trips of organic racial unity to back it up - but again, anyone willing to go that far is already too far gone. You need to catch them much, much earlier if you want words alone to save them.
>"the path of your moral impulses is smoothed by congruent politics and blocked by contradictory politics"
This way of putting it already has morality and politics as very distinct. But I think for most people they are much less separate. One might say: it is moral to care for what is precious, like children; and it is moral to cultivate or protect a society's morality in the sense of its care for what is precious;, and this becomes political. The grooming gang issue is exactly a joint moral-social-political focal point, and people can feel that; moral feelings are not being activated independently of politics here.
>I'm hoping that some people, seeking reflective equilibrium, won't want to endorse "I genuinely, under reflection, care about the lives of kids when it's convenient for my politics, but not when it's inconvenient for my politics"
A lovely hope, but "some" is doing a lot of work there, isn't it? There are many, many examples of people endorsing that attitude. You could probably come up with a dozen while mining the NYT for more snarky digs (eg, clump of cells versus [unborn baby](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/us/birthright-citizen-children-migrant.html)).
I'm not claiming that nobody ever lets their politics influence morality! I'm claiming that people who do that have an opportunity to notice the dissonance and do more moral philosophy.
I don't know why you keep saying that like it's a productive thing to do. All that's done for me is further justify my innate hatred of humanity. The same would happen to the people that you're talking about, where it would simply make them realize that they truly hate these foreign savages.
I think it's less about the horde (although that's present, and "they're coming for our women" is primal), but mostly about wokeness. That's the real enemy, and it's the same enemy in America and Britain. (Some of it's also classism, but that's largely invisible to us Americans, so it just looks like more wokeness.)
If this had started to happen, but the perpetrators had been locked up for decades, there wouldn't be as much outrage. If it had continued as long as it did, but then all protestors were exposed and dealt with and the local governments that went along with it were purged, that wouldn't have been as bad. Nor if it had happened, but all the people who let it happen were being paid for silence, or if they were all foreign agents. But instead, it was about "not saying true negative things about a protected group", and I'd bet every single person who gets outraged by this (including myself) has felt how dangerous that is, and has worried about how bad it could get. And then we saw exactly how bad it could get.
---
Also there's the "distance" factor in ethics, which I think utilitarians deny, and other people rationalize away. But it's natural to not care as much about more distant things. It's easy to rationalize this into implying that those things aren't as bad *because* we don't care, or that the people are less deserving *because* we don't care, but that's incorrect. It's just a limit based on our limitations as sapient beings. Our attention is finite, and anything that wants to claim our attention is dangerous, not just to us but to our children, whom we are biased to protect. (See above about primal fears.)
One day perhaps there'll be an app to track every sparrow's fall, and when the numbers get low enough, every dead bird will have the attention that Peanut the Squirrel got.
I have suffered several forms of what I would describe as brain damage. I no longer have the capacities I once had. I have noticed that my circles of concern have shrunken. And I have have also noticed how my ability to have larger circles was systematically exploited by those who didn't want me to notice the harm they were doing to me and those close to me.
>Also there's the "distance" factor in ethics, which I think utilitarians deny, and other people rationalize away. But it's natural to not care as much about more distant things.
Agreed. In a sense, I think that it is _necessary_ for concern to drop off pretty fast with social distance to avoid targeting one's concern in ways that look at least close to pathological to me.
We live in a world with 8 billion of us, _far_ above Dunbar's number, 150, more than the quad of it. As far as one's immediate perceptions are concerned, the population almost might as well be infinite.
If concern drops off exponentially with the number of sequential social links from oneself, what happens?
Roughly, the number of people one link away is 150, the number 2 links away is roughly 150^2, and so on. If one's concern for any given person scales as some locality-factor^number-of-links-aways, then the _total_ concern for the circle one link away is locality-factor*Dunbar-number, for the circle two links away is locality-factor^2*Dunbar-number^2, three links locality-factor^3*Dunbar-number^3 and so on.
If the locality-factor is bigger than 1/Dunbar-number, then the bulk of one's concern goes to the _most_ _distant_ circle. This looks close to pathological to me.
To keep one's concern local _at_ _all_, it has to attenuate faster than the number of people in the circle rises.
I don't have a problem with it in theory; it's more of a practical thing. If I could scale myself to be 10x smarter in all ways, I'd hope my circles would expand by as much. I could track more people in my head, I could understand more about them, I could learn what would help and harm them, and I could make changes in the world that would help.
But I'm not. I have access to only a tiny bit of information about a tiny bit of the universe, and within that, my limited attention can only track an even tinier bit of it. And when people tell me that no, I should be diverting my attention elsewhere, that comes at a cost to everything else I care about. When I spend too much of my time and energy focusing on things far away and abstract, I spend less on what's close to me. And that can be a matter of life and death.
Many Thanks! _Everyone_ gets overwhelmed if they don't prune concerns for distant people fast enough. There are just too many, 8 orders of magnitude more than we evolved to deal with.
Scott, most Americans don’t consider Moldova part of “The West” in their minds. England, on the other hand, many consider almost a 51st state. Our estranged mother, essentially, and through genetics studies, we know this isn’t even fundamentally inaccurate!
Letting this place be invaded by Mohammedans, resulting in mass rape gangs is, suffice it to say, is more salient than run-of-the-mill poverty, especially in Moldova.
The way you describe the gang victims as "proximate people in a proximate country with potential to be like them" makes me think of Scott's "finely-sliced" argument in the post. I feel like we could run an experiment where people are presented with a range of statements about, broadly speaking, people suffering and then they're asked how much they are outraged by the statement and then how much money they'd be willing to give to a top charity that deals with that particular suffering. Then you could create a visual heat map of where/who people are most likely to support financially, and to see how much that relates to the outrage intensity heat map.
Basically, from what you're saying I'd expect the people who care about grooming gangs in Britain but not about any other atrocities being committed around the world to commit the most money to statements related to "proximate people in a proximate country with potential to be like them", and the least amount of money to non-proximate people, even if the outrage could be similar across the board. The difference between being able to express "the situation in Yemen is horrible" and the lack of commitment to do anything about it, in a way
I just want to know who the "they" is in this conversation. Like, name five specific posters. Seems absurd to have this argument about what a purely hypothetical type of guy may or may not believe when you could just argue with that person directly.
If we're just talking about racists, then obviously racists care more about what happens to white kids then they do about what happens to brown kids. Doesn't seem to require a lot of explanation. Why would you expect a white nationalist to care about moral philosophy?
And I mean actually racist. Like, he really dislikes non-whites. I do not say this lightly. Jared Taylor, for instance, is a white nationalist but does not really dislike non-whites. I don't detect hatred from Taylor. I detect hatred from Catgirl kulak. And again Jared Taylor doesn't call for blood, executions, an invasion of the UK etc in response to the UK rapes.
"Bronze Age Pervert" literally has "Bronze Age" in his name, of course he is going to say that people should follow human nature and violently defend themselves from the outgroup, as they did in the Bronze Age.
Jared Taylor is racist as well, but sure, less nastily so than Kulak
I’m not sure what you think “based post-Christian vitalists” is referring to—a lot of them are actually racist. One could convincingly argue it’s one of their core defining traits!
Taylor is a white nationalist and racialist, but he claims to not hate non-white people and I believe him, as he does not seem like a hateful individual. I don't call someone a "racist" unless they have hate or at least animus toward other racial groups. I don't detect any from Taylor, just white nationalism and racialism. I find it to be a really dumb and silly ideology but I don't think he is saying the n word, he goes and debates with black people, is respectful and cordial to them, compares himself to Marcus Garvey, etc. The word "racist", in my view, has other connotations. Racists are nasty people. Taylor has some silly ideas about race but he is a gentleman.
The first 3 "based post-Christian vitalists" that came to mind are Richard Hanania, Nathan Cofnas, and Curtis Yarvin. Do you think these people are "actually racist"? Cofnas is a nerdish philosopher who writes about IQ gaps, but I don't think he hates anyone. Hanania enjoys trolling on twitter, and is a big HBD and all of that, but you can't imagine him thinking "yeah, I hate these people because of the color of their skin". Do you think Curtis Yarvin is seething about the blacks? For me, an "actual racist" is someone who says the n word, or wishes that they could, or who really hates black and brown people or something like that. I would not be surprised by Kulak saying it. But for these three people I would be.
Richard Hanania basically endorses EA (he donates to shrimp welfare!); Nathan Cofnas isn’t particularly a Based Vitalist and is mostly concerned with hereditarianism; Yarvin has cultivated an audience of people who are either racist or extremely comfortable with racism but usually more-or-less treads the line personally, outside his provocative comments around eg the end of slavery.
The names I list are much more representative of the actual cluster in play in this conversation than Hanania and Cofnas; you can add Yarvin to the list but he’s more focused on appointing a king than on Defending The White Race
As for Taylor, of course he’s racist. While my own definition is also hostility-focused, anyone who is happy to support laws against interracial marriage can and should be called racist unambiguously and without flinching.
You're basically correct then. Seems pretty unlikely to me that any of the Twitter users you named would be persuaded by this article in even the smallest way.
Aimee Terese? Sad if true. I'm pretty out of the loop here, but last I encountered her - several years ago - she was one of those "MAGA communist" postleft types, not, uh, this.
It's essentially "There should be communist redistribution policies that work to ensure that natural-born americans are never at any risk of discomfort. Other people can fuck themselves."
I'd assume it means communists who are culturally conservative, reactionary, or nationalist and decide their cultural views outweigh their economic ones, but i can't be sure.
i'm to some extent in that group, but I never voted for trump or for any other Republican.
I agree that this event has extra salience because it is about defending the culture from incoming hordes that want to bring their own culture with them. It’s like Haitians eating cats and dogs except this time it’s true and it’s young girls being raped.
It’s not even about race or religion per se. Indians don’t face the same hostility. Pakistan has a level of misogyny that would be criminal in much of the western world and this event just confirms people's prejudices.
I think this analysis also misses the groups who are criticizing the response to the rapes because its just another data point in the pile of evidence against MENA/non-EU migration (unemployment rates, lifetime net tax costs, incarceration rates). The UK doesn’t collect/publish as good of data on some of these outcomes as other European countries (Netherlands, Denmark), so this scandal is a simple way communicate the scale of the issue in England to win people over to the dangers of much of modern European immigration policies
I do think it's worth drawing a distinction between "I am Allowed to not feel moral outrage / do activism at far-off suffering" and "I am Obligated to not feel moral outrage / do activism at far-off suffering". I see a lot more ppl mad about Rotherham who fall into the former camp, where they feel too much emphasis is placed on far-off suffering generally but don't think it's inherently bad to care about it, versus the weird pseudo-Nietzchean "caring about other people is for pussies" belief. People will be arbitrary over which instances of suffering they personally care about, but that's just how people are, I don't think that's inherently philosophically wrong.
I appreciate your niceness, politeness, and empathy being applied to this situation, your willingness to hold your opposition to the ideas they claim to believe - but what if they're just racist, though?
I think if they say "sorry, I'm racist", that is 100% a defense against the "accusation" I am leveling at them. Probably some of them will use it.
But I think most of them will think "Hmm, that's funny, I don't think that I'm racist, I wonder what's going on here" and maybe do some moral philosophy.
(also, racism alone doesn't save you - there are plenty of white kids having a bad time!)
Racism is far more about hating the out-group than it is about loving the in-group. Rotherham features Pakistanis doing the raping. If you had a story of Moldovan kids being sex trafficked by Christian Nigerian gangsters, they'd suddenly discover their ability to care again, but then it would disappear when it was Christian Moldovan gangsters.
Again, I think if they say "Yeah, I actually just hate brown people, I don't care at all about child sexual abuse", that is a 100% defense against my "accusation".
I think very few people actually think that way, and even the ones who do prefer to think they don't, and even the ones who don't prefer to *pretend* that they don't, so again, I am hoping it will inspire some moral philosophy.
I think a lot of them will openly admit that they are supporters of white identity politics. It's not uncommon to run into people on Substack to openly identify as supporters of white identity politics or even openly identify as racist. I always thought it's funny when someone openly identifies as racist, it's like openly identifying as a witch.
Of course you are not willing to name any people. And also there is a big social desirability bias component here. People don't want to identify as white nationalists. Though maybe nowadays less so.
I think that "I hate brown people" is a bit of a straw man, they might not *hate* brown people, but they just don't care about them, and they care much more about white people who they see as their tribe. Walt Bismarck doesn't seem like a very hateful individual to me. He insults people a lot but doesn't really get angry. He doesn't hate people in the third world but he openly declares that he does not give a shit about them either way, saying on a podcast with Bentham's Bulldog that he would save a dog which he actually cares about over the entire population of Haiti or something.
To back you up on this a bit, I also think such a person who says they don't care at all about child sexual abuse is in a bit of a tricky position to articulate why grooming gangs are actually bad--if child sexual abuse isn't worth caring about, what is there to hate about brown people doing it?
Could not the Rotherham rapists say, "we're based post-Nietzscheans, we don't care about child sexual abuse, especially of the outgroup, we just care about defending our in group. That's why we regard snitching on us as worse than rapes"?
It feels like you have to articulate something like, "the grooming gangs and their communal enablers should have realized child sexual abuse is bad, even of the outgroup, or you really have to abandon reflective equilibrium and say, it's wrong for a Pakistani immigrant trying to decide whether to snitch on his rapist cousin to think this way--but it's right for me to think this way.
I think most of the people I encounter who think this way implicitly take the latter view, and I think there's a certain defensibility to it, but it really seems very hard to hold this attitude stably. It's like the early Israeli nationalists who realized that of course Arab nationalists would never accept Israel, they would never have done the same in their shoes--it's an easy position to maintain in theory, but much harder to hold after the twentieth bus bombing, or October 7--at some point it becomes uncomfortable to think, "yeah of course I'd do the same in their position, and that's just the way things should be" and you start looking for minimal standards that everyone has to treat the other by.
I suspect even most extreme white nationalists will say, "raping outgroup tweenagers is off limits in an absolute sense" and think that should apply symmetrically to both sides.
And, as you say, though thoughts along these lines and soon enough you're doing moral philosophy...
Yes obviously. It's just classic in-group and out-group racial dynamics. It can go in the other direction as well of course. It's why apartheid South Africa was far from the worst regime on the continent, and not the only one that oppressed some ethnicities and had other ethnicities rule, but it was the one that the rest of Africa called to boycott. I don't know if you would call this "anti-white racism" per se, but it's certainly an in-group/out-group thing.
Why doesn't racism alone save you? Let's get inside the head of a white nationalist.
The white nationalist view is that the people running the UK are evil cucks and race traitors who import third worlders into the country to rape white girls, and this is an outrage and needs to be condemned. Covering this up, in their view, is the epitome of the "CUCKED" anti-Nietzchean mentality, where the "weak" third-worlders are favored over the superior white race, when actually the Pakistani men had a lot of power over the white girls and were abusing them and not the other way around. This is an inversion of the natural order of things in their view, whites should be abusing Pakistanis if anything. Meanwhile if people in the third world die of malaria, their view is whatever, at least that way they won't be able to come into our countries, good riddance.
Meanwhile if a random white person is suffering from something else, of course they won't like that, but they would say well at least it's not an attack on white person by a non-white person enabled by traitor cuck politicians.
> Covering this up, in their view, is the epitome of the "CUCKED" anti-Nietzchean mentality, where the "weak" third-worlders are favored over the superior white race, when actually the Pakistani men had a lot of power over the white girls and were abusing them and not the other way around.
I don’t think you have to have an ideology that white people are “superior” to oppose the rape of children by non whites.
To be clear, the point of my comment was solely to explain why someone with a white nationalist, identitarian, and/or supremacist ideology would get *especially worked up* about the rape of white children by non whites.
I am not a white nationalist, and I of course strongly oppose the rape of children by non whites. Anyway, the comment was not supposed to be about my own beliefs at all.
I don't see many other worldviews that can consistently oppose the rape of white children by non-whites but be totally okay with whatever happens when children happen not to be white, though.
Hmm... I don't think one can plausibly get exactly that combination, but one could conceive of someone who was so opposed to interracial sex that they opposed rape of white children by non-whites and rape of non-white children by whites, but otherwise was ok with child rape. I doubt it would be a popular position.
It's not about "being ok with it", it's more about "not caring because they're not part of the in-group". Of course, their might be hardcore racists who actively promote these horrendous acts on non-white people (like the Nazis did with their outgroups).
The goal, as I understand it, is not to get them to admit it openly, only to sort things out in their own heads and become better people. If somebody who otherwise wouldn't have done so ends up rethinking their values and donating 10% to malaria prevention, all the kids getting those bed nets don't care if said donor also claims on twitter to have never changed and been correct all along.
Of course very few racists self-identify as racists, or will admit it in public.
They will think something more like 'Woke DEI has infiltrated the institutions to the point that the hoard of dangerous Muslim immigrants is able to impose their violent and misogynist culture on Western citizens, this has to be stopped!.'
They don't view any of that as racist, just as empirically true facts. And I don't think they'll hesitate to give a response along those lines.
The answer is pretty clearly #1. It's not even malicious or anything. People mostly care about what the things they read tell them to care about, and what they read mostly depends on how well it agrees with their beliefs and tribe. Everything else follows from that.
The recent revival of the Rotherham story is instructive because it's such an undeniably blatant example of a media circus being manufactured to push a political narrative. Usually bias is more subtle than that - they may pick and choose what stories to report, but at least the stories that get reported are actual *news*. But nobody would ever dig up a 15 year old story from another country unless they were deliberately doing it to push a political narrative, and usually not even then.
And I'm not saying this just because it's right-wingers doing it in this case. To pick a random example, the murder of Kathryn Johnston *was* outrageous, but I'd be pretty suspicious if it randomly became a media circus *now* for some reason. And at least she was American!
It's not a "15-year-old story", it's a story that's been ongoing for decades (and is still ongoing as I type this), which happens to have first come to prominence 15 years ago.
This seems like a strong claim without appropriate justification? The story first came to prominence 15 years ago, the facts start maybe a decade (or two) before that, but how is the story still ongoing?
There have been reports of grooming gangs in at least 50 towns and cities, only a small number of which have been properly investigated, and even then, the investigations' recommendations generally haven't been implemented. IOW, the factors which enabled the abuse to flourish unchecked for decades are still present, so it's a very safe bet that the abuse is still present as well.
What factors did you have in mind? The most prominent I’m thinking about is “authorities unable to believe there could be malfeasance on that scale” (often followed by an incredulous: “in Great-Britain! In this day and age!”). The failure mode is less likely to exist because the original report made sure nobody could keep their head in the sand.
Fear of looking racist, fear of community tensions, fear of disturbing what is essentially a parallel society that the authorities would have great difficulty policing regularly, dislike of the white working classes, corruption and complicity within the police itself...
In addition to Mr. X's angle, I will point out that the story does not stop when the rapes stop. Many years after the rapists are all rounded up, they will be given prison sentences commensurate with the legal system's view of the severity of their crimes, then eventually those sentences will be reported. "One of the Rotherham rapists got out of prison with only nine years served" is a continuation of the story which is naturally and appropriately going to bring a now-old series of crimes back into the spotlight.
However, if this were in fact the case, shouldn’t most of the outrage come from the British? If nothing else, because they’re literally closer to the places where this happened, and the rapists who escaped can relocate without the slightest hassle in another city, or because all of the people who messed up this badly were paid by their taxes?
Britain is still my tribe, so I feel more responsibility there than for women abused in Afghanistan.
Does this mean I think British women are inherently more worthy than Afghan women?
No! It means they are more my responsibility than women of a much more alien culture. To reform an alien culture requires a lot more killing than reforming MY culture. For MY culture, I understand who is a traitor who is worthy of a good hang/draw/quarter. (But as a swell guy, I'll settle for lesser punishment.)
Consider the second US invasion into Iraq. We killed a crap-tonne of innocent people trying to impose democracy and got ISIS instead. It turns out that the Evil Emperor system is better in a deeply divided country which has no democratic tradition than democracy imposed by infidels. We should have put less effort making Iraq a better place not because the Iraqis are less worthy people, but because as outsiders we lacked competence.
The Peace Corps and private foreign aid are fine and dandy. But I don't feel obligated to downgrade my country into an overcrowded shithole country if some other nation decides to overpopulate. I am utterly cool with with well-received foreign aid -- both public and private. But if another country decides to do something wacko, it is ultimately the responsibility of the residents of that country to fix the problem.
Power and responsibility need to go together. If we are responsible for all the problems of the world, then we need the power to conquer and impose our values militarily.
Given our own moral decline, I think we should be humble and not impose our values forcibly. Let other countries make their own mistakes and learn from them -- while offering some sage wisdom and a bit of aid from time to time. But we do NOT have the obligation to sink to the level of those who are screwing up.
"But I don't feel obligated to downgrade my country into an overcrowded shithole country if some other nation decides to overpopulate."
That's a neat little bit of anti-immigration sentiment slipped into what was otherwise (perhaps) a perfectly reasonable bit of non-interventionist theory (even if it wasn't really in response to anything Scott had written). Even if you think welcoming people into your country and providing them with aid there is harmful, its very different from invading the middle east.
Non interventionism REQUIRES immigration restriction. That's the key point.
With wide open borders, the problems of other countries become our problem.
Here's the deal: to have liberty and the benefits of Bernietopia, we need a high minimum wage. If the world minimum wage is way below this required minimum wage, then we need to either enforce a national picket line or raise the world minimum wage.
The latter option requires imposing the ideal balance of capitalism and welfare on the entire planet. This is deadly to societies who have traditions which are not economically optimal, and utterly confusing to those still in the paleolithic.
Walls are more humane than empire. Hadrian built walls INSTEAD of conquering pesky barbarians. (Trade with barbarians happened at Hadrian's walls. Hadrian gets kudos as one of the nicer Roman emperors.)
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While we should be altruistic and take measures to raise the world minimum wage, we should neither use Shock and Awe to make it happen nor should we downgrade our lifestyle because other societies are doing things different. A mix of border friction and humble foreign intervention is optimal.
I like this point. I may not like all the details of how it happened, but I like that both of the most populous countries now have a sizable middle class. I think that's a significant event in the economic history of the world and a net benefit to the rest of the working population in the world. Wasn't always great for the middle classes in the developed world. It's interesting to think about how the developed countries might have handled this better. I certainly don't think trying to halt globalization is the answer, just because globalization has a life of its own and will steamroller attempts to stop it. Globalization doesn't really care whether you like it or not.
Weird behavior to cite Roman foreign policy as optimal to learn from, but I guess I should expect that given your profile. Also, its not like Hadrian's wall was on the border of Italy. Rome pushed itself as far across the world as it could manage, looting and pillaging and sometimes committing genocide along the way, and then decide to start fencing people out. In that way I guess it is strikingly similar to Great Britain. Not sure how that should factor into your analysis, but its gotta fit somewhere.
Hadrian's policy was a huge improvement over late Republican Roman policies. Shrinking back to a subset of Italy would be like downsizing the US to the original 13 colonies.
> to have liberty and the benefits of Bernietopia, we need a high minimum wage.
Not necessarily. We could have the state collect taxes almost entirely based on land use (and similar exclusivity rights, such as intellectual property), then distribute however much of that is left after defense needs and bureaucratic operating expenses as UBI - every citizen in good standing gets a cut of the action even if they can't, or don't care to, find paying work, probably at least as much cash as they'd receive from a minimum-wage job. Among other benefits, this means that people doing good necessary work which happens to be hard to prove to outsiders - such as raising their own children, or caring for their own sick or elderly extended family, or repairs and maintenance on their own house - would get paid for it without a lot of paperwork hassle or undignified begging, and then have enough money to trivially solve various closely related problems for which mass-market capitalism is orders of magnitude more efficient.
With no income tax, nor means-tested benefits programs, they'd be keeping every cent they earn when they do find paying work, and thus every incentive to negotiate for higher pay when they think they've got leverage. Universal ability to simply walk away if they don't like the terms offered means employers would also have less cause to push toward the lower bound - at least, with regard to citizens in good standing. Immigrants who lacked access to that citizen's dividend from the outset, or criminals whose guaranteed income is gobbled up by legal consequences of their past behavior, would lack the negotiating leverage of such a safety net, and so could be offered lower pay, or excluded outright, according to any given employer or prospective business partner's assessment of the risks.
I'm certainly not arguing that we don't need *any* walls - land use rights can't exist without them, after all - but putting walls in the wrong places can do harm. "Measure twice, cut once," especially if the thing you're cutting is a trade route.
A citizen dividend to give locals a home court advantage would definitely solve many problems. I'm a bit leery of a Georgist Land Tax due to running some use cases and realizing the Georgism can be a form of Genocide Lite. (Forcing people to move vs. killing people.) See this post by the Tree of Woe and my comments thereon for details.
Any extractive mechanism can be genocidal in that sense if it's one-sided, taking without giving back. Advantage to pairing LVT with UBI is it's self-correcting: if the tax rate gets set far too high, anyone personally holding an average-or-below amount of land can just hunker down and watch the made-up numbers spin, rather than things of real value being destroyed.
> Non interventionism REQUIRES immigration restriction. That's the key point.
Not really? Non interventionism involves people in other countries. If they're in your country, now they're subject to your rules. They do have a duty to adapt some; they can't just go "this used to be legal where I come from!" if they do a crime. But guaranteeing that doesn't require just banning immigration altogether.
I don't understand why this argument doesn't make sense to people. So far I haven't seen a counterargument that doesn't boil down to, "be more feeeeeeeling!"
> It turns out that the Evil Emperor system is better in a deeply divided country which has no democratic tradition than democracy imposed by infidels.
I don't think that's even the lesson per se. But generally speaking, people having tribal instincts ALSO means that if the outside tribe rolls in with tanks and bombs, kills a bunch of yours and then props up a government saying "this is really cool!", you're more likely to think this is NOT really cool. And maybe hey, this Evil Emperor is an asshole, but he's OUR asshole.
(also it's not like all Iraqis were happy with just letting ISIS take over, I expect. See also Afghanistan and the Talibans. Simple division and a power vacuum is enough for the resident psychopaths to elbow their way into power)
Some form of democracy might have worked, but not the one we supported. When a country is deeply divided or tribal, plurality-takes-all favors the biggest tribe, even when that tribe promises to persecute the other tribes.
That may be part of it, but I also think any system propped up by a foreign invader who removed the previous one by force of arms gets a default starting -15 to approval handicap virtually in any human society, just because of the Fuck Those Guys factor.
“My point is that we all start with a host of pretty similar albeit contradictory moral impulses and a drive to reconcile them…” = typical mind fallacy. There are a surprising number of people that will commit murder over something on the order of $20. Similar things could be said for other people inclined to behavior with seriously harmful externalities. Granted, most of the murder-prone folks probably aren’t reading rationalist blogs, but still.
I think most people who commit murder for $20 wouldn't endorse the claim "you should commit murder for $20", they're just very impulsive and really want those twenty dollars.
(I am here responding to these comments when I should be working on a project I promised people I'd have done later this week, and I don't endorse "respond to comments when there's a more important project you should be working on", yet here we are! There is no *philosophical* difference between me and a person in the same situation who actually works on the project - they are just better at living up to their ideals.)
> I think most people who commit murder for $20 wouldn't endorse the claim "you should commit murder for $20", they're just very impulsive and really want those twenty dollars.
My prototype for someone committing murder over $20 isn't that they really want twenty dollars. In my mind, it's more likely that they perceive a behavioral code under which someone else owes them $20, the other person sees things differently, and the murder is over the code violation rather than the money.
There are people willing to murder complete strangers to take their money as well, without any sense of being "owed". There are people who have murdered complete strangers without even needing any financial gain.
Sure, there are, but I think those people are a very small share of murders that occur over $20 (or similar).
See the sidethread comment: "a lot of people are working from a different set of moral impulses that do not at all obviate the possibility of extreme violence in response to relatively minor slights/disrespect".
It's common for a trivial amount of money to trigger slights that require a response. It's not common for a trivial amount of money to trigger robbery.
My point is not that they endorse murder over $20, though in the right circumstances some people absolutely do endorse that, it’s that a lot of people are working from a different set of moral impulses that do not at all obviate the possibility of extreme violence in response to relatively minor slights/disrespect. To be clear, I’m not advocating against the importance of impulsivity, only that it’s insufficient to explain what I’m generally gesturing at.
(Please don’t let my bloviating cause you to fail to meet your commitments!)
I am grateful for the fact that my limited social media presence has not acquainted me with anyone wanting to invade the UK for any reason let alone over Rotherdam nor have I have run across anyone objecting to charity for those we will never meet or know much about. Are there very many of such people in the real world ?
No and it's a huge weakness of this essay. Scott is responding to a very atypical view that he happens to get exposed to much more than other people because of the topics he writes about. Your experience is much more in line with the median person.
Okay but obviously the modal “Nietzschean vitalist” who is raving about the grooming gangs is doing so because the races of the perpetrators and victims set the stage for tribal-struggle motivations for action. Right? There’s no mystery to their views, and indeed no contradiction to their moral philosophy. The universal altruistic impulse that you are trying to find in these people does not exist.
That impulse might exist in (some of) the libs/leftists suppressing talk of Rotherham, and the puzzle to solve is how to shake them out of it. And I do indeed think it’s a game-theoretic puzzle rather than a philosophical one: every lib thinks the Paki groomers are scum, but if any one of them says so they open themselves up to intrafactional attack — so they all need to say it together, but coordintion is challenging.
The reason they're feeling unbuttoned about kids in a foreign country is because they're White kids (in many cases only a few generations away from being fellow British White kids).
And that is quite right. You should be more concerned and altruistic about genetically relatively closer people than genetically relatively more distant people, if only because should implies can, and you can't know more genetically/culturally distant peoples' situations as well as you can your own.
But further, unless you believe in a religion that mandates altruism and compassion on spiritual grounds, the only grounds for altruism for a materialist is inclusive fitness: so, one is altruistic to the point of self-sacrifice in war (say) because it helps one's inclusive fitness, because your genetically closer group that survives because of your sacrifice will pass on some of your genes (it isn't necessary for inclusive fitness that "your" genes should come from your gonads in particular).
No, inclusive fitness doesn't work like that. Any gene which caused such a priority would die out in competition with other humans who lack that gene. Haldane quipped that he'd be willing to lay down his life for two siblings or four cousins, the math just keeps growing exponentially as you expand outward. When you get to the least related human, the corresponding rational sacrifice on your part is infinitesimal.
Not if it achieved fixation during some bottleneck period where the human population of the known world was low enough to count to, and tribes faced extinction-level threats from natural disasters or megafauna (which individuals with the hypothetical "all humans are my in-group" gene can solve via intertribal coordination... and use either the crisis itself, or subsequent glory of personal responsibility for success, to reduce how many grandchildren their staunchest opposition ends up with) more often than from competition with other humans.
Fixation doesn't necessarily imply universality. If it's a polygenic trait, like schizophrenia, everyone who expresses it in a given generation could die off without reducing the prevalence much. Consider a scenario where there are, say, ten tribes of biologically modern humans, each with 10% prevalence of the "I'd lay down my life to save someone outside my tribe" trait, and twenty tribes of neanderthals who lack that trait entirely. One of the neanderthal tribes decides they'd like to kill off a particular human tribe, claim their hunting grounds. Neanderthals are individually bigger and stronger than humans, without being any more difficult to coordinate within a tribe, so they have roughly the same number of individuals and expect to be able to win easily, though it'll be a slow process of attrition through successive raids.
Targeted human tribe sends envoys to the other nine, begging for aid. That 10% with the "save people outside my tribe" trait immediately volunteer, and manage to cajole a similar number of initially disinterested tribe-mates into coming along as well, whether out of pre-established personal obligation, or for chances to prove themselves as warriors, collect shiny stuff from dead neanderthals, etc.
Now the neanderthals are effectively outnumbered three-to-one, sufficient to overwhelm their individual physical advantages. Attrition ratio from raiding gets far worse. Much of that opposing force is glory-seekers who don't know or care about pre-war borders, so they can't even safely de-escalate and withdraw.
The other nineteen neanderthal tribes point and laugh, if they hear about the situation at all. Humans expand into the former neanderthal hunting grounds. A generation or two later, humans do something which makes remaining eighteen neanderthal tribes point and laugh, and on down the line. A particularly clever neanderthal scout independently invents the concept of mathematical induction, sees which way things are headed, and attempts to marry in to whichever human tribe is open-minded enough to accept, rather than be hunted to the last.
Fixation is not enough, mutations will pop up and undermine the gene. It's been a very long time since the entire human population went through a bottleneck, plenty of time for mutations (especially as the population expanded).
Not if it's a polygenic trait tied to other individually-useful features, and corresponding to a circumstantially useful strategy involving high risk but also proportionately high reward.
Consider Genghis Khan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SlAzsXa7E or, for a less grandiose case, the stereotypical sailor with "a girl in every port." How does he establish and maintain those relationships, motivate the women in question to raise his children rather than someone else's, even when he's not there most of the time? https://narts.sylvanmigdal.com/?date=20180203 Partly by taking personal, violent risks on their behalf, even though they're initially strangers, and further making it clear that this is a persistent behavioral pattern rather than circumstantial strategy on his part. Sailor in a bar gets the girl by 'chivalrously' beating up some other guy who wasn't respecting her boundaries - that is, he's marginally risking his own life (the other guy could've, say, pulled a knife, or hit back hard enough to kill by accident) to marginally benefit someone far outside his tribe, without her having committed in advance to provide any reward. That he's able to make a habit of doing so establishes lower bounds on his emotional intelligence, skill at violence, and various other useful traits which the woman in question presumably wouldn't mind her offspring inheriting.
Penelope stays stubbornly faithful to Odysseus, knowing that he'll someday return to massacre the crowd of suitors. How would it have turned out if he'd come back to find her in bed with someone else? Badly for any children from that second marriage, most likely, and thus an unwise gamble from the standpoint of her own inclusive fitness.
How does a trait being polygenic make it more likely to persist?
We know how Genghis Khan had so many children: he conquered and kept grabbing wives. Your imaginary sailor is irrelevant to that, as is the fictional Penelope.
ROI surely? Also, what I call the "knowledge mandala." As I said, ought implies can - you can't know much concrete about others' circumstances on the other side of the world (tacit knowledge also plays a part here, there's stuff they know that isn't encoded anywhere for you to read off and incorporate in your calculation); as you stray from the center that you know concretely (self, family, loved ones, friends, etc.), there are more and more ways of fucking up others' lives if you attempt concrete forms of altruism (more ways of missing a targert than hitting it), so your caring action is necessarily going to have to have a certain level of abstraction to match the level of abstraction of your knowledge.
But that also dovetails with the relative level of shared genetics (and that would also show up in an alien invasion, say, suddenly then YES, you woulid then become altruistic on behalf of the WHOLE of humanity, it would make sense in that context, because the whole of humanity's genes are relatively closer than the aliens' - if they work via genes at all :) ).
"the only grounds for altruism for a materialist is inclusive fitness:" there are all sorts of non-spiritual, non-religious philosophical arguments for altruism. Did you actually mean that you just don't think any of those arguments are as logically grounded as the ones based on inclusive fitness?
Yes, I don't think they're as logically grounded. To me, from a matrialist point of view (I'm not that myself, but iron-manning it) it seems like a principle of inertia, you're given or born with certain evolved preferences, so the question isn't justification of why you should behave morally, but justification of why you should NOT behave morally, why you should go against your nature and stray from the feelings you've been given by your genes, that have then been reinforced by your mother and father, your locale, etc. (e.g. benevolence, fellow-feeling, patriotism, etc.).
Hmm. I agree that if you think the entire point of life is inclusive fitness then all moral choices default to how to optimize for that, but A) I'm not sure even most atheists think that. Most people care more about happiness than inclusive fitness. Are the two correlated? Somewhat but not entirely and that's because B) our impulses, drives, and social systems aren't actually directly aimed at inclusive fitness, but only indirectly, which means you are still left with a system where you have to negotiate between all the different values, incentives, and social mores to decide what you should be doing and I'd be surprised if these mapped cleanly for most people onto "care more about people who have the same skin color as you," as you stated in your first comment. Immediate family? Sure. Lot of mutually reinforcing patterns there. Phenotype? That might be one impulse but there are going to be lots of other and conflicting ones that evolved through the same architecture but produce opposite incentives.
So really the life of the diehard materialist inclusive fitness maximizer is not that much different from the life of a Christian who takes their religion seriously, that is: they have a nature that gives them mixed messages. In Christianity, that's because human beings are made in God's image and guided by God's grace but simultaneously fallen and prone to temptation and destructive worldly pleasure. For materialists its the same but because of the difficulty reconciling our evolutionary imperative with the way its been historically implemented in our genes and our culture. Regardless, you are going to need some sort of guided, developed system for navigating those contradictions, and this system will produce results that seem counter-intuitive, and often in exactly the same way, like giving to charity.
As I responded to someone else, it's not necessary that you be aware of the benefits to your inclusive fitness of acting altruistically for your tribe, you just act that way because you're built that way, and in fact you need some very strange reienforcements to NOT act that way (granted bell curve distributions and all that, i.e some won't feel this way at all, but the bulk will feel it somewhat).
Obviously it's not about skin colour per se, that's just a quick and dirty marker of a relative genetic closeness vs. distance that exists along a whole host of traits. IOW for a White person (or Jew or Black, etc., with any subdivision you care to name), acting to benefit other Whites (or Jews or Blacks etc.) is a way for their motivation to orient towards what will in fact turn out to be their inclusive fitness (obvs it's the same for other ethnic and racial groups, so long as there's some easly recognizable marker that goes along with relative genetic closeness vs. distance). This all started long before it could even be articulated in language, it's probably a mammalian thing, and originates with pack mammals at that.
The "different values" you're talking about are not necessarily actually values, they may just appear that way. The most difficult problem is recognizing what is a value. But any such explorations (once the matter of inclusive fitness has been discovered for reflective thought) must take their departure from this question of relative genetic closeness vs. distance and inclusive fitness. If a "value" doesn't build on that, it's questionable whether it's just the intellect wandering off into intellectual candyfloss land, or merely a trick that makes one a tool of someone else's will to power.
Perhaps it might be clearer to conceive of this basic level as a tether. Sure, you can have values that aren't all about inclusive fitness, but they can't wander too far from that, and certainly can't contradict it, because it's only at that level where the extreme case of self-sacrifice that characterizes altruism lives (IOW self-sacrifice/altruism would never have so much as entered any creature's head without the "free-floating rationale" of inclusive fitness, all creatures would be "Hobbesian," blindly selfish, etc.)
You might come back to me and say there are other rationales for altruism, but that's what I'm questioning above when I talk about figuring out whether a value is really a value. I doubt there is anything else, other than extensions that are perhaps just somewhat independent, with their own logic, but never completely independent. A lofty spirituality perhaps? But that's yer whack.
Atheists/materialists who don't have this sense are on a hiding to nothing - merely individual rationality, hedonism, utilitarianism, etc., is a dead end because it misses out on the meta level where people get over the Prisoner's Dilemma by having a higher a-rational level of co-operation so they can build as self-conscious groups (collectivism is prior to individualism, unlike the liberal/libertarian/Randian fables). The attitude is unlikely to die out completely, but it's never going to be how most people think and behave, which is generally going to be family/clan/ethnicity/race oriented.
If the only things that qualify in your framework as "values" are those rooted is some objective reality bigger than yourself (which apparently god qualifies but universal human flourishing does not) than inclusive fitness is as illusory as any other moral framework and therefore incapable of generating value. Any materialist should be capable of recognizing that the gene is not the unit of self, our altruistic urges might have some grounding in our evolutionary history, but so would our belief in a higher power, and if the latter is no sound motivation to help others than so too would be the former. I'm not saying that you have to be a nihilist to be a materialist, but if "I'm continuing the survival of my genes" is the only acceptable bullwark, that's obviously not enough. So either you are one of those people who thinks that a true atheist can't have morals because it requires the existence of God, or you have to admit human beings can create values that aren't just evolutionary impulses wearing a trenchcoat.
I talked about the extension of moral principles, so I don't know what you're arguing against here. Saying a thing is "tethered" means it DOES have some elbow room to wander about in possibility space (in this case possible morality space or possible value space), but it also means that there are limits.
That's how relative genetic distance/inclusive fitness function, not as the "ground" of morality (because - especially from an atheist/materialist perspective, one would think, although an evolved thing can have a conditional if-then logic, it can't be "grounded" or be a "framework" in that sense, it just is) but as the limiting principle that guides you as to whether a thing is a real or false value.
For example judging by this principle a blanket rationalistic moral universalism is false. The correct understanding of moral universalism is that it's a one-sided abstraction of a more concrete situation where "us/them" is relative at every step of the way (e.g. tribe v tribe until bigger threat unites into"nation", human v human until a bigger threat unites into"humanity").
How it works is that these things dovetail: relative genetic closeness means relative ease of communication (vs. greater genetic distance) and understanding (think of the notoriously simpatico nature of monozygotic twins and extrapolate from there) which means the possibility of a tacit high level of trust in society (equivalent to how a code of omerta would function in the PD, i.e. getting the units of the group to function together and build together in a way that goes beyond their merely rational selfish desires (or rather "merely single-brainedly rational desires"). A civilization built on that kind of high trust creates a social structure into which individual sacrifice for the greater good can "slot in" (as it were), the society and culture continue to be reproduced through time (not least because the folk that comprise it continue to be reproduced through time) and that works for the individual's inclusive fitness.
A not-inconsiderale side-benefit of a monoethnic culture is also that the rules can afford to be less explicit because most of the social control is (NOT introjected but) tacit and instinctive (or close to instinctive and passed down in family forms) - contrast with a multicultural/multiracial society, which must waste time and energy on the creation and maintenance of explicit, spelled-out rules for disparate groups that don't have any sort of simpatico basis (other than perhaps general traits shared at an abstrat level). (And even then, the groups will mostly ignore those rules and act in their own interest.)
Just as a curiosity you might be interested in HP Lovecraft's take. As an atheist/materialist, his pessimistic view of the universe actually amplified (in his view) the necessity to stick together, for the concrete realities of familly, clan, locale, nation, are all we've got against the howling void.
At root, the problem with individualistically rational takes on morality is that they're closely related to the false classical liberal implication (of most of the liberal arguments) that the individual is born with liberties only, and not also with duties. That was an understandable lacuna in the context of the bourgeouisie coming to self-conscousnessness as the capitalist class, no longer wanting to be beholden to the old order of kings/aristocracy, but it rather throws the baby out with the bathwater in terms of the underestanding of human nature, morality, how societies function, etc.: morality logically CANNOT be just about the individual's rational choice, there has to be some element of the given, the pre-existent duty or obligation. And the level I've been talking about is the only place that can come from in an atheist/materialist context; you are given by your DNA a body and brain that have a certain tendency to socialize, to act morally, etc., and that givenness multiplied across a whole society means the sociey as a whole expects the individual to fulfil certain given obligations and duties (including, at the limit, altruistic self-sacrifice for the group). And that's all that's required.
I'm not sure there's any more grounds for valuing inclusive fitness than for just valuing altruism.
We're hardwired to care about (proxies to) inclusive fitness, sure - but that doesn't constitute grounds for anything: it's an 'is' not an 'ought'.
I imagine that most non religious people that value altruism value it "just because". I personally care about it much more than I care about inclusive fitness in and of itself. I don't think logical grounds really come into it - it's an axiom you either take or don't.
I don't buy into the "is/ought" distinction, I think it's a peculiarity of Hume's empiricism (or that whole line of modern philosophy generally) that stands or falls with the validity of the philosophy as a whole, which isn't much..
There is no place for "oughts" to come from OTHER THAN "is"-es. IOW, I take more of an Aristotelian/essentialist virtue-based point of view. "Ought" only comes in because we can, by choice, conform or fail to conform with the nature we're given, conform or fail to conform with the societal norms that characterize our folk. What needs justification is not morality but going AGAINST our moral nature. Why would you do that?
Of course we don't think of inclusive fitness consciously (except perhaps in occasional inchoate glimmers), lots of traits we have are "unconscious" in that true sense, products of evolution that drive us willy-nilly; but it was operative before we became self-conscious and rational in that sense, it's simply the "free-floating rationale" (or to strip away Dennett's fig-leaf and speak plainly, teleology) of morality.
But once we do come to conscious awareness we can understand that rationale and we can either accept it or not. And nothing can argue a "human shark" variant into it, if they don't already have some natural compassion, fellow-feeling, etc., that their parents then bolstered by upbringing.
So: altruism only makes sense in the context of one's folk (sacrificing one's life in a patriotic war can make sense in terms of inclusive fitness, even if - perhaps especially if - one has never had a child); an altruism for humanity in general would only make sense over and against an adversary that unites humanity into a functional whole (alien invasion, great natural disaster, etc.)
You can't make an argument for virtue ethics that centers around what's rational, Aristotle's virtuous man is driven by his Eudaimonian impulse to acts of greatness regardless of their net value to his tribe. He might not be the Ubermensch in terms of overturning all previously established values, but if he sees a situation he believe he has the capacity to improve, he will do so, and the more complex/hopeless the situation the more attracted he is to it as an opportunity to demonstrate greatness. That's the whole reason there's a utilitarian/virtue ethics divide, utilitarians look for small efficient actions that will benefit the greatest number of people, classical virtue ethicists look for monuments to build and monsters to slay. The outcomes may be reconcilable to one another, but the basic impulses are not, unless you want to turn virtue ethics into a venal parody of itself.
Also you should read less Aristotle and more Plato. And generally everyone commenting on this substack needs to brush up on their classical philosophy because whenever they invoke anyone prior to Descartes my eyes roll so hard I have to call AAA to get them out of a ditch.
As I understand it, Aristotle examines three broad types of life - life devoted to pleasure, to politics and to philosophy.
Life devoted to mere individual pleasure is base and stupid; life devoted to politics - i.e. to the benefit of the polity, tribe, people, folk (or as I put, dedicated to the flourishing of those who are relatively genetically closer rather than more distant) - is definitely a life of eudaimonia, it's just that life devoted to philosophy is supposedly best of all.
Yes, its the best of all because gazing into the metaphysical face of the universe is the grandest gesture a human can conceivably make. HIs elevation of polities is his acknowledging that man seems incapable of functioning, not just surviving, functioning fully as a human, outside of a political structure, but this is a recognized limitation on human independence, not some kind of statement about the necessity of genetic coalition. Consciousness is the highest virtue of humans, to the extent he's interested in polities, its how they foster it at different levels, not any concept of inclusive fitness.
But my point is that what's going to count as good-spirited political action is going to be shaped by the "free floating rationales" of relative genetic closeness and inclusive fitness. (cf. my comments in the other half of our discussion re. what I'm calling "tethering")
Again, whether that pre-shaping comes to conscious awareness and enters into conscious motivation as such or not isn't relevant to the functionality (e.g. pack mammals already had a proto-version of the same thing, and humans functioned on a more sophisticated version of it before philosophy) - although it should be relevant to the philosopher if they want the fullest understanding.
I'm not entirely one of the sorts of people you're talking about, but I don't really see "invade Britain" as being inconsistent with "you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization".
It's not about wanting to save the individual poor white girls, it's about wanting to save Great Britain. Poor white girls have rarely done anything to push forward human civilisation, but Great Britain has probably done more than any other force in history, and now it's a tiny weakened shadow of its former greatness that can't wipe its own arse.
Your friend was once a smart powerful man, now he's a depressed alcoholic who sits on his arse all day watching TV. He has just shit in his own pants, which encourages you to go over to his house and give him a stern talking to. It's not because you care about the shit or the pants, but a stern lecture about not shitting your own pants might perhaps be the thing that he needs to get himself up off rock bottom and start getting his life in order so that he can get back to being the man he could be.
Well in the original analogy you were the US, since we are talking about the US invading Britain. My point is that these ideologies on wokeness, but also libertarian ideologies on immigration often originate in the US.
Anyway I’m only a slight immigration restrictionist, I’m just a skeptic on the kinds and levels of immigration needed in the west.
Definitely no policy should see more rapes. Or terrorist attacks. That’s bad policy, whatever the policy is.
I can conceive of situations where increased frequency of some sort of stochastic atrocity could be fairly considered an acceptable price to pay for some other critical benefit, when compared to a short list of even worse alternatives... but at the very least I agree that would be an extremely bad sign, something to monitor and correct as soon as possible, rather than repressing official acknowledgement and allowing the practice to fester.
If I may defend a weak version of this hypocrisy that I particularly feel, it comes from a sense that, as an Australian many generations removed from my European ancestors, of whom a few are English, I exist in a common civilisational project with Britian, and my leaders tend to take cues from their elites. There is some sense that these are my distant kin, but I'm not tranquil hearing about female circumcision in Africa or cartel violence in Latin America.
It's rather an objection to the present form of the state, which in it's own internal logic views this suppression of crimes against children as a feature rather than a bug. It's clearly necessary to hide malfeasance of clannish ethnic groups to advance homogenising global consensus governance. I own that my particular anger at the rape gangs thereby has a stategic component, it's a really god awful example of particular groups breaking the implicit compact they made in immigrating, and it breaks the state's capacity to pretend every imported ethnic group are good liberals and discussing deportation is inherently immoral.
If I were actually commenting about this online I would feel morally conflicting about being so cynical, and would try to find a more sophisticated strategy to advance my particular objections to the state.
Is it really true that the state's own internal logic views suppression of crimes against children as a feature? That seems like a strong claim, needing strong evidence.
Edit: maybe I misunderstood... Obviously suppression of the *crime* is what we want. As in, make it so that these crimes happen less. But I don't think that's what you meant. I think you meant suppression in the sense of hiding the crimes so that people don't find out about them. Right?
Just to be explicit: my prior assumption is that crime is bad and the state agrees that crime is bad. Reducing crime is good. Investigating crime is good. If somebody wanted to persuade me that the state thinks that investigating crime is bad, they'd need strong evidence for that.
I am making the claim that the multicultural state, failing to prevent such crime, must suppress any public knowledge of particular groups persistently committing crimes. This extends to the rape gang situation as, while obviously a very extreme case, it still breaks open the basic and necessary taboo against noticing group behaviour.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't see why we have to notice group behaviour. Some people were systematically raping young girls. I don't need to say "oh and by the way, those people were of Pakistani ethnic origin" in order to want to bring them to justice.
I'm not saying I want to deny the truth - I'm just saying that I think any reasonable person cares less about the demographics of the criminals than about stopping the crime. (The far right and the extremely woke might care about the demographics, but they're not "reasonable people".)
I think the trouble is we've been playing out an experiment where we have tried to assume there's no casual component in a person's ethnic background, and the result has been a great vulnerability to systemic abuse. That's the result that's in.
I agree that in an ideal world the state would be indifferent to one's background in prosecuting a particular crime, but it appears that at a systemic level mass immigration has created a situation where terrible crimes are allowed to happen rather than accept a larger pattern, and hold an entire group responsible. It's clearly the case that many immigrant populations in the first world resent their hosts and tacitly condone bad behaviour against them. In some cases this is deep enough that they close ranks around mass rape.
So it seems to me that we have to break the taboo of saying "it clearly a problem with the Pakistanis" to address the problem. This is especially true with rape, which is a difficult crime to prosecute for obvious reasons.
Is there any reason to think that Rotherham was any more effective at prosecuting Child Sexual Exploitation perpetrated by whites than by Pakistanis? Across the UK (as opposed to Rotherham specifically) more perpetrators of Child Sexual Exploitation were white than Pakistani, just because the UK had a lot more whites than Pakistanis. So focusing primarily on Pakistani perpetrators might have been counterproductive.
Furthermore, it’s unclear how, even in Rotherham, focusing on Pakistani perpetrators would have helped. I think a successful investigation is likely to start by identifying victims, not perpetrators. And then you have to put together successful prosecutions.
I don't see anything to disagree with here, and I won't pretend to know the particular facts. My objection here is to the larger political machine, and the way it has tried to suppress knowledge of these crimes.
There may very well be a broader breakdown of effective prosecution for these crimes, but I'd regard that as a somewhat seperate issue needing to be addressed on different terms. It seems to me an issue of effective procedures, rather than the political priors of the ruling elites.
| ... these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.
What? This is the weirdest strawman I've seen in a while. I'm pretty sure I know well the circles you're referring to, and I've seen no one propose invading Britain. (Except maybe as an obvious joke?) What they've said is that the British legal system itself should have swiftly and harshly dealt with the Pakistani rape gangs. Which is 100% consistent with the "take care of your own" ethos that they espouse.
> "Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that capitalism solves every problem and since your solution isn’t capitalism you’re an idiot to even be considering it. I have heard zero demands that people who really care about grooming gangs have to stop talking about immigration policy or police malfeasance and focus on, I don’t know, investing in a startup working on better rape whistles. Once people care a lot about a problem, they naturally understand that - as great as capitalism is - you can’t leave everything to the free market."
This part seems rather obtuse. There were restrictions on the available actions against the groomers imposed by government authority. Most of the actual libertarian or free market solutions - although this is kind of an awkward application of a market - would result in anyone using them going to prison for assault or murder. Even posting something on social media like "we need to stop these immigrants from raping people" could result in jail time.
Scott takes a position here where the (legal) use of force is only available to one party, in this case the UK government. They then used that force against the victims of the groomers and people speaking out against them, while mostly ignoring the groomers. Then Scott says "Gee, all you people who disdain government control, this looks kind of bad for you huh."
It's an incredibly strange take by Scott, all the more strange because his thought process is usually more sensible. Also, since when does capitalism exclude the rule of law?
Historically societies without strong rule of law and state monopoly on force haven't been exactly great for protecting poor young women from predatory older men.
This seems really easy to reconcile. The view presumably is that we should be partial to kith and kin, and that ethnically similar children from countries with close cultural and historical ties to us are on the outer perimeter of that. To find the true hypocrite, report back when we get these same people up in arms over a comparable scandal involving children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
There is an old adage saying hard cases make bad law.
Personally, I think that focusing on the flashiest criminal cases might be very emotionally satisfying, but will not reliably lead to better policy outcomes. Crime statistics are, for all their problems, a much better basis to talk about supposed failings of criminal law or police than individual sob stories.
While the grooming gang thing was clearly pointing at a problem with law enforcement at that time, my gut feeling is that they are likely far removed from the median case of sexual abuse, picked out of myriads of other cases because they fit certain narratives. Humans generally are scope insensitive, but we should at least try to correct for that. So if you bring me a story about some flashy string of crimes committed by a member of your outgroup (i.e. an immigrant, a white supremacist, whatever), I will see this as an attempt to subvert policy discussions through emotional manipulation.
This. Research consistently shows most child molestation is perpetrated within families, seconded by friends of family. Never understood why this doesn’t get more attention.
This reminds me of that South Park episode where the adults of South Park learn about that same statistic, and decide that the obvious solution is that no child should be allowed to live with their own parents anymore.
If you don't want your kids to be molested by family members or family friends, then you as a parent have a lot of control over that. Not molesting them yourself is a good start already, and then exercise some good judgment over who you choose as your spouse and friends, which weird uncles you don't let your kids alone with, etc. People may acknowledge it as a big problem in a statistical sense, but they don't feel strongly about it because they think, correctly or otherwise, that it's something which only happens to other families.
If you don't want your teenage kids to be victimised by organised grooming gangs, that's not so much within your control. You can warn them and try to instill good instincts in them, but by the time they're teenagers you can't keep an eye on them every second of the day anymore. The best solution is for the grooming gangs to not exist in the first place, but that's the police's job, not yours. And in this case the police failed at that job quite spectacularly, sometimes to the point of basically siding with the rapists against the victims' parents.
It's a bit like people saying most gunshot victims are suicides -- OK, fine, that's an interesting statistic, but if I don't want to die of suicide I can avoid that very easily, so I'm still going to be more worried about my risk of getting shot by someone else.
> they don't feel strongly about it because they think, correctly or otherwise, that it's something which only happens to other families.
This seems like the effect where most people consider themselves to be above-median drivers. The difference is that at least some of the drivers are actually correct about their assessment, while the claim that you could vouch for every person your kid knows by name to a degree that strangers make up most of the probability mass of perpetrators seems frankly absurd -- you would have to be a telepath to be that confident.
It is a bit like worrying about your kid getting mauled by a bear in a city full of owners of all kinds of dogs. It is a safe thing to worry about. You don't have to make trade-offs between your kid's safety and having a normal social life. If a bear kills your kid in a city, you would be completely blameless -- a bear attack would be the kind of unknown unknown nobody could have foreseen. Certainly much more comforting to worry about than your kid getting killed by the neighbor's pit bull, which would be an actionable worry.
There was a missed opportunity here to have the last sentence read "...while hastily burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under a bushel where we can’t see it."
> we all start with a host of pretty similar albeit contradictory moral impulses and a drive to reconcile them, and our moral philosophies - rather than being handed to us by our genes - are downstream of the reconciliation process
Your moral impulses (and potential reconciliations) are incompatible with other people's, so at least one of you has to be wrong. If these impulses were just handed to us, you have no reason to think that yours are better than anybody else's. So you either have to embrace moral skepticism or find a way to derive morality that doesn't depend on our moral impulses.
I think Scott cleanly whiffs here on the pitch. The reason why these folks who normally don't care about the faraway victim care now is because they see the situation as part of a civilizational conflict that in fact is "our tribe vs their tribe." It may be chauvinistic or racist or whatever other epithet you want to cast upon it, but the impulse is very much consistent with the "help our family, friends, and maybe village" against a perceived proximate threat ("Islamic" abuse of non-Muslims) with direct implications for immigration, multiculturalism, and a host of similar "in my village" concerns.
Really excellent and accurate. There’s another comment here which is talking about how the actual fear is not about the people involved and more “It could happen here.” But that doesn’t line up with the way they’re talking about it, framing it as anger over the victims rather than at the West as a whole. This is best explained if they consider the victims part of their tribe and others to not be.
Right. Just because rationalists' woke adversaries at the NYT see racism under every rock doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Indeed, their hysterical pursuit of it over the past decade may have actually increased its prevalence.
For anyone who wants to donate to help victims, you can here: https://donate.rapecrisis.org.uk/. Otherwise, some points re: how it's framed and politicized:
>"but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist"
"11.6 [Dr Heal] also reported in 2006 that young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry, but *was not supported* by specific examples.
11.7 Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, *rather than in individual cases*. One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. ..."
My understanding is that in no case was any known or suspected perpetrator ever ignored because he was Pakistani. It was more that there was reluctance to have race itself play a role in the investigation, delaying the realization or communication that it was a gangs instead of a bunch of individual crimes. (This reluctance was due to accurate fear of weaponization by racists like the English Defense League.)
>"A recent legal dispute got them back in the news, and since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before."
It's not back in the news because of a legal dispute; it's back in the news because Elon Musk personally wants to weaponize it to crush multicultural liberalism and install far-right governments, in the UK as everywhere. (That's also why he's always "demanding an inquiry" while acting like the Jay Report doesn't exist; he doesn't care about inquiries, to him it's just a weapon.) And it didn't organically go viral because of lack of censorship, it went viral because the guy weaponizing it owns Twitter, and used that ownership to selectively amplify his weapon.
Thank you very much for supplying specifics. Nice to see some empiricism here among the logic, intuition, feelz, philosophy, etc. Not that empiricism is the be-all end-all, but it seems like a useful contribution in the mix.
Of course the official reports and officials who enabled mass rape do not admit that fear of being seen as racist as well as strong elite bias towards immigration, muslims and ethnic minorities and strong elite bias against working class white people was not a huge factor in the last 60 years of mass rapes by immigrant gangs. But of course everyone in the UK knows that elite bias and fear of being called racist was obvious and pervasive.
At least 50 cities were infested by Pakistani rape gangs but it was never treated as a systemic problem. The UK authorities and elites have consistently clamped down on any manifestation of anti-immigrant or anti-muslim opinion while massively promoting the "woke" messages of how multiculturalism is great.
There were many many more news stories about George Floyd than the rape gangs. Rape gangs were allowed to spread and operate with minimal interference for decades. Victims were ignored and treated as criminals. Many rapists, even alleged murderers, got off with no time in prison while others got ludicrous sentences of a couple of years.
Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.
Similar concerns applied at the council, where anxieties over appearing racist saw safeguarding officers waving away concerns simply because the perpetrators were Asian. It was felt that some suspects were not investigated because it would have been “politically incorrect”.
This is not to say that the council did nothing. Aware that taxi drivers were offering children rides for sex, in 2006 it suspended licensing enforcement for drivers, allowing high risk drivers to continue practicing. As the Telford Inquiry found, this was “borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism; it was craven”.
[...]
Denial about the extent of the problem is rooted deep in Britain’s political system. At times, it appears that the government’s approach to multiculturalism is not to uphold the law, but instead to minimise the risk of unrest between communities. Confronted with gangs of predominantly Pakistani men targeting predominantly white children, the state knew exactly what to do. For the good of community relations, it had to bury the story.
In Rotherham, a senior police officer told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by Pakistani heritage men became public knowledge. One parent concerned about a missing daughter was told by the police that an “older Asian boyfriend” was a “fashion accessory” for girls in the town. The father of a 15-year-old rape victim was told the assault might mean she would “learn her lesson”.
The ordeal had been so brutal that she required surgery.
As the 2014 Jay Inquiry into Rotherham found, children were “doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight”, “threatened with guns”, “witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other”.
In the same town, a senior police officer allegedly said the abuse had been “going on” for 30 years, adding “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.
As Louise Casey’s 2015 report on Rotherham Council found, this attitude was widespread. The Pakistani community accounted for around 3 per cent of the town’s population, and the story emerging was clear: Pakistani men were grooming white girls. As a result, one witness said, the council was “terrified of [the impact on] community cohesion”.
Across the town, pressure was put on people to “suppress, keep quiet or cover up” issues around child abuse. A former senior officer told her review that “x didn’t want [the] town to become the child abuse capital of the north. They didn’t want riots.”
Politicians were terrified [of the impact on] community cohesion. This nervousness meant that there was “a sense that it was the Pakistani heritage Councillors who alone ‘dealt’ with that community”, with their having a “disproportionate influence” on the council: as one witness put it, “[my] experience of council as it was and is – Asian men very powerful, and the white British are very mindful of racism and frightened of racism allegations so there is no robust challenge”. Other concerns may have been even more sinister. In 2016, it was reported that a victim of grooming in Rotherham had alleged that she was raped by a town councillor.
As a result of this combination of factors, the council went to great lengths to “cover up information and silence whistle-blowers”. In the words of witnesses, “if you want to keep your job, you keep your head down and your mouth shut”.
There's plenty more in the article, but in short, yes, there's plenty of evidence for the authorities covering up the gang problem because of racial considerations.
>(That's also why he's always "demanding an inquiry" while acting like the Jay Report doesn't exist; he doesn't care about inquiries, to him it's just a weapon.)
The Jay Report only covers Rotherham, whereas grooming gangs have been reported in at least 50 towns.
>Bedari has a formal, paid full-time working staff that has a support from a wide network of volunteers. It is establishing partnerships with donors to execute various projects with specific objectives. It has not dissociated itself from its past. Discrimination and violence against women remain core subjects. However, it has expanded its wings to other areas which affect women’s condition in the society. These include education, economic empowerment and formulation of explicit laws and their implementation to safeguard women’s rights. Today Bedari is working more vigorously on these issues.
The insistence that they haven't dissociated from their past may indicate some change in the organization, which as noted, apparently used to accept private donations. The fact that they put this in the same section as a vague reference to "establishing partnerships with donors to execute various projects with specific objectives" may further indicate that there was some change with the structure of their organization and its funding.
>Address : House # 187 A Street # main Ghouri Town Phase 2 near Fizia colony, Islamabad
It doesn't seem that most charities listed there were only valid as of some years ago, as all the other ones I see show themselves as valid until 2027.
The Bedari site lists a registration number, but at the moment, I don't see an index of organization by registration numbers.
It's self-consistent for the based post-Christian vitalists to demand that, if the government refuses to punish rape, it should also refuse to punish lynch mobs. This is not them asking for more socialism, or falling prey to tender-heartedness. They're asking for the police to allow them to victimize those who the police allow to victimize their daughters. This is fully consistent: an anarchist solution to an anarchist problem.
("Consistent" is different from "correct", of course.)
Really, when you look at their posts, what they're asking for is racial equality. Half their posts juxtapose white guys who got long sentences for complaining online about grooming gangs with brown guys who got short sentences for being part of grooming gangs. (I'm sure they're cherry-picking these.) "The police are letting the Pakistani guys get away with all kinds of stuff, why not us too?" Which is cute, since most of them are racists, so what grounds do they have to complain?
My point is that Scott fails to understand them because he forgets that they could "solve" their problem very easily (with mob violence) if allowed to. The law makes itself invisible that way, and Scott reasons as though he doesn't see it. But the "based post-Christian vitalists" see it.
It's also self-consistent to assert the difference between positive and negative interventions. Asking the police to punish rapists (a negative intervention) is different from asking for money for mosquito nets (a positive intervention). It's not slicing too thin for libertarians to claim that government's monopoly on violence naturally fits it for negative interventions -- guys with guns are good at getting people to stop doing stuff. Getting people to start doing stuff, well... you need whips for that, it's not as easy.
Again, not agreeing with either side, just trying to point out a couple of factors that seem very present in the overall conversation, but which Scott overlooks.
And to me it's astonishing that he overlooks them, because it's so obvious! Capitalism was never intended to replace rule of law. Claiming that rule of law is under threat because of wokeness is not even mildly inconsistent with the position that capitalism is the key to solving most of humanity's problems.
There's not *that* many people that actually end up jailed for tweets in the UK (after the government released violent offenders to make room for them, of course), so it wouldn't be that conclusive to distinguish cherry-picking versus the effect of a small data set.
The bigger factor is probably that American commentators have no respect for or understanding of UK speech laws and relatively short prison sentences even for violent crime. The intersection looks insane from a US perspective even if we assume away latent bias on part of the UK government.
I think all this talk about morality makes more sense when you realize that morality is controlled by desire, not the other way around. It's all just justifications for what you wanted to do anyways, and justify the hatred of those who oppose your interests. You can always try to use religion to align these people, of course, but with time, they'll just develop better rationalizations to circumvent it.
As for the issue at hand... as others have pointed out, you're missing a big point, which is that the "starving children in a far-off country" aren't white. But the bigger point is that this isn't about saving the children, this is about justice. Don't you think it would be incredibly satisfying to see those rapist scum torn limb from limb? Why is the state denying the people the satisfaction of seeing justice served? That itself is an injustice. And the perpetrators of that injustice also need to be punished.
Edit: Seeing as everyone from every side of the aisle is telling you that you're wrong, maybe you should be the one doing some soul-searching. The answer that you arrive at doesn't have to be that they're right, of course. You could instead come to the realization that humanity is, in fact, unsalvageable. Just food for thought.
It's me, your local neighborhood based post-Christian vitalist. Your mistake is in thinking that people like us care about sexual assault victims in overseas countries *qua* sexual assault victims in overseas countries. The anger expressed at these scandals is based on the fact that they illustrate the pathological tendencies of modern Western society. It's anger at the idea that *this could happen to our daughters too,* so we better do something about it before that happens.
It's a neat little trick you pulled by sarcastically crossing out the option you take issue with and then daring anyone to have the lack of social tact to identify with the censured position. I really think you could have derived the correct answer if you tried. You're smart enough to figure out the differences from an objectivist point of view between caring about systemic failure of an Anglo nation to protect little girls from rape gangs, and say, farmed animal welfare.
Do you think there's any sense in which the sexual assaulters in the UK are wrong to be doing what they're doing? Or the people in the community who cover for them? Like, if one of them said to you, "I'm a based post Christian vitalist so I don't care about sexual assault victims outside my community, that's why I feel fine either participating in it, or enabling it", would you be like, "yup, solid post-Christian vitalist reasoning--it's not your daughters at stake, so can't argue with any of that"?
"I think we all have the same basic moral impulses, and that for most people - including most people who deny it - those potentially include caring about poor people you’ll never meet, suffering in far-off countries."
Obvious question - do you think the people in the Mirpuri rape gangs share these basic moral impulses?
Every once in a while you write and/or post something that I feel like I couldn’t agree with more. I don’t necessarily learn much by nature of the fact that I used much the same logic, causal reasoning, or facts to come to pretty much the same conclusion.
But by God, it does feel good to read it. It’s nice that someone else has the same struggles and arguments as I have with the same type of person and asked the same questions of their basis.
I’m in Kansas City and that type of person here is typically a, ‘libertarian’ and/or nativist. I’m as conservative as one could be, but I’ve never been able to square that, ‘let the children of lessor gods suffer and die for all I care’ attitude with my basic principles.
Really remarkable to read and then remember the partisan split over ebola countermeasures in light of the later reversal during Covid. But I think that reverse of polarity around Covid really was kind of unnatural, and only possible because the vaccine became such a flashpoint. From my personal experience with them, it's easy to make the kind of conservatives who have a deep-seated fear of contamination motivating their politics and personal lives view a vaccine as just as much a scary alien contaminant as a virus itself.
You're not taking into account individual differences in empathy, some of them due to wiring, some to upbringing. There's considerable spread in people's ability to recognize other people's emotions from facial expression -- one decent measure is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (which you can take on Amazon, for some reason: https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html). And then there's a second dimension to empathy that the test does not measure: Once you know how somebody is feeling, how much do you care?
Seems pretty plausible to me that low empathy people require a much more powerful stimulus than high empathy people to be moved to anger and a desire to bring about change. Accounts of small, neglected children being used as sex slaves is about the most powerful stimulus to empathy that exists. I think adopting a philosophy or ethics or even just a lifestyle that that treats other's wellbeing as irrelevant comes naturally to low empathy people, and I don't think exhortations like Scott's are very likely to change that. I'm not at all sure there's anything that can change someone's baseline empathy level.
That's why, whenever people here talk about embryo selection for intelligence as a way to improve the world, I always pipe and suggest that if we must choose one trait, empathy is a better one to select. And then lots of people pile and say everything good correlates with IQ so let's just go with IQ and we'll get all the rest. Yes, everything good correlates with IQ, but not all the correlations are high. IQ accounts for only 6% of the variance in the empathy test I mentioned.
I have the same complaint with the concept of "empathy" that I do with "intelligence," which is that they're both umbrella terms for a wide variety of traits that may be correlated but are not the same and should not be conflated. Accurately reading people is one, emotionally caring about others is another, and intellectually caring is a third. (All of those could be divided into smaller traits, too.) As an anecdote, I have low empathy. I don't empathize at all with children dying of malaria on another continent. But I still donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, because I recognize that other people matter even if I don't personally care about them.
If we're defining empathy as emotionally caring about others, which seems to be the definition you're most interested in, I think selecting for that might actually be counterproductive to getting people to care about strangers on another continent, although it might increase kindness within communities. The problem is, there are too many suffering people in the world, and you simply can't empathize with most of them no matter how empathetic you are. So instead people empathize with people it's easy for them to empathize with, namely people they know personally, people who are similar to themselves, and people it's politically convenient to care about. Unfortunately, I think some people get into the habit of using empathy as a moral crutch, where if they can't empathize with someone they think that that person doesn't matter. That explains the behavior of the people Scott's arguing with. They empathize with the Rotherham victims because it's politically convenient to do so, but they don't empathize with the millions of other children who get raped every day because the human brain doesn't have the processing power to empathize with that many people.
For the record, my take on embryo selection is that we shouldn't select for anything except not having genetic diseases. Maybe overall physical health, but even then I'm wary. Chesterton's fence.
I agree with you about the existence of the 3 kinds of empathy you named, also that it's not clear which of them, if any, actually predict certain behaviors, such as helping others, being reluctant to harm others. All that seems pretty researchable, though. In fact it probably has been researched, but I'm too tired to look it up right now. It seems much simpler to deal with than the question of the meanfulness of IQ, because IQ predicts all kinds of things. We'd only care about how much empathy scores of each of the 3 types predict helping others that are known, physically nearby or similar to oneself, and which if any predict helping distant abstract others, and similarly for predicting violence.
My thought experiment: I look at the state of the world, and imagine that there's a dial that shows total human suffering, updated continuously. Also imagine that we had 2 levers, one that would increase everybody's IQ, one that would increase everybody's empathy by the same amount, as measured in standard deviations. Seems to me that we'd get a way bigger reduction in world suffering from pulling that empathy lever.
This was a nice "motivating example" of the idea that I wish everyone would internalize: it's okay (even laudable) to openly admit some action/inaction is less ethical but that you still do it (without any performative shame dance), because you've decided the action is not a sacrifice you're willing to make with your finite capacity for good.
E.g. I still eat meat, and I don't really have any good excuse to do so, except that I like it and I'm just not a perfectly good person. Virtually every justification for eating meat in 2025 seems obviously flimsy and motivated*, and I respect a meat-eater much more if they just say that it's a sonewhat selfish thing they do and that they're okay with it for now (especially if they are, like me, open to changing that decision if and when fake meats get just a tad better or more vetted or whatever).
*The health/nutrition argument is the hardest to nail down with total certainty because that field is so fuzzy. I reluctantly avoid calling BS on the people who claim eating meat definitely for sure makes them feel better. But I'm skeptical that this is not either A) placebo or B) easily overcome with a supplement or two.
I don't think I'm the target audience, but I don't understand why choice 4 is "NOT A REAL CHOICE, SORRY". I feel as though there really are people out there who really do not care that bad things happen to other people, even if the other people are really sympathetic and the bad things are really bad. Is that not the case, or is the position somehow incoherent?
If theres nothing on earth that is an emotional "blunt fact" your a psychopath
I would have phased it differently and not made it a joke(cause half yall are autists, while autists have emotional blunt facts it seems to me they justify them with motivated reasoning, not experiencing them; but what do I know)
Sure, I'll grant your point on blunt facts and psychopaths.
Because it apparently escaped me, could you make explicit what you understood to be Scott's argument with this point? I understood him to say "self-evidently, you can expand your circle of moral concern until your position is consistent but may never contract your circle of moral concern.". This seems like a bad argument and so I thought I must have misunderstood.
Im more pessimistic about humanity then scott it seems; but *as an argument* I dont think indifference is likely to be put forward in response to most shock images; even if you are indifferent to say teenagers posting their self harm online and you wont do a god damn thing or tell the algorithms to make it go away, your unlikely to claim that, because the poeple who do care produce all the value to steal.
Many Thanks! I'm not quite following you, in particular quite what you mean by indifference "_as an argument_".
Maybe a bit of context on my part would help. The default case that I have in mind is a claiming-to-be-aid organization sticking ads in my YouTube stream showing various people, typically kids, in dire circumstances. Yeah, if said person or kid appeared on my front door, I'd be inclined to help (to some reasonable degree).
But I utterly distrust the claiming-to-be-aid organizations, and I'm utterly sick of their artificial intrusions. My reaction to them is dominated by: You guys just made my life a bit worse, and you are trying to ram an obligation down my throat, so I'm deeply hostile to you. If a member of such an organization did the same thing personally, I'd give them a _very_ blunt and hostile refusal.
>If theres nothing on earth that is an emotional "blunt fact" your a psychopath
Well, yes. I'm pretty sure it's possible to become a psychopath; I built a psychopathic split personality in response to child abuse (thankfully appears to be gone now).
Becoming a psychopath is certainly a *bad* option, but it is one.
The average human being on planet Earth doesn't really care that much about bad things happening to other people. I mean, they're not fully able to conceptualise people on the other side of the planet as being real, but they also don't get that emotionally engaged with bad things that happen to people right in front of them. This is why the history of the world contains so many horrifying atrocities.
There are but they generally have to pretend otherwise because saying explicitly "I don't care about child rape I just hate muslims" tends not to be good for building political coalitions
One of Scott’s linked essays had this gem of the past (context: Ebola):
“What’s more, everyone supporting the quarantine has been on the right, and everyone opposing on the left. Weird that so many people suddenly develop strong feelings about a complicated epidemiological issue, which can be exactly predicted by their feelings about everything else.
On the Right, there is condemnation of the CDC’s opposition to quarantines as globalist gibberish, fourteen questions that will never be asked about Ebola centering on why there aren’t more quarantine measures in place, and arguments on right-leaning biology blogs for why the people opposing quarantines are dishonest or incompetent. Top Republicans call for travel bans and a presenter on Fox, proportionate as always, demands quarantine centers in every US city.”
When the issue actually was quarantining China and not letting the virus reach the West, the right was arguing for it and SJ was calling the right racist.
It was only later, when the virus was actually in the West, that it was SJ-aligned people demanding lockdowns.
How is this not just...different levels of caring for different levels of ingroups? Like, if we presume that effective altruists do not donate 100% of their non-survival income to malaria nets and the vitalist people aren't actually de facto sociopaths,
Like, imagine Bob has $40k/year to spend on non-necessities.
He spends $10k on himself, $26k on his immediate family, $3000 on some groups he cares about (Catholic Church, Democratic party, Audobon Society, whatevs) and $1000 on preventing animal abuse because his wife saw a sad commercial (1).
Circles of caring stuff, right: Self, Immediate Family, In Group, Everyone Else.
Now an effective altruist is arguing that we should probably be spending less on In Group and more on Everybody Else and a "Vitalist" might argue that you shouldn't spend any money on Everybody Else and you should spend more on yourself (and change your in group).
And, like, replace dollars in this example with attention to issues and, like, I'm not surprised that some people think you should give less to Everyone Else and more to Yourself and also that they're offended by perceived harms to their In Group.
Like, of the 5 options presented, which one represents a moderate shift in normal priorities? Because in real life, the Giving What We Can pledge is 10%, which is a big deal but also, like, 10%. In the example above it would be close to if Bob decided to donate all his charity to malaria nets.
Thank you, yes, I feel like this should be more obvious (I'm updating that it kind of isn't for most of the commentariat here? This is a niche audience but still...)
Exactly. And, at least in my case, it also applies to food: While I follow a mostly plant-based diet, I do occasionally eat meat, but only Seafood. This is because as a Human, I naturally feel closer to other Mammals and even Birds than to other animals.
The same applies to people - while I try not to treat anyone worse based on their ethnicity, if it comes to clear "tribe-vs-tribe" situations like these, for me, as an European form Germany, I definitely feel closer to other Europeans than to non-Europeans (of course there are other factors like culture, religion, etc.).
This seems like a poor representation of what these types believe - I don't think their principle is "we shouldn't care about people/places in far away countries", it would be something more like a) it's good and healthy to care more about people that are similar to yourself - your family, nation, etc - especially at the level of policy
b) 'pathological altruism' can be destructive and lead to the exact type of situation where you end up with Pakistani rape gangs in your country (or similarly covering up their crimes out of misplaced concerns for 'community relations' over your own people being victimized).
I don't think I've ever seen these people make the argument that we shouldn't care about something just because it's far away
This moral framework seems perfectly consistent with outrage over the grooming gangs in Britain - or even more simply on the level of in-group / out-group, or civilization / barbarism. (where eg they care about what happens in Britain not just because it's an obvious in-group - genetic ancestry of many americans, cultural / historical / traditional ties etc, or they care because it's civilizationally consequential - whereas caring about starving Africans just increases the population of starving africans and stretches the malthusian conditions, ie barbarism)
yes thank you - I'm good with caring about all such victims, but it's perfectly reasonable to care more about victims closer socially (not necessarily geographically, although that's one aspect of social proximity) to oneself, it's just basic circles of care
Other comments likely point this out but the claims don't seem to accurately depict vitalists or others and therefore don't highlight any contradictions in their positions.
For example, many more nationalist "charity starts at home types" advocate for circles of concern with the tightest one being a familial group and larger circles including communities, and larger circles, yet, including coethnics. Such people could consistently advocate for the concerns of fellow Europeans, but not sub-Saharan Africans.
In fact, much of nationalists' concern with Britain's semi-formally established system of child rape is that the same could happen at home, if members of the cultures perpetrating the crimes there are allowed to come to the US. And they object so vehemently to the anti-racist approach of legalizing crime on the grounds that it's mostly perpetrated by minorities, since to an extent, those forces are present in the US, as well.
So this is a foreign issue that they care about not only because it affects fellow White Europeans, but because it represents issues that America faces, as well.
Similarly, many "based post-Christian" types seems quite averse to capitalism, arguing that it just values lines going up, and "we're a nation, not an economy." They don't seem like the sort of people who argue that all problems should be solved by capitalism.
Similarly, many people may not have been saying that "every well-intentioned attempt to help another person will always backfire and end up causing incalculable harm." Some of them may have just been critical of redirecting resources from the US to sub-Saharan Africa which has never accomplished much, in spite of a literal trillion dollars and more being poured into it.
Similarly, even people skeptical of charity not only in sub-Saharan Africa, but at home, as well, could distinguish between charity and law enforcement. I don't think most vitalists think that murder and child rape should be legal, so they're hardly inconsistent with objecting to a government de facto legalizing those.
The claim that that distinction disappears if vitalists don't also donate money to anti-rape charities in Pakistan is similarly specious. The objection to legalizing child-rape in Britain isn't that charities aren't stepping up - it's simply that those should be illegal there, and in Pakistan too, for that matter.
Sure, plenty of people and groups have poorly reasoned or internally contradictory impulses, but this doesn't seem to do a very good job of demonstrating that.
Frankly, you could have skipped the whole article and jumped to the end and made the same point. Ultimately, almost everybody espouses an eclectic combination of contradictory moral impulses and the question is what to do with that. Good question! And it can be addressed just fine without attacking what appear to be strawman representations of particular ideologies.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of the above nationalist or vitalist approaches. I just don't think that the descriptions and pseudo-quotes were very representative.
Well said - not only is it perfectly consistent with such moral frameworks, the events sound like bigoted conjured fever-dreamed imaginings of someone warning about the dangers of extending the altruistic hand too far and bringing in alien peoples that will inevitably clash with and damage the host culture
Scott really whiffed on this one - either poor theory of mind for these people or isn't paying close enough attention to their arguments
Effective altruists have pretty bad theory of mind for people who aren't effective altruists, which explains why they keep posting things like "come on, just admit you secretly agree with me already".
"the events sound like bigoted conjured fever-dreamed imaginings of someone warning about the dangers of extending the altruistic hand too far and bringing in alien peoples that will inevitably clash with and damage the host culture"
And it objectively, literally happened. Exactly.
Which, dare I say, should maybe give you pause to consider that maybe, just maybe, those warning of such dangers might be on to something.
Another interesting question is why grooming gangs abroad provoke a reaction when they happen in the UK more than in Pakistan or Egypt, if you're in neither of those countries. It can't be due to the moral philosophy of it... Is it because we expect better of a Western democracy?
We expect the civilized world to be civilized. When part of it reverts to uncivilized, it merits serious concern. What caused the degradation? Can it be fixed? Are we similarly vulnerable?
When the uncivilized world is, surprise, uncivilized, it's Dog Bites Man.
It's because people correctly believe that the same cultural currents that have infected the UK have also infected our countries, and therefore the same could happen here unless we draw attention to it
I was confused by the statement: "A recent legal dispute got them back in the news, and since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before. Now the entire Right is demanding investigations, heads on pikes, and (in some cases) the American invasion of Britain" because that doesn't match my experience at all. I've only heard a couple of passing references in the last year (I am not exaggerating, I'm pretty sure it's less than five time total), WAY less than I did a decade ago the last time it came up, so I went and checked Google Trends as the easiest method of tracking general interest.
As it turns out, at least according to Google Trends, searches for "Rotherham" are much less popular than a decade ago:
It's never come close to the amount of attention it had a decade ago, and the interest lingered for months back then while this year it never lasted more than a week.
Also going to note, I'm really not sure what to make of that dotted line projection at the end, since if you look at just the last 18 months:
"Grooming gangs" is consistently below attention to Rotherham, but Rotherham also has a much higher baseline due to football and other news. I'm curious what happened in May 2018 when "grooming gangs" reached parity with Rotherham according to google.
My prior is that American Jews were especially horrified by the 10/7 atrocities in Israel. I feel like it would be both obtuse and insensitive to do the "you shouldn't care any more about those particular foreigners than you do about any other foreigners or else you're incoherent" bit in that case.
I think it's obviously the same for Americans for whom the British victims of the rape gangs are distant cousins, culturally and also genetically. The victims sure seem a lot like my kids, and I doubt any of the rapists or enablers would think any differently about them.
I also think the idea that "it could (possibly, eventually) happen here, to my kids" is more appropriate when comparing the relative situation of poor British kids to poor American kids, as they're more similarly situated politically/geographically than Israeli Jews <->American Jews. The UK is a supposedly secure, Anglo-ruled 1st world nation, and yet it STILL allowed this.
I offer this comparison because I think it's particularly surprising that Scott missed this. Scott, I am a big fan!
I tried very hard not to bring this up, but this comment made it impossible for me - Scott did refrain from saying a single word of consolation after October 7, and I have excellent reasons to believe that while he did feel the event was horrifying, it happening far away from him was an explicit part of the reason for his silence. Allow me not to quote evidence. I swear it exists and is compelling.
Also worth noting that shortly after that he expressed his condolences to everyone involved in the OpenAI mess, confirmed he was not being ironic, and wondered why anyone would think he might be.
Does this make Scott’s misses in this post less surprising?
He takes the principle of charity a little too far. It's part of what makes him good to read--everyone does the opposite. I tend to go by the Principle of Infinite Cynicism--everyone's looking for that dopamine hit in their brain, even if it's the one that you get from being a good person, however that's defined. (I had a very Pollyannaish liberal upbringing I'm reacting against.)
But he's a much better writer than me, very bright, and explores a lot of interesting questions. Nobody's perfect, and I've yet to find someone who agrees with me on everything.
That's probably because he understood what both the causes of that event were, and the inevitable outcome of it would be... The problem isn't that he doesn't feel sympathy for Jews, it's that he also holds sympathy for people that don't deserve it.
I don't disagree with the second part - not much, at least. As for the first - worth noting that he was less accurate on casualties than, say, Erdogan (unless one takes the view that both Turkish intelligence and Hamas have been trying very hard to present numbers that were too low), and that he apparently thinks ~166K people died in the Ukraine war in the year prior to the Bird Flu post. The latter is wrong by a factor of 3x-4x (various estimates of just Russian casualties in 2024 using different methodologies are 420-440K), concerns one of the most salient events in recent years, and doesn't have much to do with Jews. (If I misunderstand "166,666 deaths. In some weird probabilistic expected utility way, about as many people will probably die of H5N1 next year as died in the past year of the Ukraine War", please let me know. I'd be very happy to know.)
It's a more general attitude towards geopolitics, military conflicts, and many related topics. At times I wonder if it's related to AI fears - a world where the chances of civilizational collapse in the next few decades in case of business-as-usual are commensurate with AI risk is one with a very different calculus than the AI-worried usually present.
Ah, that makes me feel much better and apologies to Scott for the x3-x4 part. 166K is still fairly off, likely - estimates for Russian military deaths for 2024 are in the 120-150K range, and for Ukraine the numbers greatly depend on kill ratio estimates. Taking 1:5 to be the modal assessment that also makes sense vs. other methods (various sources go as far as 1:1.5 - or 1:13!) we get to 24-30K (and you can find "sane" sources claiming up to 60K). These numbers include purely "official" military forces. Not civilians joining the fighting, not (some of the) paramilitary activity, not North Korean/ Chechnyan troops/ Western volunteers. Not Russian private militias. I don't want to write a whole PhD on this, but 190-200K total military-in-the-broad-sense in 2024 seems to be roughly correct.
And then there is the question of counting some of the MIAs.
And then we come to civilians and POWs on both sides.
ETA: and I'm trying very hard not to use the obvious "...and everybody knows all these are severe undercounts, and don't count those that are currently dying in hospitals and much of the data for December hasn't been processed etc." argument. Worth noting that one can find Ukrainian forums counting soldiers' deaths by families/ other personal accounts with comments such as "we found 16K personal testimonies this year but believe it to be at most a third".
That's interesting, and I honestly don't know if it makes it more surprising!
The possibilities still seem to be that (a) sure, Scott felt it was horrifying, but felt no additional horror that it happened to Israelis rather than to more culturally distant people, or (b) that he did/does feel additional horror, but doesn't give voice to those feelings b/c that would be inconsistent with his moral framework.
I do think he hides the ball sometimes for consequentialist reasons.
(b) would be surprising because he doesn't even list circles of care as an option - he's usually honest about dealing with difficult issues (sometimes hiding the ball a bit for consequentialist reasons but this feels different)
(a) would be surprising because it's just so weird to me...but Scott's mind is pretty atypical!
I don't think the US reaction to the abuse of British white kids works anything like the reaction American Jews to the atrocities committed against Israeli Jews. Jews are a small percent of the world population. Whites are a large percent. Jews have been persecuted for being Jewish, whites have not been persecuted for being white.
I am a WASP, and up until I was 8 or 9 I had the vague impression that I was the basic, generic, majority example of our species, and that almost everybody on the planet was white like me and spoke English. Knew there were some others who had a little extra shot of flavor or color or odd traditions added, which was OK with me, but I thought of them as sort of unimportant variants of the main stock, me. Anyhow, I tell you this as further evidence that being a non-Jewish white ikid n the USA is very very different from being a Jewish kid. Jewish kids do not grow up thinking that almost all the rest of the civilized world is like them.
>After Algeria became independent in 1962, about 800,000 pieds-noirs of French nationality evacuated to mainland France, while about 200,000 remained in Algeria. Of the latter, there were still about 100,000 in 1965, about 50,000 by the end of the 1960s and 30,000 in 1993.[8] During the Algerian Civil War between 1992 and 2002, the population of pieds-noirs and others of European descent plummeted, _as they were often targeted by Islamist rebel groups_ .
Yeah, I get that, and there are obvious historical asymmetries.
But the evidence seems strong that these girls *were* targeted for being white in this case. There have also been many such historical cases of whites being persecuted for being white, although generally this happens on small scales in frontier conflicts or in hate crimes like the ones under discussion. But the main thing is that it was true in this case!
Yeah, OK, but my point is that if you're a non-Jewish white there's just much less feeling of there being an "us" than if you're Jewish. (Ten or 20 years ago I saw a book called *A History of White People in America* and the title was intended humorously, and in fact I and I expect most people giggled when we saw it. ( I believe the book was a collection of humorous essays or stories.). But the title is funny because non-Jewish whites don't have the feeling of being a "we." Our early naive sense of ourselves, at least in the US, is that we are everybody -- we are the archetype, other people are variants.
Are you thinking that a lot of the reaction to the abuse of these girls is due to their being *white*? Like that white people are having a "that's one of us" reaction? Or feel extra disgust that the people abusing these girls were brown? If so, I think you're wrong. I'm sure white people find other whites, even those in a foreign country, a bit easier to feel empathy for than brown or black people, but I think it's fairly weak (unless of course the white's are white supremacists). And in the case of this crime I think the most powerful demographic fact is the victims' age and gender. Sexual abuse of little girls is so pathetic & so horrifying to most people that they max out on sympathy and indignation, and so any extra empathy that might have been due to sharing skin color with the victims just doesn't add anything to the total.
Plenty of comments are pointing out that you're criticizing a very small set of people. But this means that "everyone's a" is basically "almost nobody's a". Everybody, nobody, what's the difference?
Also, the reason people care about Rotterham even though it's in another country is that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that the UK is culturally close to themselves, so they sympathize more with problems in the UK more than they do with random human beings in the world--the UK falls under "family, friends, and village".
There's also more sympathy because the scandal seems to be related to culture war issues that are problems in the USA too.
I'd like to talk about the struck-through option 4, because I think it's much more important than the striking out suggests.
First, I understand the striking out, because in general, I agree, it is literally impossible for human beings to not care. So, yes, for the vast majority of people, 4 is not really worth thinking about. However:
There are three kinds of actors in the world who don't care, I think.
(1) Psychopaths. Of interest to psychologists, of course, but also to the rest of us given that certain psychopaths seem to be highly successful, and to be given the opportunity to shape the world. I'm thinking mainly of pre-modern military leaders, but of it seems just possible that Putin could be among them. (And of course one could also talk about the cold-blooded tech bros. Perhaps they are not uncaring, but possibly *less caring* than the rest of us? I don't know how much of a spectrum this is.) If psychopaths don't care about others, but they shape the context in which we live, it would be useful to think about them.
(2) Institutions. States, companies, non-profits. Even though two of these are set up with the explicit aim of caring, they regularly fail at it in quite distinctive, non-human ways, and that seems worth thinking about.
(3) AI. I mean, every post has to be about AI these days, and this one is no exception. It's not clear how much AIs can abstract "caring" from their formalised models of our language, but it's at least possible that they'll be intelligent but uncaring, and this seems relevant as well.
I... haven't got anything intelligent to say about these groups off the top, but I thought it was worth pointing out that that struck out option is still quite important.
It's trivially easy for human beings to "not care" about child sexual assault victims. In some parts of the world - areas of rural Pakistan, for example - raping kids is not considered to be a particularly big deal.
Some good points. I see a couple of angles making me want to un-strike-through #4
[1] psychopaths/sociopaths may have a disproportionate impact (especially because hierarchies select for sociopathy) [2] it may not be common for people to care about no one; it's more common for people to regards swaths of humanity as less than human and therefore not worthy of care.
I'm one of the people who thinks capitalism is great and thinks that promoting and sustaining it should be the most important parts of any effective altruist's portfolio.
I think you have an overcomplicated view of the impulse. The people you're addressing simply have a pathological zero-sum mentality to the point where any expectation of goodwill imposed upon them is a threat to themselves. This issue gets a pass because it's a partial political football against brown immigrants. I've found that as long as someone is getting hurt, and especially if they're not the same identity as the person who holds this view, any policy to improve the common weal is paid for.
I'm not just being dismissive when I say this article comes off as so oddly unnecessary to me that I don't understand its point. Maybe your experience with people who self identify as vitalists is different (leaning libertarian) but all the vitalists I know, especially those who identify with Nietzsche, aren't interested in pure capitalism. They're essentially *all* eugenicists who embrace the inherent worth of things they deem 'higher' or more masterly--and as realists, they post that meme with the two heatmaps of in-group and out-group preference you've all probably seen by now. Liking things closer to you is amoral kin-bias, not philosophy. In essence, their argument is that you should care about things in closer proximity, and this is a very easy solution to navigating your 'finely sliced gradation' issue. The thing is that you're pointing at their political pragmatism (they are generally racist and anti-immigration, and this is a good instance of validating those feelings) and calling it a philosophical self-contradiction.
So I don't understand how there's any contradiction in saying something like, "I don't care about rape gangs in dirty pakistan but I'm extremely concerned about immigrant rape gangs in the Anglosphere." Is this some kind of weird straussian way to boost the issue or conduct mass psychological testing, because I feel like you know all this. Saying 'no particular skills' especially is almost leading the reader to distinguish between capitalistic and biological potential.
I think there may be a conflation here, both in this essay and in the people the essay is talking about, of “care” as in “feel an emotional response to a situation” and “care” as in “choose to spend actual energy doing something about it.”
It’s perfectly consistent to have an immediate emotional reaction of sympathy towards raped children and also be entirely clear that since you live in another country across a rather large ocean and have many other much more pressing responsibilities, that you are not going to do one single blessed thing about it (maybe some prayers).
the harder the emotional trigger gets hit, the harder it is for people to acknowledge the truth that, yeah, they’re not going to do a damn thing about that. So you get a lot of people making confused statements and trying to slice the salami way too thin and being very ideologically inconsistent.
I think it’s fine not to spend energy on things that are far away from us, though. It’s normal and natural to care in the sense of feeling a sympathetic impulse of the heart. But we’d definitely go crazy if we tried to care-in-the-sense-of-fixing-it about every awful thing we hear about.
The kids in the other country are white, so they identify with them. It's simple racialism, a tribal loyalty of a particularly American sort. Though there is also a sort of extreme antinomianism against the current 'nonwhites, nonstraights, and nonmen have higher moral status' of the current woke ideology. They say X, so you say not-X. They've been told that white people are bad and they're white and don't appreciate that, so they then decide they *love* white people. And if you've got white girls being abused by nonwhite men, you can rev up the 'defense of the tribe against foreign genes' program that's whirring in the hindbrain.
I can see it in myself. Frame abortion as a bodily autonomy or personal liberty issue and I'll gladly support it; frame it as a women's rights issue and I'll hem and haw, because I have a lot of resentment against feminism.
There really ought to be further investigation of 'negative moralities' that are basically other moralities multipled by -1. It's more common than people think.
Some things are true *even if* the Party says they are.
In a world full of takes on how any person or thing is evil/problematic, only Scott Alexander has the guts to say "as much as they try to hide it, those internet trolls are actually good persons"
The larger issue is that the elites in many Western nations are failing to care for their own populations. The rape gangs, which exist beyond just "several" cities in the UK, are the exemplar of this. The response is not a lazy, emotional Helen Lovejoy "won't someone think of the children?!" Nor is it performative like Just Stop Oil and Greta Thunberg. It is the seeming sacrifice of your own population because they fall short or even fail on some kind of intersectional scoring metric.
You likely cannot see the connection between Rotherham and, for example, the problems my immigrant wife in the US have had, but I can. I watch as my representatives on Capitol Hill fight to protect illegals, while at the same time they give my wife and I the run-around. My heart is not "bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind." Rather, I care about my wife. Why aren't we and other peons worth fighting for? Why George Floyd but not the victims of grooming gangs? Elites in government, media, academia, etc. have failed the people they are supposed to represent, and in the UK those failings are just disgusting to read about.
Yeah, my wife is Mexican... It took two years to get her here (was supposed to be 7-9 months before COVID), it's pretty frustrating to think people are just jumping the fence, and the bleeding hearts are like, how dare you not just let them do that? When white liberals assume legal immigrants must be in favor of illegal immigration... WTF? Also she's from a place where...one of the safer parts of her country, but she never goes anywhere without a male escort, because it's just not safe. That's just normal to her, which is something that's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. So she knows that many of them can be dangerous. And do you think Mexicans want immigrants in their country or are indifferent to them? They are not. So yeah, she's super-based, and likes Trump more than I do. It's obvious to her that order is good, criminals are bad and need to be dealt with harshly, that marriage is good, loyalty is good, that weakness is a provocation, that the world is full of people who will take advantage of you and possibly leave you dead in a gutter if you're too soft... "Common sense" things that I had to go on a long, winding intellectual journey to figure out. I have to be a liberal-whisperer sometimes to try to explain how people can actually believe that stuff. Since I come from that background and used to believe it myself. But it's been getting increasingly difficult to remember what it was like to take it seriously.
People jump the fence for the same reason your wife "gets the run around" and has to wait 2 years to come here. Your wife and most illegal immigrants are victims of the same system. If routes of legal immigration were made more efficient and broadened and if republicans were willing to fund those routes, your wife wouldn't have had to wait 2 years and people would need to jump the fence, they could enter legally.
There is absolutely no indication that Trump has any interest in making legal routes to immigration more efficient. Nothing he plans to do would solve her problem. I am not sure why your wife would like Trump when he clearly doesn't like her.
Leftists have an annoying habit of deliberately conflating legal and illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants generally do not have a way to obtain permanent immigration status through legal pathways because these legal pathways mostly aim to select those who'll be a net benefit to the country to which they illegally immigrate. This is why they immigrate illegally. Illegal immigrants clog up the system and the political space to the detriment of those who have a realistic chance of becoming a legal immigrant
His wife had a realistic pathway through spousal sponsorship. Although Trump may not make the administration of legal pathways more efficient, the discouraging of illegal immigration would free up resources and political capital to make them more efficient, at least in the medium to long term after the costs of undoing the damage that leftists' did in encouraging illegal immigration have been paid
Legal vs illegal immigration is a political definition. It has no basis outside of the legislation that defines it. If you change the legislation then more people are "legal" or "illegal".
One of the long standing legal pathways to immigration is through asylum. But just today trump issued an executive order making it much more difficult to claim asylum and cancelled existing asylum appointments. So with the stroke a pen (and no legislative action) they went from "legal" to "illegal" with no change to who they are or why they wish to immigrate.
>aim to select those who'll be a net benefit to the country
Putting aside a debate of whether any immigrant has a bigger benefit vs another, it's demonstrably untrue that our immigration system is designed for this. For example, H1B visas are given out by a lottery. If we wanted to pick the immigrants who could have the biggest net benefit we would not use a lottery. Additionally, there is no reason to believe that someone's spouse will be a bigger net benefit to the country than a random farm worker. Why should the spouse be given preference. We also have quotas on how many green cards can be issued for a certain types of visas. How do we know that we aren't excluding the immigrants with the biggest net benefits just because they didn't apply first?
Exactly. This should be so incredibly obvious from even casually observing the BAPsphere. Is this guy really so stupid and unable to understand people that he thinks BAPists and right wingers are colourblind individualist libertarians who don't care about their kith and kin? He thinks BAPists and RWers like people from all nations equally? I thought he was meant to be a gigabrained psychologist?
> As a practicing Christian, I invite all off he vitalists to practice one of the most universal pagan traditions and convert to Christianity.
...I really don't think that's a good idea, unless you want crusades and inquisitions to make a comeback. Converting to a religion doesn't actually change one's morality, it only changes how they frame their actions.
>Converting to a religion doesn't actually change one's morality, it only changes how they frame their actions.
I don't think that's true. Christian Europe was different in important ways to pagan Europe, and to post-Christian Europe.
This post was Scott at his best. Like a rhetorical cartoon anvil ready to splatter the callous and the weak.
But what if you could allow a billion shrimp to reach sexual maturity at a cost of not providing a human child with an extra 1/2 hours of life (which would actually be a much more tortured 30 minutes due to the extension)? \S
I don't think rationalism is big enough to be a political movement with a base, really. It's a centrist middle-to-upper-class social club.
Turkish and Persian Gulf altruism is not exactly universalist. Erdogan, the same guy who took in (Middle Eastern, mostly Muslim) refugees, calls for Turks in Europe to out-breed and take over the west. Turks in Europe vote for him. Real grateful people. Just don't look at their crime rates.
I think China's economic imperialism is already well-debated so let's leave that out.
Japan, is losing WW2 what makes them a loser? What about being invaded in a war but ultimately not being on the losing side? Some of the top foreign aid countries in percentage terms(which Japan and China are not) like Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark are like that, but I haven't heard them considered loser countries before. Sweden is also up there, but not a loser in that way. So are loser countries the most generous? Nah.
But that's just government aid, who are the most charitable as individuals? Looks like US is by far number one, followed by other Anglo countries. Not losers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitable_donation_as_percentage_of_GDP#2016_rankings
Oh and there's a big selection effect when you talk about people who grew up poor and became rich, that doesn't mean the average poor person would behave like that if they magically became rich.
"most Americans’ donations are...basically for community-building purposes not altruistic helping of poor people who can’t help you back. "
I don't know to what degree that's the case in other countries, but the disparity would have to be extreme to explain some of these gaps.
Charitable donations as percentage of GDP:
US 1.44%
New Zealand 0.79%
Canada 0.77%
United Kingdom 0.54%
---
Japan 0.12%
Norway 0.11%
Switzerland 0.09%
China 0.03%
Mexico 0.03%
---
"If anything they’d probably be self-selected against being altruistic since they’d be more ambitious."
Maybe, maybe not, I'm just saying it's pretty weak evidence either way unless one can control for that. More intelligent people are more cooperative, but probably also more careful with money in general. And that's just one trait complicating things.
---
" Most people have a point where they are satisfied and they become progressively more altruistic as their wealth exceeds this satisfaction point. The satisfaction point generally being lower for people who are used to being poorer."
Ok, but that doesn't necessarily mean their altruism would extend to their outgroup, that's the "if your situations were reversed" part of the claim. And I'm not claiming the outgroup for Chinese people is the odd western guest worker, a curiosity more than anything.
The Pakistanis in Britain have practically won the lottery and had their wealth massively increased by being allowed into Britain. But do they behave altruistically towards native British people? And of course it's not just Pakistani immigrants who show this hostility.
> But do they behave altruistically towards native British people?
Probably many do, yeah, though I expect most of it would be in ways that don't make the news.
Don't be pedantic, you can tell we're talking about group level comparisons here. There's an asymmetry of altruism that doesn't go in the direction that Lowmad's theory predicts.
This is my interpretation as well.
> It’s likely that if it could happen there, it will eventually happen here, unless you fight it at its source
This seems to misunderstand the modern state of the world. The US is the source. This isn't a bad idea from England that we want to prevent from spreading to America. It's a bad idea from America that has spread to England.
This is a worthy sense of responsibility, but I think the facts are incorrect.
It is not clear that the rationale that “we should be careful not to disproportionately publicize bad actions by members of certain groups because other minorities hate said groups and will grab at *anything* to tar all of their members with the same brush, and will go up to physical violence if properly excited (and yes we know it’s a tough act to balance and we’ll likely mess up in creative and exciting ways, now go away and leave us in peace so that we can try not to suck too much at this)” emanates from America.
(Nor is the failure mode “yes, these actions are wrong, but what *I* *actually* know does not suggest a pattern of badness on *that* scale.”)
The US is the chief source of wokeness, not disputed. But maybe there's some confusion over whether the chief evil here is wokeness or Islam, or the mix of both?
The UK has far more Muslims (as a % of population) than the US.
It's not even that. Most of the people Scott's talking about are overtly racist. From their perspective British people and Americans are the equivalent of North and South Koreans, separated by politics but not ethnicity. They care more about them than starving children in Africa because of their commitment to [White? Anglo-Saxon?] nationalism. It's juicy because it's tribal and in-group/out-group, not because they've suddenly discovered a hole in their politics through which the well-spring of altruism can gush forth.
It strikes me that it's far more likely to be a cultural affinity than some kind of ugly racial one. You guys are absolutely determined to see racism wherever it could plausibly lurk and it's just so much rarer than you'd like to admit.
Why are you reluctant to accept that they're racists? Do you have pedantic objections? If you look at the bulk of the discourse among those with strong "cultural affinities", the slippage between culture and race as proxies for each other is very common, and even the ones that talk about culture rarely denounce outright racists. On the contrary, they nonchalantly co-mingle with them. There is a general "no enemies to the right" attitude on the far right.
Yeah, that's my take as well. There's a reason it's "invade England" and not, for instance, "invade Pakistan".
At risk of nutpicking, I’ve seen the same person 1) outraged about Rotherham, 2) pushing the circle-of-concern thing, and 3) insisting that Hamas was totally justified in butchering Israelis. Clearly time spent as an English colony isn’t sufficient.
...I think that person is just an antisemite.
Unambiguously, yes.
But he’s also a central example of this sort of aesthetic vitalism.
I don't know if that's the case... While these people would be perfectly happy to do unspeakable things to minorities, I don't think most people care about Jews enough to want them dead. Antisemitism just isn't as relevant as it once was, at least on the right. Most people on the right hate the races that hate Jews more than they themselves hate Jews. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so forth.
Any specific examples of such people? The first example of "based post-Christian vitalist" that came to mind was Richard Hanania. The next examples were Curtis Yarvin and Nathan Cofnas. I don't think any of them tweeted any red meat about the grooming gangs.
I'm thinking of commenters here and on X more than public intellectuals. I realize that's a copout but don't want to name names. I predict at least a few people in the comments here will identify as such people and give better or worse justifications for their actions; if not, I'll admit I was overestimating the size of this demographic.
This is an incredibly niche demographic, to the degree that I have no idea who you’re responding to
This isn't really a strong argument against addressing it when you're far enough down the subculture rabbit hole to be in the Scott Alexander comment section or in tpot
Tpot is the far more niche of the two, no?
I suspect Scott is, charitably or because they are friends of friends, assuming that TPOT is by definition all high rung thinkers.
In this he is grievously mistaken, and maybe this is one of his steps to learning the reality.
Are those of us who don't sit at the cool kids table what is tpot? Even chat GPT doesn't know
“That Part of Twitter.”
Something between a filter bubble and a postrationalist movement. The phrase “vibecamp” was involved at some point.
Look at the various issues here and follow the threads as far as you like:
https://x.com/St_Rev/status/1882307336360144927
Here's a stronger, more fleshed out version of my complaint:
https://x.com/handleym99/status/1882549682800574685
I barely read the comments here anymore, and yet I have read this sort of people in the comments and twitter, so I don't think it's that niche
I'm not pointing at any individuals, mainly because I'm terrible at remembering names, but in - for example - discussions on Nietzsche/slave morality here and over on TheMotte, there's a few who are all "ha ha your slave morality is for losers, you losers" and proudly boast of being masters who don't care if all the trash and riff-raff live or die.
And these people also never seem to consider that someone in charge of their own morality and mind and body doesn't care what they think, and decides for themselves what is worth caring about.
The pessimistic side of my brain expects this is how the rich tech folks think. They're excited for AI & robots so they can be supermen standing above the starving hordes of now-useless people.
Even Nietzschian masters would sympathize with children being raped, I think. They can hardly blame the victims in this case.
Yes, but that is precisely what happened. The girls were seen to have been making an informed choice. There is a BBC news report (shared by Elon) where the the girl is cast as though she was the one taking advantage of the adult! Including an interview with the mother of the accused male who is claiming her son is the victim.
I said nietzschian masters could sympathize. I didn't say leftists could.
I’ve seen people openly profess to belief sets like this but mostly write it down to young men trying ti be edgy.
The specific example he had in mind are almost certainly a very small niche. But the general reaction pattern is widely observable. I think it's usually invisible to the person exhibiting it, though.
Personally, my choice is to focus on areas I'm interested in, and to assume that someone else will focus on the areas I "approve of" but am not that interested in. And to insist that everyone be interested in an area because I'm interested in it seems immoral. (E.g., I've never heard about "grooming gangs", though I've heard about the topic sufficiently to guess what they are about...though I thought the idea of grooming was to encourage consensual behavior that was illegal among the young, so "rape" was a surprise. [I assume he didn't mean statutory rape.])
So I'm all in favor of the problem being addressed, but feel no compulsion to address it personally.
The gang busted in Rotheram 10 years ago were busted for grooming/statutory rape exactly as you suspect. The accusation is that there are other gangs engaging in the kidnapping/violent rape, which police/prosecutors/courts are also turning a blind eye to for fear of looking racist.
(I don't know if this is true. The BBC continues to insist that there were purely historic problems, that it was purely grooming, and that Musk et al are being confused by misinformation. The misinformation in question appears to be British court transcripts, which one would usually label 'information'. To add to my confusion, a national enquiry is usually a way of making something you don't want to deal with go away for a few years while appearing to care about it. I don't know why the press aren't delightedly sticking a scandal to the government. I'm pretty confused.)
They literally had sentencing for more gangs just yesterday. Some men got as short a sentence as 3 years. One of the notorious gang leaders in Rotherham is out & working as an Uber driver.
Why don't you do an ounce of research on this before rambling about it? I recommend reading "Broken and Betrayed" by Jayne Senior, one of the whistleblowers, to understand exactly how bad it was and is.
With all due respect to Scott, a handful of his posts (including this one) remind me of a conversation I once had with my mom, regarding a childhood friend of mine who moved to San Francisco:
My mom: He's hanging out with the weirdos over there.
Me: What weirdos?
My mom: Oh, you know, those weirdos in San Francisco.
Me: It definitely wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are weirdos in San Francisco, but I've got no idea what weirdos you're talking about.
Andrew Tate, Bronze Age Pervert, Walt Bismark, Kristi Noem.
There is huge slice of the right wing that use Nietzschean rhetoric to sound tough. "Niche Demographic", man it seems very much a "Trump Base Demographic", "Republican Free Market Religion Demographic".
A lot of those commenters are pretty dumb people. There's a reason why public *intellectuals* don't hold the position of "helping distant people is *never* a priority".
Well, not publicly.
You are something of a magnet for that particular flavour of dumb.
Mostly because you're willing to listen to and debate some pretty crazy ideas. And partly because your nerdy logic-above-all approach is conducive to questioning the basic foundations of morality. But also because, I think, they see you as a fellow traveler. Some of the people they hate most accuse you of being like them.
I wouldn't put too much by these accusation. Certain people also accuse everyone they disagree with as a Nazi.
Somewhat depressingly, a small portion of those actually are.
Plus they can use engagement on ACX to funnel traffic to their brands and Substacks. It's useful to have the famous blogger use his valuable time to debate you. Throws a welcome spotlight.
The rationalist willingness to share social space with people whose ideas they absolutely abhor: something I have incredibly mixed feelings about. I'm for social tolerance in general but humans are social animals and socialization works to change our beliefs. It's a constant process going on in the background, whether you know about it or not. So there's a very rational reason to worry about total social tolerance, and to look askance at people who are totally socially tolerant of others. The rot has to be stopped somewhere.
If you feel immune to social conditioning, congratulations. Almost everybody feels that way, and almost everyone is wrong.
The next two famous people I thought of were Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor. Of course they talked about the rape scandal but they didn't say anything so hotheaded. Neither one is really a "based post-Christian nationalist", Steve Sailer is an old-school paleoconservative, and Jared Taylor is a white nationalist.
Here's what I wrote about the grooming gang scandal in 2013, the year before the Rotherham revelation:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_real_threat_to_british_elites_steve_sailer/
In 2013 I was on the side of the adolescent girl victims, not the adult statutory rapists.
Obviously. My point is you didn’t call for invading the UK or anything like that.
Yeah, you talked about it, but didn’t say anything so hotheaded, as I said. You rightly criticized the UK government’s response but didn’t obsess about it.
You can just say Bronze Age Pervert. And you can check out this essay I wrote about American Nietzscheans that has a very interesting analysis of him: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/nietzsches-eternal-return-in-america/
Pace your article, it has long been apparent that the rebels, the rulebreakers, the class clowns. The Roasters of Sacred Cows and Tellers Of Forbidden Truths are found on the Alt-right (and, to a lesser extent, the Dirtbag Left), while liberals have morphed into prissy schoolmarmish scolds so humorless and smug, they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison (Johnny Rotten himself in fact recently made this observation).
This is not because of any inherent love of liberty on the right, nor any innate censoriousness on the left, but is an artifact of their respective relationships with power.
> while liberals have morphed into prissy schoolmarmish scolds so humorless and smug, they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison
An eloquent and incisive articulation of something I think many of us are reacting to without putting it in quite these words, kudos for a great encapsulation of the dynamic.
See Scott's "Right is the new left" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ though he later concluded that dirtbag socialism rather than right-wing politics became cool.
I've seen this dichotomy described as "bad boys vs mean girls."
Hm....me likes.
What do you think is the relevant relationship with power here? It can’t be anything simplistic like “the alt right has power and liberals don’t” or “liberals have power and the alt right doesn’t” because both of those are trivially false - both groups have some sorts of power and lack other sorts of power, and you have to squint really hard to miss all the ways that one of these groups has power.
The PMC is the hegemonic class, and so, by definition, PMC values are seen as normative.
The PMC is a postmodern attempt to rehabilitate Marxism for the Information Age.
I don’t find it very convincing. Yes, it’s now easier to accumulate prestige without controlling capital. That doesn’t translate into the same kind of class interest. Nor does it allow the kind of hegemony which proponents like to assert.
Basically, yes. The schoolmarms are on the left now, so the teenage boys lean right. (And the beards have all grown longer overnight...)
I think this is an appealing narrative, but not a correct one.
If you draw one box around mainstream liberals, and another around young and hungry Twitter hustlers, is it any surprise if the former looks more stodgy? The correct comparison for mainstream liberalism is mainstream conservatism. I think that will prove to be just as humorless.
Counterparts to this article exist, but are a lot harder to find in the comments section of a technolibertarian blog.
Considering that mainstream conservatives have pretty much zero following remaining.
I had a similar wonder, although I think it's fine to not pick on specific people especially if they're smaller accounts.
That being said, I do always wonder how I should evaluate claims that X group was saying A, and now they are saying B, contradicting their earlier statements. This has very different implications for what I should think if the people saying A and B just both happen to be in semi-overlapping spheres vs being the literal same person.
In the former case, it's more of a Motte and Bailey doctrine where the people saying reasonable thing A are providing cover for different people saying B. The annoying thing about that version is that the motte and the bailey can both be fully staffed at all times, but no one involved is actually contradicting themselves.
They'll show when they see this. An irresistible branding opportunity. I'd wager they get a lot more out of this than you do, simply though attention share capture. Not everyone engages in good faith, Scott.
I think most of the really extreme commenters of this school have been internet ferals swinging through. I have definitely read rants on here, mostly from passing ferals, saying that while some poor people are poor because of circumstance, on average the poor are weak, sickly and dumb, and we should let them die to strengthen the species.
I do remember an exchange on here where someone, maybe Scott, maybe a commenter, said that a certain thing would greatly help the world's poor, and someone who comments here quite regularly posted "yeah, but what do I get out of it?"
I for one identify as such a person, and will admit this post struck a nerve.
I bet that Scott has read hundreds of books by Brits, while the only books he has read by Pakistanis are by Kipling.
It took me a few years to realize that the grooming gang rumors were true, but I'm proud to say I posted red meat in 2013:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_real_threat_to_british_elites_steve_sailer
Catgirl Kulak. His whole schtick on Twitter is how only losers care about anything other than their own tribe, and also everyone should be making the streets of London run red with blood right now.
He (and yes it's a he) is a white identitarian, right? So he would view the white grooming gang girls as part of his own tribe and the Pakistani rapists as the outgroup.
Yes, but he's also Canadian, and the lower-class English girls who were the primary victims of Pakistani grooming gangs would be exactly the sort of girls he considers to be rightful spoils of war.
His thinking is simple: white people good, non-white people bad. He also dislikes Jews, and not consider them to be white. He also dislikes Indians and East Asians.
Richard Hanania is the canonical example of a "based post-Christian Nietzchean vitalist". He is a hereditarian and hardcore first-worlders who strongly supports civilizational progress. He likes Jews and Asians, is a big fan of Israel, is a big fans of Singapore (though perhaps they don't like Singapore's low TFR and conformism), likes LKY, likes Milei, likes Bukele, want lots of high-skill immigration etc.
People whose #1 issue is the grooming gangs tend to be hardcore white nationalists or some such and tend to have a lot of sympathy for the white working-class. Richard Hanania makes fun of these people and looks down on them. In fact this article by Scott is in some sense basically a more gentle version of a bunch of Richard Hanania tweets attacking white nationalists.
> His thinking is simple: white people good, non-white people bad. He also dislikes Jews, and not consider them to be white. He also dislikes Indians and East Asians.
wow Im sure those quotes would be interesting, Id be interested in a primary source
https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1796267869157605778
https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1855653289410384100
https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1874702366383243441
https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1848429564655243280
Consistent pattern of negative comments toward non-white groups, Jews, Indians, etc. And he literally has "kulak" in the name so of course he is a fan of the white working class.
Seriously, why even mention that someone like that exists? The world is full of nuts.
Because nuts on social media have turned out to be one of the most influential groups on future social developments in history?
Surely an Anglo-Canadian ethnic nationalist is going to view English girls as being part of the same, well, ethnic nation.
Are you really this clueless? RWers don't consider all foreign countries the same. They care more about people who are more genetiically similar to them, which is a natural human instinct because it is a successful evolutionary strategy and is why you love your relatives more than strangers.
So of course they care much more when indigenous brits whom are their fellow people of European descent get mass raped than when for example Boko Haram mass rapes nigerians.
nothing about htis contradicts BAPism or online RW, NRx or dissident right thought.
If Catgirl Kulak is a he, then who is this person, who has breasts?
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ae74e0c-329e-4f15-bb2c-570ca99eae75_542x590.png
Note: this not an AI generated image. According to AI detecting software it has <1% odds of being AI generated.
Unless this person is a transwoman and you follow the unfashionable custom of calling a transwoman a he?
I don’t know but I once heard at least part of a podcast with catgirl kulak by Alex Kaschuta or someone and the voice was distinctively male.
I guess Kulak is either a transwoman, or a ciswoman with a very male voice (I know one).
Explicitly denies being trans here: https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1834836756509741469
Smoking will get you there eventually.
I've read some of CK's blog and I'd bet actual money whoever wrote that is a smoker, and not a moderate one.
Internet seems to be consistent in calling this Fabienne Farge.
https://www.instagram.com/fireforce.ventures/p/CnnlzmbJ1Zd/
No idea, but I’ve only ever seen him identified as “him.”
This goes back to before he adopted the “catgirl” prefix.
See discussion here: https://www.themotte.org/post/400/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/73644?context=8#context
Kulak is a he. Went on to Alex Kaschuta and said so and everything.
Yeah, I don't know why Scott finds this behavioural pattern to be especially mysterious. The based post-christian vitalist (whoever that is) could easily consider the english working class to be broadly part of their extended genetic and cultural in-group, and hence included in their sphere of moral concern.
...Because that would be racist, and he really doesn't want to believe people are racist.
The kind of people he was talking about in this post, most likely: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers
Who, Walt Bismarck? Walt was a leader in the alt-right famous for making what he calls "racist Disney parodies" and now runs this job stacking thing with the goal of "making white boys rich". While he is no longer a white nationalist and is no longer part of the "alt-right", he continues to self identify proudly as "pro white". He says that white people need to develop business networks and become rich and that this is the goal of his "Tortuga Society". Of course he cares much about white girls getting raped by gangs of Pakistani rapists than black people dying in the third world. I don't think this is a great mystery.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87982934
I understand that you've seen the comment, but others might be interested too
John Arcto and Johaan Kurtz talked a lot about them, but they’re both British, so I’m not exactly surprised they care about their fellow countrymen being raped by immigrants they didn’t want in the country. I can’t think of any Americans wanting an invasion, and I’m definitely in the circles for this. Even Walt Bismark isn’t calling for an invasion.
John Arcto is a 20ish year old British nationalist who like most 20 year olds interested in politics often says some hotheaded things, like go and arrest all of the people involved in gender ideology, cancel all the wokes, we need remigration etc etc, but if you DM him and ask him about his policy proposals they are just normal nationalist proposals within the Overton window, and he’ll be nice to you even if you disagree with him politically.
My intuition is that:
a. This is a salient issue now for media focus reasons, and will stop being salient again in a couple weeks.
b. It's easier for me to see being very worked up about this if you're British than if you're American.
c. It's worthwhile to point out the pathology of policemen not investigating some crimes for fear of being accused of racism, because that's a way you could end up with your police tolerating a lot of crime.
I don't think remigration is particularly far outside the overton window. It was official state policy in Sweden last I checked.
Point conceded. There are various forms of remigration which vary widely in how reasonable they are. On substack Arcto often sounds like he wants some kind of white ethnostate with crazy remigration where you deport the grandchildren of immigrants, but if you ask him what policy he wants in a DM you get something that is more reasonable like Sweden.
When I said remigration I meant some extreme forms of it, I would consider Swedish style remigration to be a normal nationalist policy within the Overton window.
Fair enough.
You know, I have to say Walt Bismarck's conversations with Robert Stark and John Arcto are one of the funniest things I've heard lately. A long day of kissing ass at work and then you hear guys arguing over whether cunnilingus is mystical or not. I spewed my soda all over the screen.
Hanania is pro EA. Yarvin isn't, but that is a side effect of having some 9-D chess explanation of why it's bad that makes no sense.
I’m pretty sure Yarvin thinks that EA is good. I think he just criticizes it because he thinks it does not address the fundamental political and institutional problems of governance which he views as much more important, and he would say a movement by a bunch of naive rationalist autists who doesn’t understand how the world works. I can’t imagine he thinks that bed nets are a particularly bad use of money, given the kind of rationalist adjacent company he keeps.
If your description of Moldbug is right, then I wonder why he doesn't support IIDM https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/improving-institutional-decision-making
Walt Bismarck might be an example.
Walt Bismarck is a former alt right white nationalist figure and is still a practitioner of white identity politics who always emphasizes that he is “pro white” is running the Tortuga job stacking operation (or if you’re cynical, the Tortuga scam) to “make white boys rich”, so of course he is especially worked up about crimes committed against white girls by Pakistani rapists.
To be on the same page, the "based post-Christian vitalist" ethic is an attempt in the West to assert emotional and practical limits to in-group treatment. Non-Western cultures have no such difficulty.
Let's not forget Christianity's previous in-group limits of looking out for Christian converts were superceded by Progressivism's assertion of universal human rights which have been a moral and practical failure (i.e., the 20-year American war in Afghanistan).
The popularization of anything (Nietzsche included) will necessarily be inconsistent and ham-fisted. Insofar as the article is addressing this popularization, its characterization of the vitalist is a straw man. Hanania, at least, is not that simplistic.
I don’t think Scott is floating around our particular gulag, but I have definitely seen this behavior from commenters on the Motte.
Scott is writing in response to me though not in any meaningful way about me.
https://x.com/futuristright/status/1878623841809059881
Or at least I have no idea what I've ever written that would give him the impression that I feel *No* moral duty to the suffering around the world. What I feel is *far less* of one than to people more like me. This isn't just about poverty or IQ; though I bet you the avg IQ of a white kid born in Rotherham is higher than that of Pakistan's top half.
Pakistani elites still do their cousins in a way lower class Britons do not. Pakistani elites were pro-Osama, lower-class Britons are not. Pakistani Elites would kill me for my atheism (if I were born a muslim), lower class Britons would not. Kill every upper class Briton tomorrow, and the emerging society would still within a generation look more like one in which I would want to live in than Pakistan.
So I care about the British lower-class more than I do Pakistanis... generally. This isn't even racism, and I'm an open (soft-white-man's-burden) racist. I felt this way long before I was at all racist. I don't know how to explain these sentiments to someone who lacks them.
---
* My response post will include comments on and maybe from Catgirl Kulak, Covfefe, and Walt Bismarck, Bronze Age Pervert and their views. While I have my disagreements with all, I suppose this post reveals just how much closer we are to each other than Scott Alexander's worldview.
You're something of a rather rarer kind of writer because you are in between the two camps I discuss here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87971631
The Hanania camp and the white nationalist camp. I would say you're a mix of them, mostly in the Hanania camp talking about progress and scientific achievements and all of those good things but there is a bit of white nationalism, thinking that Hitler salutes are funny because they own the libs, getting extremely angry over Roterham in a way Hanania wouldn't, saying HBD demands racism against blacks etc.
I guess Walt would also fall into this category, and perhaps so would Richard Hoste.
Hanania 100% believes HBD demands racism against Blacks.
In fact the refusal of whites to be racist against blacks is the #2 reason he's not a white nationalist!
I mean Hanania is a strong opponent of black nationalism, but this is not the same as “racism against blacks”. Black people are human beings. Opposition to black nationalism is not “racism against blacks”.
Go to PoliticalCompassMemes on reddit, you'll see what type of people ussually don't care about foreign kids suffering, but suddenly get obsessed with the topic when there's an accusation that Muslims are responsible.
Even the most pro capitalist, libertarian “better rape whistle” advocate believes in a Night Watchman state which would prosecute rapists with zeal. I’m not sure I see so much contradiction here…
I think once you have acknowledged that you can care about the inhabitants of other countries that are incompetent at their core night watchman duties, you have opened yourself up to caring about the inhabitants of lots of kleptocratic and genocidal states.
Also, what about immigration policy?
Pro capitalists have always included extreme anti government types as well.as moderate smaller government types...even if the no-government position doesn't make sense to you. It doesn't make much sense to me , either.
It's not that they care about the inhabitants, it's that they want to see evil destroyed. Thus, such desire is compatible with not actually trying to help people.
Yes, there is at least the possibility they are anti-perpetrator more than pro victim. As everyone is saying.
The solution to that is imperialist war. That's not an option, so people don't bother spending energy on it.
The reason people are outraged at the Pakistani rape syndicates is because the UK government, was locking people up for saying mean things about Pakistanis (and others) while at the same time looking at 12 year-olds reporting rapes and responding that they were little whores trying to stoke racial hatred, and then call their "boyfriends" (the middle-aged Pakistani men running the rape cartel) to pick them up.
It was literally treason, siding with foreigners, who live in foreign enclaves, against the natives that they ostensibly represent and are part of.
Treason is a pretty good approximation to the sentiments at work, yes, although it might not fit the technical definition.
The desire to set up a British style governorship and the impulse to sent mosquito nets to Congo are two completely different impulses. Not understanding this is why you are conflating them. Both the desire to send mosquito nets to Africa and the desire to ignore/coverup immigrant rape gangs comes from the same impulse: Aversion to responsibility, in two forms. First an aversion to holding people responsible for their own conditions and choices, and second an aversion to taking responsibility yourself.
For all his faults, a dictatorial colonizer who sets up courts and police in a disorganized country is doing real, sustainable (so long as western progressives dont butt in) good for the populace. In ways mosquito net guy can never get close to (who knows, our colonizer might get his country to the place where they can actually manufacture their own nets!). But this isn't the fun kind of charity that makes you feel good. You have to be able to put criminals in prison, you have to let some beggars starve to death, etc. But that is how you do real good.
Its just like prosecuting Pakistanis in England. Doing whats right isn't what is easy or what feels good (if you buy into some of the leftist talking points regarding racism/other isms).
Rhodesia and South Africa were very rich for SSA countries.
India's per-capita GDP was basically stable under the British Raj, at the same time the population roughly doubled, which is actually not what you would expect under pre-industrial malthusian assumptions. The per-capita risk of death by famine also dropped by about a factor of 4, and was concentrated in regions outside of British control.
There are plenty of examples of African countries whose economies and per-capita incomes expanded substantially under colonialism, although the data suggests they were statistically above subsistence level even prior to this period.
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498321000462
Honestly, no you haven't necessarily opened yourself up to that. I mean, if you accept your universalist premises, then yes. If all lives are of equal worth, then if you care about white English children, you should care about Pakistani children.
But these people don't accept that all lives are of equal worth. If you're broadly pro-white (and this extends beyond outright 1488-style white nationalists), you care about white people more than others. English Rotherham kids yes, African malaria sufferers no. I doubt you've run into many white nationalists in your everyday life for obvious reasons, but I'm sure you've run into rabbis who seem much more exercised about Jewish suffering than other types.
Frankly, this is the default, normal human position, and universalism is a late development by post-Axial Age religions like Christianity and Buddhism (I will let you comment on Judaism), just as the use of reason to understand the universe with things like science and philosophy is a hack of a tool designed for persuasion. Most people care more about people like them. The Greco-Roman gods were supposed to keep the polis or empire going; elsewhere in the world you'd pray for rain for your tribe. Confucianism prescribes concentric loyalties to family and state, (EDIT: though you do owe things to humanity as well) . Even older (and the modern more aggressive) forms of Islam have a House of Islam and a House of War that would have been recognizable to any medieval crusader (with the positions flipped, of course). (And there was a House of Treaty too, which people conveniently forget.)
This is where the 'post-Christian' bit comes in, I think. It's been said, by both Christian conservative and leftist commentators, that if you remove Christianity from conservatism you get vitalism or tribalism, which in the modern world manifests most easily as simple racism of the sort Ibram Kendi's always talking about.
Immigration policy's a separate, related issue, but this comment's long enough already. I think you can see how the same logic holds.
Noted, and hopefully corrected.
Yeah, I agree a lot with your argument. I also consider myself to be somewhat of a "tribalist" in terms of preferring Western/European culture to others for the most part, even though I am also a "globalist" in many aspects. But I fully understand why White Americans would care more about the children in England than about those in Pakistan. Interestingly, I feel like if the same situation were to happen in the USA as in England, I'm not sure that the reaction by European Nationalists would be the same. Overall, I feel like the "Whites as in-group" phenomenon is mostly a US-specific one, because of the history of racial dynamics there, and doesn't apply that much in Europe (though the internet is changing that a bit I guess).
My guess is that during the time when the worst of the Rotherdam stuff was going on, it was still better to be a poor English girl in that town than a poor Haitian girl in Port Au Prince.
I think you're misinterpreting the concerns as purely altruistic rather than being more fear-driven. If institutions in a culturally similar country are abandoning their core "night watchman" duties for ideological reasons that are also prevalent in your own country, it's reasonable to worry about those trends spreading if left unchecked.
If one believes the engine of progress is "The West", it's important that the engine doesn't break down.
This. People talk about the grooming gangs story because it has a political moral relevant to any country in the Western world: similar stuff could happen in your town too, if not right now, then after only a slight further shift towards looser immigration policy and more political correctness and reflexive anti-racism. That's unlike extreme poverty in poor countries, which there isn't a risk of happening in your town.
There's also what many others said, that many Westerners feel closer to other Westerners. But even without that, if something makes a talking point relevant to domestic hot button issues, it's going to be talked about.
Thirded. I don't want Woke to impede policing here (writing from the USA).
We know that Britain, once upon a time, was perfectly capable of being a competent night-watchman, and in principle could be so again with the appropriate political, legal, and/or demographic adjustments.
A lot of other kleptocratic/genocidal states could have rather more limited potential for reform, for HBD reasons that you are perfectly well aware of. I don't know if I'm *personally* that pessimistic, but I don't find the 'double standard' here incomprehensible.
What about immigration policy? Are you trying to say that letting millions of people per year into the country is a moral obligation on the level of prosecuting child rape?
You of all people should understand that morality is not a matter of "always do the virtuous thing without worrying about the consequences." Every action has harms and benefits. It is much less clear that the benefits outweigh the harms for "let anyone who wants to immigrate anytime they want to" than for "stop child rapers". Are you not a consequentialist?
Caring about helping foreign people is not the same as caring about *villainizing* racial groups and using foreign examples to do it.
When the right calls for a Muslim ban and uses examples of ISIS brutalizing women in the Middle East to justify it, that doesn't mean they want to do anything to help women in the Middle East.
> Even the most pro capitalist, libertarian “better rape whistle” advocate believes in a Night Watchman state which would prosecute rapists with zeal.
errrr no
My preferred solution wasnt offered
We'd probably also want a privately funded police force and judiciary etc to do something about this.
Lynch mobs?
*Victorian gasp* How ghastly to suggest lynching on a public forum. Mobs would be collectivist and easily manipulated.
Well, if you don't believe in the Nigh Watchmen state, you most likely believe that a privately funded police should do something about it, too.
Would you? Why, exactly, would the privately-funded police be working for the victims instead of the gangsters? The whole point of "privately-funded" is that they work for whoever pays them. Heck, gangs and organized crime families are more-or-less private, self-funding police forces already.
Because white people have more money.
Mostly not the families of the girls who were forced into prostitution by those pimps, and certainly not the girls themselves--they had nothing, not even the earnings from their prostitution, since that went to the pimps.
But white people would fund the punishment of the perpetrators because the perps are Pakistani, just as they're doing now. Problem solved.
Most of the perpetrators are walking free because whites are too cucked to do anything lol.
I don't really know about the people you're talking about, but how do they square the idea of loving the strong people with only helping family and friends?
With a lot of cope.
They don't.
It's the same as all the Leopards Eating Faces victims you see around.
"I voted for the candidate who's position on anyone who isn't straight is that they are a pervert degen child predator " Followed by "but it's okay because I'm one of the special good ones".
Oh, they're only friends with other white people.
The problem here is not Christian or Nietzschean morality. Imagine if the scandal happened in the Britain of the 19th or 18th or at the beginning of the 20th. Far away from an ultra-based Nietzschean society, but the reaction would have been probably grim and bloody. Ditto for all European countries, massacres happened for way less.
The problem is that we had a mix of old population, media control, and literal anti-European ethnic propaganda that see basic Nationalism as evil. I think that we can agree that LARPing is stupid, but we have a growing situation of "if you get killed maybe you deserve it"
Another loss caused by the new morality of the 1968.
And I think that often people take the wrong approach regarding empathy towards the outgroup. Charity is a creation of the European morality, because opennes and anti-tribalism are good and positive for the flourishing of a stable civilization. The problem is, again, use it as an hammer to smash the nail, and that nail is Europe.
> Charity is a creation of the European morality
Is it? I can think of a least one dude whose shtick was being big on charity and who was living in the middle east. Or was he European because the land he lived was part of the Roman Empire? Or because the modern state who controls that land is allowed to participate in the ESC?
Nor do I think that charity is uniquely Christian.
Charity may not be uniquely Christian, but it is uniquely monotheistic (in the West, at least). Jews, Christians, and Muslims do charity. The polytheistic pagans they replaced in Europe and the Middle East did not.
Don't Buddhist doe charity?
I don't know enough about Buddhism to say. In the West (read, Europe+Middle East) nobody was doing what we would recognize as charity. You might donate your money to build public baths or something, but the point of that wasn't to help commoners who were suffering it was explicitly to glorify your family name.
Sounds like you don't actually know much about what non-monotheistic cultures do in general, so maybe generalizing about them isn't a very safe thing to do until you learn more? I think it's perfectly fair to say that the early Christians were substantially *more* charitable than the culture that surrounded them: it does not therefore follow that no polytheistic cultures in any time or place had any notion of charity.
> nobody was doing what we would recognize as charity. You might donate your money to build public baths or something, but the point of that wasn't to help commoners who were suffering it was explicitly to glorify your family name.
That's normal charity. Where do you imagine the glory comes from?
This is pretty overstated. The Greco-Roman world had no *organized poverty relief*; it absolutely had a notion of charity. He's Cicero, for instance, in de Officiis:
"The case of the man who is overwhelmed by misfortune is different from that of the one who is seeking to better his condition, though he suffers from no actual distress. It will be the duty of charity to incline more to the unfortunate, unless, perchance, they deserve their misfortune."
And here's Seneca the Elder reporting a speech of Gallio, in the Controversiae:
"Some laws are unwritten—but more immutable than all written ones. I may be a son, dependent on my father; yet I can hand alms to a beggar, throw dust on a corpse. It is wrong not to stretch out a hand to the prostrate: this is the common right of humanity. "
"The Greco-Roman world had no *organized poverty relief*"
What about the grain dole?
The dole was a price stability program more than anything, though admittedly there's some overlap.
Sikhs have been doing organized charity since the days of Guru Nanak (six hundred years). During the NorCal fires a few years ago, they set up food kitchens and shelter for the displaced fire victims. I'm sure they're active in SoCal this fire season.
Well, Sikhs *are* monotheists, and technically FLWAB only said "monotheistic" not "Abrahamic" (though he possibly only had the latter in mind as all his examples are the latter)
One could argue that the moral circle is largest in western Christian societies though, even amongst secular ppl in those societies. There are few charities for poverty in other continents originating in, say, Singapore or Taiwan despite relatively high levels of wealthy by global standards.
Culture matters in terms of expression of charitable impulse, and how non-ingroup restrained western charity is is an anomalous aspect of W.E.I.R.D. countries world-historically, emphasis on the W & D.
At least that's the weaker position I think is more strongly defensible.
We should probably use the Japanese government to illustrate this claim.
I would say Trump's platform is that we should stop treating foreigners and minorities as a protected/privileged class immune to the normal processes of law enforcement and granted special access to jobs, loans, and financial relief, which in many ways they do enjoy.
Non-ingroup charity is a social technology that has been discovered multiple times, most of them not even in Europe. Even Europe's version of it was mostly discovered by early Christians, who were mostly Middle Eastern.
Yeah, I'm not sure about this either. A lot of European "White" Nationalists tend to think that Europeans are uniquely out-group oriented, but if that's the case, why did nation-states arise in Europe first, and why are some physical features unique to parts of Europe (eye/hair colors etc.)? Also, Muslim Arabs for example, seemed to have no problems mingling with the local population in their expansion.
No, it's really simpler than that: In the early 2000s, the British authorities did not see rape, even of young children, as very serious at all. Several major BBC celebrities have since been outed as rapists, pedophiles, or both. This was an era with an absolutely insane problem with pedophiles.
Wealthy elites get away with a lot of things worldwide. Always has been the case. Whats usually not common is for a lot of poorer immigrants to get away raping the children of the native majority. Like Pakistani elites probably rape Pakistanis kids all the time. But I can't imagine a gang of British taxi drivers who arrived in the country yesterday and raping Muslim kids for decades getting away from it. No(non-Muslim) immigrates to Pakistan so its not a fair comparison but still. Maybe switch it with a reasonably wealthy non-Western country.
Maybe this just shows how advanced Britain and Western liberal democracies really are. Justice is so color blind in Britain than both the native elites and Muslim immigrants can rape local kids for decades without any consequence!
I think that's more the case in southeast Asia rather than south Asia.
No; this was a pervasive issue across the entirety of British society. The elite cases are just the most brazen and high-profile.
The distinction is that people assume "The UK lets foreigners rape without consequence" when British natives also faced fairly lax standards of prosecution and could also rape children with relative impunity. Obviously this did play a factor, but the bigger factor is that they just didn't see it as a big problem, which is reflective of the attitude of the era.
Idk man, and maybe its just a third world mentality but reflexively it just seems weird that poor immigrants can get away with things, just like the natives. Like I expect wealthy native elites to never face any consequence, poor natives to get away some but not all the time, and poor immigrants to never really get away with crime but I guess in Britain all three groups equally never face any consequences. Very strange country to me at least.
They didn't face any consequences for raping children because at the time this was just not seen as a serious offense in the same way that murder would have been.
20 years ago child rape was taken as seriously as now. 2005 wasn’t the Stone Age.
What are you talking about? Paedophilia was a huge tabloid issue in the UK in the early 2000s!
'Following the abduction and killing of Sarah Payne in July 2000, News of the World began campaigning for laws that publicly disclosed personal details of people convicted of sex offenses. After the government stated that it had no plans to implement such laws, the newspaper, edited by Rebekah Brooks, began publishing names of sex offenders itself in name and shame on July 23, 2000.[8][6]
After the first issue was published, several lynch mobs and protestors gathered in several parts of the United Kingdom. A group of mothers from Hampshire organized nightly marches and held "vigils" near homes of people convicted of sex offenders. In Paulsgrove, a life-size doll was hanged while protestors chanted "we'll lynch the pervs". A Greater Manchester man had his home surrounded by a mob of 300 people, who shouted "pedophile, rapist, beast, pervert" at him and dragged a six-year-old child to his door while asking "do you want this one?".'
>British natives also faced fairly lax standards of prosecution and could also rape children with relative impunity.
Is this a UK/USA difference? Writing from the USA, at least the impression that I get (admittedly online) is that popular sentiment here about rapists of children is pretty close to "burn them at the stake" - though I don't know how well this correlates with law enforcement's actions.
Have you never heard of sex tourism?
Sex tourism similarity is very weak, it's sex between older man/younger woman of different ethnicity ok but
- economic/class power is reversed
- rape is not common in sex tourism, except with quite broad definition of rape
- the broken laws (and, more important, the typical application of those laws) are (very) different in the country where it happen.
So yeah, comparing the 2 muddle the issue more that it clarify it. Same as Scott's number 2: it ignores the very simple criterium of victim in ingroup/perpetror in outgroup. There is nothing mysterious about it, this is a trigger in all cultures, a trigger of nuclear magnitude...Just discover (and admit) who is your ingroup/outgroup for the matter at hand, and the difference in outrage and preferred actions becomes very easy to understand.
Scott ignoring this, while he introduced ingroups/outgroups and have discussed how import they are seems...strangely myopic.
Unless you are equating rape with prostitution - in which case, please elaborate - this is an extremely weak response.
Prostitution debate is full of equivocation, strawmans, motte and bailey and goalpost shifting, from both sides. Well, most discussions have large doses of this, those fallacies are always the most popular I think, but this topic is a specially rich source of those gems.
Opposition will use nastier and nastier form of exploitation (they have no choice), less and less control of the prostitute regarding the term of contract (it's rape) and larger and larger age differences (they are childs), until they get the support they want. Reality is they oppose any element of transaction in sex (or, more precisely, they insist any element of transaction is enough to legally ban the kind of sex they do not like. Because else it would ban almost all sex, because like almost all activities it contains transaction - if only of your time (which I guess is the real position of some prostitution opponents, but they are fringe - I hope ;-) ).
On the other side, any sex is OK as long as there is a contract, even implicit. And to support this, they will attack all form of constraints that may make the explicit contract look more forced than other types of contracts, typically employment contract: economic distress, black mail, power imbalance,.... They systematically show examples where the contract is troublefree (happy participants, participants clearly able to form contracts in general (legal age, no dependence,...), no lasting consequences, no obstacle to stop recurrence,....Until basically the only opponents left are those opposing classic work contracts.
Still, I have far more sympathy with the later (not a hard guess looking at how I exposed the sides. At least they will agree to roughly say what kind of prostitution is OK and what kind is not if you insist being accurate, without shifting the goalposts almost immediately.
The former, no, they will never do that.
Thank you for your elaborate response. I agree with you on most your points, I erroneously replied to your comment instead of the grand-parent. Apologies.
I am under the impression that a lot of sex tourism involves sex with girls who are 13 years old or younger. I do pretty much equate this with rape. I imagine many, possibly even most, sex tourists, are not attempting to have sex with adolescents, they're just trying to get a better deal. This is still a sin but not even close to as bad as trying to have sex with a 12 year old for money.
Your impression is 99.9% wrong, except if you define sex tourism as people going abroad to have sex with girls less than 13. In this case it's trivially true but then sex tourism is not a mass phenomenon, just like pedophilia with girl this young is also completely fringe.
I guess your impression is precisely linked to constant motte and Bailey: the girls are always underage in the anti-prostitution discourse, but underage can mean anything between less than 13yo to younger that the guy.
The bulk of sex tourism is just what the name imply: guy going abroad to have sex because they get it easier than home. Easier means cheaper, or better quality for the same price, or less risky depending on the laws at home....could even mean pickup is easier, no prostitution aspect... Although this is also less commonly referred as sex tourism because it would include the typical adolescent Holliday couples. Still, when travelling to countries of different cultures and lower wealth, some people will use sex tourism even in the (rare) non-prostitution case...
It's just mondialisation applied to prostitution
I would have been skeptical about what @neco-artic wrote prior to reading large sections of the Jay Report. Having read those sections, I can't help but agree with him.
The report makes clear that racial issues played *a* role in causing this issue to be swept under the rug. But comparatively, they played much less of a role than the fact that
a. the victims were nearly all lower-class girls with psychiatric problems who were in and out of social housing, and
b. the local police basically didn't care when the families of girls in that demographic claimed their daughters were being raped -- not because the perpetrators were British Muslims, but because they simply weren't exercised about sexual assault against minors.
What I expected going into the report was that the police would start off upset about reported sexual assaults, but then moderate their response when they learned the ethnic identity of the perpetrators. That's not what happened at all. In fact, from the moment of reporting, police would downplay victim complaints and come up with excuses to avoid looking into allegations. Their basic assumption was that these girls and their families were white trash prone to fits of drama, whose mission in life was to waste police time. When a family came in and said that their daughter had been abducted by Pakistani cab drivers, they'd say, "Lots of girls have older boyfriends." When the parents would say their daughter was missing, they'd say, "She'll turn up."
This is all before race enters the equation. The role of the British police's tolerance for both childhood sexual abuse and apathy towards the well-being of poor children (irrespective of the race of their perpetrators) is by now extremely under-discussed as a factor underlying the Rotherham scandal.
To be clear, race *was* relevant to the events, but often not in the ways people imagine it being so. In terms of the police response, it seemed to operate at a higher level of the bureaucracy -- senior police pressuring their subordinates not to mention the racial angle to the press. It was also relevant in the sense that British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were *probably* more likely than average to commit these crimes in the first place (I say "probably" here because the data here isn't great, but I think it's highly suggestive that a significant disparity exists).
No, the phenomena is replicated across European countries. Everytime a non-European kill, maim or brutally massacre an European, the reaction is way more calm than when the opposite happens.
Is it? What makes you say that? Do Europeans regularly engage in ethnic cleansing against foreigners?
That's really not the case. It tends to be deeply politicised. The anti-immigrants faction uses it to make the case that all immigrants are nothing but brutal barely restrained berserkers waiting to unleash their fury on the poor civilized locals. The maybe-don't-lynch-the-immigrants faction falls for the classic blunder of "if conceding that this has happened gives even 1 cm of territory to our opponents, even if the deranged conclusions they draw are the real problem, let's just pretend this has not happened at all" and beclowns itself in the process.
This explanation doesn't really work with the official statements that investigations shouldn't be done because that might stigmatize the Pakistanis. You are instead saying that investigation wouldn't have stigmatized the Pakistanis because they weren't doing anything wrong.
I agree. Liberals took the old antiracist injunction too far, and wound up overcorrecting to be racist against their own group. The only people to care were of course people who were racist in the old fashion.
From the prewoke liberal point of view, there are no good guys here.
>and wound up overcorrecting to be racist against their own group.
And sanctimonious about it as well, to add insult to bigotry.
All sorts of things we we would be shocked by were tolerated in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Yeah, exactly. Steve Sailer had a point when he wrote that gang-rapists seem to assume the larger British society doesn't really mind their activities, since no mobs attempted to burn down their neighborhoods, which, where they came from, would happen for far less.
We rightly understand that "tribalism" and "racism" can be ugly and the cause of much evil... But humans are both naturally tribal, and responsive to incentives. In the past, ethnic minorities kept their own people in line, in part because they knew transgressions against the majority could bring retribution down on them all.
On one hand we have this belief that there are only individuals, and to acknowledge that there are groups and that humans often act in groupish ways is a moral failing (classical liberalism)...OTOH the (incompatible) notion that one race is the source of all evil, so it is virtuous to give preference to other races (wokism)... Both are turning out to be delusional and threats to survival on the individual and collective level.
I don't want pogroms or anything, yet, but by the point at which they are systemically gang-raping and torturing your female children with impunity... For f***s sake, there worse things in the world than "racism". Cry me a bloody river about how they had to hear people use unflattering words about them, or how they aren't positively depicted often enough in the movies that they themselves don't have the talent or infrastructure to make. No one has an intrinsic right to live anywhere they please, much less to form ethnic enclaves in the territory of another.
Imagine if I opened a white-only frat house on an Indian reservation, encouraged other white college bros to move in, we started routinely and systematically gang-raping the little Indian girls. Can you imagine the response? Would the locals be justified in responding with possibly lethal violence, burning our frat house to the ground and driving us (including even those of us who may not have participated personally?) out of town on the points of pitchforks? Especially if the authorities ignored complaints and protected us, leaving them with no recourse other than just accepting that we rape their children and that's just the way it is? I would say abso-f***ing-lutely.
The Catholic Church kinda did that, at small scale, in isolated places. Put the known child rapists as priests in remote Alaskan areas with no police and access to kids...
Here's what I wrote a dozen years ago:
Strikingly, the Pakistani pimps and johns seem astonished that anybody would object to their behavior. If the girls’ parents cared about protecting their daughters, in their view, they would keep them locked up at home like good Muslims do.
The pimps seemed convinced that since their victims’ families haven’t organized lethal vendettas against them like any honorable Pakistani family would, they must not have cared.
Moreover, since the English people hadn’t carried out mass communal violence, such as burning down Pakistani neighborhoods in the time-honored South Asian manner, clearly they didn’t mind.
And if the English government didn’t want Pakistanis to act Pakistani, they wouldn’t let them into England, now would they?
You have to admit the defendants have a point.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_real_threat_to_british_elites_steve_sailer/2/
Wait, what? You're saying 18th century Britain would have given the slightest shit about poor girls being exploited? I, uh, disagree.
They sure as hell would have cared if the perpretrators weren't white.
And that was a good thing. It ensured that they never would have dared, or if they did, they would very swiftly be incapable of continuing. I'm not a WN; if I was I would happily admit it. I lived in a non-white country for 10 years and my wife is only partially white. Oh, and I happen to live in an all black neighborhood. It's a decent neighborhood. I really don't care. But when racially/ethnically/culturally distinct foreigners have formed enclaves and are literally gang-raping thousands of girls, targeting them specifically by race, and still you're greatest concern is "oh no, someone might have negative feelings about these people"... This is a kind of brain damage only W.E.I.R.D. white liberals seem capable of. It takes it to an extreme that even at my most right-wing, I would have taken to be over-the-top hyperbolic satire, not reality. Sometimes there really is an us and a them. The "primitive" "tribal" impulses we have exist for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Riots
This is a society that massively rioted when official discrimination against British(not even Irish) Catholics was somewhat reduced. I can't even imagine what the response would have been if a hundreds of "Mohemmedans" were found to be raping Protestant girls for decades.
Uh, that's what happened in this century.
No it hasn't. The Gordon Riots had a body count of several hundred. We haven't gotten to the point where people are razing Pakistani communities to the ground yet.
"In case you’ve been under a rock recently, in the early 2010s, several organized child sexual assault rings got busted in Britain - but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Muslim and busting them might seem racist."
I find it hard to believe that that was the real reason. I know the police claim that, and it's a very convenient reason for them, but the British police otherwise don't seem terribly worried about looking racist.
And it's not like they did anything about Jimmy Savile either. Say what you will about the American handling of Epstein, he went to prison twice and died there. I think maybe the police in the UK are just really bad on sex crimes.
I mean, plenty of hard failures in the US to investigate sexual predators. Epstein's original plea deal was fuckin' bananas.
But also, I share your skepticism that the story is literally this simple. It sounds like something out of a Breitbart fever dream about DEI. I welcome more in-depth reporting about it that hopefully clarifies things.
Multiple components I guess? You had resistance against looking into this deeply at each stage. The local councils in question were often corrupt, the thing mostly happened within working class and so it was ignored by other social classes, the state didn't want to look closely because of the fear of riots, respectable media didn't want to raise it too much because it didn't really fit, and then the people largely didn't want to read up on it either because it sounds too much like a racist wet dream.
or something like that, I didn't phrase everything perfectly
I do sort of want to point out that it was ultimately the most establishment media of all, The Times, that exposed the whole scandal. Not the most important aspect but there’s even a little ‘blame “the media” as if it’s just one thing’ from Scott above and I think it’s important to acknowledge we wouldn’t know about this at all if it wasn’t for a journalist called Andrew Norfolk.
People have been reporting about this for years. The original investigative journalism of Andrew Norfolk and Julie Bindel is still there. Knock yourself out.
Obviously if you only read what Elon Musk has tweeted about it, you're going to have read an oversimplified narrative, because Musk isn't an investigative journalist, he's the world's richest keyboard warrior.
The police get a lot of criticism (rightfully) but the problem was the social workers/local government officials who *should* have been protecting the girls, but instead were all hands-off, let's not impose our values, twelve year olds can consent to sex, let's not be racist, and who set policy about "let's not do anything that could be seen as oppressing brown people". A lot of those heads should have rolled, but instead went on to similar jobs in local government elsewhere.
https://x.com/PrivateEyeNews/status/1877765507572535367
"After five men were jailed this month for a string of sexual offences against four girls aged 12-16, Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham council’s children and young people’s services, told the post-trial press conference of fears that one or all of the girls could have been killed.
“I think they were in very serious danger, possibly of death,” she said, adding that she was glad “we got to the root of this before a fatality happened”. The families of the 12-year-old, two 13-year-olds and the 16-year-old who were raped may well ask why social workers didn’t get to the “root” of what was happening well before police moved in.
Ms Thacker let it slip that the girls were already under “child protection” plans, supposedly under the protection of soical services, while the gang were “grooming” and abusing them. She said: “When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move those girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham”. But she admitted social workers knew something of the abuse in the late summer of 2008, months before police acted in December of that year.
The Eye asked Rotherham how long the girls had been “known” to social services before the sexual abuse came to light. As we went to press, no answer was forthcoming.
Ms Thacker, meanwhile, blames the parents: “At the end of the day I would put the responsibility back on the parents. They need to realise these are their children. Parents do have a duty.” That’s social services off the hook, then!"
That later became 1,400 and not 4 girls who turned out to have been abused by the grooming and rape gang.
Yet there was no problem taking back children in care because their foster parents belonged to the wrong political party, then giving them back to allegedly abusive parents because the argument over culture was accepted by a judge:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/30/ukip-row-many-reasons-children-removed
"Joyce Thacker, the council's director of children and young people's services, was criticised last weekend when she appeared to admit that Ukip members might not be suitable foster parents for non-British children. "These children are not UK children and we were not aware of the foster parents having strong political views. There are some strong views in the Ukip party and we have to think of the future of the children," she said last weekend."
That one is tough, but you see even in 2012 the problems faced: social workers claim father is sexually and physically abusive and family is living in overcrowded and bad conditions. Children are taken into care. Then the foster parents are claimed to be anti-immigrant because of UKIP membership, parents go to court, and children are placed back in the alleged abusive situation since a judge accepts that "the birth parents successfully argued that the council had failed in their duty to ensure the children enjoyed the linguistic right to learn and speak the language of their birth".
Who's right here, who's wrong? Ms. Thacker was the one who said in 2010 (pace "Private Eye") that it was the parents' responsibility to ensure their children were safe. She was eventually forced to resign in 2014, but not without getting a nice payout:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-29674059
"Rotherham Council's director of children's services was paid £40,000 to leave in the wake of the child sex abuse scandal, it has been revealed.
Joyce Thacker resigned last month after weeks of pressure following the publication of the Jay Report., external
It was discovered shortly before she quit that she had been on sick leave.
The council told BBC Radio Sheffield the amount paid to Mrs Thacker was less than the contractual notice entitlement.
The payout came to light following an Freedom Of Information request, external from the Sheffield Star.
Mrs Thacker left her post by "mutual agreement" in the wake of the report, which detailed the sexual abuse of 1,400 children in the town, mainly by gangs of men of Pakistani heritage, from 1997 to 2013."
It became 1400 in the British press, where projected estimates count as victims.
It does seem to have been that simple: a combination of "these girls are low-class, they're naturally whores and liars", fears of seeming to be racist, and a wish that by sweeping it under the carpet it would all go away on the part of local councillors and police. Before it all blew up, there had been *three* different reports that were ignored or suppressed:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28942986
"An estimate that 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 is among the key findings of an independent report by Professor Alexis Jay, external into the handling of child sexual exploitation (CSE) by social services and police in the South Yorkshire town.
Prof Jay's report describes the abuse as "appalling" and says it included the rape of girls as young as 11 by "large numbers of male perpetrators".
Children were raped by multiple attackers, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated, the report revealed.
Some were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, while others were threatened with guns, made to watch "brutally violent rapes" and warned they would be next if they told anyone.
The report said the "collective failures" of political and officer leadership were "blatant" over the first 12 years covered by the inquiry.
Senior managers within social care were said to have "underplayed" the scale and seriousness of the problem.
Police were said to have given CSE no priority, regarding many child victims "with contempt" and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.
The report found that three other publications in 2002, 2003 and 2006 provided "stark evidence" to the police and council.
The first of these was suppressed, which the report said had led to suggestions of a cover-up, while the other two were ignored.
Staff were said to have believed the extent of CSE had been exaggerated, while some were "overwhelmed" by the numbers of cases involved.
The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the victims were young white girls.
Yet the report found that councillors failed to engage with the town's Pakistani-heritage community during the inquiry period.
Some councillors were said to have hoped the issue would "go away", thinking it was a "one-off problem".
The report said several staff members were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so.
Several councillors interviewed believed highlighting the race element would "give oxygen" to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion."
The Jay Report is here. It's very even-handed and describes the difficulty that all the services were working under: too many cases, not enough staff and funding, crossed wires, lack of emphasis by the police on child sex abuse crime in relation to other crimes, and the likes.
https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham
But then you read this - fathers who went to get their daughters being arrested instead and you have to ask "what the hell was going on there?":
"Experiences of Exploited Children
5.6 It is difficult to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that the victims of sexual exploitation in Rotherham have endured over the years. Victims were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the North of England,
5.7 abducted, beaten and intimidated. Some of their experiences were described in 36 national media reports. We read three case files that had been covered by the media, and considered the reporting to be accurate.
5.8 We read cases where a child was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, children who were threatened with guns, children who witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other.
5.9 In two of the cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene. In a small number of cases (which have already received media attention) the victims were arrested for offences such as breach of the peace or being drunk and disorderly, with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children.
5.10 There are numerous historic examples (up to the mid-2000s) of children being stalked by their abusers, and some extreme cases of violent threats or actual assaults on the victims and their families.
5.11 One parent, who agreed to her child being placed in a residential unit in order to protect her, wrote to children’s social care expressing her fears for her daughter’s safety. She described her despair that instead of being protected, her child was being exposed to even worse abuse than when she was at home:
“My child (age 13) may appear to be a mature child, yet some of her actions and the risks to which she constantly puts herself are those of a very immature and naïve person. She constantly stays out all night getting drunk, mixing with older mature adults, and refuses to be bound by any rules.”
5.12 One child who was being prepared to give evidence received a text saying the perpetrator had her younger sister and the choice of what happened next was up to her. She withdrew her statements. At least two other families were terrorised by groups of perpetrators, sitting in cars outside the family home, smashing windows, making abusive and threatening phone calls. On some occasions child victims went back to perpetrators in the belief that this was the only way their parents and other children in the family would be safe. In the most extreme cases, no one in the family believed that the authorities could protect them.
...5.17 Schools raised the alert over the years about children as young as 11, 12 and 13 being picked up outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown males in Rotherham, other local towns and cities, and further afield. Typically, children were courted by a young man whom they believed to be their boyfriend. Over a period of time, the child would be introduced to older men who cultivated them and supplied them with gifts, free alcohol and sometimes drugs. Children were initially flattered by the attention paid to them, and impressed by the apparent wealth and sophistication of those grooming them."
EDIT: You read this, and you come away wanting heads on pikes. And if it didn't happen then, it should happen now.
Oh, and charming examples of acts by the authorities such as this:
"5.21 Child A (2000) was 12 when the risk of sexual exploitation became known. She was associating with a group of older Asian men and possibly taking drugs. She disclosed having had intercourse with 5 adults. Two of the adults received police cautions after admitting to the Police that they had intercourse with Child A. Child A continued to go missing and was at high risk of sexual exploitation. A child protection case conference was held. It was agreed by all at the conference that Child A should be registered. However, the CID representative argued against the category of sexual abuse being used because he thought that Child A had been ‘100% consensual in every incident’. This was overruled, with all others at the case conference demonstrating a clear understanding that this was a crime and a young child was not capable of consenting to the abuse she had suffered. She was supported appropriately once she was placed on the child protection register."
"In my professional opinion as a police officer, this 12 year old consented and was able to consent to sex with adult men, so you can't call it sexual abuse".
"5.23 Child C (2002) was 14 when sexual exploitation was identified. She was referred several times to children’s social care between 2002 and 2004 because of family breakdown. She was described as being out of control. Her mother voiced her concerns about Child C being sexually active, going missing and repeated incidents of severe intoxication when she had been plied with drink by older males. Several initial assessments were carried out and some family support was offered. The case was then closed. The social worker’s assessment was that Child C’s mother was not able to accept her growing up. In fact, she was displaying what are now known to be classic indicators of child sexual exploitation from the age of 11. By the age of 13, she was at risk from violent perpetrators, associating with other victims of sexual exploitation, misusing drugs, and at high risk. She was referred to Risky Business whose staff identified these risk factors and addressed them through a planned programme of preventive work."
"Your 14 year old is drinking, getting drunk, and having sex with older guys? Sounds like a you problem, just accept she's growing up!"
"5.24 Child D (2003) was 13 when she was groomed by a violent sexual predator who raped and trafficked her. Her parents, Risky Business and Child D herself all
understood the seriousness of the abuse, violence and intimidation she suffered.
Police and children’s social care were ineffective and seemed to blame the child. A core assessment was done but could not be traced on the file. An initial assessment accurately described the risks to Child D but appeared to blame her for ‘placing herself at risk of sexual exploitation and danger’. Other than Risky Business, agencies showed no comprehension that she had been groomed at 13, that she was terrified of the perpetrators, and that her attempts to placate them were themselves a symptom of the serious emotional harm that CSE had caused her. Risky Business worked very hard with Child D and her parents. None of the other agencies intervened effectively to protect her, and she and her parents understandably had no confidence in them."
"If she doesn't want to be raped, then she shouldn't be rapeable, it's her own fault!"
"5.30 Child H (2008) was 11 years old when she came to the attention of the Police. She disclosed that she and another child had been sexually assaulted by adult males. When she was 12, she was found drunk in the back of a car with a suspected CSE perpetrator, who had indecent photos of her on his phone. Risky Business became involved and the Locality Team did an initial assessment and closed the case. Her father provided Risky Business with all the information he had been able to obtain about the details of how and where his daughter had been exploited and abused, and who the perpetrators were. This information was passed on to the authorities. Around this time, there were further concerns about her being a victim of sexual exploitation. She was identified as one of a group of nine children associating with a suspected CSE perpetrator. Her case had not been allocated by children’s social care. The Chair of the Strategy meeting expressed concern about her and considered she needed a child protection case conference. This does not appear to have been held. Three months later, the social care manager recorded on the file that Child H had been assessed as at no risk of sexual exploitation, and the case was closed. Less than a month later, she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested. Child H was at this point identified as being at high risk of CSE. Risky Business, social care workers and the Police worked to support Child H and her father and she was looked after for a period. She suffered a miscarriage while with foster carers. Her family moved out of the area and Child H returned home. Some of the perpetrators were subsequently convicted."
"Okay, so she's 12, her family are concerned about her, she's been found drunk and had indecent photos taken of her, but nah - she's okay! Probably!"
To be fair, there are other cases where all the authorities tried their best but the children involved wee angry, groomed into compliance, and did not want to hear or engage with efforts to help them. But I don't know, there were an awful lot of gaps and an awful lot of slipping through them.
Attitudes of the police:
"South Yorkshire Police
8.1 We deal with the response of South Yorkshire Police at some length throughout this report. While there was close liaison between the Police, Risky Business and children’s social care from the early days of the Risky Business project, there were very many historic cases where the operational response of the Police fell far short of what could be expected. The reasons for this are not entirely clear. The Police had excellent procedures from 1998, but in practice these appear to have been widely disregarded. Certainly there is evidence that police officers on the ground in the 1990s and well beyond displayed attitudes that conveyed a lack of understanding of the problem of CSE and the nature of grooming. We have already seen that children as young as 11 were deemed to be having consensual sexual intercourse when in fact they were being raped and abused by adults.
8.2 We were contacted by someone who worked at the Rotherham
interchange in the early 2000s. He described how the Police refused to intervene when young girls who were thought to be victims of CSE were being beaten up and abused by perpetrators. According to him, the attitude of the Police at that time seemed to be that they were all ‘undesirables’ and the young women were not worthy of police protection.
8.3 By 2007, there was evidence that the Police were more pro-active in tackling CSE. Senior police officers had established good liaison arrangements with Risky Business and progress was being made in protecting the children and investigating the perpetrators.
8.4 The Police were commended by the trial judge, along with children’s social care, for their handling of a successful prosecution in 2007. Shortly thereafter, work began on what would eventually lead to the successful prosecution of five offenders in 2009 as part of Operation Central, brought about by excellent joint working between the Police, Risky Business and children’s social care."
Taxi drivers and the police:
"Taxis and Licensing
8.16 One of the common threads running through child sexual exploitation across England has been the prominent role of taxi drivers in being directly linked to children who were abused. This was the case in Rotherham from a very early stage, when residential care home heads met in the nineties to share intelligence about taxis and other cars which picked up girls from outside their units. In the early 2000s some secondary school heads were reporting girls being picked up at lunchtime at the school gates and being taken away to provide oral sex to men in the lunch break.
8.17 A diagram and backing papers supplied to the Police in 2001 by Risky Business linked alleged perpetrators with victims, taxi companies and individual drivers.
...8.21 The Safeguarding Unit convened Strategy meetings from time to time on allegations involving taxi drivers. We read some of the most serious, from 2010, and were struck by the sense of exasperation, even hopelessness, recorded as the professionals in attendance tried to find ways of disrupting the suspected activity. Strategy meetings about one specific taxi firm had been held on four occasions in a seven week period. The minutes of one meeting record a total of ten girls and young women, three of whom were involved in three separate incidents of alleged attempted abduction by taxi drivers. The seven other girls had alleged that they were being sexually exploited in exchange for free taxi rides and goods. Two of the girls involved were looked after children. The Licensing Enforcement Officer took the step of formally writing to the Police following the incidents of alleged attempted abductions by drivers, complaining about the Police failure to act. In one incident, a driver accosted a 13-year-old girl. She refused to do what he asked and reported this to her parents who followed the taxi through the town, where they managed to identify the driver and dialled 999 for assistance. According to the Licensing Enforcement Officer, the Police did not attend until later and took no action. In his email to the Police he stated that 'a simple check would have revealed that the driver had been arrested a week previously in Bradford for a successful kidnapping of a lone female.' He concluded by acknowledging that police priorities were not the same as Licensing, but he 'should not be holding this together on his own'.
...8.25 In a number of different meetings, the Inquiry talked to 24 young people, aged 14-25, who lived in the Council area. One of the main items for discussion with them was safe transport. When asked about taxis, there was an immediate and consistent response from the young women and men on every occasion. All avoided the use of taxis if at all possible. Their parents and partners strongly discouraged, even forbade, them from being on their own at night in a taxi, unless it was a company they personally knew. The girls described how on occasions they would be taken on the longest, darkest route home. One said the driver's first question would be 'How old are you, love?'. All talked about the content of their conversation quickly turning flirtatious or suggestive, including references to sex.
8.26 All the young people we met preferred to use the bus, despite their nervousness and dislike of the Rotherham Interchange, which they described as attracting drug dealers, addicts and people involved in a range of criminal activity. Many of these people congregated outside the Bus Station. The young people described their sense of intimidation and 'running the gauntlet' to get to their buses."
The Crown Prosecution Service and (yet again) the police:
8.36 In October 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions at that time, Keir Starmer, revised the CPS guidance on child sexual exploitation to set out a clear, agreed approach which prosecutors would take to tackle cases of child sexual abuse. A list of stereotypical behaviours previously thought to undermine the credibility of young victims was included to dispel the associated myths when bringing a prosecution. These included:
• The victim invited sex by the way they dressed or acted
• The victim used alcohol or drugs and was therefore sexually available
• The victim didn't scream, fight or protest so they must have been consenting
• The victim didn't complain immediately, so it can't have been a sexual assault
• The victim is in a relationship with the alleged offender and is therefore a willing partner
• A victim should remember events consistently
• Children can consent to their own sexual exploitation
• CSE is only a problem in certain ethnic/cultural communities
• Only girls and young women are victims of child sexual abuse
• Children from BME backgrounds are not abused
• There will be physical evidence of abuse.
8.37 All of the above elements have been referred to at some point in historic files we read, usually as reasons given by the Police or the CPS for not pursuing suspected perpetrators. This guidance was welcomed by many of the main organisations, both statutory and voluntary, dealing with CSE."
Now, some of this may fall into "he said/she said" territory if we're talking about adult men and women, but remember: we're talking about attitudes that "11 and 12 year olds can consent to sex with adult men, 14 year olds going out drinking and getting drunk and having sex are only growing up", so yeah.
What about those earlier reports, were they indeed ignored? And the answer seems to be "pretty much, yeah":
"10. Three Early Reports A chapter of a draft report on research into CSE in Rotherham, often referred to as 'The Home Office Report', was written by a researcher in 2002. It contained severe criticisms of the agencies in Rotherham involved with CSE. The most serious concerned alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers. The report also stated that responsibility was continuously placed on young people's shoulders, rather than with the suspected abusers. It presented a clear picture of a 'high prevalence of young women being coerced and abused through prostitution.' Senior officers in the Police and the Council were deeply unhappy about the data and evidence that underpinned the report. There was a suggestion that facts had been fabricated or exaggerated. Several sources reported that the researcher was subjected to personalised hostility at the hands of officials. She was unable to complete the last part of the research. The content which senior officers objected to has been shown with hindsight to be largely accurate. Had this report been treated with the seriousness it merited at the time by both the Police and the Council, the children involved then and later would have been better protected and abusers brought to justice. These events have led to suspicions of collusion and cover up.
Dr Heal's reports present a vivid and alarming picture of the links between sexual exploitation, drugs, gangs and violent crime in Rotherham from 2002 to 2006. They were widely distributed to middle and senior managers in all key agencies. There is no record of any formal, specific discussion of these reports in Council papers, in ACPC minutes or in the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board minutes made available to the Inquiry.
...10.8 The examples of poor practice and negative attitudes were far more prevalent. These included:
a) Awareness of CSE and interest in it were not widespread. Effective interventions were lacking;
b) Some professionals were working as individuals rather than seeking interagency solutions;
c) Information was not being shared with the Police, and Strategy meetings were not being called by children’s social care;
d) The 'mapping exercise' devised by Risky Business that cross-referenced a large amount of data on victims and perpetrators was not well received by the Police. No charges were brought against alleged perpetrators, nor was any investigation undertaken.
e) The Police had responded reluctantly to missing person reports, as a 'waste of time'. Some young women had been threatened with arrest for wasting police time;
f) The young women concerned were often seen by the Police as being deviant or promiscuous. The adult men with whom they were found were not questioned;
g) A database was developed to provide consistent recording of CSE-related information across agencies. Owing to a dispute between these agencies, it was not used;
h) Possibly as a result of their experience, parents were often not reporting a missing child since they saw it as a waste of time;
i) Professionals were reluctant to be named as a source of information in prosecution, fearing for their safety. Some Police said that if young people were not prepared to help themselves by making complaints against their abusers and giving evidence, they would take no further action on the case;
j) Despite ACPC procedures, there was no consistent way of addressing the issue of CSE. Many professionals were unaware of it; and
k) Some professionals were cautious about working together and sharing information. Some feared an increase in workload. Some, especially the Police, made personal judgements about the young women involved.
10.9 According to the researcher, attempts to raise many of the concerns described above with senior personnel were met with defensiveness and hostility.
…10.11 She described a particular case that was 'the final straw'*. In 2001, a young girl who had been repeatedly raped had tried to escape her perpetrators but was terrified of reprisals. They had allegedly put all the windows in at the parental home and broken both of her brother's legs 'to send a message'. At that point, the child agreed to make a complaint to the Police. The researcher took her to the police station office where she would be interviewed in advance in order to familiarise her with the place and the officer who would be conducting the interview. Whilst there, the girl received a text from the main perpetrator. He had with him her 11-year old sister. He said repeatedly to her 'your choice…'. The girl did not proceed with the complaint. She disengaged from the pilot and project and is quoted by the researcher as saying 'you can't protect me'. This incident raised questions about how the perpetrator knew where the young woman was and what she was doing.
10.12 Following this incident, the researcher described how she discussed what to do next with her manager and others in the project and pilot’s Steering Committee. It was agreed that she should put her concerns in writing to the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police and the Rotherham District Commander of Police. This letter was approved by her manager and the steering group before being hand-delivered to Rotherham Police Station. The Inquiry had access to this letter. According to the researcher, this resulted in a meeting with the District Commander and senior Council officials at which she was instructed never to do such a thing again. The content of her letter was not discussed.
*This case is also mentioned in Chapter 5. It was one of the case files read independently by the Inquiry team, and the details given by the researcher were found to be accurate."
Just going by first principles, "my enemies would want this to be true, therefore it can't *really* be true" seems like a very dangerous sort of trapped prior.
A fair point.
Although this is perhaps no better a heuristic, I DO also do that for stuff that aligns too closely with my beliefs (like Moral Mazes).
Agreed - I think it was Kelsey Piper (but I might be wrong) that listed out dozens of cases of police in the US and abroad just sitting on their hands for years, decades sometimes, about obvious child sexual abuse crimes - just generally out of bureaucratic apathy (and a dozen other reason ofc), aided by the victims generally being unable to really pressure them. It is in fact something of a default state! The idea that "police fucked up" requires any explanation at all is an intense special plead. I am happy to amid that PC dynamics played a role here, it was The Vibes at the time; but it was lifting, at the very most, 10% of the weight.
I am inclined to agree. However not all police forces are apathic and incompetent. Singapore seems to be quite on the ball.
That might be true, I agree the world is heterogeneous! I have also heard good things, I expect they are better on average. But I will say - do you live in Singapore? How many newspapers and bloggers on Singaporean crime do you regularly read? Maybe you do, I don’t know you! But we should also acknowledge Singapore, like all societies, is a distant place that brands itself, both passively and actively. Some of that reputation is just vibes that we lack the expertise to judge.
I've lived there, and still have good friends there. Singapore really is about 10x better run than the US, UK, and most of Europe, and you definitely live and feel that when you're there.
It's not ethnically or linguistically homogenous either - the metro announces in 4 different languages, and there are clear class-based ethnic divides (Malays do all the construction and infrastructure work, for example), but even with those pressures, it remains better run than pretty much everywhere else.
City states for the win, I suppose (though Singapore is better than Hong Kong too).
Depressingly also a lot of people are opposed to child sexual abuse in the abstract, when they are thinking of predators grabbing preteens. But when it comes to teenage girls who are part of the wrong social groups, drink, take drugs, dress revealingly etc. (or can be characterized as such) they switch into victim blaming mode instead
That was actually my conclusion, or feeling, from the extensive quotes Deiseach shared above. As the attitudes of the police (toward the girls specifically) were described, a strong picture of these girls grew in my mind: in a word, young girls whose appearance said "trashy" to the police. That would mean both low-class (and I believe class played a HUGE part here) and overly sexualized in clothing & mannerisms for their age. There were reports of girls of 11, 12 & 13 being deemed (by the police) capable to consent to sex with adult men--& this wasn't a general statement "we believe 12-year-olds to be capable of sexual consent" it was "THIS 12-year-old was capable of sexual consent." How does a cop get to that conclusion?? B/c he looks at the 12-year-old and she *looks* like a woman to him, whether because she's that far into puberty and/or because she dresses and acts as though she is.
It's an extremely foolish way of thinking. Has it never occurred to them that the way the child dresses & their mannerisms could actually have been initiated and encouraged by the abuser? Or that puberty and maturity are 2 different things? I've met a handful of very young teenagers who had essentially the bodies of adults, in such a striking way that one instinctively treated them as such--and I found that instinct to be a mistake. (My mistake was no more than an expectation of a higher standard of behavior, but the behavior I did see was in fact child behavior, not even teen behavior.) I believe they looked at the girls' appearance, consulted their instinct that "oh, this is an adult interested in sex," consulted their cultural prejudice that "these low-class girls are sluts and whores anyhow," and judged the matter to be no big deal.
>The idea that "police fucked up" requires any explanation at all is an intense special plead.
"My Lords, do the Government accept that if we extrapolate nationally the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford, there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years? What is the Government’s answer to the chief constable of Northumbria Police, who has just said that there is every likelihood that these grooming gangs are operating in every one of our major cities?"
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2018-10-22/debates/A26039CF-894E-4875-AB3A-B26360DE2CEC/SexualOffences#:~:text=My%20Lords%2C%20do,these%20victims%20mentally%3F
Sure, police forces f-up all the time. But there's police forces f-ing up, and then there's police forces letting *more than a quarter of a million* schoolgirls get raped over a period of several decades. I don't think that can really be brushed off as just normal intertia and incompetence.
Seriously, holy hell. That's not just an oopsie. That is the state complicit in war crimes against their own people. Is a quarter million really accurate? Under those circumstances, those people would be absolutely justified in organizing themselves and using whatever deadly force is necessary to defend themselves and overthrowing the treasonous regime.
i think the likelihood that a quarter million brits were being raped daily for years and somehow kept it covered, is far far lower than the likelihood that this doesn't actually extrapolate nationally...
250,000 is actually on the low end of the estimates; I've seen others suggest there were at least a million victims. Although I'll admit that even 250,000 seems like a surprisingly high number. If only there were some kind of process whereby the national government could inquire into the whole scandal, to try and get more accurate data...
> nything about Jimmy Savile either. Say what you will about the American handling of Epstein, he went to prison twice and died there
If you think that Epstein was running a one man show without any participation from his visitors, who continued to visit after he was found guilty of abuse, then you are very naive indeed.
Saville wasn’t anywhere near as important in Britain as were most visitors to the island, and there’s very little investigation about that.
The truth is probably much simpler - it's not just that they were afraid of being seen as racist, it's that the police were afraid of these communities and afraid of enforcing the laws in what are basically parallel societies within Britain
That strikes me as extremely unlikely. Online right-wingers often claim that there are "no-go zones" and parallel societies, but when they present evidence it always seems to be terribly weak or outright fake.
> when they present evidence it always seems to be terribly weak
To some extent isn't that what you'd expect to see if it were true, though, given that the core claim involves people who'd normally be responsible for collecting stronger evidence being deliberately excluded and/or complicit?
So evidence against the claim is also evidence for the claim?
I think you can safely disregard anything backed by that kind of Catch-22 logic. A claim needs to be falsifiable in order to mean anything.
There's a difference between "absence of strong supporting evidence" and "presence of strong conflicting evidence" or "unfalsifiable even in principle."
In peacetime, that lumpy roadside shrub with a black plastic rod sticking out, which doesn't seem to be in quite the same spot as you remember it being when you looked that way before... is probably just bad gardening, wind-blown trash, and deja vu.
During a war, though, that's not safe to disregard - gotta seriously consider the hypothesis it's an unfriendly man with a rifle, wearing camouflage. Constantly dealing with those sorts of questions is hard work, which is why most people prefer to avoid war zones when given a reasonable alternative.
I'm not saying the right-wingers stuck in a siege mentality are correct, or even necessarily worth listening to, but if you're going to ignore that boy for crying wolf too often, claiming wolves don't really exist is still a step too far.
Your comments here seem overall a bit trollish but let's look at the official material. References found in the articles below.
Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerable_area
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_urban_zone
(German term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_society )
If I seem trollish to you, then you are very thoroughly bubbled.
And you have to understand that "according to Wikipedia, some random scholar said so ten years ago" is the kind of thing I had in mind when I said "terribly weak". The well-supported parts of those articles are not surprising (like the existence of bad neighbourhoods) and the surprising parts (like "mini-Islamic States") are not well-supported.
Also, your own articles take pains to point out that so-called "no-go zones" aren't. The police do go there; in fact, they go there in greater force.
I will give you points for introducing me to more serious uses of the phrase parallel society, though; previously I'd only really heard it from cranks.
I understand it was the distributed aspect that was key. Several local administrations had the same biases (including wokeness, but also dislike of the victims and general incompetence).
It's like the difference between random error and bias. Random error evens out - sometimes you let things slide, sometimes you throw the book at them. But in this case the systemic tendency allowed for more and more organized and daring "gangs", and when the rock was finally lifted it turned out that the end result was pretty horrific.
From the level of sheer malfeasance it also seems to me that likely to me that at least some of the police departments in cities with notable grooming gang cases are directly connected in corrupt ways to organized crime enterprises running the grooming networks.
That thought had occurred to me. But I didn't want to make the accusation without any hard evidence.
It's worth putting it in the context of it being at a time of major cuts to police budgets in the UK under the Conservative government's austerity program. Blaming it on wokeness (or i guess political correctness back then) was a politically convenient way of avoiding blame
It goes back much earlier than that, into the early-2000s.
Oh, it goes back at least to the 1980s, if not earlier (there are newspaper reports from the '60s which with hindsight look like they could be referring to grooming gangs, although it's hard to be sure from this distance).
Yeah from what I’ve read it seems the bigger problem than “let’s not look racist” was (ironically for Scott’s argument) is that people just didn’t care about these kids. Even those who were supposed to be looking after them thought they were just making a lifestyle choice. Add to that “the police's universal general reluctance to prosecute any sex crime where the victim is less sympathetic than a nun getting stranger-raped in broad daylight with 15 witnesses” (h/t Helen Lewis, who has a great Substack).
I also read on another Substack by some academic whose name I’ve forgotten that in the 90s hundreds of underage girls were prosecuted for solicitation. So it’s part of a wider pattern/history of society and the authorities just not taking child sexual exploitation seriously. Grim, but not something Musk/Robinson et al would address
There are two missing parts to the story.
The first is that the UK has a class system, the girls were either in care (meaning they'd been taken away from their parents by the state) or living in council estates (public housing projects). There was a pervasive view that would translate into American as "they're white trash, they're all crawling all over each other like a box of hamsters anyway, who cares," sometimes also framed in terms of relativism and different groups having different values. I can personally remember when the story broke in the Times, my initial reaction was, "Wait, what the fuck?" Then on the inside there were pictures of one of the victims and her parents, the other shoe dropped, and I went back to not caring. That then led to soul-searching etc down the line which is why I remember it. Thus for a lot of people in Britain, it gets filed in the Darfur/malaria/textile industry drawer of bad things that happen to the sort of people bad things happen to but which don't really matter. No-one on either side can address this head on (the British right has a de facto omertà on discussing the class system because maintaining it is secretly the point of the Tory party, but they need the votes of more than 2% of the population; the British left can only talk about class in a very specific Marxism-inspired scheme that ceased to function 50 years ago, as without it their political formula could no longer explain their actions (the heart of their coalition is public sector workers, a handful of specific racial minorities and a smattering of second-tier metropolitan liberals; most of what they do is designed to funnel money and sinecures to the first two groups).
The second missing part is that most Midlands/Northern England urban borough councils (local government) were controlled by the Labour Party to a far greater extent than today (where they still hold most of them). But Labour in somewhere like Rotherham isn't a bunch of metropolitan liberal elites. It's a smattering of white trade unionists* and a lot of Pakistanis. The result of this was a lot of internal pressure to look the other way came from base practical motives and patronage, rather than white upper-middle-class handwringing (the places where this happened don't have much of an upper-middle-class; they're the UK's answer to the Rust Belt). A standard example would be: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/rotherham-grooming-trial-victim-claims-she-was-raped-by-town-councillor . This aspect can't be addressed because it doesn't have palatable solutions, so gets ignored.
*In the UK, unions only meaningfully exist in the public and quasi-public sector; the result is that Labour councils are often made up of people who are employed by a different council.
Sure, it’s definitely a complicated mix of societal and local factors at play. You could also count in the death of local journalism which is at least supposed to scrutinise local authorities. But I guess we both agree that it’s not simply what Scott said ( authorities afraid to look racist).
"I was worried about being called a racist" is probably a wiser explanation for why you didn't investigate some crime than "I didn't give a f--k and wanted to get back to the donut shop" or "I was on the take and didn't want to lose my weekly bribe money."
UK is bad on crime in general. AFAIK the real story here is that many decades of austerity policy has hollowed out state capacity to the point where they can barely keep any public services running, and police are underfunded to the point where they barely do anything to begin with.
You really have to go digging online to find London's violent crime rate but it's 42 percent higher than in NYC.
Tag: 'essay titles that would confuse my grandma'
I feel like anything other than option 1 is a hallmark Isolated Demand for Rigour. Actually just having opinions about things is a fine and normal thing to do.
Yes. We are all bundles of incoherent preferences. Attempting to reconcile them all is what twists people into knots
Ugly knots and exploitable flaws are what you get when that reconciliation process is put off until the last minute. Integrity thinks ahead. Exercise those moral and tactical intuitions across a wide enough variety of impossible, fantastical situations, and the merely unlikely scenarios become easy.
Regarding option no.5 here, say I have a friend who, when considering the repugnant conclusion, opts to "hit the bricks." Any advice on how I can get him to do more testing against his values?
What do you mean by hitting the bricks?
It's a common expression https://media.tenor.com/389d4qUlKRAAAAAC/da-share-z0ne-justwalkout.gif
> all the people who claim a principled commitment to not caring about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries suddenly care a lot about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries.
The uk is an american vassal and I hear in theory related to my blood line(... tho Im confused are the red coats or black and tans?)
I agree with the contents but also it feels mildly bizarre to read such a rebuttal of a position I don't see anyone serious hold... Makes me wonder what kind of circles Scott is reading nowadays
It's kind of as if I saw a post titled "Everyone is a Based Post-Sleep Awakeist till Drowsiness shows up"; sure, but also what kind of circles are those?
One of the reactions to effective altruism and third world charity in general is this position, I think it's more common on the right among younger people than it would seem because it's the kind of opinion to get no visibility in the MSM, even to disagree with it. It's just too perpendicular
> Makes me wonder what kind of circles Scott is reading nowadays
Attention belongs to those who show up in the comments, I suppose.
He reads the comments to his posts, where commenters say things like this. E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers
even a utilitarian could solve this conundrum easily
I think you are making a rhetorical trick when talking about "thinly sliced differences". I and most people care aboit people more the closer they are to us on multiple dimensions.
Geographically, Culturally and even over time. (me now vs me in 10 years).
Britain is pretty close for lany westerners.
You mentioned the grooming gangs case burst open in 2013. That's eleven years ago, and it made a lot of noise at the time in Europe. Europeans collectively understood the ins and outs of the case, as far as a group of people can when it's discussed for a few weeks. It was used, predictably, by those opposed to muslim immigration. It was used, also predictably, to further anti-anti-muslim rhetoric, because in Europe, anytime a prominent political figure said something that resembled a harmful religious or ethnic stereotype, typically based on a dreadful case, what you'd now call the "woke" crowd would drown out the chat about the dreadful case by making the political figure another villain of the story. A few weeks on, everyone kinda got back to what they were doing, and people conveniently turned their anger at newer, shinier horrible things.
Anyways, as far as Europe goes, this is a bit of a cold case. Pretty much everyone collectively acknowledged the crimes were horrid and the accused, monsters. Almost everyone felt somewhat disgusted by the fact that the crimes were unreported for so long due to fears of being called systemically racist or whatever.
And then, eleven years later, Elon takes an interest in British politics, obviously supporting someone who's highly controversial (what's the fun in doing anything else as the richest man on the planet?) and brings back this case in the open to an audience who is ready to, like you said in your post, suddenly care about the suffering of people overseas.
Let's be real. The reason so many people care about these cases is because 1. the attackers are muslim and 2. the attacked are young girls in Britain.
This doesn't mean it's wrong to point out that number 1 and number 2 might have links beyond random noise. But it means the “based post-Christian vitalist” you're describing most likely does not care about the victims in this case. They see the case as a convenient political weapon and wield it using huge amounts of misinformation (I've stopped counting the number of times people on X have claimed upwards of a million British girls were raped by the grooming gang, which is a fake I've had to disprove for people close to me). They're not going to care about the case once it gets off their feed, and they're not going to donate or fight for the girls in any way, shape or form. They'll continue saying you're a weakling for giving away money to save people you can't see or meet or who can't otherwise make you a more powerful or richer person.
In that sense, they're being faithful to their based vitalism and only pretending to care in order to further their own designs.
> In that sense, they're being faithful to their based vitalism and only pretending to care in order to further their own designs.
Well, if you suspect your opponents are faking outrage in order to score cheap political points, pointing out that by their self-professed moral values, they should not care about that is a valid counter-strategy, which Scott employs here.
Oh but they're not faking the outrage part. They are politically outraged, which I think goes way beyond the outrage they feel for the actual victims. I think it's easily discernable when looking at the amount of disinformation being shared on the number of victims, for example. Say you care deeply about the civilian deaths in Gaza. Your political outrage and your empathy are both on high alert, and since you care deeply (you're not faking it), you've hopefully done the tiniest amount of research beyond X retweets and dubious news websites' headlines. Then, you see a tweet in your feed purporting that "The situation in Gaza is absolutely horrible. There could be as many as 1,500,000 dead, according to [random name of low level politician]." Since you KNOW through your at-least-tiny-amount-of-research that the number of deaths is blurry, yes, but closer to 40000-60000, I hope you wouldn't share the tweet that multiplies that number by 30, because it's misinformation.
Again, the outrage is real. But I believe the vitalist archetype described in the article cares more about the political ramifications than about the victims - therefore the emphasis is placed on policy (immigration control for example) rather than on empathy for the sufferers.
It's important to remember that how much outrage someone feels isn't correlated with the actual harm or insult done. People can and do get outraged over stuff that never even happened.
Which is precisely what’s going on in this case. This is exactly what a Mossad operation would look like: Muslim cabbies raping your brainwashed and trafficked daughters, yet everyone’s daughter YOU know is accounted for, somehow.
I mean, the Rotherdam stuff really did happen and really was bad. It's just a terrible thing that happened in another country about a decade ago, and it was widely reported in the news then.
There's far too much documentation on the grooming gangs to make this kind of denialism at all tenable.
There's next to no documentation. This is literally the Satanic Panic redux.
So is every "altruist" including Effective Altruists. No rich person puts the lives of people in a poor backward country above their own status and goals. Most philanthropists, if not all of them just want to virtue signal and get tax breaks. True altruism is a myth.
Whether "true" altruism is a myth doesn't really come into play in my message because I'm not making a defense of "true" altruism, or even altruism itself. But if you're going there, the mere fact that "no rich person puts the lives of people in a poor backward country above their own status and goals" does not mean "there aren't varying degrees of caring primarily about (1) the political aspects of a dreadful case or about (2) the victims and their suffering.
If (1), seems unlikely this person would care about massive suffering across the world (even in non-"backward" countries) if it didn't involve a political aspect that stirred their outrage further. If (2), whether the person is truly altruistic or not, they'd be more likely to care about *any* massive suffering across the globe, since the political aspect wasn't the main draw to caring about it in the first place.
I'm a working class effective altruist who doesn't really talk about it and I certainly don't get any tax breaks.
I just think it's the right thing to do and I enjoy the knowledge that I have sacrificed some money and saved some kids.
You can tell yourself all sorts of stories about why you shouldn't give to charity.
Or have the moral sense to understand that they are not fully living up to their ideals, and can try better, but probably still aren’t going to live up to their ideals, but shouldn’t take that as a reason to deny that anything matters.
I’d nitpick the word “sacrifice”, but otherwise I find that admirable. I know you’re not doing it for anyone else’s approval, but we should absolutely praise behavior that we want to encourage!
Well, yeah. That's kind of the whole point of the movement, that most Westerners can live quite comfortably on a smaller income, and save some lives. For me that trade-off is a no-brainer.
I think the problem discussing altruism is that most people just generalize from one example -- themselves.
So on one hand we get people believing that deep down everyone wants to help others, and the only thing that could possibly prevent them from doing so is that they are currently fighting their own emotional trauma or something, but as soon as that problem is solved, they will be free to go and do nice things for others.
On the other hand, we get people believing that everyone who does something seemingly nice is just doing it as a part of some scam, because why the hell would anyone care about other people.
Longer version of this comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/naAwghw54bCnD6ggk/notes-on-altruism?commentId=HTkwYcdCQcr7FExww
No, I think a lot of EA people actually believe in it. The fact that SBF was FOS doesn't mean the rest of the EAs are. Professional philanthropists, yeah, they're trying to look good, and to some degree it's part of the job--your whole shtick is to get rich people to give you money after all. But the people who post here about shrimp suffering? They're honest.
I'm on the left-hand path myself, but I can tell you many people are not.
This kind of reply makes me think of the reaction of some people who, upon learning that other people claim to have a visual imagination, and noting that they themselves do not, simply claim other people are faking it, or confused.
>The reason so many people care about these cases is because 1. the attackers are muslim and 2. the attacked are young girls in Britain.
3. The police turned a blind eye to it for years.
4. Even after conviction, many of the perpetrators got laughably short sentences. One perpetrator received three years in prison (https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1876130589000323463), while a white Briton who posted some racially inflammatory comments on Facebook received three years and two months (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy76dxkpjpjo).
There's a very good reason the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer (director of public prosecutions for a significant portion of the period under discussion) is widely referred to as "Two-Tier Kier".
Citing my own comment: "Anyways, as far as Europe goes, this is a bit of a cold case. Pretty much everyone collectively acknowledged the crimes were horrid and the accused, monsters. Almost everyone felt somewhat disgusted by the fact that the crimes were unreported for so long due to fears of being called systemically racist or whatever."
What you listed were concerns for British and European people at the time. I'm sure it made the news in the US, too, but I wasn't following US politics at the time.
I should have been clearer. I should have written "The reason so many people care about these cases [all of a sudden in late 2024, eleven years after the fact, outside of mainland Europe] is..."
This is not a cold case. They have been raping native girls for decades, and they will continue until the police stop worrying about 'community relations' and start doing their job.
Looking at the dates, Starmer took charge of British prosecution offices the year after the case you refer to. And if anything, he seems responsible for the prosecutors starting to get more serious about this kind of cases, even when the police recommended not to proceed. Blaming him is mostly political opportunism.
Also the tweet is wrong, the rapist got six years not three (still looks too little, indeed the prosecution appealed asking for a longer sentence).
I think Scott is not aiming to convince the people he ostensibly addresses here. (This is basically a corollary of the old "you convince the audience, not the opponent" rule of debating.) He's aiming to convince people who actually do care, but, due to unfamiliarity with the case, might be swayed by their arguments.
This is, of course, the correct thing to do, much better than the recently depressingly common "those people are just wrong and evil and you shouldn't even consider they could ever be right", because that, well, ends up giving us things like Rotterham.
>Anyways, as far as Europe goes, this is a bit of a cold case.
The factors that enabled the gangs to operate for so long are still in force, so this is almost certainly an ongoing case.
It’s flat out wrong to describe this as a cold case, and deeply misleading to act as if the problem is an old one that has been solved.
It’s an ongoing major problem that has more attention and resources now than it used to, but is still under resourced and unresolved. The scale of ongoing abuse is genuinely disturbing.
This is not a “cold case”! There were *hundreds* of arrests in 2023 (and more of them since) with the newest grooming gang task force, and even the ex head of one first major grooming gang task task forces says that it is "obvious" grooming is still "happening in every city around the country", and highlights how hard it is to get convictions when victims are terrified and unwilling to testify.
This is a major ongoing issue, not a cold case. Even if the level of suppression of information about it has reduced, the problem itself is still there and is worthy of attention.
As an aside, I believe no one has so far been prosecuted for failing to do their job and protect these girls, which is a strong signal that real incentives in the police and councils have not changed, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
This is a big, nasty, ingrained problem that people are rightfully upset about even today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2050kkpzypo.amp
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/grooming-gangs-taskforce-arrests-hundreds-in-first-year
Scott argues that the fact that Based post-Christian vitalists want to save Children from grooming gangs in the UK shows that they do, after all, care about defending the unfortunate and weak in at least some circumstances. Here's a thought. For some of the cynical actors involved in this (e.g. BAP) this needn't be motivated by compassion for the victims at all, but concern about racial struggle, which is entirely consistent with based-pseudo-Nietzschean-vitalism. Possible motivations:
1. Preserving "racial stock"
2. Giving a causus belli to attack Islam, providing an opportunity to sweep up naive Christians who do care about compassion in a vitalist racial war.
Supporting evidence. It's very clear that the vitalists here are fishing for certain kinds of solutions. They don't want to stop grooming gangs in the most efficient and effective ways, they want racial resentment.
Many of the leaders of this movement are absolutely cynical enough to think in these terms. Perhaps I've missed something though. I agree that deep down almost everyone has the same moral obligations (with the possible exception of psychopaths, if they turn out to be qualitatively and not merely quantitatively distinct) but that doesn't mean some people aren't very successfully suppressing some of these motivations.
Do you think that the average rural Pakistani has the same basic moral instincts as you?
Instinct? Yes, I suspect the urge to protect one's family, village, tribe, nation in that order is instinctive and universal to all humans. It may be disguised by religious, political, or ethical philosophical constructs, but the instinct to protect our own is there. Depending on who's doing the motivating, those constructs can be used to manipulate the instincts of others into acting beyond the identity of their family-village-tribe-nation to help or harm others.
Someone else replied in another comment that if you suspect that the morality framing is insincere, it’s especially valid to attack it and prove it inconsistent with other beliefs your opponent has claimed to have.
(I do, however, agree with your conclusion.)
Yeah but Scott's not even doing that a little bit, he's saying 'secretly you're good people who do care about foreign victims, no matter how much you try to conceal it.'
I think the median person who does this is kind of incoherent. However, I don't see a contradiction in the following logic:
- Pakistani rape gangs are an acute problem that we can solve. The solutions don't involve capitalism.
- Much of the 3rd world problems would be solved with capitalism (better hygiene, better doctors, etc.).
- Therefore, we should be outraged about acute problems we can solve immediately and permanently.
- Other problems we should just wait for capitalism to solve.
Standard disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with this logic, I just think it's coherent in a way that Scott doesn't seem to think is reasonable.
I think the analogy to "wait for capitalism to solve the Third World's problems" would be "wait for police to solve the grooming gang issue". Great idea, as long as Third World countries are capitalist and the police aren't corrupt.
I don't agree with this analogy in my steelman framing. Democracies are (supposed to be) responsive to the will of the people. Hypothetically, making the police un-corrupt is a one-time solution, whereas giving people in the 3rd world helps them now, but doesn't help them in the future.
> Hypothetically, making the police un-corrupt is a one-time solution
Why on earth would that be guaranteed? The police got corrupt in the first place somehow, after all. Maybe conditions are different now, but in the absence of evidence your prior should be that they're not.
Guaranteed, no.
Achievable? Iterative institutional design is our signature move.
Why would it not help them in the future? Direct money transfers are extremely well studied in economic experiments and have been shown to help people get out of poverty traps. On a societal scale lower child mortality/sickness has many positive effects on for instance birthrate and population health.
You say these things, but why do you think they're true?
Making the police un-corrupt once could just work until those police retire and are replaced by new ones, or until corrupting influences find new holes in your updated systems.
If the savior of third world countries is going to be capitalism, then they need to do capital accumulation in order to have something to invest and spend to get the process started. Someone handing you a bunch of money once is a very efficient form of capital accumulation, it lets you start businesses and create a fluid marketplace.
Waiting has worked well enough for economic development in the Third World that there's a "grand theory" that can be summed up as "wait in line" https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-studwell-got-wrong
Almost 100% of those third-world countries *are already capitalist*, and have been for hundreds of years in many cases.
People have to get over the idea that capitalism is magic. If a country has been capitalist for a hundred years and is still poor and dysfunctional, that mean capitalism produces poor and dysfunctional countries as well as modern rich countries.
Capitalism isn't magic, other factors determine the outcome of societies and capitalism won't magically overwhelm all those other factors someday. capitalism isn't unitary, it takes a wide variety of forms and produces a wide variety of outcomes, some of those are observably good and some of those are observably bad.
> So it was revealing to watch some of these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.
> Now the entire Right is demanding investigations, heads on pikes, and (in some cases) the American invasion of Britain.
Local man picks nuts, discovers logical inconsistencies.
But first, our investigators reveal what happens after items that were dry are submerged in water. Are they still dry when removed? The answer may surprise you.
This is your news at 11.
You're missing the key point here! The British were based and Empire-Pilled a century ago, and although the poor British who were raped are poor children suffering in a foreign nation (who we should not care about), they are only not rich and powerful (who we should care about) because of a century of LIBERALISM and decay. In their essence, the British are Ubermensch, like all of us Vitalists, who are only kept from their greatness due to WOKE ideology and MORALS. In the same way that most of us vitalists are just average people (with no especially "vital" achievements) who are kept down by your stupid morals and """society""", the British spirit (as proven by their awesome Empire) are vitalists who have been poisoned by YOUR charitable ideology.
Thus, it's totally self-consistent to care about the grooming gangs, who are a symptom of altruistic ideology allowing grooming gangs to even exist in the first place, while not caring about poor Africans dying of Malaria, who weren't going to be based empire builders in the first place.
At least that's my attempt to half-steelman, half-satirize what I think a Vitalist might say.
As a sorta-vitalist I agree that this is basically about wokeness. Cucked Brits don't really deserve sympathy, but since they are similar enough culturally, their failure is a canary in the mine, which needs to be taken seriously and dealt with resolutely, because The Same Can Happen Here due to malign memetic viruses.
The reconciliation I would propose here is that the post-Christian vitalist is not primarily focused on reducing suffering of the innocent for the sake of reducing suffering. It is that they see a clash of cultures where what they deem to be an inferior culture is having its way with a weakened (formerly?) superior culture, and like good Nietzscheans they want the better culture to thrive and the rascals to be cast out or forced to assimilate into the better way.
I don't think vitalists are this victim-centered in their opposition to grooming gangs. It's not about "helping poor people with no particular skills", it's about protecting orderly society, which, in their view, requires purging these kinds of people. Third-world countries don't have much of an orderly society in the first place, so there's nothing worth defending.
I don't know - if this were all, I would expect them to be sympathetic to the government's attempts to sweep things under the rug, which kept things very orderly for everyone except the victims (who, on this line of reasoning, don't matter). You'd also think they'd be more against Tommy Robinson violating a bunch of laws in his crusade to spread awareness, or concerned about the possibility about causing some kind of freak BNP election victory.
I think if you read the posts, they're at least claiming to be angry for the sake of the kids.
Sweeping things under the rug isn't orderly, it's just more disorder. Then you don't just have rape gangs, you have the government messing with the feedback process that's supposed to deal with problems like rape gangs.
Order isn't just peace and quiet, it's also people doing what they're supposed to do and refraining from egregiously improper behavior, and sometimes you have to be more assertive and less cooperative if you want to protect well-functioning society.
> they're at least claiming to be angry for the sake of the kids
I think that's mainly because the victims being kids make it particularly egregious disorder - there's rarely any good reason to harm children, so you're probably really deviant if you do.
> supposed to deal with problems like rape gangs.
On what grounds are they supposed to though? I have an easy answer - because rape gangs are bad for their victims - but that's because I am not a based post christian vitalist. In the absence of any concern for the welfare of others, it's not clear to me how you're supposed to arrive at the claim that the state has duties towards them.
A society that lets its children be raped is degenerate and failing
Work on your reading comprehension.
Playing the devil's advocate for a moment, even if the vitalist doesn't care about the victim, cops certainly claim to, and if the cops are being grossly negligent with regard to this particular duty, they're likely misbehaving in other ways too, less overtly horrific but more relevant to vitalist interests.
I think you can note the disconnect between their actions and their stated motivations when assessing how sincere they are.
I've yet to see Musk or any of the x people suddenly interested in the case talk about implementing the recommendations of the national inquiry into grooming gangs, which the conservative government refused to. But instead they're using it to attack the current left wing government on spurious guilt by association grounds.
Well no, Musk backs Tommy Robinson and Reform UK who have faced ostracism from polite society and in the case of Tommy imprisonment for not toeing the line
The left are awful everywhere in the West, although in the UK it is true that the right are almost as bad
When you say he was imprisoned for not toeing the line do you mean the time he was imprisoned in 2005 for assault, in 2012 for using false travel documents, or in 2014 for mortgage fraud? The two 2018 contempt of court cases where he almost invalidated grooming trials? Or the 2021 case where he falsely accused a child of sexual assault, causing him and his family to need to flee their home? Which was a civil libel case. It's a bit hard to keep track
He is the Nelson Mandela of our time
Hm. I hear what you’re saying here, but I think you’ll be talking past the target audience in a way liable to frustrate them more than to clarify. If I can be at once more and less charitable to them:
They care about grooming gangs in Britain because they believe Western Civilization will fall with too much immigration from incompatible cultures, and the grooming gangs are one particularly salient example of that. It’s not “defending poor kids in a foreign country,” per se—although they’re sincerely concerned!—it’s “here is a highly salient evil caused by something that touches on all my core concerns, so blatant that you all cannot ignore it.”
For them, it’s not distant children in a foreign country, it’s a proximate people in a proximate country with potential to be like them that they see being undone by what they’d call suicidal empathy to the foreign.
Put in crude racial terms: they care because the kids are white, and therefore in their circle of concern. They don’t care about kids in Africa because those kids are (if they want to be crude about it) low-IQ brown biotrash that’s probably unfit for civilization, destined to hover around Malthusian limits and suck up the resources of suicidally empathetic white people, and regardless not in their circle of moral concern because their own people can take care of them.
This is an oversimplification but you could do much worse as a predictor.
In other words, they’re not going to read your article and think “oh yeah, I care about the foreign here so I should care about it elsewhere,” they’ll think “this man’s definition of foreign is so distant from ours that he’s not even in the same moral universe.” Very little could be more consistent in their frame than caring about Rotherham but not Africa.
> it's often a prelude to either asking for money or some kind of repugnant conclusion rug pull where they get shamed and humiliated if they don't go along with something their interlocutor wants after having committed to the moral priors which demand it.
Asking for money seems like a strict subset of that second thing, albeit usually less intense.
I think these people wouldn't be especially interested in helping poor kids in Moldova, even if they are white, or even poor kids in Britain suffering from the usual kinds of poverty-related problems.
Neither of those examples carries the same “save civilization from the incoming hordes” salience for them. I’m not saying they don’t care about the kids—they absolutely, sincerely do—but their prioritization of the topic ties directly into its salience to their fundamental overriding issue. Moldova is further from their sphere of concern, but they’d care about the same fact pattern there and they care about immigration from developing countries to Moldova. See eg reactions to Hungary and Poland.
I basically agree with you on this, but I would describe this as something like "the path of your moral impulses is smoothed by congruent politics and blocked by contradictory politics". People don't want to hear about saving African kids because it has too many unpleasant political implications. Then they say "I don't care about foreign kids". But if we can think of a way of saving foreign kids that has friendly pro-ingroup political implications, then you become in favor of saving foreign kids. That gives you a heads-up that you are capable of moral impulses, and gives you a chance to do moral philosophy with it and see where it takes you.
I'm hoping that some people, seeking reflective equilibrium, won't want to endorse "I genuinely, under reflection, care about the lives of kids when it's convenient for my politics, but not when it's inconvenient for my politics" and will decide to smooth themselves off to "I always care about the lives of kids" rather than "I never do".
Is this a mystery? Isn't this just what I said? They view white people as in the ingroup and non-whites as the outgroup, so they are especially enraged about the rape of white girls by Pakistani rape gangs.
That's a nice hope, but in practice anyone far enough down the rabbit hole to be defending these positions online has already rounded things off to "I care about things with pro-ingroup political implications" explicitly. Some of them aren't real enough Nietzscheans to handle that, so they construct these various metaphysical morning glory trips of organic racial unity to back it up - but again, anyone willing to go that far is already too far gone. You need to catch them much, much earlier if you want words alone to save them.
>"the path of your moral impulses is smoothed by congruent politics and blocked by contradictory politics"
This way of putting it already has morality and politics as very distinct. But I think for most people they are much less separate. One might say: it is moral to care for what is precious, like children; and it is moral to cultivate or protect a society's morality in the sense of its care for what is precious;, and this becomes political. The grooming gang issue is exactly a joint moral-social-political focal point, and people can feel that; moral feelings are not being activated independently of politics here.
>I'm hoping that some people, seeking reflective equilibrium, won't want to endorse "I genuinely, under reflection, care about the lives of kids when it's convenient for my politics, but not when it's inconvenient for my politics"
A lovely hope, but "some" is doing a lot of work there, isn't it? There are many, many examples of people endorsing that attitude. You could probably come up with a dozen while mining the NYT for more snarky digs (eg, clump of cells versus [unborn baby](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/us/birthright-citizen-children-migrant.html)).
I'm not claiming that nobody ever lets their politics influence morality! I'm claiming that people who do that have an opportunity to notice the dissonance and do more moral philosophy.
I don't know why you keep saying that like it's a productive thing to do. All that's done for me is further justify my innate hatred of humanity. The same would happen to the people that you're talking about, where it would simply make them realize that they truly hate these foreign savages.
I think it's less about the horde (although that's present, and "they're coming for our women" is primal), but mostly about wokeness. That's the real enemy, and it's the same enemy in America and Britain. (Some of it's also classism, but that's largely invisible to us Americans, so it just looks like more wokeness.)
If this had started to happen, but the perpetrators had been locked up for decades, there wouldn't be as much outrage. If it had continued as long as it did, but then all protestors were exposed and dealt with and the local governments that went along with it were purged, that wouldn't have been as bad. Nor if it had happened, but all the people who let it happen were being paid for silence, or if they were all foreign agents. But instead, it was about "not saying true negative things about a protected group", and I'd bet every single person who gets outraged by this (including myself) has felt how dangerous that is, and has worried about how bad it could get. And then we saw exactly how bad it could get.
---
Also there's the "distance" factor in ethics, which I think utilitarians deny, and other people rationalize away. But it's natural to not care as much about more distant things. It's easy to rationalize this into implying that those things aren't as bad *because* we don't care, or that the people are less deserving *because* we don't care, but that's incorrect. It's just a limit based on our limitations as sapient beings. Our attention is finite, and anything that wants to claim our attention is dangerous, not just to us but to our children, whom we are biased to protect. (See above about primal fears.)
One day perhaps there'll be an app to track every sparrow's fall, and when the numbers get low enough, every dead bird will have the attention that Peanut the Squirrel got.
I have suffered several forms of what I would describe as brain damage. I no longer have the capacities I once had. I have noticed that my circles of concern have shrunken. And I have have also noticed how my ability to have larger circles was systematically exploited by those who didn't want me to notice the harm they were doing to me and those close to me.
>Also there's the "distance" factor in ethics, which I think utilitarians deny, and other people rationalize away. But it's natural to not care as much about more distant things.
Agreed. In a sense, I think that it is _necessary_ for concern to drop off pretty fast with social distance to avoid targeting one's concern in ways that look at least close to pathological to me.
We live in a world with 8 billion of us, _far_ above Dunbar's number, 150, more than the quad of it. As far as one's immediate perceptions are concerned, the population almost might as well be infinite.
If concern drops off exponentially with the number of sequential social links from oneself, what happens?
Roughly, the number of people one link away is 150, the number 2 links away is roughly 150^2, and so on. If one's concern for any given person scales as some locality-factor^number-of-links-aways, then the _total_ concern for the circle one link away is locality-factor*Dunbar-number, for the circle two links away is locality-factor^2*Dunbar-number^2, three links locality-factor^3*Dunbar-number^3 and so on.
If the locality-factor is bigger than 1/Dunbar-number, then the bulk of one's concern goes to the _most_ _distant_ circle. This looks close to pathological to me.
To keep one's concern local _at_ _all_, it has to attenuate faster than the number of people in the circle rises.
I don't have a problem with it in theory; it's more of a practical thing. If I could scale myself to be 10x smarter in all ways, I'd hope my circles would expand by as much. I could track more people in my head, I could understand more about them, I could learn what would help and harm them, and I could make changes in the world that would help.
But I'm not. I have access to only a tiny bit of information about a tiny bit of the universe, and within that, my limited attention can only track an even tinier bit of it. And when people tell me that no, I should be diverting my attention elsewhere, that comes at a cost to everything else I care about. When I spend too much of my time and energy focusing on things far away and abstract, I spend less on what's close to me. And that can be a matter of life and death.
Many Thanks! _Everyone_ gets overwhelmed if they don't prune concerns for distant people fast enough. There are just too many, 8 orders of magnitude more than we evolved to deal with.
Scott, most Americans don’t consider Moldova part of “The West” in their minds. England, on the other hand, many consider almost a 51st state. Our estranged mother, essentially, and through genetics studies, we know this isn’t even fundamentally inaccurate!
Letting this place be invaded by Mohammedans, resulting in mass rape gangs is, suffice it to say, is more salient than run-of-the-mill poverty, especially in Moldova.
If those kids in Moldova were being raped by Muslims? I think they would still circulate memes about it, yes.
I think you got to the core of the issue.
The way you describe the gang victims as "proximate people in a proximate country with potential to be like them" makes me think of Scott's "finely-sliced" argument in the post. I feel like we could run an experiment where people are presented with a range of statements about, broadly speaking, people suffering and then they're asked how much they are outraged by the statement and then how much money they'd be willing to give to a top charity that deals with that particular suffering. Then you could create a visual heat map of where/who people are most likely to support financially, and to see how much that relates to the outrage intensity heat map.
Basically, from what you're saying I'd expect the people who care about grooming gangs in Britain but not about any other atrocities being committed around the world to commit the most money to statements related to "proximate people in a proximate country with potential to be like them", and the least amount of money to non-proximate people, even if the outrage could be similar across the board. The difference between being able to express "the situation in Yemen is horrible" and the lack of commitment to do anything about it, in a way
I just want to know who the "they" is in this conversation. Like, name five specific posters. Seems absurd to have this argument about what a purely hypothetical type of guy may or may not believe when you could just argue with that person directly.
If we're just talking about racists, then obviously racists care more about what happens to white kids then they do about what happens to brown kids. Doesn't seem to require a lot of explanation. Why would you expect a white nationalist to care about moral philosophy?
Sure. BAP, Catgirl Kulak, Zero HP Lovecraft, Covfefe Anon, Aimee Terese
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87973164
"Catgirl Kulak" is pretty openly racist: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87978568
And I mean actually racist. Like, he really dislikes non-whites. I do not say this lightly. Jared Taylor, for instance, is a white nationalist but does not really dislike non-whites. I don't detect hatred from Taylor. I detect hatred from Catgirl kulak. And again Jared Taylor doesn't call for blood, executions, an invasion of the UK etc in response to the UK rapes.
"Bronze Age Pervert" literally has "Bronze Age" in his name, of course he is going to say that people should follow human nature and violently defend themselves from the outgroup, as they did in the Bronze Age.
I don't know the others well.
Jared Taylor is racist as well, but sure, less nastily so than Kulak
I’m not sure what you think “based post-Christian vitalists” is referring to—a lot of them are actually racist. One could convincingly argue it’s one of their core defining traits!
Taylor is a white nationalist and racialist, but he claims to not hate non-white people and I believe him, as he does not seem like a hateful individual. I don't call someone a "racist" unless they have hate or at least animus toward other racial groups. I don't detect any from Taylor, just white nationalism and racialism. I find it to be a really dumb and silly ideology but I don't think he is saying the n word, he goes and debates with black people, is respectful and cordial to them, compares himself to Marcus Garvey, etc. The word "racist", in my view, has other connotations. Racists are nasty people. Taylor has some silly ideas about race but he is a gentleman.
The first 3 "based post-Christian vitalists" that came to mind are Richard Hanania, Nathan Cofnas, and Curtis Yarvin. Do you think these people are "actually racist"? Cofnas is a nerdish philosopher who writes about IQ gaps, but I don't think he hates anyone. Hanania enjoys trolling on twitter, and is a big HBD and all of that, but you can't imagine him thinking "yeah, I hate these people because of the color of their skin". Do you think Curtis Yarvin is seething about the blacks? For me, an "actual racist" is someone who says the n word, or wishes that they could, or who really hates black and brown people or something like that. I would not be surprised by Kulak saying it. But for these three people I would be.
Richard Hanania basically endorses EA (he donates to shrimp welfare!); Nathan Cofnas isn’t particularly a Based Vitalist and is mostly concerned with hereditarianism; Yarvin has cultivated an audience of people who are either racist or extremely comfortable with racism but usually more-or-less treads the line personally, outside his provocative comments around eg the end of slavery.
The names I list are much more representative of the actual cluster in play in this conversation than Hanania and Cofnas; you can add Yarvin to the list but he’s more focused on appointing a king than on Defending The White Race
As for Taylor, of course he’s racist. While my own definition is also hostility-focused, anyone who is happy to support laws against interracial marriage can and should be called racist unambiguously and without flinching.
So...scientific racism isn't racism, because it's unemotional?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/88214291
Yeah, called it.
Thanks!
You're basically correct then. Seems pretty unlikely to me that any of the Twitter users you named would be persuaded by this article in even the smallest way.
> Zero HP Lovecraft
I thought Zero HP was on hiatus because he almost got doxxed or something? Is he still publishing somewhere?
he came back and is around on Twitter
Aimee Terese? Sad if true. I'm pretty out of the loop here, but last I encountered her - several years ago - she was one of those "MAGA communist" postleft types, not, uh, this.
yeah, she's continued on that natural trajectory and come out in that cluster
> "MAGA communist" postleft types
boy, am I struggling to interpret what this means. Care to unpack, for me? or point me in the direction of a link?
It's essentially "There should be communist redistribution policies that work to ensure that natural-born americans are never at any risk of discomfort. Other people can fuck themselves."
Thanks. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, considering how frequently communism morphs into the nationalistic type.
I'd assume it means communists who are culturally conservative, reactionary, or nationalist and decide their cultural views outweigh their economic ones, but i can't be sure.
i'm to some extent in that group, but I never voted for trump or for any other Republican.
I agree that this event has extra salience because it is about defending the culture from incoming hordes that want to bring their own culture with them. It’s like Haitians eating cats and dogs except this time it’s true and it’s young girls being raped.
It’s not even about race or religion per se. Indians don’t face the same hostility. Pakistan has a level of misogyny that would be criminal in much of the western world and this event just confirms people's prejudices.
Way more false this time. It’s just a retread of the Satanic Panic. Read Samantha’s testimonies (quite plural).
I think this analysis also misses the groups who are criticizing the response to the rapes because its just another data point in the pile of evidence against MENA/non-EU migration (unemployment rates, lifetime net tax costs, incarceration rates). The UK doesn’t collect/publish as good of data on some of these outcomes as other European countries (Netherlands, Denmark), so this scandal is a simple way communicate the scale of the issue in England to win people over to the dangers of much of modern European immigration policies
I do think it's worth drawing a distinction between "I am Allowed to not feel moral outrage / do activism at far-off suffering" and "I am Obligated to not feel moral outrage / do activism at far-off suffering". I see a lot more ppl mad about Rotherham who fall into the former camp, where they feel too much emphasis is placed on far-off suffering generally but don't think it's inherently bad to care about it, versus the weird pseudo-Nietzchean "caring about other people is for pussies" belief. People will be arbitrary over which instances of suffering they personally care about, but that's just how people are, I don't think that's inherently philosophically wrong.
I appreciate your niceness, politeness, and empathy being applied to this situation, your willingness to hold your opposition to the ideas they claim to believe - but what if they're just racist, though?
I think if they say "sorry, I'm racist", that is 100% a defense against the "accusation" I am leveling at them. Probably some of them will use it.
But I think most of them will think "Hmm, that's funny, I don't think that I'm racist, I wonder what's going on here" and maybe do some moral philosophy.
(also, racism alone doesn't save you - there are plenty of white kids having a bad time!)
Racism is far more about hating the out-group than it is about loving the in-group. Rotherham features Pakistanis doing the raping. If you had a story of Moldovan kids being sex trafficked by Christian Nigerian gangsters, they'd suddenly discover their ability to care again, but then it would disappear when it was Christian Moldovan gangsters.
Again, I think if they say "Yeah, I actually just hate brown people, I don't care at all about child sexual abuse", that is a 100% defense against my "accusation".
I think very few people actually think that way, and even the ones who do prefer to think they don't, and even the ones who don't prefer to *pretend* that they don't, so again, I am hoping it will inspire some moral philosophy.
See also https://meteuphoric.com/2013/12/22/pretend-to-really-really-try/
I think a lot of them will openly admit that they are supporters of white identity politics. It's not uncommon to run into people on Substack to openly identify as supporters of white identity politics or even openly identify as racist. I always thought it's funny when someone openly identifies as racist, it's like openly identifying as a witch.
Of course you are not willing to name any people. And also there is a big social desirability bias component here. People don't want to identify as white nationalists. Though maybe nowadays less so.
Look Scott if you don't give us any specific examples then we can't help you. I think Walt Bismarck is an example of someone who openly identifies as a white identity politics person: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87974555
I think that "I hate brown people" is a bit of a straw man, they might not *hate* brown people, but they just don't care about them, and they care much more about white people who they see as their tribe. Walt Bismarck doesn't seem like a very hateful individual to me. He insults people a lot but doesn't really get angry. He doesn't hate people in the third world but he openly declares that he does not give a shit about them either way, saying on a podcast with Bentham's Bulldog that he would save a dog which he actually cares about over the entire population of Haiti or something.
> I always thought it's funny when someone openly identifies as racist, it's like openly identifying as a witch.
I don't know, it seems the world is becoming more accepting of the occult.
>I always thought it's funny when someone openly identifies as racist, it's like openly identifying as a witch.
Both of those have been relatively popular for 10+ years.
Openly identifying as racist with a positive affect, and the racism targeting brown people, that is weird.
To back you up on this a bit, I also think such a person who says they don't care at all about child sexual abuse is in a bit of a tricky position to articulate why grooming gangs are actually bad--if child sexual abuse isn't worth caring about, what is there to hate about brown people doing it?
Could not the Rotherham rapists say, "we're based post-Nietzscheans, we don't care about child sexual abuse, especially of the outgroup, we just care about defending our in group. That's why we regard snitching on us as worse than rapes"?
It feels like you have to articulate something like, "the grooming gangs and their communal enablers should have realized child sexual abuse is bad, even of the outgroup, or you really have to abandon reflective equilibrium and say, it's wrong for a Pakistani immigrant trying to decide whether to snitch on his rapist cousin to think this way--but it's right for me to think this way.
I think most of the people I encounter who think this way implicitly take the latter view, and I think there's a certain defensibility to it, but it really seems very hard to hold this attitude stably. It's like the early Israeli nationalists who realized that of course Arab nationalists would never accept Israel, they would never have done the same in their shoes--it's an easy position to maintain in theory, but much harder to hold after the twentieth bus bombing, or October 7--at some point it becomes uncomfortable to think, "yeah of course I'd do the same in their position, and that's just the way things should be" and you start looking for minimal standards that everyone has to treat the other by.
I suspect even most extreme white nationalists will say, "raping outgroup tweenagers is off limits in an absolute sense" and think that should apply symmetrically to both sides.
And, as you say, though thoughts along these lines and soon enough you're doing moral philosophy...
Yes obviously. It's just classic in-group and out-group racial dynamics. It can go in the other direction as well of course. It's why apartheid South Africa was far from the worst regime on the continent, and not the only one that oppressed some ethnicities and had other ethnicities rule, but it was the one that the rest of Africa called to boycott. I don't know if you would call this "anti-white racism" per se, but it's certainly an in-group/out-group thing.
>Racism is far more about hating the out-group than it is about loving the in-group.
It's mostly about feeling that the in-group is threatened by the out-group.
Why doesn't racism alone save you? Let's get inside the head of a white nationalist.
The white nationalist view is that the people running the UK are evil cucks and race traitors who import third worlders into the country to rape white girls, and this is an outrage and needs to be condemned. Covering this up, in their view, is the epitome of the "CUCKED" anti-Nietzchean mentality, where the "weak" third-worlders are favored over the superior white race, when actually the Pakistani men had a lot of power over the white girls and were abusing them and not the other way around. This is an inversion of the natural order of things in their view, whites should be abusing Pakistanis if anything. Meanwhile if people in the third world die of malaria, their view is whatever, at least that way they won't be able to come into our countries, good riddance.
Meanwhile if a random white person is suffering from something else, of course they won't like that, but they would say well at least it's not an attack on white person by a non-white person enabled by traitor cuck politicians.
> Covering this up, in their view, is the epitome of the "CUCKED" anti-Nietzchean mentality, where the "weak" third-worlders are favored over the superior white race, when actually the Pakistani men had a lot of power over the white girls and were abusing them and not the other way around.
I don’t think you have to have an ideology that white people are “superior” to oppose the rape of children by non whites.
To be clear, the point of my comment was solely to explain why someone with a white nationalist, identitarian, and/or supremacist ideology would get *especially worked up* about the rape of white children by non whites.
I am not a white nationalist, and I of course strongly oppose the rape of children by non whites. Anyway, the comment was not supposed to be about my own beliefs at all.
Yes, I think I misinterpreted you. Apologies.
I don't see many other worldviews that can consistently oppose the rape of white children by non-whites but be totally okay with whatever happens when children happen not to be white, though.
Yeh, I suppose. The bad faith argument here is that people who are opposed to the rape of white children are ok with it otherwise.
Hmm... I don't think one can plausibly get exactly that combination, but one could conceive of someone who was so opposed to interracial sex that they opposed rape of white children by non-whites and rape of non-white children by whites, but otherwise was ok with child rape. I doubt it would be a popular position.
It's not about "being ok with it", it's more about "not caring because they're not part of the in-group". Of course, their might be hardcore racists who actively promote these horrendous acts on non-white people (like the Nazis did with their outgroups).
They don't owe you an admission. You should know better than anyone else that it's bad PR.
The goal, as I understand it, is not to get them to admit it openly, only to sort things out in their own heads and become better people. If somebody who otherwise wouldn't have done so ends up rethinking their values and donating 10% to malaria prevention, all the kids getting those bed nets don't care if said donor also claims on twitter to have never changed and been correct all along.
Of course very few racists self-identify as racists, or will admit it in public.
They will think something more like 'Woke DEI has infiltrated the institutions to the point that the hoard of dangerous Muslim immigrants is able to impose their violent and misogynist culture on Western citizens, this has to be stopped!.'
They don't view any of that as racist, just as empirically true facts. And I don't think they'll hesitate to give a response along those lines.
What if they are just racist? I once knew someone with black nationalist sympathys, should I have treated them worse?
Yes.
while I bet you have an interesting take here; I more setting up a an argument for people who say no
My answer is egotistical already; I like interesting argumentative people so I treat such people most write off *better* then boring people
The answer is pretty clearly #1. It's not even malicious or anything. People mostly care about what the things they read tell them to care about, and what they read mostly depends on how well it agrees with their beliefs and tribe. Everything else follows from that.
The recent revival of the Rotherham story is instructive because it's such an undeniably blatant example of a media circus being manufactured to push a political narrative. Usually bias is more subtle than that - they may pick and choose what stories to report, but at least the stories that get reported are actual *news*. But nobody would ever dig up a 15 year old story from another country unless they were deliberately doing it to push a political narrative, and usually not even then.
And I'm not saying this just because it's right-wingers doing it in this case. To pick a random example, the murder of Kathryn Johnston *was* outrageous, but I'd be pretty suspicious if it randomly became a media circus *now* for some reason. And at least she was American!
AIUI, it's not a "15-year-old story" in the sense that an individual murder is, but a thing that's been going on *for* 15 years (or more).
It's not a "15-year-old story", it's a story that's been ongoing for decades (and is still ongoing as I type this), which happens to have first come to prominence 15 years ago.
This seems like a strong claim without appropriate justification? The story first came to prominence 15 years ago, the facts start maybe a decade (or two) before that, but how is the story still ongoing?
There have been reports of grooming gangs in at least 50 towns and cities, only a small number of which have been properly investigated, and even then, the investigations' recommendations generally haven't been implemented. IOW, the factors which enabled the abuse to flourish unchecked for decades are still present, so it's a very safe bet that the abuse is still present as well.
What factors did you have in mind? The most prominent I’m thinking about is “authorities unable to believe there could be malfeasance on that scale” (often followed by an incredulous: “in Great-Britain! In this day and age!”). The failure mode is less likely to exist because the original report made sure nobody could keep their head in the sand.
Fear of looking racist, fear of community tensions, fear of disturbing what is essentially a parallel society that the authorities would have great difficulty policing regularly, dislike of the white working classes, corruption and complicity within the police itself...
In addition to Mr. X's angle, I will point out that the story does not stop when the rapes stop. Many years after the rapists are all rounded up, they will be given prison sentences commensurate with the legal system's view of the severity of their crimes, then eventually those sentences will be reported. "One of the Rotherham rapists got out of prison with only nine years served" is a continuation of the story which is naturally and appropriately going to bring a now-old series of crimes back into the spotlight.
This is a valid point.
However, if this were in fact the case, shouldn’t most of the outrage come from the British? If nothing else, because they’re literally closer to the places where this happened, and the rapists who escaped can relocate without the slightest hassle in another city, or because all of the people who messed up this badly were paid by their taxes?
So why would the outrage come from Americans?
Britain is still my tribe, so I feel more responsibility there than for women abused in Afghanistan.
Does this mean I think British women are inherently more worthy than Afghan women?
No! It means they are more my responsibility than women of a much more alien culture. To reform an alien culture requires a lot more killing than reforming MY culture. For MY culture, I understand who is a traitor who is worthy of a good hang/draw/quarter. (But as a swell guy, I'll settle for lesser punishment.)
Consider the second US invasion into Iraq. We killed a crap-tonne of innocent people trying to impose democracy and got ISIS instead. It turns out that the Evil Emperor system is better in a deeply divided country which has no democratic tradition than democracy imposed by infidels. We should have put less effort making Iraq a better place not because the Iraqis are less worthy people, but because as outsiders we lacked competence.
The Peace Corps and private foreign aid are fine and dandy. But I don't feel obligated to downgrade my country into an overcrowded shithole country if some other nation decides to overpopulate. I am utterly cool with with well-received foreign aid -- both public and private. But if another country decides to do something wacko, it is ultimately the responsibility of the residents of that country to fix the problem.
Power and responsibility need to go together. If we are responsible for all the problems of the world, then we need the power to conquer and impose our values militarily.
Given our own moral decline, I think we should be humble and not impose our values forcibly. Let other countries make their own mistakes and learn from them -- while offering some sage wisdom and a bit of aid from time to time. But we do NOT have the obligation to sink to the level of those who are screwing up.
"But I don't feel obligated to downgrade my country into an overcrowded shithole country if some other nation decides to overpopulate."
That's a neat little bit of anti-immigration sentiment slipped into what was otherwise (perhaps) a perfectly reasonable bit of non-interventionist theory (even if it wasn't really in response to anything Scott had written). Even if you think welcoming people into your country and providing them with aid there is harmful, its very different from invading the middle east.
Non interventionism REQUIRES immigration restriction. That's the key point.
With wide open borders, the problems of other countries become our problem.
Here's the deal: to have liberty and the benefits of Bernietopia, we need a high minimum wage. If the world minimum wage is way below this required minimum wage, then we need to either enforce a national picket line or raise the world minimum wage.
The latter option requires imposing the ideal balance of capitalism and welfare on the entire planet. This is deadly to societies who have traditions which are not economically optimal, and utterly confusing to those still in the paleolithic.
Walls are more humane than empire. Hadrian built walls INSTEAD of conquering pesky barbarians. (Trade with barbarians happened at Hadrian's walls. Hadrian gets kudos as one of the nicer Roman emperors.)
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While we should be altruistic and take measures to raise the world minimum wage, we should neither use Shock and Awe to make it happen nor should we downgrade our lifestyle because other societies are doing things different. A mix of border friction and humble foreign intervention is optimal.
I like this point. I may not like all the details of how it happened, but I like that both of the most populous countries now have a sizable middle class. I think that's a significant event in the economic history of the world and a net benefit to the rest of the working population in the world. Wasn't always great for the middle classes in the developed world. It's interesting to think about how the developed countries might have handled this better. I certainly don't think trying to halt globalization is the answer, just because globalization has a life of its own and will steamroller attempts to stop it. Globalization doesn't really care whether you like it or not.
Weird behavior to cite Roman foreign policy as optimal to learn from, but I guess I should expect that given your profile. Also, its not like Hadrian's wall was on the border of Italy. Rome pushed itself as far across the world as it could manage, looting and pillaging and sometimes committing genocide along the way, and then decide to start fencing people out. In that way I guess it is strikingly similar to Great Britain. Not sure how that should factor into your analysis, but its gotta fit somewhere.
Hadrian's policy was a huge improvement over late Republican Roman policies. Shrinking back to a subset of Italy would be like downsizing the US to the original 13 colonies.
> to have liberty and the benefits of Bernietopia, we need a high minimum wage.
Not necessarily. We could have the state collect taxes almost entirely based on land use (and similar exclusivity rights, such as intellectual property), then distribute however much of that is left after defense needs and bureaucratic operating expenses as UBI - every citizen in good standing gets a cut of the action even if they can't, or don't care to, find paying work, probably at least as much cash as they'd receive from a minimum-wage job. Among other benefits, this means that people doing good necessary work which happens to be hard to prove to outsiders - such as raising their own children, or caring for their own sick or elderly extended family, or repairs and maintenance on their own house - would get paid for it without a lot of paperwork hassle or undignified begging, and then have enough money to trivially solve various closely related problems for which mass-market capitalism is orders of magnitude more efficient.
With no income tax, nor means-tested benefits programs, they'd be keeping every cent they earn when they do find paying work, and thus every incentive to negotiate for higher pay when they think they've got leverage. Universal ability to simply walk away if they don't like the terms offered means employers would also have less cause to push toward the lower bound - at least, with regard to citizens in good standing. Immigrants who lacked access to that citizen's dividend from the outset, or criminals whose guaranteed income is gobbled up by legal consequences of their past behavior, would lack the negotiating leverage of such a safety net, and so could be offered lower pay, or excluded outright, according to any given employer or prospective business partner's assessment of the risks.
I'm certainly not arguing that we don't need *any* walls - land use rights can't exist without them, after all - but putting walls in the wrong places can do harm. "Measure twice, cut once," especially if the thing you're cutting is a trade route.
A citizen dividend to give locals a home court advantage would definitely solve many problems. I'm a bit leery of a Georgist Land Tax due to running some use cases and realizing the Georgism can be a form of Genocide Lite. (Forcing people to move vs. killing people.) See this post by the Tree of Woe and my comments thereon for details.
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/the-physiocratic-platform-land-tax
Any extractive mechanism can be genocidal in that sense if it's one-sided, taking without giving back. Advantage to pairing LVT with UBI is it's self-correcting: if the tax rate gets set far too high, anyone personally holding an average-or-below amount of land can just hunker down and watch the made-up numbers spin, rather than things of real value being destroyed.
> Non interventionism REQUIRES immigration restriction. That's the key point.
Not really? Non interventionism involves people in other countries. If they're in your country, now they're subject to your rules. They do have a duty to adapt some; they can't just go "this used to be legal where I come from!" if they do a crime. But guaranteeing that doesn't require just banning immigration altogether.
+1; best take.
+1000.
This is the based take. Not the straw-man Scott set up.
Agree
I don't understand why this argument doesn't make sense to people. So far I haven't seen a counterargument that doesn't boil down to, "be more feeeeeeeling!"
> It turns out that the Evil Emperor system is better in a deeply divided country which has no democratic tradition than democracy imposed by infidels.
I don't think that's even the lesson per se. But generally speaking, people having tribal instincts ALSO means that if the outside tribe rolls in with tanks and bombs, kills a bunch of yours and then props up a government saying "this is really cool!", you're more likely to think this is NOT really cool. And maybe hey, this Evil Emperor is an asshole, but he's OUR asshole.
(also it's not like all Iraqis were happy with just letting ISIS take over, I expect. See also Afghanistan and the Talibans. Simple division and a power vacuum is enough for the resident psychopaths to elbow their way into power)
Some form of democracy might have worked, but not the one we supported. When a country is deeply divided or tribal, plurality-takes-all favors the biggest tribe, even when that tribe promises to persecute the other tribes.
Range Voting might have worked in Iraq. Uniters could have possibly succeeded over strongest factions. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/where-all-else-fails-change-the-rules To to impose Range Voting elsewhere, we need to practice it here first.
That may be part of it, but I also think any system propped up by a foreign invader who removed the previous one by force of arms gets a default starting -15 to approval handicap virtually in any human society, just because of the Fuck Those Guys factor.
Agreed. It amazes me how much the interventionists fail to realize that patriotism exists in other countries.
"Hey, I'm American and I think America is great! That must mean these people who are Afghan *also* think America is great."
“My point is that we all start with a host of pretty similar albeit contradictory moral impulses and a drive to reconcile them…” = typical mind fallacy. There are a surprising number of people that will commit murder over something on the order of $20. Similar things could be said for other people inclined to behavior with seriously harmful externalities. Granted, most of the murder-prone folks probably aren’t reading rationalist blogs, but still.
I think most people who commit murder for $20 wouldn't endorse the claim "you should commit murder for $20", they're just very impulsive and really want those twenty dollars.
(I am here responding to these comments when I should be working on a project I promised people I'd have done later this week, and I don't endorse "respond to comments when there's a more important project you should be working on", yet here we are! There is no *philosophical* difference between me and a person in the same situation who actually works on the project - they are just better at living up to their ideals.)
> I think most people who commit murder for $20 wouldn't endorse the claim "you should commit murder for $20", they're just very impulsive and really want those twenty dollars.
My prototype for someone committing murder over $20 isn't that they really want twenty dollars. In my mind, it's more likely that they perceive a behavioral code under which someone else owes them $20, the other person sees things differently, and the murder is over the code violation rather than the money.
There are people willing to murder complete strangers to take their money as well, without any sense of being "owed". There are people who have murdered complete strangers without even needing any financial gain.
Sure, there are, but I think those people are a very small share of murders that occur over $20 (or similar).
See the sidethread comment: "a lot of people are working from a different set of moral impulses that do not at all obviate the possibility of extreme violence in response to relatively minor slights/disrespect".
It's common for a trivial amount of money to trigger slights that require a response. It's not common for a trivial amount of money to trigger robbery.
Crime doesn't pay and if you compare prison time to robbery gains, robbers make less than minimum wage.
My point is not that they endorse murder over $20, though in the right circumstances some people absolutely do endorse that, it’s that a lot of people are working from a different set of moral impulses that do not at all obviate the possibility of extreme violence in response to relatively minor slights/disrespect. To be clear, I’m not advocating against the importance of impulsivity, only that it’s insufficient to explain what I’m generally gesturing at.
(Please don’t let my bloviating cause you to fail to meet your commitments!)
I am grateful for the fact that my limited social media presence has not acquainted me with anyone wanting to invade the UK for any reason let alone over Rotherdam nor have I have run across anyone objecting to charity for those we will never meet or know much about. Are there very many of such people in the real world ?
No and it's a huge weakness of this essay. Scott is responding to a very atypical view that he happens to get exposed to much more than other people because of the topics he writes about. Your experience is much more in line with the median person.
Okay but obviously the modal “Nietzschean vitalist” who is raving about the grooming gangs is doing so because the races of the perpetrators and victims set the stage for tribal-struggle motivations for action. Right? There’s no mystery to their views, and indeed no contradiction to their moral philosophy. The universal altruistic impulse that you are trying to find in these people does not exist.
That impulse might exist in (some of) the libs/leftists suppressing talk of Rotherham, and the puzzle to solve is how to shake them out of it. And I do indeed think it’s a game-theoretic puzzle rather than a philosophical one: every lib thinks the Paki groomers are scum, but if any one of them says so they open themselves up to intrafactional attack — so they all need to say it together, but coordintion is challenging.
The reason they're feeling unbuttoned about kids in a foreign country is because they're White kids (in many cases only a few generations away from being fellow British White kids).
And that is quite right. You should be more concerned and altruistic about genetically relatively closer people than genetically relatively more distant people, if only because should implies can, and you can't know more genetically/culturally distant peoples' situations as well as you can your own.
But further, unless you believe in a religion that mandates altruism and compassion on spiritual grounds, the only grounds for altruism for a materialist is inclusive fitness: so, one is altruistic to the point of self-sacrifice in war (say) because it helps one's inclusive fitness, because your genetically closer group that survives because of your sacrifice will pass on some of your genes (it isn't necessary for inclusive fitness that "your" genes should come from your gonads in particular).
No, if theres enough logic to stop pushing the nuclear button the debate of access to resource between genes is that 1%
No, inclusive fitness doesn't work like that. Any gene which caused such a priority would die out in competition with other humans who lack that gene. Haldane quipped that he'd be willing to lay down his life for two siblings or four cousins, the math just keeps growing exponentially as you expand outward. When you get to the least related human, the corresponding rational sacrifice on your part is infinitesimal.
Not if it achieved fixation during some bottleneck period where the human population of the known world was low enough to count to, and tribes faced extinction-level threats from natural disasters or megafauna (which individuals with the hypothetical "all humans are my in-group" gene can solve via intertribal coordination... and use either the crisis itself, or subsequent glory of personal responsibility for success, to reduce how many grandchildren their staunchest opposition ends up with) more often than from competition with other humans.
Fixation doesn't necessarily imply universality. If it's a polygenic trait, like schizophrenia, everyone who expresses it in a given generation could die off without reducing the prevalence much. Consider a scenario where there are, say, ten tribes of biologically modern humans, each with 10% prevalence of the "I'd lay down my life to save someone outside my tribe" trait, and twenty tribes of neanderthals who lack that trait entirely. One of the neanderthal tribes decides they'd like to kill off a particular human tribe, claim their hunting grounds. Neanderthals are individually bigger and stronger than humans, without being any more difficult to coordinate within a tribe, so they have roughly the same number of individuals and expect to be able to win easily, though it'll be a slow process of attrition through successive raids.
Targeted human tribe sends envoys to the other nine, begging for aid. That 10% with the "save people outside my tribe" trait immediately volunteer, and manage to cajole a similar number of initially disinterested tribe-mates into coming along as well, whether out of pre-established personal obligation, or for chances to prove themselves as warriors, collect shiny stuff from dead neanderthals, etc.
Now the neanderthals are effectively outnumbered three-to-one, sufficient to overwhelm their individual physical advantages. Attrition ratio from raiding gets far worse. Much of that opposing force is glory-seekers who don't know or care about pre-war borders, so they can't even safely de-escalate and withdraw.
The other nineteen neanderthal tribes point and laugh, if they hear about the situation at all. Humans expand into the former neanderthal hunting grounds. A generation or two later, humans do something which makes remaining eighteen neanderthal tribes point and laugh, and on down the line. A particularly clever neanderthal scout independently invents the concept of mathematical induction, sees which way things are headed, and attempts to marry in to whichever human tribe is open-minded enough to accept, rather than be hunted to the last.
Fixation is not enough, mutations will pop up and undermine the gene. It's been a very long time since the entire human population went through a bottleneck, plenty of time for mutations (especially as the population expanded).
Not if it's a polygenic trait tied to other individually-useful features, and corresponding to a circumstantially useful strategy involving high risk but also proportionately high reward.
Consider Genghis Khan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SlAzsXa7E or, for a less grandiose case, the stereotypical sailor with "a girl in every port." How does he establish and maintain those relationships, motivate the women in question to raise his children rather than someone else's, even when he's not there most of the time? https://narts.sylvanmigdal.com/?date=20180203 Partly by taking personal, violent risks on their behalf, even though they're initially strangers, and further making it clear that this is a persistent behavioral pattern rather than circumstantial strategy on his part. Sailor in a bar gets the girl by 'chivalrously' beating up some other guy who wasn't respecting her boundaries - that is, he's marginally risking his own life (the other guy could've, say, pulled a knife, or hit back hard enough to kill by accident) to marginally benefit someone far outside his tribe, without her having committed in advance to provide any reward. That he's able to make a habit of doing so establishes lower bounds on his emotional intelligence, skill at violence, and various other useful traits which the woman in question presumably wouldn't mind her offspring inheriting.
Penelope stays stubbornly faithful to Odysseus, knowing that he'll someday return to massacre the crowd of suitors. How would it have turned out if he'd come back to find her in bed with someone else? Badly for any children from that second marriage, most likely, and thus an unwise gamble from the standpoint of her own inclusive fitness.
How does a trait being polygenic make it more likely to persist?
We know how Genghis Khan had so many children: he conquered and kept grabbing wives. Your imaginary sailor is irrelevant to that, as is the fictional Penelope.
ROI surely? Also, what I call the "knowledge mandala." As I said, ought implies can - you can't know much concrete about others' circumstances on the other side of the world (tacit knowledge also plays a part here, there's stuff they know that isn't encoded anywhere for you to read off and incorporate in your calculation); as you stray from the center that you know concretely (self, family, loved ones, friends, etc.), there are more and more ways of fucking up others' lives if you attempt concrete forms of altruism (more ways of missing a targert than hitting it), so your caring action is necessarily going to have to have a certain level of abstraction to match the level of abstraction of your knowledge.
But that also dovetails with the relative level of shared genetics (and that would also show up in an alien invasion, say, suddenly then YES, you woulid then become altruistic on behalf of the WHOLE of humanity, it would make sense in that context, because the whole of humanity's genes are relatively closer than the aliens' - if they work via genes at all :) ).
"the only grounds for altruism for a materialist is inclusive fitness:" there are all sorts of non-spiritual, non-religious philosophical arguments for altruism. Did you actually mean that you just don't think any of those arguments are as logically grounded as the ones based on inclusive fitness?
Yes, I don't think they're as logically grounded. To me, from a matrialist point of view (I'm not that myself, but iron-manning it) it seems like a principle of inertia, you're given or born with certain evolved preferences, so the question isn't justification of why you should behave morally, but justification of why you should NOT behave morally, why you should go against your nature and stray from the feelings you've been given by your genes, that have then been reinforced by your mother and father, your locale, etc. (e.g. benevolence, fellow-feeling, patriotism, etc.).
Hmm. I agree that if you think the entire point of life is inclusive fitness then all moral choices default to how to optimize for that, but A) I'm not sure even most atheists think that. Most people care more about happiness than inclusive fitness. Are the two correlated? Somewhat but not entirely and that's because B) our impulses, drives, and social systems aren't actually directly aimed at inclusive fitness, but only indirectly, which means you are still left with a system where you have to negotiate between all the different values, incentives, and social mores to decide what you should be doing and I'd be surprised if these mapped cleanly for most people onto "care more about people who have the same skin color as you," as you stated in your first comment. Immediate family? Sure. Lot of mutually reinforcing patterns there. Phenotype? That might be one impulse but there are going to be lots of other and conflicting ones that evolved through the same architecture but produce opposite incentives.
So really the life of the diehard materialist inclusive fitness maximizer is not that much different from the life of a Christian who takes their religion seriously, that is: they have a nature that gives them mixed messages. In Christianity, that's because human beings are made in God's image and guided by God's grace but simultaneously fallen and prone to temptation and destructive worldly pleasure. For materialists its the same but because of the difficulty reconciling our evolutionary imperative with the way its been historically implemented in our genes and our culture. Regardless, you are going to need some sort of guided, developed system for navigating those contradictions, and this system will produce results that seem counter-intuitive, and often in exactly the same way, like giving to charity.
As I responded to someone else, it's not necessary that you be aware of the benefits to your inclusive fitness of acting altruistically for your tribe, you just act that way because you're built that way, and in fact you need some very strange reienforcements to NOT act that way (granted bell curve distributions and all that, i.e some won't feel this way at all, but the bulk will feel it somewhat).
Obviously it's not about skin colour per se, that's just a quick and dirty marker of a relative genetic closeness vs. distance that exists along a whole host of traits. IOW for a White person (or Jew or Black, etc., with any subdivision you care to name), acting to benefit other Whites (or Jews or Blacks etc.) is a way for their motivation to orient towards what will in fact turn out to be their inclusive fitness (obvs it's the same for other ethnic and racial groups, so long as there's some easly recognizable marker that goes along with relative genetic closeness vs. distance). This all started long before it could even be articulated in language, it's probably a mammalian thing, and originates with pack mammals at that.
The "different values" you're talking about are not necessarily actually values, they may just appear that way. The most difficult problem is recognizing what is a value. But any such explorations (once the matter of inclusive fitness has been discovered for reflective thought) must take their departure from this question of relative genetic closeness vs. distance and inclusive fitness. If a "value" doesn't build on that, it's questionable whether it's just the intellect wandering off into intellectual candyfloss land, or merely a trick that makes one a tool of someone else's will to power.
Perhaps it might be clearer to conceive of this basic level as a tether. Sure, you can have values that aren't all about inclusive fitness, but they can't wander too far from that, and certainly can't contradict it, because it's only at that level where the extreme case of self-sacrifice that characterizes altruism lives (IOW self-sacrifice/altruism would never have so much as entered any creature's head without the "free-floating rationale" of inclusive fitness, all creatures would be "Hobbesian," blindly selfish, etc.)
You might come back to me and say there are other rationales for altruism, but that's what I'm questioning above when I talk about figuring out whether a value is really a value. I doubt there is anything else, other than extensions that are perhaps just somewhat independent, with their own logic, but never completely independent. A lofty spirituality perhaps? But that's yer whack.
Atheists/materialists who don't have this sense are on a hiding to nothing - merely individual rationality, hedonism, utilitarianism, etc., is a dead end because it misses out on the meta level where people get over the Prisoner's Dilemma by having a higher a-rational level of co-operation so they can build as self-conscious groups (collectivism is prior to individualism, unlike the liberal/libertarian/Randian fables). The attitude is unlikely to die out completely, but it's never going to be how most people think and behave, which is generally going to be family/clan/ethnicity/race oriented.
If the only things that qualify in your framework as "values" are those rooted is some objective reality bigger than yourself (which apparently god qualifies but universal human flourishing does not) than inclusive fitness is as illusory as any other moral framework and therefore incapable of generating value. Any materialist should be capable of recognizing that the gene is not the unit of self, our altruistic urges might have some grounding in our evolutionary history, but so would our belief in a higher power, and if the latter is no sound motivation to help others than so too would be the former. I'm not saying that you have to be a nihilist to be a materialist, but if "I'm continuing the survival of my genes" is the only acceptable bullwark, that's obviously not enough. So either you are one of those people who thinks that a true atheist can't have morals because it requires the existence of God, or you have to admit human beings can create values that aren't just evolutionary impulses wearing a trenchcoat.
I talked about the extension of moral principles, so I don't know what you're arguing against here. Saying a thing is "tethered" means it DOES have some elbow room to wander about in possibility space (in this case possible morality space or possible value space), but it also means that there are limits.
That's how relative genetic distance/inclusive fitness function, not as the "ground" of morality (because - especially from an atheist/materialist perspective, one would think, although an evolved thing can have a conditional if-then logic, it can't be "grounded" or be a "framework" in that sense, it just is) but as the limiting principle that guides you as to whether a thing is a real or false value.
For example judging by this principle a blanket rationalistic moral universalism is false. The correct understanding of moral universalism is that it's a one-sided abstraction of a more concrete situation where "us/them" is relative at every step of the way (e.g. tribe v tribe until bigger threat unites into"nation", human v human until a bigger threat unites into"humanity").
How it works is that these things dovetail: relative genetic closeness means relative ease of communication (vs. greater genetic distance) and understanding (think of the notoriously simpatico nature of monozygotic twins and extrapolate from there) which means the possibility of a tacit high level of trust in society (equivalent to how a code of omerta would function in the PD, i.e. getting the units of the group to function together and build together in a way that goes beyond their merely rational selfish desires (or rather "merely single-brainedly rational desires"). A civilization built on that kind of high trust creates a social structure into which individual sacrifice for the greater good can "slot in" (as it were), the society and culture continue to be reproduced through time (not least because the folk that comprise it continue to be reproduced through time) and that works for the individual's inclusive fitness.
A not-inconsiderale side-benefit of a monoethnic culture is also that the rules can afford to be less explicit because most of the social control is (NOT introjected but) tacit and instinctive (or close to instinctive and passed down in family forms) - contrast with a multicultural/multiracial society, which must waste time and energy on the creation and maintenance of explicit, spelled-out rules for disparate groups that don't have any sort of simpatico basis (other than perhaps general traits shared at an abstrat level). (And even then, the groups will mostly ignore those rules and act in their own interest.)
Just as a curiosity you might be interested in HP Lovecraft's take. As an atheist/materialist, his pessimistic view of the universe actually amplified (in his view) the necessity to stick together, for the concrete realities of familly, clan, locale, nation, are all we've got against the howling void.
At root, the problem with individualistically rational takes on morality is that they're closely related to the false classical liberal implication (of most of the liberal arguments) that the individual is born with liberties only, and not also with duties. That was an understandable lacuna in the context of the bourgeouisie coming to self-conscousnessness as the capitalist class, no longer wanting to be beholden to the old order of kings/aristocracy, but it rather throws the baby out with the bathwater in terms of the underestanding of human nature, morality, how societies function, etc.: morality logically CANNOT be just about the individual's rational choice, there has to be some element of the given, the pre-existent duty or obligation. And the level I've been talking about is the only place that can come from in an atheist/materialist context; you are given by your DNA a body and brain that have a certain tendency to socialize, to act morally, etc., and that givenness multiplied across a whole society means the sociey as a whole expects the individual to fulfil certain given obligations and duties (including, at the limit, altruistic self-sacrifice for the group). And that's all that's required.
I'm not sure there's any more grounds for valuing inclusive fitness than for just valuing altruism.
We're hardwired to care about (proxies to) inclusive fitness, sure - but that doesn't constitute grounds for anything: it's an 'is' not an 'ought'.
I imagine that most non religious people that value altruism value it "just because". I personally care about it much more than I care about inclusive fitness in and of itself. I don't think logical grounds really come into it - it's an axiom you either take or don't.
I don't buy into the "is/ought" distinction, I think it's a peculiarity of Hume's empiricism (or that whole line of modern philosophy generally) that stands or falls with the validity of the philosophy as a whole, which isn't much..
There is no place for "oughts" to come from OTHER THAN "is"-es. IOW, I take more of an Aristotelian/essentialist virtue-based point of view. "Ought" only comes in because we can, by choice, conform or fail to conform with the nature we're given, conform or fail to conform with the societal norms that characterize our folk. What needs justification is not morality but going AGAINST our moral nature. Why would you do that?
Of course we don't think of inclusive fitness consciously (except perhaps in occasional inchoate glimmers), lots of traits we have are "unconscious" in that true sense, products of evolution that drive us willy-nilly; but it was operative before we became self-conscious and rational in that sense, it's simply the "free-floating rationale" (or to strip away Dennett's fig-leaf and speak plainly, teleology) of morality.
But once we do come to conscious awareness we can understand that rationale and we can either accept it or not. And nothing can argue a "human shark" variant into it, if they don't already have some natural compassion, fellow-feeling, etc., that their parents then bolstered by upbringing.
So: altruism only makes sense in the context of one's folk (sacrificing one's life in a patriotic war can make sense in terms of inclusive fitness, even if - perhaps especially if - one has never had a child); an altruism for humanity in general would only make sense over and against an adversary that unites humanity into a functional whole (alien invasion, great natural disaster, etc.)
You can't make an argument for virtue ethics that centers around what's rational, Aristotle's virtuous man is driven by his Eudaimonian impulse to acts of greatness regardless of their net value to his tribe. He might not be the Ubermensch in terms of overturning all previously established values, but if he sees a situation he believe he has the capacity to improve, he will do so, and the more complex/hopeless the situation the more attracted he is to it as an opportunity to demonstrate greatness. That's the whole reason there's a utilitarian/virtue ethics divide, utilitarians look for small efficient actions that will benefit the greatest number of people, classical virtue ethicists look for monuments to build and monsters to slay. The outcomes may be reconcilable to one another, but the basic impulses are not, unless you want to turn virtue ethics into a venal parody of itself.
Also you should read less Aristotle and more Plato. And generally everyone commenting on this substack needs to brush up on their classical philosophy because whenever they invoke anyone prior to Descartes my eyes roll so hard I have to call AAA to get them out of a ditch.
As I understand it, Aristotle examines three broad types of life - life devoted to pleasure, to politics and to philosophy.
Life devoted to mere individual pleasure is base and stupid; life devoted to politics - i.e. to the benefit of the polity, tribe, people, folk (or as I put, dedicated to the flourishing of those who are relatively genetically closer rather than more distant) - is definitely a life of eudaimonia, it's just that life devoted to philosophy is supposedly best of all.
Yes, its the best of all because gazing into the metaphysical face of the universe is the grandest gesture a human can conceivably make. HIs elevation of polities is his acknowledging that man seems incapable of functioning, not just surviving, functioning fully as a human, outside of a political structure, but this is a recognized limitation on human independence, not some kind of statement about the necessity of genetic coalition. Consciousness is the highest virtue of humans, to the extent he's interested in polities, its how they foster it at different levels, not any concept of inclusive fitness.
But my point is that what's going to count as good-spirited political action is going to be shaped by the "free floating rationales" of relative genetic closeness and inclusive fitness. (cf. my comments in the other half of our discussion re. what I'm calling "tethering")
Again, whether that pre-shaping comes to conscious awareness and enters into conscious motivation as such or not isn't relevant to the functionality (e.g. pack mammals already had a proto-version of the same thing, and humans functioned on a more sophisticated version of it before philosophy) - although it should be relevant to the philosopher if they want the fullest understanding.
I'm not entirely one of the sorts of people you're talking about, but I don't really see "invade Britain" as being inconsistent with "you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization".
It's not about wanting to save the individual poor white girls, it's about wanting to save Great Britain. Poor white girls have rarely done anything to push forward human civilisation, but Great Britain has probably done more than any other force in history, and now it's a tiny weakened shadow of its former greatness that can't wipe its own arse.
Your friend was once a smart powerful man, now he's a depressed alcoholic who sits on his arse all day watching TV. He has just shit in his own pants, which encourages you to go over to his house and give him a stern talking to. It's not because you care about the shit or the pants, but a stern lecture about not shitting your own pants might perhaps be the thing that he needs to get himself up off rock bottom and start getting his life in order so that he can get back to being the man he could be.
That analogy might work if you felt sorry for your once powerful but now alcoholic friend, if you gave him his first drink.
We all make mistakes. That doesn't mean we shouldn't solve the problem now.
I am no longer sure who "I" am in this analogy.
Well in the original analogy you were the US, since we are talking about the US invading Britain. My point is that these ideologies on wokeness, but also libertarian ideologies on immigration often originate in the US.
Anyway I’m only a slight immigration restrictionist, I’m just a skeptic on the kinds and levels of immigration needed in the west.
Definitely no policy should see more rapes. Or terrorist attacks. That’s bad policy, whatever the policy is.
I can conceive of situations where increased frequency of some sort of stochastic atrocity could be fairly considered an acceptable price to pay for some other critical benefit, when compared to a short list of even worse alternatives... but at the very least I agree that would be an extremely bad sign, something to monitor and correct as soon as possible, rather than repressing official acknowledgement and allowing the practice to fester.
> it's a tiny weakened shadow of its former greatness that can't wipe its own arse.
Nah, Britain's mostly fine, really. It might not be as rich or militarily mighty as the US, but I know where I'd rather live.
The sad story of Victoria Climbie also comes to mind.
If I may defend a weak version of this hypocrisy that I particularly feel, it comes from a sense that, as an Australian many generations removed from my European ancestors, of whom a few are English, I exist in a common civilisational project with Britian, and my leaders tend to take cues from their elites. There is some sense that these are my distant kin, but I'm not tranquil hearing about female circumcision in Africa or cartel violence in Latin America.
It's rather an objection to the present form of the state, which in it's own internal logic views this suppression of crimes against children as a feature rather than a bug. It's clearly necessary to hide malfeasance of clannish ethnic groups to advance homogenising global consensus governance. I own that my particular anger at the rape gangs thereby has a stategic component, it's a really god awful example of particular groups breaking the implicit compact they made in immigrating, and it breaks the state's capacity to pretend every imported ethnic group are good liberals and discussing deportation is inherently immoral.
If I were actually commenting about this online I would feel morally conflicting about being so cynical, and would try to find a more sophisticated strategy to advance my particular objections to the state.
Is it really true that the state's own internal logic views suppression of crimes against children as a feature? That seems like a strong claim, needing strong evidence.
Edit: maybe I misunderstood... Obviously suppression of the *crime* is what we want. As in, make it so that these crimes happen less. But I don't think that's what you meant. I think you meant suppression in the sense of hiding the crimes so that people don't find out about them. Right?
Just to be explicit: my prior assumption is that crime is bad and the state agrees that crime is bad. Reducing crime is good. Investigating crime is good. If somebody wanted to persuade me that the state thinks that investigating crime is bad, they'd need strong evidence for that.
I am making the claim that the multicultural state, failing to prevent such crime, must suppress any public knowledge of particular groups persistently committing crimes. This extends to the rape gang situation as, while obviously a very extreme case, it still breaks open the basic and necessary taboo against noticing group behaviour.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't see why we have to notice group behaviour. Some people were systematically raping young girls. I don't need to say "oh and by the way, those people were of Pakistani ethnic origin" in order to want to bring them to justice.
I'm not saying I want to deny the truth - I'm just saying that I think any reasonable person cares less about the demographics of the criminals than about stopping the crime. (The far right and the extremely woke might care about the demographics, but they're not "reasonable people".)
I think the trouble is we've been playing out an experiment where we have tried to assume there's no casual component in a person's ethnic background, and the result has been a great vulnerability to systemic abuse. That's the result that's in.
I agree that in an ideal world the state would be indifferent to one's background in prosecuting a particular crime, but it appears that at a systemic level mass immigration has created a situation where terrible crimes are allowed to happen rather than accept a larger pattern, and hold an entire group responsible. It's clearly the case that many immigrant populations in the first world resent their hosts and tacitly condone bad behaviour against them. In some cases this is deep enough that they close ranks around mass rape.
So it seems to me that we have to break the taboo of saying "it clearly a problem with the Pakistanis" to address the problem. This is especially true with rape, which is a difficult crime to prosecute for obvious reasons.
Is there any reason to think that Rotherham was any more effective at prosecuting Child Sexual Exploitation perpetrated by whites than by Pakistanis? Across the UK (as opposed to Rotherham specifically) more perpetrators of Child Sexual Exploitation were white than Pakistani, just because the UK had a lot more whites than Pakistanis. So focusing primarily on Pakistani perpetrators might have been counterproductive.
Furthermore, it’s unclear how, even in Rotherham, focusing on Pakistani perpetrators would have helped. I think a successful investigation is likely to start by identifying victims, not perpetrators. And then you have to put together successful prosecutions.
I don't see anything to disagree with here, and I won't pretend to know the particular facts. My objection here is to the larger political machine, and the way it has tried to suppress knowledge of these crimes.
There may very well be a broader breakdown of effective prosecution for these crimes, but I'd regard that as a somewhat seperate issue needing to be addressed on different terms. It seems to me an issue of effective procedures, rather than the political priors of the ruling elites.
| ... these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.
What? This is the weirdest strawman I've seen in a while. I'm pretty sure I know well the circles you're referring to, and I've seen no one propose invading Britain. (Except maybe as an obvious joke?) What they've said is that the British legal system itself should have swiftly and harshly dealt with the Pakistani rape gangs. Which is 100% consistent with the "take care of your own" ethos that they espouse.
Really weird flex on this one.
"Regime change" might be closer to what is proposed than "invasion."
Jokes are no longer obvious.
Perhaps relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/2071/
This sounds quite relevant to a lot of discussions in the comments these days…
> "Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that capitalism solves every problem and since your solution isn’t capitalism you’re an idiot to even be considering it. I have heard zero demands that people who really care about grooming gangs have to stop talking about immigration policy or police malfeasance and focus on, I don’t know, investing in a startup working on better rape whistles. Once people care a lot about a problem, they naturally understand that - as great as capitalism is - you can’t leave everything to the free market."
This part seems rather obtuse. There were restrictions on the available actions against the groomers imposed by government authority. Most of the actual libertarian or free market solutions - although this is kind of an awkward application of a market - would result in anyone using them going to prison for assault or murder. Even posting something on social media like "we need to stop these immigrants from raping people" could result in jail time.
Scott takes a position here where the (legal) use of force is only available to one party, in this case the UK government. They then used that force against the victims of the groomers and people speaking out against them, while mostly ignoring the groomers. Then Scott says "Gee, all you people who disdain government control, this looks kind of bad for you huh."
I believe the term for this is "anarcho-tyranny."
It's basically the Simpsons quote "[The Law] is powerless to help you, not punish you."
Yes. I tried (and failed) to articulate why that particular passage grated on me, and I think you have captured it precisely.
It's an incredibly strange take by Scott, all the more strange because his thought process is usually more sensible. Also, since when does capitalism exclude the rule of law?
Historically societies without strong rule of law and state monopoly on force haven't been exactly great for protecting poor young women from predatory older men.
This seems really easy to reconcile. The view presumably is that we should be partial to kith and kin, and that ethnically similar children from countries with close cultural and historical ties to us are on the outer perimeter of that. To find the true hypocrite, report back when we get these same people up in arms over a comparable scandal involving children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
There is an old adage saying hard cases make bad law.
Personally, I think that focusing on the flashiest criminal cases might be very emotionally satisfying, but will not reliably lead to better policy outcomes. Crime statistics are, for all their problems, a much better basis to talk about supposed failings of criminal law or police than individual sob stories.
While the grooming gang thing was clearly pointing at a problem with law enforcement at that time, my gut feeling is that they are likely far removed from the median case of sexual abuse, picked out of myriads of other cases because they fit certain narratives. Humans generally are scope insensitive, but we should at least try to correct for that. So if you bring me a story about some flashy string of crimes committed by a member of your outgroup (i.e. an immigrant, a white supremacist, whatever), I will see this as an attempt to subvert policy discussions through emotional manipulation.
This. Research consistently shows most child molestation is perpetrated within families, seconded by friends of family. Never understood why this doesn’t get more attention.
Because thinking about parents abusing their children is horrific and disturbing. And doesn't come with any easy cathartic solutions.
This reminds me of that South Park episode where the adults of South Park learn about that same statistic, and decide that the obvious solution is that no child should be allowed to live with their own parents anymore.
If you don't want your kids to be molested by family members or family friends, then you as a parent have a lot of control over that. Not molesting them yourself is a good start already, and then exercise some good judgment over who you choose as your spouse and friends, which weird uncles you don't let your kids alone with, etc. People may acknowledge it as a big problem in a statistical sense, but they don't feel strongly about it because they think, correctly or otherwise, that it's something which only happens to other families.
If you don't want your teenage kids to be victimised by organised grooming gangs, that's not so much within your control. You can warn them and try to instill good instincts in them, but by the time they're teenagers you can't keep an eye on them every second of the day anymore. The best solution is for the grooming gangs to not exist in the first place, but that's the police's job, not yours. And in this case the police failed at that job quite spectacularly, sometimes to the point of basically siding with the rapists against the victims' parents.
It's a bit like people saying most gunshot victims are suicides -- OK, fine, that's an interesting statistic, but if I don't want to die of suicide I can avoid that very easily, so I'm still going to be more worried about my risk of getting shot by someone else.
> they don't feel strongly about it because they think, correctly or otherwise, that it's something which only happens to other families.
This seems like the effect where most people consider themselves to be above-median drivers. The difference is that at least some of the drivers are actually correct about their assessment, while the claim that you could vouch for every person your kid knows by name to a degree that strangers make up most of the probability mass of perpetrators seems frankly absurd -- you would have to be a telepath to be that confident.
It is a bit like worrying about your kid getting mauled by a bear in a city full of owners of all kinds of dogs. It is a safe thing to worry about. You don't have to make trade-offs between your kid's safety and having a normal social life. If a bear kills your kid in a city, you would be completely blameless -- a bear attack would be the kind of unknown unknown nobody could have foreseen. Certainly much more comforting to worry about than your kid getting killed by the neighbor's pit bull, which would be an actionable worry.
This is very well put. I had a vague discomfort gesturing in this direction but couldn't quite put it into words.
There was a missed opportunity here to have the last sentence read "...while hastily burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under a bushel where we can’t see it."
> we all start with a host of pretty similar albeit contradictory moral impulses and a drive to reconcile them, and our moral philosophies - rather than being handed to us by our genes - are downstream of the reconciliation process
Your moral impulses (and potential reconciliations) are incompatible with other people's, so at least one of you has to be wrong. If these impulses were just handed to us, you have no reason to think that yours are better than anybody else's. So you either have to embrace moral skepticism or find a way to derive morality that doesn't depend on our moral impulses.
I think Scott cleanly whiffs here on the pitch. The reason why these folks who normally don't care about the faraway victim care now is because they see the situation as part of a civilizational conflict that in fact is "our tribe vs their tribe." It may be chauvinistic or racist or whatever other epithet you want to cast upon it, but the impulse is very much consistent with the "help our family, friends, and maybe village" against a perceived proximate threat ("Islamic" abuse of non-Muslims) with direct implications for immigration, multiculturalism, and a host of similar "in my village" concerns.
Really excellent and accurate. There’s another comment here which is talking about how the actual fear is not about the people involved and more “It could happen here.” But that doesn’t line up with the way they’re talking about it, framing it as anger over the victims rather than at the West as a whole. This is best explained if they consider the victims part of their tribe and others to not be.
Right. Just because rationalists' woke adversaries at the NYT see racism under every rock doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Indeed, their hysterical pursuit of it over the past decade may have actually increased its prevalence.
For anyone who wants to donate to help victims, you can here: https://donate.rapecrisis.org.uk/. Otherwise, some points re: how it's framed and politicized:
>"but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist"
This seems like a misleading summary, if we go by the 2014 Jay Report [https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham]. E.g. [emphasis added]:
"11.6 [Dr Heal] also reported in 2006 that young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry, but *was not supported* by specific examples.
11.7 Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, *rather than in individual cases*. One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. ..."
My understanding is that in no case was any known or suspected perpetrator ever ignored because he was Pakistani. It was more that there was reluctance to have race itself play a role in the investigation, delaying the realization or communication that it was a gangs instead of a bunch of individual crimes. (This reluctance was due to accurate fear of weaponization by racists like the English Defense League.)
>"A recent legal dispute got them back in the news, and since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before."
It's not back in the news because of a legal dispute; it's back in the news because Elon Musk personally wants to weaponize it to crush multicultural liberalism and install far-right governments, in the UK as everywhere. (That's also why he's always "demanding an inquiry" while acting like the Jay Report doesn't exist; he doesn't care about inquiries, to him it's just a weapon.) And it didn't organically go viral because of lack of censorship, it went viral because the guy weaponizing it owns Twitter, and used that ownership to selectively amplify his weapon.
Thank you very much for supplying specifics. Nice to see some empiricism here among the logic, intuition, feelz, philosophy, etc. Not that empiricism is the be-all end-all, but it seems like a useful contribution in the mix.
Of course the official reports and officials who enabled mass rape do not admit that fear of being seen as racist as well as strong elite bias towards immigration, muslims and ethnic minorities and strong elite bias against working class white people was not a huge factor in the last 60 years of mass rapes by immigrant gangs. But of course everyone in the UK knows that elite bias and fear of being called racist was obvious and pervasive.
At least 50 cities were infested by Pakistani rape gangs but it was never treated as a systemic problem. The UK authorities and elites have consistently clamped down on any manifestation of anti-immigrant or anti-muslim opinion while massively promoting the "woke" messages of how multiculturalism is great.
There were many many more news stories about George Floyd than the rape gangs. Rape gangs were allowed to spread and operate with minimal interference for decades. Victims were ignored and treated as criminals. Many rapists, even alleged murderers, got off with no time in prison while others got ludicrous sentences of a couple of years.
This was anarcho-tyranny at its most obvious.
Sed contra:
Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.
Similar concerns applied at the council, where anxieties over appearing racist saw safeguarding officers waving away concerns simply because the perpetrators were Asian. It was felt that some suspects were not investigated because it would have been “politically incorrect”.
This is not to say that the council did nothing. Aware that taxi drivers were offering children rides for sex, in 2006 it suspended licensing enforcement for drivers, allowing high risk drivers to continue practicing. As the Telford Inquiry found, this was “borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism; it was craven”.
[...]
Denial about the extent of the problem is rooted deep in Britain’s political system. At times, it appears that the government’s approach to multiculturalism is not to uphold the law, but instead to minimise the risk of unrest between communities. Confronted with gangs of predominantly Pakistani men targeting predominantly white children, the state knew exactly what to do. For the good of community relations, it had to bury the story.
In Rotherham, a senior police officer told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by Pakistani heritage men became public knowledge. One parent concerned about a missing daughter was told by the police that an “older Asian boyfriend” was a “fashion accessory” for girls in the town. The father of a 15-year-old rape victim was told the assault might mean she would “learn her lesson”.
The ordeal had been so brutal that she required surgery.
As the 2014 Jay Inquiry into Rotherham found, children were “doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight”, “threatened with guns”, “witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other”.
In the same town, a senior police officer allegedly said the abuse had been “going on” for 30 years, adding “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.
As Louise Casey’s 2015 report on Rotherham Council found, this attitude was widespread. The Pakistani community accounted for around 3 per cent of the town’s population, and the story emerging was clear: Pakistani men were grooming white girls. As a result, one witness said, the council was “terrified of [the impact on] community cohesion”.
Across the town, pressure was put on people to “suppress, keep quiet or cover up” issues around child abuse. A former senior officer told her review that “x didn’t want [the] town to become the child abuse capital of the north. They didn’t want riots.”
Politicians were terrified [of the impact on] community cohesion. This nervousness meant that there was “a sense that it was the Pakistani heritage Councillors who alone ‘dealt’ with that community”, with their having a “disproportionate influence” on the council: as one witness put it, “[my] experience of council as it was and is – Asian men very powerful, and the white British are very mindful of racism and frightened of racism allegations so there is no robust challenge”. Other concerns may have been even more sinister. In 2016, it was reported that a victim of grooming in Rotherham had alleged that she was raped by a town councillor.
As a result of this combination of factors, the council went to great lengths to “cover up information and silence whistle-blowers”. In the words of witnesses, “if you want to keep your job, you keep your head down and your mouth shut”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover-up-oldham-telford-rotherham/
There's plenty more in the article, but in short, yes, there's plenty of evidence for the authorities covering up the gang problem because of racial considerations.
>(That's also why he's always "demanding an inquiry" while acting like the Jay Report doesn't exist; he doesn't care about inquiries, to him it's just a weapon.)
The Jay Report only covers Rotherham, whereas grooming gangs have been reported in at least 50 towns.
Bedari is making an amazing difference for people! Hard, hard work.
I can't find the Donate icon for Bedari on the website. Is it right in front of me?
Thank you~
Something strange may be going on there. They used to have a donation option, which you can see here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130723021754/http://bedari.org.pk/support.php, but by 2014, that tab was removed, apparently along with the donation button (https://web.archive.org/web/20141222153147/http://www.bedari.org.pk/).
Then, in 2016, a "donate now" button appeared, but apparently for one particular campaign. (https://web.archive.org/web/20160314012711/https://bedari.org.pk/) and by 2017, it was gone.
I'm guessing they don't accept private donations.
Their website (https://bedari.org.pk/about-us/) says:
>Bedari has a formal, paid full-time working staff that has a support from a wide network of volunteers. It is establishing partnerships with donors to execute various projects with specific objectives. It has not dissociated itself from its past. Discrimination and violence against women remain core subjects. However, it has expanded its wings to other areas which affect women’s condition in the society. These include education, economic empowerment and formulation of explicit laws and their implementation to safeguard women’s rights. Today Bedari is working more vigorously on these issues.
The insistence that they haven't dissociated from their past may indicate some change in the organization, which as noted, apparently used to accept private donations. The fact that they put this in the same section as a vague reference to "establishing partnerships with donors to execute various projects with specific objectives" may further indicate that there was some change with the structure of their organization and its funding.
This Pakistani charity index: https://pcp.org.pk/npo-directory/ (which is itself apparently recognized by the government (https://nacta.gov.pk/guidelines-sops/cft/charity-laws/safe-charities-list/) states regarding Bedari:
>Valid Till : 25/10/2022
>Address : House # 187 A Street # main Ghouri Town Phase 2 near Fizia colony, Islamabad
It doesn't seem that most charities listed there were only valid as of some years ago, as all the other ones I see show themselves as valid until 2027.
The Bedari site lists a registration number, but at the moment, I don't see an index of organization by registration numbers.
Their Twitter account abruptly stopped posting in February 2024: https://x.com/bedaripakistan.
It's self-consistent for the based post-Christian vitalists to demand that, if the government refuses to punish rape, it should also refuse to punish lynch mobs. This is not them asking for more socialism, or falling prey to tender-heartedness. They're asking for the police to allow them to victimize those who the police allow to victimize their daughters. This is fully consistent: an anarchist solution to an anarchist problem.
("Consistent" is different from "correct", of course.)
Really, when you look at their posts, what they're asking for is racial equality. Half their posts juxtapose white guys who got long sentences for complaining online about grooming gangs with brown guys who got short sentences for being part of grooming gangs. (I'm sure they're cherry-picking these.) "The police are letting the Pakistani guys get away with all kinds of stuff, why not us too?" Which is cute, since most of them are racists, so what grounds do they have to complain?
My point is that Scott fails to understand them because he forgets that they could "solve" their problem very easily (with mob violence) if allowed to. The law makes itself invisible that way, and Scott reasons as though he doesn't see it. But the "based post-Christian vitalists" see it.
It's also self-consistent to assert the difference between positive and negative interventions. Asking the police to punish rapists (a negative intervention) is different from asking for money for mosquito nets (a positive intervention). It's not slicing too thin for libertarians to claim that government's monopoly on violence naturally fits it for negative interventions -- guys with guns are good at getting people to stop doing stuff. Getting people to start doing stuff, well... you need whips for that, it's not as easy.
Again, not agreeing with either side, just trying to point out a couple of factors that seem very present in the overall conversation, but which Scott overlooks.
And to me it's astonishing that he overlooks them, because it's so obvious! Capitalism was never intended to replace rule of law. Claiming that rule of law is under threat because of wokeness is not even mildly inconsistent with the position that capitalism is the key to solving most of humanity's problems.
Capitalism works best when combined with secure rights, including but not limited to property rights, under the rule of law.
I think it's closer to 'Capitalism works only when combined with secure property rights'
>I'm sure they're cherry-picking these.
There's not *that* many people that actually end up jailed for tweets in the UK (after the government released violent offenders to make room for them, of course), so it wouldn't be that conclusive to distinguish cherry-picking versus the effect of a small data set.
The bigger factor is probably that American commentators have no respect for or understanding of UK speech laws and relatively short prison sentences even for violent crime. The intersection looks insane from a US perspective even if we assume away latent bias on part of the UK government.
I think all this talk about morality makes more sense when you realize that morality is controlled by desire, not the other way around. It's all just justifications for what you wanted to do anyways, and justify the hatred of those who oppose your interests. You can always try to use religion to align these people, of course, but with time, they'll just develop better rationalizations to circumvent it.
As for the issue at hand... as others have pointed out, you're missing a big point, which is that the "starving children in a far-off country" aren't white. But the bigger point is that this isn't about saving the children, this is about justice. Don't you think it would be incredibly satisfying to see those rapist scum torn limb from limb? Why is the state denying the people the satisfaction of seeing justice served? That itself is an injustice. And the perpetrators of that injustice also need to be punished.
Edit: Seeing as everyone from every side of the aisle is telling you that you're wrong, maybe you should be the one doing some soul-searching. The answer that you arrive at doesn't have to be that they're right, of course. You could instead come to the realization that humanity is, in fact, unsalvageable. Just food for thought.
It's me, your local neighborhood based post-Christian vitalist. Your mistake is in thinking that people like us care about sexual assault victims in overseas countries *qua* sexual assault victims in overseas countries. The anger expressed at these scandals is based on the fact that they illustrate the pathological tendencies of modern Western society. It's anger at the idea that *this could happen to our daughters too,* so we better do something about it before that happens.
It's a neat little trick you pulled by sarcastically crossing out the option you take issue with and then daring anyone to have the lack of social tact to identify with the censured position. I really think you could have derived the correct answer if you tried. You're smart enough to figure out the differences from an objectivist point of view between caring about systemic failure of an Anglo nation to protect little girls from rape gangs, and say, farmed animal welfare.
Caring about the idea that ‘this could happen to “our” daughters’ is not compatible with the crossed out position.
Do you think there's any sense in which the sexual assaulters in the UK are wrong to be doing what they're doing? Or the people in the community who cover for them? Like, if one of them said to you, "I'm a based post Christian vitalist so I don't care about sexual assault victims outside my community, that's why I feel fine either participating in it, or enabling it", would you be like, "yup, solid post-Christian vitalist reasoning--it's not your daughters at stake, so can't argue with any of that"?
I wonder if you've read Tom Holland's "Dominion"? So much that's confusing about moral opinions was clarified for me by that book.
Excellent book.
"I think we all have the same basic moral impulses, and that for most people - including most people who deny it - those potentially include caring about poor people you’ll never meet, suffering in far-off countries."
Obvious question - do you think the people in the Mirpuri rape gangs share these basic moral impulses?
Every once in a while you write and/or post something that I feel like I couldn’t agree with more. I don’t necessarily learn much by nature of the fact that I used much the same logic, causal reasoning, or facts to come to pretty much the same conclusion.
But by God, it does feel good to read it. It’s nice that someone else has the same struggles and arguments as I have with the same type of person and asked the same questions of their basis.
I’m in Kansas City and that type of person here is typically a, ‘libertarian’ and/or nativist. I’m as conservative as one could be, but I’ve never been able to square that, ‘let the children of lessor gods suffer and die for all I care’ attitude with my basic principles.
Thanks again
Really remarkable to read and then remember the partisan split over ebola countermeasures in light of the later reversal during Covid. But I think that reverse of polarity around Covid really was kind of unnatural, and only possible because the vaccine became such a flashpoint. From my personal experience with them, it's easy to make the kind of conservatives who have a deep-seated fear of contamination motivating their politics and personal lives view a vaccine as just as much a scary alien contaminant as a virus itself.
You're not taking into account individual differences in empathy, some of them due to wiring, some to upbringing. There's considerable spread in people's ability to recognize other people's emotions from facial expression -- one decent measure is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (which you can take on Amazon, for some reason: https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html). And then there's a second dimension to empathy that the test does not measure: Once you know how somebody is feeling, how much do you care?
Seems pretty plausible to me that low empathy people require a much more powerful stimulus than high empathy people to be moved to anger and a desire to bring about change. Accounts of small, neglected children being used as sex slaves is about the most powerful stimulus to empathy that exists. I think adopting a philosophy or ethics or even just a lifestyle that that treats other's wellbeing as irrelevant comes naturally to low empathy people, and I don't think exhortations like Scott's are very likely to change that. I'm not at all sure there's anything that can change someone's baseline empathy level.
That's why, whenever people here talk about embryo selection for intelligence as a way to improve the world, I always pipe and suggest that if we must choose one trait, empathy is a better one to select. And then lots of people pile and say everything good correlates with IQ so let's just go with IQ and we'll get all the rest. Yes, everything good correlates with IQ, but not all the correlations are high. IQ accounts for only 6% of the variance in the empathy test I mentioned.
> I'm not at all sure there's anything that can change someone's baseline empathy level.
You can always try injecting them with estrogen.
I have the same complaint with the concept of "empathy" that I do with "intelligence," which is that they're both umbrella terms for a wide variety of traits that may be correlated but are not the same and should not be conflated. Accurately reading people is one, emotionally caring about others is another, and intellectually caring is a third. (All of those could be divided into smaller traits, too.) As an anecdote, I have low empathy. I don't empathize at all with children dying of malaria on another continent. But I still donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, because I recognize that other people matter even if I don't personally care about them.
If we're defining empathy as emotionally caring about others, which seems to be the definition you're most interested in, I think selecting for that might actually be counterproductive to getting people to care about strangers on another continent, although it might increase kindness within communities. The problem is, there are too many suffering people in the world, and you simply can't empathize with most of them no matter how empathetic you are. So instead people empathize with people it's easy for them to empathize with, namely people they know personally, people who are similar to themselves, and people it's politically convenient to care about. Unfortunately, I think some people get into the habit of using empathy as a moral crutch, where if they can't empathize with someone they think that that person doesn't matter. That explains the behavior of the people Scott's arguing with. They empathize with the Rotherham victims because it's politically convenient to do so, but they don't empathize with the millions of other children who get raped every day because the human brain doesn't have the processing power to empathize with that many people.
For the record, my take on embryo selection is that we shouldn't select for anything except not having genetic diseases. Maybe overall physical health, but even then I'm wary. Chesterton's fence.
Indeed. You have 'dark empaths' who are good at understanding other people but don't care about them, and they're very dangerous.
I agree with you about the existence of the 3 kinds of empathy you named, also that it's not clear which of them, if any, actually predict certain behaviors, such as helping others, being reluctant to harm others. All that seems pretty researchable, though. In fact it probably has been researched, but I'm too tired to look it up right now. It seems much simpler to deal with than the question of the meanfulness of IQ, because IQ predicts all kinds of things. We'd only care about how much empathy scores of each of the 3 types predict helping others that are known, physically nearby or similar to oneself, and which if any predict helping distant abstract others, and similarly for predicting violence.
My thought experiment: I look at the state of the world, and imagine that there's a dial that shows total human suffering, updated continuously. Also imagine that we had 2 levers, one that would increase everybody's IQ, one that would increase everybody's empathy by the same amount, as measured in standard deviations. Seems to me that we'd get a way bigger reduction in world suffering from pulling that empathy lever.
This was a nice "motivating example" of the idea that I wish everyone would internalize: it's okay (even laudable) to openly admit some action/inaction is less ethical but that you still do it (without any performative shame dance), because you've decided the action is not a sacrifice you're willing to make with your finite capacity for good.
E.g. I still eat meat, and I don't really have any good excuse to do so, except that I like it and I'm just not a perfectly good person. Virtually every justification for eating meat in 2025 seems obviously flimsy and motivated*, and I respect a meat-eater much more if they just say that it's a sonewhat selfish thing they do and that they're okay with it for now (especially if they are, like me, open to changing that decision if and when fake meats get just a tad better or more vetted or whatever).
*The health/nutrition argument is the hardest to nail down with total certainty because that field is so fuzzy. I reluctantly avoid calling BS on the people who claim eating meat definitely for sure makes them feel better. But I'm skeptical that this is not either A) placebo or B) easily overcome with a supplement or two.
Your position seems to assume a real and universal morality that not everyone holds.
Ie, someone could find the arguments against eating meat to also be ethically unfounded. A 'human supremacist' position probably isn't that uncommon.
I don't think I'm the target audience, but I don't understand why choice 4 is "NOT A REAL CHOICE, SORRY". I feel as though there really are people out there who really do not care that bad things happen to other people, even if the other people are really sympathetic and the bad things are really bad. Is that not the case, or is the position somehow incoherent?
If theres nothing on earth that is an emotional "blunt fact" your a psychopath
I would have phased it differently and not made it a joke(cause half yall are autists, while autists have emotional blunt facts it seems to me they justify them with motivated reasoning, not experiencing them; but what do I know)
Sure, I'll grant your point on blunt facts and psychopaths.
Because it apparently escaped me, could you make explicit what you understood to be Scott's argument with this point? I understood him to say "self-evidently, you can expand your circle of moral concern until your position is consistent but may never contract your circle of moral concern.". This seems like a bad argument and so I thought I must have misunderstood.
"If I show you an image of a sex abused child, I will call you a liar for continuing to hold the position you dont care"
Much clearer, thanks
Hmm, that can be overwhelmed by the "There is an ethicist attempting to ram an obligation down my throat! [optionally: Slay him!]" reaction.
Im more pessimistic about humanity then scott it seems; but *as an argument* I dont think indifference is likely to be put forward in response to most shock images; even if you are indifferent to say teenagers posting their self harm online and you wont do a god damn thing or tell the algorithms to make it go away, your unlikely to claim that, because the poeple who do care produce all the value to steal.
Many Thanks! I'm not quite following you, in particular quite what you mean by indifference "_as an argument_".
Maybe a bit of context on my part would help. The default case that I have in mind is a claiming-to-be-aid organization sticking ads in my YouTube stream showing various people, typically kids, in dire circumstances. Yeah, if said person or kid appeared on my front door, I'd be inclined to help (to some reasonable degree).
But I utterly distrust the claiming-to-be-aid organizations, and I'm utterly sick of their artificial intrusions. My reaction to them is dominated by: You guys just made my life a bit worse, and you are trying to ram an obligation down my throat, so I'm deeply hostile to you. If a member of such an organization did the same thing personally, I'd give them a _very_ blunt and hostile refusal.
>If theres nothing on earth that is an emotional "blunt fact" your a psychopath
Well, yes. I'm pretty sure it's possible to become a psychopath; I built a psychopathic split personality in response to child abuse (thankfully appears to be gone now).
Becoming a psychopath is certainly a *bad* option, but it is one.
The average human being on planet Earth doesn't really care that much about bad things happening to other people. I mean, they're not fully able to conceptualise people on the other side of the planet as being real, but they also don't get that emotionally engaged with bad things that happen to people right in front of them. This is why the history of the world contains so many horrifying atrocities.
There are but they generally have to pretend otherwise because saying explicitly "I don't care about child rape I just hate muslims" tends not to be good for building political coalitions
One of Scott’s linked essays had this gem of the past (context: Ebola):
“What’s more, everyone supporting the quarantine has been on the right, and everyone opposing on the left. Weird that so many people suddenly develop strong feelings about a complicated epidemiological issue, which can be exactly predicted by their feelings about everything else.
On the Right, there is condemnation of the CDC’s opposition to quarantines as globalist gibberish, fourteen questions that will never be asked about Ebola centering on why there aren’t more quarantine measures in place, and arguments on right-leaning biology blogs for why the people opposing quarantines are dishonest or incompetent. Top Republicans call for travel bans and a presenter on Fox, proportionate as always, demands quarantine centers in every US city.”
Funny how the sides swap every once in a while.
When the issue actually was quarantining China and not letting the virus reach the West, the right was arguing for it and SJ was calling the right racist.
It was only later, when the virus was actually in the West, that it was SJ-aligned people demanding lockdowns.
How is this not just...different levels of caring for different levels of ingroups? Like, if we presume that effective altruists do not donate 100% of their non-survival income to malaria nets and the vitalist people aren't actually de facto sociopaths,
Like, imagine Bob has $40k/year to spend on non-necessities.
He spends $10k on himself, $26k on his immediate family, $3000 on some groups he cares about (Catholic Church, Democratic party, Audobon Society, whatevs) and $1000 on preventing animal abuse because his wife saw a sad commercial (1).
Circles of caring stuff, right: Self, Immediate Family, In Group, Everyone Else.
Now an effective altruist is arguing that we should probably be spending less on In Group and more on Everybody Else and a "Vitalist" might argue that you shouldn't spend any money on Everybody Else and you should spend more on yourself (and change your in group).
And, like, replace dollars in this example with attention to issues and, like, I'm not surprised that some people think you should give less to Everyone Else and more to Yourself and also that they're offended by perceived harms to their In Group.
Like, of the 5 options presented, which one represents a moderate shift in normal priorities? Because in real life, the Giving What We Can pledge is 10%, which is a big deal but also, like, 10%. In the example above it would be close to if Bob decided to donate all his charity to malaria nets.
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gspElv1yvc
Thank you, yes, I feel like this should be more obvious (I'm updating that it kind of isn't for most of the commentariat here? This is a niche audience but still...)
Exactly. And, at least in my case, it also applies to food: While I follow a mostly plant-based diet, I do occasionally eat meat, but only Seafood. This is because as a Human, I naturally feel closer to other Mammals and even Birds than to other animals.
The same applies to people - while I try not to treat anyone worse based on their ethnicity, if it comes to clear "tribe-vs-tribe" situations like these, for me, as an European form Germany, I definitely feel closer to other Europeans than to non-Europeans (of course there are other factors like culture, religion, etc.).
This seems like a poor representation of what these types believe - I don't think their principle is "we shouldn't care about people/places in far away countries", it would be something more like a) it's good and healthy to care more about people that are similar to yourself - your family, nation, etc - especially at the level of policy
b) 'pathological altruism' can be destructive and lead to the exact type of situation where you end up with Pakistani rape gangs in your country (or similarly covering up their crimes out of misplaced concerns for 'community relations' over your own people being victimized).
I don't think I've ever seen these people make the argument that we shouldn't care about something just because it's far away
This moral framework seems perfectly consistent with outrage over the grooming gangs in Britain - or even more simply on the level of in-group / out-group, or civilization / barbarism. (where eg they care about what happens in Britain not just because it's an obvious in-group - genetic ancestry of many americans, cultural / historical / traditional ties etc, or they care because it's civilizationally consequential - whereas caring about starving Africans just increases the population of starving africans and stretches the malthusian conditions, ie barbarism)
yes thank you - I'm good with caring about all such victims, but it's perfectly reasonable to care more about victims closer socially (not necessarily geographically, although that's one aspect of social proximity) to oneself, it's just basic circles of care
Other comments likely point this out but the claims don't seem to accurately depict vitalists or others and therefore don't highlight any contradictions in their positions.
For example, many more nationalist "charity starts at home types" advocate for circles of concern with the tightest one being a familial group and larger circles including communities, and larger circles, yet, including coethnics. Such people could consistently advocate for the concerns of fellow Europeans, but not sub-Saharan Africans.
In fact, much of nationalists' concern with Britain's semi-formally established system of child rape is that the same could happen at home, if members of the cultures perpetrating the crimes there are allowed to come to the US. And they object so vehemently to the anti-racist approach of legalizing crime on the grounds that it's mostly perpetrated by minorities, since to an extent, those forces are present in the US, as well.
So this is a foreign issue that they care about not only because it affects fellow White Europeans, but because it represents issues that America faces, as well.
Similarly, many "based post-Christian" types seems quite averse to capitalism, arguing that it just values lines going up, and "we're a nation, not an economy." They don't seem like the sort of people who argue that all problems should be solved by capitalism.
Similarly, many people may not have been saying that "every well-intentioned attempt to help another person will always backfire and end up causing incalculable harm." Some of them may have just been critical of redirecting resources from the US to sub-Saharan Africa which has never accomplished much, in spite of a literal trillion dollars and more being poured into it.
Similarly, even people skeptical of charity not only in sub-Saharan Africa, but at home, as well, could distinguish between charity and law enforcement. I don't think most vitalists think that murder and child rape should be legal, so they're hardly inconsistent with objecting to a government de facto legalizing those.
The claim that that distinction disappears if vitalists don't also donate money to anti-rape charities in Pakistan is similarly specious. The objection to legalizing child-rape in Britain isn't that charities aren't stepping up - it's simply that those should be illegal there, and in Pakistan too, for that matter.
Sure, plenty of people and groups have poorly reasoned or internally contradictory impulses, but this doesn't seem to do a very good job of demonstrating that.
Frankly, you could have skipped the whole article and jumped to the end and made the same point. Ultimately, almost everybody espouses an eclectic combination of contradictory moral impulses and the question is what to do with that. Good question! And it can be addressed just fine without attacking what appear to be strawman representations of particular ideologies.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of the above nationalist or vitalist approaches. I just don't think that the descriptions and pseudo-quotes were very representative.
Well said - not only is it perfectly consistent with such moral frameworks, the events sound like bigoted conjured fever-dreamed imaginings of someone warning about the dangers of extending the altruistic hand too far and bringing in alien peoples that will inevitably clash with and damage the host culture
Scott really whiffed on this one - either poor theory of mind for these people or isn't paying close enough attention to their arguments
Effective altruists have pretty bad theory of mind for people who aren't effective altruists, which explains why they keep posting things like "come on, just admit you secretly agree with me already".
"the events sound like bigoted conjured fever-dreamed imaginings of someone warning about the dangers of extending the altruistic hand too far and bringing in alien peoples that will inevitably clash with and damage the host culture"
And it objectively, literally happened. Exactly.
Which, dare I say, should maybe give you pause to consider that maybe, just maybe, those warning of such dangers might be on to something.
Well said!
Another interesting question is why grooming gangs abroad provoke a reaction when they happen in the UK more than in Pakistan or Egypt, if you're in neither of those countries. It can't be due to the moral philosophy of it... Is it because we expect better of a Western democracy?
We expect the civilized world to be civilized. When part of it reverts to uncivilized, it merits serious concern. What caused the degradation? Can it be fixed? Are we similarly vulnerable?
When the uncivilized world is, surprise, uncivilized, it's Dog Bites Man.
It's because people correctly believe that the same cultural currents that have infected the UK have also infected our countries, and therefore the same could happen here unless we draw attention to it
I was confused by the statement: "A recent legal dispute got them back in the news, and since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before. Now the entire Right is demanding investigations, heads on pikes, and (in some cases) the American invasion of Britain" because that doesn't match my experience at all. I've only heard a couple of passing references in the last year (I am not exaggerating, I'm pretty sure it's less than five time total), WAY less than I did a decade ago the last time it came up, so I went and checked Google Trends as the easiest method of tracking general interest.
As it turns out, at least according to Google Trends, searches for "Rotherham" are much less popular than a decade ago:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2009-01-01%202025-01-20&geo=US&q=Rotherham&hl=en-US
It's never come close to the amount of attention it had a decade ago, and the interest lingered for months back then while this year it never lasted more than a week.
Also going to note, I'm really not sure what to make of that dotted line projection at the end, since if you look at just the last 18 months:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2023-11-01%202025-01-22&geo=US&q=rotherham&hl=en-US
You can see that the interest at the beginning of this month never even reached the level of last January, and it's already died off.
'Rotherham' my be the wrong term. Try 'grooming gangs'
Attempting that: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2009-01-01%202025-01-20&geo=US&q=%22grooming%20gangs%22,%22grooming%20gang%22,Rotherham&hl=en-US
"Grooming gangs" is consistently below attention to Rotherham, but Rotherham also has a much higher baseline due to football and other news. I'm curious what happened in May 2018 when "grooming gangs" reached parity with Rotherham according to google.
Edit: Yeah, looking at the UK Google Trends for those search terms (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2009-01-01%202025-01-20&geo=GB&q=%22grooming%20gangs%22,%22grooming%20gang%22,Rotherham&hl=en-US), I don't think it's a useful tool for detecting interest in this particular topic.
Just for fun, George Floyd consistently got more attention in the UK (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2021-01-01%202025-01-20&geo=GB&q=%22grooming%20gangs%22,%22grooming%20gang%22,george%20floyd&hl=en-US) from 1/1/2021 until the Musk Event. Obviously not a relevant search term prior to May 2020 and so doesn't help us analyze the trends before that, but interesting for calibration of what a foreign one-off does to Google Trends relative to a decades-long and ongoing problem.
My prior is that American Jews were especially horrified by the 10/7 atrocities in Israel. I feel like it would be both obtuse and insensitive to do the "you shouldn't care any more about those particular foreigners than you do about any other foreigners or else you're incoherent" bit in that case.
I think it's obviously the same for Americans for whom the British victims of the rape gangs are distant cousins, culturally and also genetically. The victims sure seem a lot like my kids, and I doubt any of the rapists or enablers would think any differently about them.
I also think the idea that "it could (possibly, eventually) happen here, to my kids" is more appropriate when comparing the relative situation of poor British kids to poor American kids, as they're more similarly situated politically/geographically than Israeli Jews <->American Jews. The UK is a supposedly secure, Anglo-ruled 1st world nation, and yet it STILL allowed this.
I offer this comparison because I think it's particularly surprising that Scott missed this. Scott, I am a big fan!
I tried very hard not to bring this up, but this comment made it impossible for me - Scott did refrain from saying a single word of consolation after October 7, and I have excellent reasons to believe that while he did feel the event was horrifying, it happening far away from him was an explicit part of the reason for his silence. Allow me not to quote evidence. I swear it exists and is compelling.
Also worth noting that shortly after that he expressed his condolences to everyone involved in the OpenAI mess, confirmed he was not being ironic, and wondered why anyone would think he might be.
Does this make Scott’s misses in this post less surprising?
He takes the principle of charity a little too far. It's part of what makes him good to read--everyone does the opposite. I tend to go by the Principle of Infinite Cynicism--everyone's looking for that dopamine hit in their brain, even if it's the one that you get from being a good person, however that's defined. (I had a very Pollyannaish liberal upbringing I'm reacting against.)
But he's a much better writer than me, very bright, and explores a lot of interesting questions. Nobody's perfect, and I've yet to find someone who agrees with me on everything.
That's probably because he understood what both the causes of that event were, and the inevitable outcome of it would be... The problem isn't that he doesn't feel sympathy for Jews, it's that he also holds sympathy for people that don't deserve it.
I don't disagree with the second part - not much, at least. As for the first - worth noting that he was less accurate on casualties than, say, Erdogan (unless one takes the view that both Turkish intelligence and Hamas have been trying very hard to present numbers that were too low), and that he apparently thinks ~166K people died in the Ukraine war in the year prior to the Bird Flu post. The latter is wrong by a factor of 3x-4x (various estimates of just Russian casualties in 2024 using different methodologies are 420-440K), concerns one of the most salient events in recent years, and doesn't have much to do with Jews. (If I misunderstand "166,666 deaths. In some weird probabilistic expected utility way, about as many people will probably die of H5N1 next year as died in the past year of the Ukraine War", please let me know. I'd be very happy to know.)
It's a more general attitude towards geopolitics, military conflicts, and many related topics. At times I wonder if it's related to AI fears - a world where the chances of civilizational collapse in the next few decades in case of business-as-usual are commensurate with AI risk is one with a very different calculus than the AI-worried usually present.
Casualties means dead and *injured*.
Ah, that makes me feel much better and apologies to Scott for the x3-x4 part. 166K is still fairly off, likely - estimates for Russian military deaths for 2024 are in the 120-150K range, and for Ukraine the numbers greatly depend on kill ratio estimates. Taking 1:5 to be the modal assessment that also makes sense vs. other methods (various sources go as far as 1:1.5 - or 1:13!) we get to 24-30K (and you can find "sane" sources claiming up to 60K). These numbers include purely "official" military forces. Not civilians joining the fighting, not (some of the) paramilitary activity, not North Korean/ Chechnyan troops/ Western volunteers. Not Russian private militias. I don't want to write a whole PhD on this, but 190-200K total military-in-the-broad-sense in 2024 seems to be roughly correct.
And then there is the question of counting some of the MIAs.
And then we come to civilians and POWs on both sides.
ETA: and I'm trying very hard not to use the obvious "...and everybody knows all these are severe undercounts, and don't count those that are currently dying in hospitals and much of the data for December hasn't been processed etc." argument. Worth noting that one can find Ukrainian forums counting soldiers' deaths by families/ other personal accounts with comments such as "we found 16K personal testimonies this year but believe it to be at most a third".
That's interesting, and I honestly don't know if it makes it more surprising!
The possibilities still seem to be that (a) sure, Scott felt it was horrifying, but felt no additional horror that it happened to Israelis rather than to more culturally distant people, or (b) that he did/does feel additional horror, but doesn't give voice to those feelings b/c that would be inconsistent with his moral framework.
I do think he hides the ball sometimes for consequentialist reasons.
(b) would be surprising because he doesn't even list circles of care as an option - he's usually honest about dealing with difficult issues (sometimes hiding the ball a bit for consequentialist reasons but this feels different)
(a) would be surprising because it's just so weird to me...but Scott's mind is pretty atypical!
So who knows!
I don't think the US reaction to the abuse of British white kids works anything like the reaction American Jews to the atrocities committed against Israeli Jews. Jews are a small percent of the world population. Whites are a large percent. Jews have been persecuted for being Jewish, whites have not been persecuted for being white.
I am a WASP, and up until I was 8 or 9 I had the vague impression that I was the basic, generic, majority example of our species, and that almost everybody on the planet was white like me and spoke English. Knew there were some others who had a little extra shot of flavor or color or odd traditions added, which was OK with me, but I thought of them as sort of unimportant variants of the main stock, me. Anyhow, I tell you this as further evidence that being a non-Jewish white ikid n the USA is very very different from being a Jewish kid. Jewish kids do not grow up thinking that almost all the rest of the civilized world is like them.
> whites have not been persecuted for being white
I think you would be more accurate if you were less absolute.
E.g. there was the case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieds-noirs
>After Algeria became independent in 1962, about 800,000 pieds-noirs of French nationality evacuated to mainland France, while about 200,000 remained in Algeria. Of the latter, there were still about 100,000 in 1965, about 50,000 by the end of the 1960s and 30,000 in 1993.[8] During the Algerian Civil War between 1992 and 2002, the population of pieds-noirs and others of European descent plummeted, _as they were often targeted by Islamist rebel groups_ .
[emphasis added]
Yeah, I get that, and there are obvious historical asymmetries.
But the evidence seems strong that these girls *were* targeted for being white in this case. There have also been many such historical cases of whites being persecuted for being white, although generally this happens on small scales in frontier conflicts or in hate crimes like the ones under discussion. But the main thing is that it was true in this case!
Yeah, OK, but my point is that if you're a non-Jewish white there's just much less feeling of there being an "us" than if you're Jewish. (Ten or 20 years ago I saw a book called *A History of White People in America* and the title was intended humorously, and in fact I and I expect most people giggled when we saw it. ( I believe the book was a collection of humorous essays or stories.). But the title is funny because non-Jewish whites don't have the feeling of being a "we." Our early naive sense of ourselves, at least in the US, is that we are everybody -- we are the archetype, other people are variants.
Are you thinking that a lot of the reaction to the abuse of these girls is due to their being *white*? Like that white people are having a "that's one of us" reaction? Or feel extra disgust that the people abusing these girls were brown? If so, I think you're wrong. I'm sure white people find other whites, even those in a foreign country, a bit easier to feel empathy for than brown or black people, but I think it's fairly weak (unless of course the white's are white supremacists). And in the case of this crime I think the most powerful demographic fact is the victims' age and gender. Sexual abuse of little girls is so pathetic & so horrifying to most people that they max out on sympathy and indignation, and so any extra empathy that might have been due to sharing skin color with the victims just doesn't add anything to the total.
>several organized child sexual assault rings got busted in Britain - but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them
Decades. This had been on going since the 70s. 2010s was the first time a national investigation was conducted
Plenty of comments are pointing out that you're criticizing a very small set of people. But this means that "everyone's a" is basically "almost nobody's a". Everybody, nobody, what's the difference?
Also, the reason people care about Rotterham even though it's in another country is that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that the UK is culturally close to themselves, so they sympathize more with problems in the UK more than they do with random human beings in the world--the UK falls under "family, friends, and village".
There's also more sympathy because the scandal seems to be related to culture war issues that are problems in the USA too.
I'd like to talk about the struck-through option 4, because I think it's much more important than the striking out suggests.
First, I understand the striking out, because in general, I agree, it is literally impossible for human beings to not care. So, yes, for the vast majority of people, 4 is not really worth thinking about. However:
There are three kinds of actors in the world who don't care, I think.
(1) Psychopaths. Of interest to psychologists, of course, but also to the rest of us given that certain psychopaths seem to be highly successful, and to be given the opportunity to shape the world. I'm thinking mainly of pre-modern military leaders, but of it seems just possible that Putin could be among them. (And of course one could also talk about the cold-blooded tech bros. Perhaps they are not uncaring, but possibly *less caring* than the rest of us? I don't know how much of a spectrum this is.) If psychopaths don't care about others, but they shape the context in which we live, it would be useful to think about them.
(2) Institutions. States, companies, non-profits. Even though two of these are set up with the explicit aim of caring, they regularly fail at it in quite distinctive, non-human ways, and that seems worth thinking about.
(3) AI. I mean, every post has to be about AI these days, and this one is no exception. It's not clear how much AIs can abstract "caring" from their formalised models of our language, but it's at least possible that they'll be intelligent but uncaring, and this seems relevant as well.
I... haven't got anything intelligent to say about these groups off the top, but I thought it was worth pointing out that that struck out option is still quite important.
It's trivially easy for human beings to "not care" about child sexual assault victims. In some parts of the world - areas of rural Pakistan, for example - raping kids is not considered to be a particularly big deal.
I think if an outgroup member raped a child in rural Pakistan, that child's relatives would be extremely angry.
Some good points. I see a couple of angles making me want to un-strike-through #4
[1] psychopaths/sociopaths may have a disproportionate impact (especially because hierarchies select for sociopathy) [2] it may not be common for people to care about no one; it's more common for people to regards swaths of humanity as less than human and therefore not worthy of care.
I'm one of the people who thinks capitalism is great and thinks that promoting and sustaining it should be the most important parts of any effective altruist's portfolio.
I'm also thoroughly confused by this post.
I think you have an overcomplicated view of the impulse. The people you're addressing simply have a pathological zero-sum mentality to the point where any expectation of goodwill imposed upon them is a threat to themselves. This issue gets a pass because it's a partial political football against brown immigrants. I've found that as long as someone is getting hurt, and especially if they're not the same identity as the person who holds this view, any policy to improve the common weal is paid for.
I'm not just being dismissive when I say this article comes off as so oddly unnecessary to me that I don't understand its point. Maybe your experience with people who self identify as vitalists is different (leaning libertarian) but all the vitalists I know, especially those who identify with Nietzsche, aren't interested in pure capitalism. They're essentially *all* eugenicists who embrace the inherent worth of things they deem 'higher' or more masterly--and as realists, they post that meme with the two heatmaps of in-group and out-group preference you've all probably seen by now. Liking things closer to you is amoral kin-bias, not philosophy. In essence, their argument is that you should care about things in closer proximity, and this is a very easy solution to navigating your 'finely sliced gradation' issue. The thing is that you're pointing at their political pragmatism (they are generally racist and anti-immigration, and this is a good instance of validating those feelings) and calling it a philosophical self-contradiction.
So I don't understand how there's any contradiction in saying something like, "I don't care about rape gangs in dirty pakistan but I'm extremely concerned about immigrant rape gangs in the Anglosphere." Is this some kind of weird straussian way to boost the issue or conduct mass psychological testing, because I feel like you know all this. Saying 'no particular skills' especially is almost leading the reader to distinguish between capitalistic and biological potential.
I think there may be a conflation here, both in this essay and in the people the essay is talking about, of “care” as in “feel an emotional response to a situation” and “care” as in “choose to spend actual energy doing something about it.”
It’s perfectly consistent to have an immediate emotional reaction of sympathy towards raped children and also be entirely clear that since you live in another country across a rather large ocean and have many other much more pressing responsibilities, that you are not going to do one single blessed thing about it (maybe some prayers).
the harder the emotional trigger gets hit, the harder it is for people to acknowledge the truth that, yeah, they’re not going to do a damn thing about that. So you get a lot of people making confused statements and trying to slice the salami way too thin and being very ideologically inconsistent.
I think it’s fine not to spend energy on things that are far away from us, though. It’s normal and natural to care in the sense of feeling a sympathetic impulse of the heart. But we’d definitely go crazy if we tried to care-in-the-sense-of-fixing-it about every awful thing we hear about.
The kids in the other country are white, so they identify with them. It's simple racialism, a tribal loyalty of a particularly American sort. Though there is also a sort of extreme antinomianism against the current 'nonwhites, nonstraights, and nonmen have higher moral status' of the current woke ideology. They say X, so you say not-X. They've been told that white people are bad and they're white and don't appreciate that, so they then decide they *love* white people. And if you've got white girls being abused by nonwhite men, you can rev up the 'defense of the tribe against foreign genes' program that's whirring in the hindbrain.
I can see it in myself. Frame abortion as a bodily autonomy or personal liberty issue and I'll gladly support it; frame it as a women's rights issue and I'll hem and haw, because I have a lot of resentment against feminism.
There really ought to be further investigation of 'negative moralities' that are basically other moralities multipled by -1. It's more common than people think.
Some things are true *even if* the Party says they are.
By distant, Scott thought we meant "in miles."
Rationalism has really fallen off, hasn't it?
On the reflective equilibrium thing. . .yeah, we never get there, but I read (what I thought was) a great paper on Adam Smith's views of morality, of working to construct "the other within" based on positive and negative examples we see in the people around us. It's a bit bumpy in machine translation, but I think it's worth a read: https://hashiloach-org-il.translate.goog/the-fellow-in-the-chest/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
In a world full of takes on how any person or thing is evil/problematic, only Scott Alexander has the guts to say "as much as they try to hide it, those internet trolls are actually good persons"
The larger issue is that the elites in many Western nations are failing to care for their own populations. The rape gangs, which exist beyond just "several" cities in the UK, are the exemplar of this. The response is not a lazy, emotional Helen Lovejoy "won't someone think of the children?!" Nor is it performative like Just Stop Oil and Greta Thunberg. It is the seeming sacrifice of your own population because they fall short or even fail on some kind of intersectional scoring metric.
You likely cannot see the connection between Rotherham and, for example, the problems my immigrant wife in the US have had, but I can. I watch as my representatives on Capitol Hill fight to protect illegals, while at the same time they give my wife and I the run-around. My heart is not "bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind." Rather, I care about my wife. Why aren't we and other peons worth fighting for? Why George Floyd but not the victims of grooming gangs? Elites in government, media, academia, etc. have failed the people they are supposed to represent, and in the UK those failings are just disgusting to read about.
Yeah. Thank God for Trump and Elon. I believe this will be the beginning of a new era across the Anglosphere and the Western world.
Is this sarcasm or are you deluded?
It’s not sarcasm
Astounding.
A lot of people feel this way
Yeah, my wife is Mexican... It took two years to get her here (was supposed to be 7-9 months before COVID), it's pretty frustrating to think people are just jumping the fence, and the bleeding hearts are like, how dare you not just let them do that? When white liberals assume legal immigrants must be in favor of illegal immigration... WTF? Also she's from a place where...one of the safer parts of her country, but she never goes anywhere without a male escort, because it's just not safe. That's just normal to her, which is something that's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. So she knows that many of them can be dangerous. And do you think Mexicans want immigrants in their country or are indifferent to them? They are not. So yeah, she's super-based, and likes Trump more than I do. It's obvious to her that order is good, criminals are bad and need to be dealt with harshly, that marriage is good, loyalty is good, that weakness is a provocation, that the world is full of people who will take advantage of you and possibly leave you dead in a gutter if you're too soft... "Common sense" things that I had to go on a long, winding intellectual journey to figure out. I have to be a liberal-whisperer sometimes to try to explain how people can actually believe that stuff. Since I come from that background and used to believe it myself. But it's been getting increasingly difficult to remember what it was like to take it seriously.
People jump the fence for the same reason your wife "gets the run around" and has to wait 2 years to come here. Your wife and most illegal immigrants are victims of the same system. If routes of legal immigration were made more efficient and broadened and if republicans were willing to fund those routes, your wife wouldn't have had to wait 2 years and people would need to jump the fence, they could enter legally.
There is absolutely no indication that Trump has any interest in making legal routes to immigration more efficient. Nothing he plans to do would solve her problem. I am not sure why your wife would like Trump when he clearly doesn't like her.
Leftists have an annoying habit of deliberately conflating legal and illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants generally do not have a way to obtain permanent immigration status through legal pathways because these legal pathways mostly aim to select those who'll be a net benefit to the country to which they illegally immigrate. This is why they immigrate illegally. Illegal immigrants clog up the system and the political space to the detriment of those who have a realistic chance of becoming a legal immigrant
His wife had a realistic pathway through spousal sponsorship. Although Trump may not make the administration of legal pathways more efficient, the discouraging of illegal immigration would free up resources and political capital to make them more efficient, at least in the medium to long term after the costs of undoing the damage that leftists' did in encouraging illegal immigration have been paid
Legal vs illegal immigration is a political definition. It has no basis outside of the legislation that defines it. If you change the legislation then more people are "legal" or "illegal".
One of the long standing legal pathways to immigration is through asylum. But just today trump issued an executive order making it much more difficult to claim asylum and cancelled existing asylum appointments. So with the stroke a pen (and no legislative action) they went from "legal" to "illegal" with no change to who they are or why they wish to immigrate.
>aim to select those who'll be a net benefit to the country
Putting aside a debate of whether any immigrant has a bigger benefit vs another, it's demonstrably untrue that our immigration system is designed for this. For example, H1B visas are given out by a lottery. If we wanted to pick the immigrants who could have the biggest net benefit we would not use a lottery. Additionally, there is no reason to believe that someone's spouse will be a bigger net benefit to the country than a random farm worker. Why should the spouse be given preference. We also have quotas on how many green cards can be issued for a certain types of visas. How do we know that we aren't excluding the immigrants with the biggest net benefits just because they didn't apply first?
I am not a leftist.