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?
Political definitions are an outcome of political processes. Biden decided to make millions of illegals legal and Americans tossed his party out of all levels of government in large part due to it in favour of the party that wants to restrict illegal immigration honestly without snapping their fingers and pretending the problem disappears by slapping a 'legal' sticker on illegals
I said 'most' specifically with asylum in mind. In any case Trump was elected in large part due to Americans being fed up with asylum seekers
>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
H1Bs are given out by lottery to a restricted pool of applicants that meet some set of criteria. Just because it doesn't get down to the individual level of granularity does not mean that the H1B program is not meant to benefit America. Some specificity is sacrificed for expedience
> Additionally, there is no reason to believe that someone's spouse will be a bigger net benefit to the country
There are different types of benefits and they aren't all fungible. In this case, spousal sponsorship programs exist to benefit Americans who want to marry non-Americans
>How do we know that we aren't excluding the immigrants with the biggest net benefits just because they didn't apply first?
As above, some specificity is sacrificed for expedience. Policies not being exact does not mean it's not the central aim
>I am not a leftist.
If it walks like a leftist, quacks like a leftist...
Reducing illegal immigration will have no impact on wait times for visas or green cards because immigration enforcement is handled by ICE and CBP while visas and green cards are handled by USCIS. Unsurprisingly, USCIS gets way less funding than ICE and CBP. Additionally, most of USCIS's budget is paid for through fees and not taxes.
I wont hold my breath for Trump's proposal on increasing funding and resources for USCIS to process the backlog for people trying to immigrate legally.
Well said. I have no strong opinion on whether the amount of legal immigration should go up or down. I _would_ like to see the paperwork for potential legal immigrants sped up, so those that pass should get cleanly in more quickly, and those that fail should get a firm "no" quickly.
And I would like the borders policed and something like e-verify used more consistently so that _il_legals don't make it in in the first place, and those that e.g. overstay visas should be located (probably through workplace screening) and deported.
I admit, kicking and screaming, that I might be a good person. I do some moral philosophy, and see if it implies anything. And I find that what it implies is Option 1.
What, did you think there was an objective moral truth we could deduce via the power of pure logic?
“They” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting here…
I follow some “right wing” Twitter and I have seen precisely zero calls for invading Britain.
I think a better split here is that I have aggressively curated my feed to include only high rung posters, and you (have not?) And if you’re not exclusively following high rung thinkers, well what do you expect? Dumb, inconsistent ideas is what low rung thinkers DO!
I find myself (presumably not alone) in a sixth category where my moral responsibility regarding children in far off countries is vague and distant, but my moral responsibility toward my own children is primal, clear and immediate, and I am not wealthy enough to say that any given dollar I possess is not going to be needed for my children's well-being at some point. I would like to better the lives of people beyond my nuclear family and have done substantial donation in the past before having children, but my moral algorithm received a very disruptive update on becoming a parent. How do I make the calculation to know what I should spare from my own children to help others?
This is the most reasonable view. For almost everyone our resources are limited so we must make choices. If our resources were unlimited then maybe we can be condemned for not helping everyone we can.
Just chiming in to confirm that this one seems obvious, they see Britain as a part of their tribe, either due to a shared Anglosphere connection or - in cases like The Golden One, a Swedish account who seems to meet the "based post-Christian vitalist" definition with flying colors - because Britain is a part of EVROPA, its belonging or non-belonging to certain economic unions aside. It's what they would say themselves and it's what other people cognizant of the group would say (either in this form or, more probably, just by saying that they're racist - they might also say themselves that they're racist).
The fundamental mistake here is thinking that fantasies about invading Britain have anything to do with preventing sexual abuse. They're not about that, and although everyone else here is correctly emphasizing the racial dimensions of these fantasies, they're not really about preventing sexual abuse of white girls by Pakistani men, either.
These fantasies are primarily about retributive violence — that classic blind spot for consequentialists trying to make sense of politics. This is why directing attention to the question of "whether the suffering is because of a human bad actor or a natural cause" is a red herring. What's relevant here is not the "cause" of the suffering, it's the possibility of taking retribution against it. There's a reason why "War on X" rhetoric is so politically effective: even when "X" is something like "cancer," it activates the sense that we can wreak a terrible vengeance against X for all the pain it has caused us. A lot of people are always going to find this sort of thing more appeal at a fundamental level than an anodyne goal like "reducing suffering."
Bedari, for example, looks like a great charity, but a quick glance at their website shows that they engage in activities like "empowering women" and "youth engagement for peace." There's nothing there about programmes for beating up or lynching Pakistani men suspected of abuse. This suggests to me that donating to Bedari isn't going to be popular with the sort of Based Post-Christian Vitalists who are fantasizing about invading Britain (although I'd be very happy to be proved wrong!).
The BPCVs aren't thinking about what sorts of actions might make the world a better place. They're thinking about how an "honorable man" might act in response to the situation they perceive themselves to be facing. If you try to interpret the relevant moral impulses in terms of "what do they care about" rather than "how are they trying to preserve their own honor," you'll end up misconstruing the underlying logic of their position.
Retributive violence is not a selbstzweck, but serves a direct purpose. Putting someone in prison or hanging them is retributive violence. Civilizations rise and fall, based on their willingness to use it, against those in need of it. In the UK we see an absence of retributive violence, which systematically perpetuates the problem. Hang the first rapist and not only do you get a 0% recidivism rate, the second one may well get scared preventing further violence. Ergo this is absolutely 100% about preventing sexual abuse of white girls by Pakistani men.
But oh sure, hang none, refuse to even systematically hunt them down, not even imprison them for life when you catch one despite hardly trying, you not only encourage this, but you are protecting the grooming gangs and become complicit. Because vigilante killings? People self-organizing and helping themselves in the form of vigilante killings? The state would crush those. The affected families and communities are prevented from using the tool of violence themselves due to the state having a monopoly... one it deigns to only selectively enforce.
It's not empathy run amok, that motivates this blood thirst when hearing about the "far away land of Britain" (as if far away means anything in the age of plane travel, unenforced borders and the internet). It's the knowledge, that if such things are not challenged in places similar to ours, perpetuated by governments similar to ours, it may well happen to us.
[insert the obligatory "first they came for the X, but I was not X.... then they came for me"-cliché]
You are correct, that this is about honor. Violated honor demands satisfaction. Tit for tat, the most obvious game-theoretic logic underpins it. Honor is not only compatible with consequentialism, but absolutely required by it.
Sorry, but you should qualify that with “in the US/on social media”. Here in the UK it’s been a well-known scandal for well over a decade, with arrests, inquiries and even a TV drama. Just because Captain Ketamine started tweeting about it in the early hours doesn’t mean it was previously unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
I don't think the online right's stance is inconsistent at all. You're missing that England is not just a random faraway country, it's the American Urheimat, the realm of Anglo-Saxons, the ancestral homeland of white people. It's not some random disadvantaged children suffering there, it's white children. If you take into account racial solidarity, it all makes sense. Surely the online right is not suggesting to invade Pakistan and help children in similar situations there.
>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.
No, that's not what happened. The stories are obviously awful, have been in the British news for years, but since Americans rarely pay attention to things happening beyond their shores, they didn't notice them. Then what happened last year? Musk got into a fight with the new British government, the right wing party, now in opposition, saw a chance to create a scandal, they fed it to Musk through certain contacts, and he blew it up. Nothing to do with the social media being less censored.
>This is pretty impressive, because the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm.
No, it isn't. I'd suggest you take some time to look into British politics before you go around making statements like this, and don't just believe what you read on X. There has plenty of action against the gangs, a lot of them are in prison for a long time and there have been investigations into the failings that allowed this to happen. And, also, much of this happened under the previous right wing government, which is now using their "inaction" to beat the new government.
Sorry, I couldn't get through the rest of it since by that point it appeared to be some obscure comment against random people I don't care about on X. The display of American ignorance about foreign politics is what has riled me up.
Was it a coincidence you posted this around midnight in Britain?
Until you guys free the political prisoners who posted mean things on social media and deport every single one of the Pakistani Muslims who raped children, the rest of the world will continue to not take you seriously
Musk drew attention to it for his own reasons but it blew up because millions of people in the UK and elsewhere are disgusted with the failure of elites and authorities to prevent an entirely foreseeable and preventable horror, to prevent its spread and perpetration over decades, and to deliver justice to the victims and consequences to the rapists and their enablers.
Some rapists went to prison sure but many did not or got ludicrously short sentences and are currently back in the communities where the raped and tortured girls live, and appear to be doing very well. This upsets people.
And yes, for those who lived through it, it was obvious the elites and authorities have always wanted to minimise the crimes committed by immigrants partly because they are emotionally and politically strongly in favour of immigrants (and against the English white working class) and partly because they feared riots and public disorder if they paid attention to the mass rapes. So yes, it is fair to say : they feared the consequences of acting against gangs.
As a based post- Christian vitlaist, the answer is obvious. To many Americans the English are a sister people, and sharing language and much of the culture the moral circle naturally would include this - more than in other countries. The outrage in English internet would be less about an equivalent situation in the Czech Republic or Romania.
You're throwing Great Britain , a country close to the US in the same bag as Chad or Bangladesh, and it's the source of the mistake. 🙄
"the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm. All the experts are begging you not to do it"
Wait what? I thought the official position is that we're totally doing something about it, we've had an inquery, now we're in the process of implementing the recommendations. Which is bullshit, but still.
I have no beef with giving in to your altruistic impulses if you find yourself in a national-political context where the state is weak (Pakistan) or hopelessly divided against itself (present-day US?). But voluntary charity is unlikely to fix any social problems, in the US or elsewhere. Since Scott invites pondering Big Questions in this post, let me spell out some of the traditional counter-arguments to libertarian-style effective altruism:
Protection against poverty (and everything else that most people dislike, such as rape) can in principle be provided through voluntary charity. Let those who do not like to encounter dying people in the streets, or for other reasons think human suffering is something to avoid, voluntarily chip in to care for the poor & ufortunate. They can contribute to charity until they feel the level of unpleasantness is ”acceptable”. That is, until their felt unpleasantness becomes less than the (marginal) utility of instead spending money on themselves.
Unfortunately, attempting to provide relief against human suffering through voluntary charity alone runs into a collective action problem. Each well-to-do member of society may be tempted to free ride on the charitable contributions of others. While at the same time being afraid of ending up as a sucker if he/she/they are the only ones who voluntarily contribute. Voluntary charity then ends up in a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation, and in such situations the dominant strategy is not to contribute.
...bringing in the existence of post-Christian vitalists (and they exist) further boosts the problem. Such people make a point of shirking and are proud of it, and hence further reduce the likelihood of solving widespread problems on a voluntary basis.
However, Prisoner’s Dilemma situations can be remedied if an outside power – such as (although not limited to) the state – compels everybody to contribute. Those who shirk contributing to poverty relief are punished. This eliminates the free-rider problem.
This is particularly the case if one relies on voluntary charity to provide preventive care. The “psychic rewards” of voluntary contributing to the welfare of others – be it the warm internal glow; or the satisfaction of having performed one’s moral duty; or enjoying the reputational benefit of not being seen by others as an egoist; or assuming it rakes up good karma points - is clearly felt when giving food to a starving child or shelter to a family that is shivering from cold, since here there is a an easy-to-see connection between one’s charitable action and the observed result. The “psychic reward” is less salient if one instead spends one’s money preventing something bad from happening. Thus, getting people to voluntarily finance care for victims after a catastrophic flood is easier than getting them to voluntary donate sufficient funds to build dikes strong enough to prevent floods in the first place.
Concerning gang rape by Pakistani and other gangs, the rest of the population (or people who care in the US) may similarly in principle voluntarily finance a police force and child protection agencies. But voluntary financing runs into the same collective action-problem as when providing law and order more generally. Law and order are public goods. It is difficult to deny protection of the law to those who shirk contributing to the salaries of police officers and judges. At the same time, one person’s benefit from being protected by the law does not diminish other peoples’ benefit from also being protected. Add to this the negative externality that arises if children who are abused grow up, if their childhood traumas make them unpleasant or dangerous to others.
The latter is a social investment-arguments for state (coercive) social protection policies, in the UK, US, Pakistan and elsewhere. And there are a host of related social investment - arguments why a state that compels its citizens to care for the less fortunate of its members is likely to be more successful (and hence powerful) in today’s globalized market place that states which leave such stuff to voluntarism. That is also why a state peopled by post-Christian vitalists is likely to be a weaker and less powerful state than a state where people care about others, plus accept to be coerced by the state to do so. However, that collective power-argument is more distantly related to Scott’s defense of voluntary charity, and this comment is already long enough, so I’ll end here.
> It is difficult to deny protection of the law to those who shirk contributing to the salaries of police officers and judges
I don't think it was difficult in medieval Iceland to exclude people from protection. The police already have no legal obligation to protect people in the US, they could have a policy of not taking calls from people who aren't registered taxpayers.
I don’t think the suggestions to take over Britain were serious, and even people that won’t do anything for people in faraway lands are still allowed to have an opinion on those same lands without being considered hypocrites.
It’s not that I consider them a bastion of morality or an example anyone should follow, but bashing them for being inconsistent is silly IMO.
As for me, I try to help the people who are in reach of my agency. But there's a vast world outside my agancy. I don't know enough about the Rothreham thing to comment sensibly.
The skew here is that the perps are Muslim immigrants obviously. There's a lot of people in the UK and US who like evidence that Muslim Pakistanis are exceptionally rapey. As a matter of fact I am just back from rural Pakistan and they seem pretty ordinary people, and the Church of England is helpfully giving us a "look here upon this picture, and on this" object lesson that English Christians are capable of equally awful behaviour. Privilege from investigation is the key to both cases.
The labour party doesn't have an official position other than "your lot didn't hold an investigation when you were in power". Their unofficial position is that an investigation would harm them with Muslims who vote labour overwhelmingly and corruptly, boost the right and throw doubt on the political philosophy which prevented investigation of the offences.
>There's a lot of people in the UK and US who like evidence that Muslim Pakistanis are exceptionally rapey. As a matter of fact I am just back from rural Pakistan and they seem pretty ordinary people, and the Church of England is helpfully giving us a "look here upon this picture, and on this" object lesson that English Christians are capable of equally awful behaviour. Privilege from investigation is the key to both cases.
"As Sophie tried to report Waites to police, officers dismissed her and told her to "re-attend [the station] with an adult when she was not drunk".
But, as she left, she was coaxed into a car by 39-year-old Shakil Chowdhury, and driven to a house where she was raped by five men over a number of hours.
She was sexually assaulted in a car, before being left near a park and raped in the house of man, Sarwar Ali, who she had asked for directions.
Sophie was then picked up by a man who was posing as a taxi driver, named Shakil Chowdhury, who had promised to help her.
Only Chowdhury and Ali were ever arrested, with Chowdhury jailed in 2007 for six years after pleading guilty to six counts of rape. Ali, was charged by fled the country.
During his trial Chowdhury named two other men involved in the rapes of Sophie as part of his mitigation, but these were not followed up by GMP at the time, the report states, and is branded "another serious failure"."
I think I can quite confidently say that there are no majority-English Christian areas where a 12-year-old girl would be opportunistically gang raped, not just once, not just twice, but three times in the course of a single night.
That's the wrong question. The question is whether it would happen in a majority English Christian area where the inhabitants believed they had effective immunity from the law.
Take into account the ethnicity of the perps in the Pelicot case.
Given the UK's religious demographics, a majority English Christian area would probably be quite middle-class, i.e., the sort of community where people can normally be trusted to obey the law without state coercion. Even if you went to a white British underclass area of the sort where the police don't generally get involved, I don't think you'd randomly come across three paedophilic rapists in one night, much less three paedophilic rapists who also happened to be friends with a load of other paedophilic rapists ready to come round on short notice for a bit of impromptu paedophilic rape.
You are getting over excited. Calm down. Who is talking about random selection? We are talking about networks built up over years as people realise what they can get away with. Like the network built up by Christian heritage white man Dominique Pelicot of other predominantly Christian heritage white men.
It's a very general principle that most people are pretty decent but there is always a minority who will take advantage. You are curiously determined to degeneralise the principle.
I'm sorry, perhaps you could tell me what the appropriate level of excitement is for talking about paedophilic gang rape.
>Who is talking about random selection? We are talking about networks built up over years as people realise what they can get away with.
None of Sophie's encounters were premeditated, and she didn't know any of the people involved, but all three of the people she came across turned out to be rapists. That's not a case of a few bad apples or an anti-social minority, that's a case of a deeply misogynistic, deeply racist subculture, where abuse of outsiders has become normalised.
>You are curiously determined to degeneralise the principle.
Why don't you say what you actually mean instead of hiding behind passive-aggressive innuendoes?
It tolerated for decades a horrible abuser called John Smyth, and eventually exiled him to Zimbabwe where he carried on as usual in, again, Anglican institutions. Archbishop of Canterbury resigned to the issue at the beginning of the month.
It's interesting to hear some vague echo of the snowball forming right now somewhere on the web about this. (I started hearing it a few days ago.)
- The Rotherham grooming gangs were a scandal years ago; it was abundantly reported by the mainstream print media, including the liberal media - New York Times, The Guardian (many times), etc. Why are some people hearing about it only now?
- AFAIK "don't prosecute them because they are a minority" wasn't the only or even the main dynamic. To wit (and no, none of this is to diminish how horrific this matter was):
These were not random kids suddenly grabbed from the street and raped in an alley. These were also not middle-class kids. Rather: children (mainly in their early teens, it seems) from the underclass were seduced, in part with alcohol and drugs, and then drawn into a hideously exploitative ring, sometimes with violence, threats and blackmail, and often with subtler methods.
There are obvious class prejudices at play in the reaction to this. Also at play: on the one side, the attitude that if something is not an obvious case of rape, it's not what the police should be worrying about; on the other side, an ever-expanding definition of rape (aren't post-Christian vitalists supposed to be against that?) - again, to judge from echoes, early work in exposing and trying to prevent the matter seems to have come in part from activists that erased the distinction between the (hideous, criminal, nauseating) goings-on and "classic" rape, thus the reaction from police that the activists were misunderstanding things and ignoring young girls' agency, etc.
Mind you, the bit about "ignoring young girls' agency" (a phrase that I'm quoting from memory as something that was cherry-picked by the media from an internal police report on the matter in the late 2000s or early 2010s) may have been a valid criticism in context, in that these distinctions matter when it comes to how to stop the problem, unravel these criminal networks and bring them to prosecution. It is not valid as a way to wash one's hands on the matter. (The same is true of complaints about how some ways to describe the problem could inflame racial tensions; UK media seems to have settled on "Asian men" as the culprit or as the right way to describe the culprits, weirdly.)
And that brings us to why I think Scott's parallel is actually a good one. Sure, as people have said here, there's a class of people that simply care about white victims everywhere (particularly if they are victims of rape or sexual exploitation at the hands of non-white men) and not about non-white children being maimed by hunger (or targeted for sexual exploitation, etc.). There's a class of people that do not care about hunger or poverty in the Third World because they are *complicated*; yes, more extreme and less expensive to address immediately and effectively than hunger or poverty in rich countries (... which they often don't want to address either), but complicated to solve permanently, in a way that does not require repeated outside intervention. But sexual exploitation is not a simple problem in this sense either!
>it was abundantly reported by the mainstream print media, including the liberal media
"Abundantly" was one of the points of contention- supposedly, UK newspapers published almost 10 times as many articles about BLM and George Floyd than they did about grooming gangs, despite the latter being over a much longer time period: https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1876673371103994305
Well, I wasn't living in the UK when things became widely known, and I'm only a very occasional reader of the Guardian/the Independent - and yet I came across many articles about the matter.
The reaction isn't purely about concern for the welfare of the children. It is also about the chance to take down the Labour government and also to win a hit against wokeness. If these people were really concerned about the welafre of children then, as you allude, they would care just as much about kids who are being abused in non-politically advantageous situations.
Hm, as someone who is more of a localist morally I feel like I should defend the "based post-christian vitalist" position but I actually come into it from a different direction and don't tend to get along with that cluster.
Swill FWIW - I think there are strong reasons to have models of morality that do not obligate you to resolve bottomless pits of suffering that you're not entangled with in any way (e.g. if we discovered a distant planet was inhabited by an alien race who for some reason evolved to feel chronic pain, I don't think we'd be morally obligated to develop interstellar travel to fly there and genetically engineer them out of it). Partly that's due to incentive issues (e.g. it makes us vulnerable to emotional blackmail), but partly as a philosophy of morality thing, it feels wrong to say that you are by default responsible for all suffering in the universe (I wrote some thoughts about an adjacent viewpoint to this here https://shakeddown.substack.com/p/the-two-sources-of-moral-value)
(There's also the practical issue where people working off sensationalist news articles that don't actually affect them directly have a tendency to react in counterproductive ways - in many cases there's a practical argument that uninvolved third parties involving themselves in conflict usually make things worse).
If you assume this, this implies you should care about problems like this to the extent that you're entangled with them. You can argue that it's correct to see ourselves as more entangled with british rape gang issues than third world deworming (e.g. we have a shared language and culture with effects that go both ways, and when we use our cultural influence to improve policing in Britain it makes the general anglosphere philosophy of policing better all around, while the cultural malaise that let this happen in the first place is a shared cultural illness we should all be fighting together). Or you can reasonably argue that this is wrong (the language similarities are superficial and make us overestimate the culture sharing, we're actually more entangled with third world illnesses than we think but unfairly dismiss it due to language distance or just plain old racism).
(I personally end up coming down that we are somewhat more entangled with the british thing for shared culture/problem reasons, but also third world EA involvement is much more likely to be net helpful and much more cost effective, which more than offsets the entanglement difference. For animal-related EA stuff though I have a much harder time deciding - we're multiplying a tiny number (our degree of entanglement) with a huge number (the amount of benefit that results), which means the error bars are huge).
I sometimes find Scott & I inhabit different experiential universes. I have been banging the drum about suffering in other countries for a long time, and I have never met any of these based post-Christian vitalists, despite being on the political right and an admirer of both Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.
It has been the ultra-cucked slave moralists (UCSM) who have been the issue. For instance, I have been taking the side of the Yazidi for at least ten years. I know exactly the kind of person who yells at me for bringing it up. I also know that it is the northern province of Cuckistan that deplatforms and shuts up survivors of slavery and genocide because Hurty Feelies (go look up Nadia Murad). I know I have heard this when I talk about the ethnic cleansing in Pakistan and Bangladesh, or of the genocide in the Sudan or or or...
And it is the ucsm that are still concealing and defending and enabling the child rape and torture gangs that operate throughout Britain (far more than Rotherham).
I don't think this is an accident, mind you. I think this is a logical consequence of the ideas underlying it. The idea is that you are supposed to be altruistic, not selfishly care about your own welfare. You are supposed to be "disinterested". This is why the ucsm went after me for defending the Yazidi. Because I'm being _selfish_, dontcherknow? I am doing it because they are facing the same filthy menace that is now attacking Europe. I am not being properly _altruistic_.
To which I say, Well, Yes. Duh. And I am proud of that.
Putting on my objectivist hat here, I think that the people Scott mentions who are suddenly furious about the grooming gangs are confused, but they have the right instincts. They sense that the ucsm fundamentally want them to abandon anything they value or hold dear (I'm old enough to remember the ucsm reactions to 9/11). They react against that, viciously, and sometimes wrongly, but I get the impulse.
The actual solution is - Objectivist hat on! - to recognise that the purpose of morality is to serve your life, to enable your life _and that defending others is inextricably part of that_. Solidarity, internationalism, compassion are all profoundly practical and selfish mental disciplines to cultivate and practice.
I am going to repeat that: if you want the best life you can have, developing as much Justice, as much solidarity and compassion as you can, is a really good strategy. And if you want your country and civilisation to do well, you should embrace internationalism. It's not complicated: those inflicting hideous injustice and suffering elsewhere in the world will gladly do it to _you_ if given half a chance.
When you see that, everything falls into place. For example I care more - in terms of emotional valance and effort and time spent - for the attacks happening in Europe than those currently being perpetrated against Hindus in Bangladesh. Because Europe is my home and such attacks are more likely to hit someone I know.
Is that disconnect a problem? I don't see how - I have Bangladeshi Hindu comrades who are pro Europe but, obviously, care more about their own country and people.
I suppose one could make some strange abstract utilitarian argument that this is depraved and morally sub-optimal. To which I can only respond: maybe. But in practice, in reality, it is a choice between this and between the ucsm types defending and enabling torture, rape, slavery and genocide (I have not forgotten nor forgiven those who enabled Darfur). So I find I can live with my choice.
Does anybody know these people in real life? It's easy to maintain a consistent extremist position online where you can pick your battles and your mom, spouse and children are not around. But in real life when you sit with your friends around the coffee table?
I know a few. They tend to be a lot more circumspect in real life interactions than online. Certainly they won't say to your face that they believe you in particular shouldn't exist, even as they post long screeds online about their opinion of groups of people that include you.
> the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist.
> since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before
> the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm.
I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt to signal to the right-wingers this post is aimed at that you're on their side and they should take your philosophical point seriously, but these just read like they're directly taken from far-right talking points. I could imagine Tommy Robinson saying these things if he was a bit more eloquent. I'm noy saying that everything Tommy Robinson says is wrong by default, but on these issues I got the impression there was some debate, with the far right on one side (and some well meaning but relatively uninformed people who have been caught up in the emotional tempest of it) and everybody who is both reasonable and informed on the other.
Am I wrong? I guess the main point I'm interested in hearing more about is the first one. The police spent years deliberately ignoring them because it might seem racist?? I know the police didn't act quickly enough, but wasn't that just plain old incompetence?
Also interested to know if there was really much meaningful censorship on social media a decade ago, and if this has substantively changed. I thought the main thing that had changed in that time was more ads and spambots, but I don't know much about social media.
Actually, forget the enquiries. The quote included "acting against the gangs". I'm pretty sure the perpetrators are mostly in prison now. Isn't that "acting against" them?
It's not wrong, it's written in an entertaining way for emphasis.
1. There were immigrant child rape and torture gangs in at least 50 cities. The few that got a thorough investigation found around 1,000 girl victims many being raped hundreds of times by dozens of mens. This is millions of offences. The attention given to this was many times less than the attention given to criticising the immigrants or e.g. George Floyd. It wasn't censorship of the atrocity so much as neglect. Why? because elites and authorities sympathies were with immigrants rather than white working class and they feared drawing attention would cause unrest. The latter fear of being seen as racist or triggering reaction has been documented over and over again in the inquiries.
2. As to the inquiries, the problem is a) they were limited in scope covering only a minority of the rape gangs; b) they did not result in justice to the victims, punishment to the perpetrators or accountability for the enablers who looked the other way (police, social services); c) the recommendations have yet to be enacted. In this context, many saw the inquiries as not a genuine attempt to put the wrongs right, but rather an attempt to evade responsibility and once again ignore and cover-up the atrocity. And to disguise some truly horrific things such as returning victims to rapists, arresting the abused child and not the rapists she was with, preventing the abused child's father from removing her from her rapist.
3. Many of the perpetrators never went to court. Many who went to court got off because there were procedural errors or (in at least one case the rapist was old and ill). Many who had committed truly Mengele- level crimes (read the court records) got 3-10 year sentences which in practice meant 1-4 years in gaol. It appears none of the foreign-born and dual citizen rapists and torturers actually got deported and once released continue to live in the communities they terrorised and abused. Meanwhile people who say nasty things about Islam on social media get harassed by police, arrested and sent to prison for years. This gives people the feeling that justice was not done.
I was planning to do some more research on this and come back to you (either with counterargument or admission that you changed my mind) but life got in the way. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to reply, and assure you that your comment has been read and reflected on.
<i>I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt to signal to the right-wingers this post is aimed at that you're on their side and they should take your philosophical point seriously, but these just read like they're directly taken from far-right talking points.</i>
That's because, for years, the far-right were the only ones talking about the scandal. Scott's summary is basically accurate.
<i>Am I wrong? I guess the main point I'm interested in hearing more about is the first one. The police spent years deliberately ignoring them because it might seem racist?? I know the police didn't act quickly enough, but wasn't that just plain old incompetence?</i>
No, it wasn't:
"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”."
<i>Also interested to know if there was really much meaningful censorship on social media a decade ago, and if this has substantively changed. I thought the main thing that had changed in that time was more ads and spambots, but I don't know much about social media.</i>
In pre-Musk Twitter, when moderation was generally more heavy-handed and had a distinct left-wing slant, the story would almost certainly not have been able to spread as far as it has done recently.
Most victims' charities are calling for a nation-wide inquiry. The "several inquiries" the government's announced are laughably inadequate, for several reasons:
(1) The funding available is just £5m, to be split across five different investigations. By way of contrast, the Oldham investigation alone cost £8m.
(2) The funding is to help councils that choose to conduct their own investigations; those that don't, won't be forced to.
(3) A common theme in many accounts of grooming gangs is that local government turned a blind eye, so even those councils which choose to hold investigations will essentially be investigating themselves, with obvious implications for the integrity of the process.
The "several inquiries" thing is an obvious smokescreen designed to make it look as if the government's doing something when it's actually not, and the government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do even this much. So whilst "the government's official position is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm" may be literally false, it's directionally correct, insofar as, left to its own devices, the government almost certainly would refuse to do anything.
I was planning to do some more research on this and come back to you (either with counterargument or admission that you changed my mind) but life got in the way. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to reply, and assure you that your comment has been read and reflected on.
This starts out with such an incredibly credulous framing of events at top I read through assuming it was some sort of literary device about disingenuous framing that would be revealed at the end, but alas no.
The ideas its being discussed now because of lack of censorship in social media - what social media censorship prevented it being discussed previously, its a subject frequently in the UK news and often discussed in UK social media, were the US specifically being censored from discussing it? Or just Musk? And now he has freed himself from that censorship only he had, luckily just at the same time he is in dispute with the UK govt? Come on.
And some members of the police certainly said they ignored the crimes because they were afraid of being called racist... but there is not many investigations into incompetence/corruption where you just entirely take the investigateds word for what happened is there.
But of course its tempting to swallow something when thats the issue you personally care about.
Similarly if you were left wing you would probably pick the big issue that the victims were exclusively the underclass, poor people from broken homes or already in social care. People who when seeking help are ignored even when not related to non white people, then its obvious to you this is a class issue and a failure of sufficient govt regulation because everything is that to you.
Maybe both groups should perhaps look at the facts more objectively, maybe a major inquiry could gather those facts and write a report on them.
Oh one did, years ago - it had 20 core recommendations, none of which the last govt considered or put in despite suddenly deciding they care now in opposition and none of which the current govt has so far. None of which this furore on US social media seems to care about either, because its not really about facts or fixing things I might suspect.
<i>The ideas its being discussed now because of lack of censorship in social media - what social media censorship prevented it being discussed previously, its a subject frequently in the UK news and often discussed in UK social media, were the US specifically being censored from discussing it? Or just Musk? And now he has freed himself from that censorship only he had, luckily just at the same time he is in dispute with the UK govt? Come on.</i>
Pre-Musk Twitter was more heavily moderated, and the moderation had a stronger left-wing slant, meaning that, at least on Twitter, the scandal wouldn't have been able to blow up like it has recently.
<i>And some members of the police certainly said they ignored the crimes because they were afraid of being called racist... but there is not many investigations into incompetence/corruption where you just entirely take the investigateds word for what happened is there.</i>
When multiple independent witnesses say "We were told not to draw attention to this out of fear of seeming racist," it's generally best to assume they're telling the truth absent strong evidence to the contrary.
While it's tangential to the point you're making, this is potentially misleading as to what happened in Rotherham and the response of the British state.
Firstly, you say, "the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm." This is incorrect. There has already been a independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. The report was published in 2014 and you can read it here: https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham. There were also more limited enquiries by the Home Affairs Committee and Louise Casey. A week ago, the Home Secretary announced a further review (also headed by Louise Casey): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5l4vxv2qo. Various criticisms could be made of these various investigations, but the British government certainly has done something.
Secondly, reading from the executive summary of the Jay Report, this says, "Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant... Seminars for elected members and senior officers in 2004-05 presented the abuse in the most explicit terms. After these events, nobody could say 'we didn't know'. In 2005, the present Council Leader chaired a group to take forward the issues, but there is no record of its meetings or conclusions, apart from one minute. By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."
This is certainly very bad, but it isn't fairly summarised by saying, "the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist." That characterisation confuses two separate points (both of which are dreadful): firstly, the relevant authorities failed to get a grip on the problem and, secondly, people were reluctant to identify the ethnic origins of perpetrators. Probably the reluctance to describe the problem accurately was an obstacle to dealing with it, but there's no credible evidence that anybody in authority *deliberately* ignored the problem.
Thirdly, nobody was censoring anyone in the 2010s. The story was widely reported. As you note, you commented on it yourself. I don't know why it's gone viral recently: this seems to happen fairly randomly, as with the Post Office scandal, but it's not because we're less censored. If anything, I would guess that it's because it now aligns more squarely with culture wars in the US.
Thanks. I too would object to Scott's characterisation of the UK government's position - it's a pretty shallow caricature.
As a side point, I always find it interesting when a British issue breaks out, and we get hot takes from other counties. Sometimes it's helpful to get a different perspective, but often it's surprising how weak that perspective is. I can only assume that our hot takes about foreign shores are equally bad.*
If anyone wants to explain to me why this has blown up recently, I'd be interested. Is it because the new info on the Southport killer has reignited discussion about "two tier policing", of which Rotherham etc is the most obvious example?
*Excepting the USA. Their politics is the world's politics, and we all pay attention, whether we want to or not.
>Is it because the new info on the Southport killer has reignited discussion about "two tier policing", of which Rotherham etc is the most obvious example?
In relation to the Southport riots, someone was convicted of "incitement" for tweeting and sentenced to 3 years, 2 months; there were convicted rapists involved with the gangs sentenced to 3 years or less.
Also Elon decided to pick a fight with Labour/the UK government for other reasons, and this is really big convenient stick to bash anyone with.
It's been suggested that UK newspapers published 10x articles on George Floyd than on grooming gangs, despite the latter being relevant for a much longer time period, but I have no way of independently verifying that: https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1876673371103994305
If there's a degree of truth to this, that's the reason people so vehemently disagree that it was "widely" reported.
6. Yes, this suffering in faraway countries is terrible, but what should I do about it? Why must I spend my money on helping anybody? Can't my government take care of all that? Our ministers can visit the faraway countries and bring them development aid, apologize for colonial crimes committed a hundred years ago, and gain the moral high ground.
Same thing, why are there even food banks? Can't the government simply pay the poor enough welfare so they can lead a dignified life?
Whether this "let the government take care of this" necessarily leads to "invade a country which doesn't properly punish child abuse", well I don't know.
"while hastily burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under the bedsheets where we can’t see it"
<3
I think many of the comments here are interesting, and that your basic intuition about this is still spot on. The wise intuitive heart knows that compassion does not make it weaker and is thus free to burst with it for everyone. But of course our fear-based predictive pain-avoidant minds can't know this - because their only mode of knowing is understanding, and maybe it doesn't make sense and is just true -, and so, understandably, try their very best to hold the reigns on all that compassion, to the point of denying it.
In any case, I think it just doesn't matter so much if this view of people is true. It is the view that makes it easiest to be kind and do good, and frees up mental energy to find out how to do those.
Related topic: DEI vs DUI, a quantification of harms. Or, I dunno, any quantification of the harms of woke culture vs virtually any other issue. Sure there are problems resulting from this stuff but I'm pretty certain they'll pale in comparison with a host of other issues that based post-Christian vitalists ignore.
In all of this it needs to be remembered that the South Yorkshire constabulary has never been the most impressive law enforcement agency. It did laps of honour back in 198(?1) when it caught the Ripper, after the lads up the M1 had bungled it for years. But the post-Hillsborough cover up was grim.
It also needs to be remembered that much of the incompetence among operational staff at Rotherham was by relatively junior staff who had been immersed in a need to avoid offence etc and who were treading - of course misguidedly - on eggshells, no doubt after one training course too many.
It's this sort of soup of uselessness, feebleness, and poor leadership which makes me suspicious of attempts twenty years later to fit any kind of theoretical framework around what happened.
Perhaps I've the wrong read of Americans, but based on the reaction to the grooming gangs scandal my sense is that white British children are well within the circle of concern for many of you. This may be especially true of the right, which still retains some attachment to America's original mother country (notwithstanding that the conservatives would trample over the UK without even realising it, and never feel bad). The fact we all speak English and you like watching Harry Potter doesn't hurt.
People are wired to care more about people that resemble them, both racially and culturally. When a white American sees a white British kid suffering he'll feel more empathy than if it's an African or Pakistani kid and that is ok.
I tend to think though that in a case like this, the demographic detail that has the most punch is that the abuse victims are female children. The idea of little girls being sexually abused by mulitiple adult males is so pathetic and horrifying that I think most people's distress and rage maxes out. Knowing that the kids were white would add little or nothing to the strength of their response.
I think we need to take a step back in our logical analysis to understand the grooming gang position.
Calls for action in this crisis, one that affects a population of greater affinity to our own than nearly any other, actually advances the “help the local” position.
The argument being that charity towards Pakistani migrants and tolerance toward refugees has led to this issue, said charity arisen out of the position that supports helping everyone everywhere including starving children you’ll never meet.
Now regardless of whether action is taken, highlighting the issue cements one of the main concerns the “help the local” stance has towards the global priest army “every soul years to be free” position - that charity towards the unknown can often prove disastrous for what you already hold dear.
In your link about your own writing on Rotherham, you have a link to HBD Chick, whose blog post is now gone but fortunately archived https://web.archive.org/web/20141117084220/https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/response-to-scott-alexander/ In it she says she cares about Rotherham because she used to live near there, while she doesn't care as much about FGM in other countries because those are other countries. I send all of my charitable donations to the Third World via GiveWell's recommended charities, but I will submit that HBD Chick was actually correct and the Americans talking about how Britain should be invaded are wrong. A basic part of politics going back to the decline of the wars of religion and the rise of the Weberian state is that each polity gets to govern itself, and those policies are not the business of outsiders to interfere with.
Scott, you’re straw manning them. They see Britain as being fundamentally different from Somalia because they feel ancestral ties to Briton. They see poor Britons as their cousins, poor Somalians as someone else’s problem.
To my read, he doesn’t want to simply accuse people of being hypocritical raging jerks, so he reframes it as everyone wanting to be good in order to get his point across.
Having circles of concern and being more concerned by people perceived to be culturally similar isn't hypocrisy. It's only hypocrisy if you assume that caring for people implies caring for all people equally.
It’s hypocrisy if you say, “Only the people close to you,” and then when you don’t like something elsewhere suddenly you redefine what “close to you” means. This is Scott’s “finely sliced” thing.
"circles of concern" does not mean a simple binary "close" vs "not close".
For a charge of hypocrisy, you need to show that, of the two contrasting cases, they are showing more concern for the "distant" than the "close" case, not by *your* standard of closeness but by their own. Which you would need some evidence or understanding of.
You left off option 6: consider that the bundle of feelings and impulses actually map to something real, and then try to fit your map to the territory. With this option, moral philosophy becomes something like science without experiments. History becomes your empirical data source and the various wisdom traditions and schools of thoughts become hypothesis, with the sole test being, “does this belief structure produce human thriving at scale for a long time.” This is what good rationalists ought to do.
" burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under the bedsheets"
I wish I were half or a quarter as good a person as this. I really do incline towards option number four (do not care about anyone) because I don't like people. But religion, drat it, forces me to care! "Love your neighbour as yourself". Okay, who is my neighbour? What, you mean *everybody*? Can't I just bury my head under the bedsheets instead?
I suspect that most of the people you are describing didn't really mean to include protection against crime in the kinds of help that backfire. What they meant was attempts to help others by offering them a hand up (money, training, housing) tends to backfire but protecting them from being physically harmed or robbed is extremely effective and important.
And they have to mean something like that since, taken literally, all of civilization is in some sense benefiting, so technically helping, all sorts of strangers and they approve of civilization.
You're being a bit unfair to reflective equilibrium and logic as offering resolutions -- at least to the things they have ever been purported to resolve.
Of course they can't clear away your messy human emotions of sympathy and outrage. But why would you think they should? But plenty of people have used them to reach perfectly coherent conclusions -- I believe that, to the extent moral claims can be true or false, act utilitarianism is the correct moral theory (bit bullets on repugnant conclusion and experience machine) so how can you say that reflective equilibrium has failed for me?
Am I always going to act like a perfect utilitarian, of course not and sometimes moral emotions will be part of what sways me (don't want to feel guilty, feel sympathy etc) but that's never been what reflective equilibrium was supposed to address.
--
In short I think you're doing a bit of conflation between moral feelings and moral beliefs.
I think this is projecting somewhat. These people don't care about foreign children. They care about the culture war. Abused foreign children are weapons for their arguments-as-soldiers
One reason people tend to deny any moral benefit from helping strangers is that many people think of morals as a set of duties. And on that picture if they admit a moral reason to help anyone all the sudden they are obliged to meet the insatiable need of the whole world. I think what's needed there is a explanation of the concept of supererogation or just the idea of morals w/o duties.
Though since outrage at violations of rules comes from a different moral foundation than sympathy so it may be that some such people are just much more moved by outrage than empathy,
That is a good point, more people should frame problems in terms of positive and negative rights creating positive and negative obligations. Most common moral values should be interpreted to create only obligations to refrain from action. Libertarians are about the only big group who even remember there IS a moral distinction being act and omission, the political left have obliterated it with a laundry list of positive rights, Christians never really had it in the first place, and all the Singer-ite consequentialists here refuse the distinction.
You quite simply need some way to ignore most of what happens in the world in order to enjoy your life, and "I'll fix problems that I have assumed a duty to fix" + "I didn't cause that so it's not my problem" is about the easiest way that feels capable of consistent application.
You shouldn't assume that if you can successfully predict the outputs of a black box, that you know what's in the box. If you understand the concepts of "race", "a people", "a nation", "a sphere" the way based gigathad post-post-christian vitalists do, then this analysis just reads like a failed attempt at solving a math problem from somebody who doesn't understand the material. The error is assuming that you can accurately model the outgroup using your own terms at the level of persuasion, which requires an internal model. You can model whoever you want in your own terms in order to predict them. But to *persuade* them you must speak their language.
That is to say, don't take a concept from the outgroup, translate it into ingroup language, dissect it, and assume that dissection still maps to the original concept.
Maybe the post-chad dark gigas terms are wrong because they resist reduction into terms you can model. Or maybe you just lack basic intuitions about the world that they see very obviously. It's like hearing an asexual give you their theory of sex. They might be good reasoners, but lacking direct knowledge of the nouns involved, bootstrapping from on hand proxies to ape understanding, their language is basically gibberish.
I’m not sure I count as a “based post-Christian vitalist”. I don’t self-describe that way, but I do have broadly right-libertarian politics, am post-Christian in both the cultural and personal senses, and *Where’s My Flying Car?* is a strong contender for my favorite book. So, if I can be so arrogant as to speak for the group with those caveats in place:
Option 1, giving up on ever being more than a bundle of incoherent preferences, sounds pretty good to me. Mike Heumer calls it “moral intuitionism”, if you want to look up the long-form argument in favor. But the tl;dr is that it’s a fundamental mistake of rationalist culture, as well as many of its precursor cultures, to view moral reasoning as deductive rather than inductive (in the middle-school logic (and is there any better indication of my at least fitting the “post-Christian” part of the label than that “middle-school logic” feels like a natural category to me?) sense of “applying general rules to specific cases”/“reasoning from specific cases to general rules”). We don’t view “have a rule you can near-losslessly summarize on a business card and follow it in every case” as desirable, and we don’t view “you do X in situation A, and Y in situation B, which seems like you’re following a complex and possibly inconsistent moral rule!” as a devastating blow. Indeed, I personally would respond to the latter with a confused “you only follow one moral rule?”
As a matter of a philosophical academic (meant in both senses) interest, I don’t mind you trying to follow the inductive chain on my/our moral intuitions and trying to figure out the rule(s) I/we are following. That seems like at least as good a use of your time as playing Sudoku. But arguing from the premise of “you don’t have a consistent moral rule!” will be as fruitless as arguing to, I dunno, Pakistani grooming gang members in Britain that raping children is bad. There’s a fundamental cultural mismatch there.
I also object to the whole “objectively I think I’d rather have malaria than be raped” thing, since human-caused violence does seem special even in your own framework. I don’t know if any cases of, say, PTSD (real PTSD, not “I read the n-word in an antiracist novel from the 1800’s” PTSD) from a serious illness outside the context of a pandemic. Though your point about this being inconsistent with not caring about domestic abuse in Pakistan is well taken. But this is all a side-issue, me indulging in my own academic project.
Perhaps helping and having empathy with strangers is more complicated. I have higher confidence in the hypothesis that if police and social services would act strongly against child gang rapists, we would get less child gang rape and that would be a good thing. And also that is not a very difficult thing in a high income country to provide incentives so police and social workers do their jobs.
It is less obvious that if I donate money to malaria charities in Africa this will be an un-mitigated good thing. 1. The money may not get to the intended beneficiaries or do the intended good or have a lot of unintended adverse consequences. 2. Merely having more and healthier Africans may be great in the short term but not in the long term interests of Africa or the world. Both propositions have a lot of arguments on both sides whereas strongly objecting to authorities neglecting child rape and torture in the UK has fewer potential downsides.
For sure. In fact I do donate to improving agriculture, education and health in Africa because I hope it helps. But I am not very sure that it actually does help and think there is some non-zero probability by donations are actually making things worse.
Incisive as usual. I face the basic issue regularly, because I'm into charitable giving. I sympathize with the effective altruism movement. I think there's something flawed in the "every human life has equal value" concept notwithstanding its abstract appeal, but I've found no compelling alternative. My current compromise is to balance between the notion of equally-weighted humanity and some kind of moral inverse-square law.
I think the EA stance is sufficiently compatible with an unequal weighing of lives, because there are several orders of magnitude wrt to cost for extending X number of children lives for Y years in poorer countries compared to spending 1000X for equivalent +EV in the US. Yes, EA would be incredibly demanding if they asked you to run into every burning building to save a child. But what would you think of a person who wouldn't press a single button to save a building full of children, even if they are foreign and that this is an isolated incident? (I.e. doing this once wouldn't cause the button to pop up again etc)?
I'm not saying we're anywhere close to the button pressing universe, but there are people who use the former burning building example as if that's the only life saving intervention that can be done and there are no cheaper, less impactful on your QoL interventions.
You describe it as if it began and ended in the 2010s. It started earlier and is STILL HAPPENING!
I'm not aware of the argument you're describing, but the thing that springs to mind is that Americans that are usually against foreign intervention may be more interested in this case because it hits close to home.
1. The people doing it came through open borders policies (there's no possibility they entered through the aggressively unfriendly legal immigration scheme for professionals) -- which are the same policies (being pushed by the same groups) the US is struggling with.
2. Ditto the mechanisms making it impossible to deport them.
3. Ditto the culture of political correctness suppressing reporting about it and branding anyone who objects as far right.
4. Ditto the horrifyingly amoral deep state who did everything they could to not simply ignore but also to facilitate it. (I read the other day a case where a young girl was taken from her family by social services because she was pregnant, so clearly being abused, and the chosen foster family was her abuser, who promptly married her in an Islamic ceremony, attended by the social worker...)
I hear you've got similar problems; so these people may see it as part of the same fight.
British grooming gangs, however horrible they are, are not really worse than what is routinely happening to christians in Pakistan, or muslims in India, or yezidi and alawites in the Middle East. The honest reason why they elicit a much more intense response from the American Twitter is that these events appear to be closer to twitter-americans than other atrocities. Why would they be closer if the events took place in a different country.
A charitable explanation of this closeness is that these events are happening in the same media-space. British media is definitely pre-occupied by the US events as if they were happening almost in the same country. For example, stories about the recent LA fires were more popular than all other contemporaneous stories combined, while German floods of 2024 received much less coverage. It would be only natural if the american media space reciprocated if only a little.
A less charitable explanation would be that the victims happened to have skin of just the right color.
I will not be guessing here which explanation carries more weight in which case.
There’s a simple explanation: It’s not a matter of caring or not caring; it’s a matter of how much one cares. Moral issues are rarely black and white; they’re on a continuum.
Yeah this may be banworthy, but they definitely just like that they have an excuse to hurt Pakistanis and fortunately some are worthy of hurting. The kids don't factor in.
The extent to which I'm sick of entertaining convoluted explanations of why some standard applies one way to brown people and another to white people would be hard to convey in mere words. I try to live by the charitable principle as best as a mortal can. But this is 2,000 words about why a philosophy that is white supremacist in impact if not in belief might have different values when victims are white and perpetrators aren't vs. other configurations. Sometimes Occam is right.
I see how Scott's choice to focus on this particular piece of injustice, one with brown villains and white victims, could be seen as white supremacist in impact if not in belief. But how is the philosophy espoused supportive of white supremacy?
1) Scott is focusing on this particular piece of injustice because it's an aberration in Vitalist philosophy.
2) This comments section is full of self-proclaimed Vitalists explaining that this situation is different than the situation in developing countries because the victims are white, or British, or European, or "kin" in some abstract sense and the perpetrators aren't.
Oh, it's not Scott you're complaining about, it's the Vitalists here who are pushing back? Is that right?
<But this is 2,000 words about why a philosophy that is white supremacist in impact if not in belief might have different values when victims are white and perpetrators aren't vs. other configurations
So what you mean here is that Scott is busting the Vitalists who hang out here by pointing out that even they show some interest in the welfare of poor folks when the poor folks are white and their abusers are not? Is that right?
Scott's point with this article is to claim that Vitalists are inconsistent in their philosophy - that they sometimes support altruism given the right circumstances. I think he hopes to convince them that their reasoning is faulty based on their stated principles and to either change the reasoning or change the principles.
Based on Vitalist writing I don't think any such inconsistency exists. If an action serves the goals of white nationalism, they support it. The fact that it also happens to be altruistic isn't a downside for them, but isn't part of the reasoning (except insofar as it gives them a way to advocate white supremacy that falls inside the Overton Window). Scott's argument will not convince because it assumes the wrong premises - that there's some spark of human empathy in these people.
Looking at the old SSC post is, as usual, an interesting and surprising experience.
1) the discussion about pandemics (especially foreign-imported) and quarantine could use a COVID update,
2) the dynamic about “local questions becoming referenda (referendums?) on Everything”, or “[member of tribe X] puts [member of tribe Y] on the spot to publicly criticize [genuinely horrifying stuff that tribe Y tends to not invoke as part of its discourse downplays], [member of tribe Y] refuse to give [member of tribe X] satisfaction” seems to have worsened a lot.
Of course, 2) is exclusively the responsibility of the alt-right’s industrial-scale bullshit signal-boosting machine that never saw a fire it didn’t like to add fuel to… (wait, am I doing it again?)
It seems that you are mistaking tribal loyalty for moral empathy. These people don't care about rape or crime. Quite a few of them actually want society to collapse so that THEY can form gangs that raid villages and take women and so on. They care that a bunch of foreigners are attacking their extended family. "Vita" means life, and the core of life (and vitalism) is genetics.
This reads like a failure to decouple. It's perfectly possible to realize that your evolutionary response is a misfire, still feel really bad about something, and then endeavor to do nothing about it and let the locals deal with their own issues.
> Resolve the contradiction by ceasing to care about child sexual assault victims or anyone else. THIS IS NOT A REAL OPTION, SORRY.
This is very much an option. Pretty sure it’s the only option on the table, actually, if you want reflective equilibrium and still desire to have some kind of diversity in human values.
*Traditional Low-Tech Lifestyle Sphere of Influence, 2060 A.D.*
— Elder Alice, do you have a moment ?
— Always, Friend Bob. Is there a problem ?
— It’s about the news you shared from beyond the Boundary. In the England Sphere. Those poor little girls…
— What about them ?
— Can’t we help them ?
— We know the Rules. The Boundaries are Sacred. The People of the England Sphere do not want help. More precisely, they value their Sovereignty and Responsibility more than they want help in this situation. This is a Correct and Healthy preference, and the meta-preference to respect that preference is Correct and Healthy too — indeed the foundation of all Existence. We can’t help and we must learn not to want to.
— But… why ? How can not helping here be… correct ? Forget the People of the England Sphere. Surely those poor little girls want to be helped ?
— Remember when you broke your left foot two years ago ?
— Yes. Are you changing the subject ?
— I’m not. This suffering was avoidable. Of your own doing, by your own admission, remember ? "I should have paid more attention to the stability of that heavy hammer". There are Spheres where people are genetically engineered to dissociate the physical sensation of pain and the qualia of suffering. There are Spheres where people wear an earring¹ that direct their actions, who would have instructed you to stabilize that hammer first. There are Spheres where it is flatly illegal to put yourself or another human in a situation where there is such a danger of injury, like being close to a heavy hammer.
— Dangerous situation ? I was at work in my own workshop ! It was just a stupid mistake ! And you’re changing the subject.
— And in those Spheres your work is highly Illegal due to unacceptably high risks of injury. I’m not changing subjet. I’m saying that, seeing you suffer for your mistake, the people of those Spheres would react like you just did : "Such avoidable suffering ! We should help him ! By genetically engineering him. Or forcing him to accept that Earring. Or by forbidding him to work in that dangerous occupation." Do you want that earring ? Or be genetically re-engineered to not experience suffering ? Our Sphere allow unconditional emigration and those particular Spheres allow immigration if you desire so.
— Well, no, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. In that Sphere, I mean. I enjoy being here.
— So be happy that the people of those other Spheres are not allowed and unable to "help" you. Accept that you can’t help those little girls, the same way you couldn’t be "helped". The two situations are, in the grand scheme of things, exactly the same — some people want the Boundaries to be breached for helpful reasons, but this is not allowed, for good reasons.
— But why did your share that story then ? If we can’t help ? Just to… teach us that acceptance ? I would rather have not known at all.
— No. It was a lesson, yes, but not that lesson.
— What lesson ?
— The England Sphere is very similar to us. Much more technologically advanced, granted, without any Law preventing technological progress, but with unaugmented, unmodified humans, and with purely human governance. What happened there can happen here. It is what happen when the People fail at their responsibility of Maintaining their Community and Institutions. But that possibility of failure is what we accept when we decide to live in a Sphere where the Responsibility of Governance is left in our human hands. This is why I decided to let the news cross the Boundary, as is my prerogative. Let not forget the importance of that responsibility, just because we happen to live in good times.
The thing is that most "based post-Christian vitalists" consider that white people are natural allies of other white people.
Since the kids being groomed are white, it suddenly becomes very based, post-Christian and vitalist to care about them.
If the kids being raped were brown, the gangs wouldn't matter, the kids would be loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed. Which is why these people would call you a cucked soy idiot if you do something like donating to Bedari.
These people are all for supporting people who advance civilization. It's just that they believe that advancing civilization is inherently tied to being white.
The idea that we all have the same sorta moral impulses seems 1) an empirical questions and 2) unbacked by empirical evidence. What makes you believe this broadly?
It seems like the people that still live in tribes in low income countries (say, certain parts of Africa) probably aren’t really egalitarian at all. While one can say that we have better access to the correct moral impulses (by whatever your chosen moral mechanism is), this seems hard to justify — at what point do the correct views about who to care about interact with our beliefs about them such that those people that don’t believe in egalitarianism are missing out.
To pump this intuition a little more, imagine you go to one of these African tribes and are attempting to convince them to start caring about their outgroup. I think you would have quite a hard time doing this - despite any argument that you give that relies on a sort of western intuition that people usually already accept and are trying to justify.
While you can argue that these people in the west actually don’t have these moral intuitions and are just confused — this seems much more implausible to me than saying that they actually don’t have it at all (especially given that we have cases where humans don’t know it all).
Not here to argue for the vitalists (which despite being in these circles, I'm still a bit fuzzy on what exactly that actually means)... I agree that's it's normal and good to care about suffering and injustice anywhere in the world, and I have no objections to anyone who wants to spend their money on malaria nets or whatever (although I think we have a duty to prioritize our own families, as a government has a duty to prioritize its citizens).
But I don't think you have to be a hardcore white nationalist to feel that the UK isn't just the same as any a random distant foreign country. Most of us in these spaces are Anglos. Certainly culturally if not ethnically/genetically, although I'm pretty sure most of us are the latter as well. As Americans, our political traditions are distinctly British as well. My 10 years in SE Asia really made me realize how much of a shared culture we Anglophones have, whether we're from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (I had friends from each of the above).
So not only is it totally normal (and I think perfectly fine) to more easily empathize with people who are similar to ourselves... Our cultures are very similar and afflicted by similar pathologies. If it were to happen in say Haiti, we still think it's tragedy, but we wouldn't be surprised as we all know it has long been and will probably continue to be a deeply dysfunctional society by our standards, so it doesn't have any implications for us.
OTOH, throughout the Angloshpere, the professional managerial class, those in academia, media, bureaucracy, the "elites" or however you want to say, IQW almost everyone who matters in terms of shaping public opinion and policy, are afflicted by the same mind virus. And to see undeniable evidence of it leading to what would otherwise be dismissed as the most outlandish, extreme (and of course racist) slippery slope argument, where hostile invaders are gang-raping native girls who are specifically targeted on the bases of their race, and to have it actually covered up by authorities because it counteracts the official narrative about which race is the victimizer race and which races are the victim races... When a similar dynamic recently resulted in Americas news media cheerleading the violent race riots they triggered with their distorted reporting on the basis of that same ideology... It's not surprising that many people find it not only deeply shocking but alarming. It contributes to the impression that our institutions are not merely corrupt and delusional, but in fact actively hostile to many of us.
There's a category difference between giving to charity and invading a country to fix its way of life. The former is altruistic, the latter is more of a "fair deal" where I make things better for people by making them my responsibility, but with that responsibility comes control (and spoils? at the discretion of the conqueror). Christians (and EAs?) never go for deals like that.
IF a Nietzschean were going to solve the UK's problems, conquering it would be the only righteous way.
The main reason they care isn’t because of generic impulse that suffering is bad. It’s because they believe that the same kind of reasoning that made it happen there(don’t look in to criminal cases of minorities because it fuels racism) could cause it to happen here.
I think the obvious intuition is that everyone hates it when a recognizable outgroup is oppressing a recognizable ingroup. When a fargroup is oppressing another fargroup, then our objections are usually, at best, far more intellectual than visceral.
The same applies to the left, by the way. I recall a few decades ago, Bernard Lewis observing that the US left reacted far, far more strongly to Franco jailing some leftists late in his regime (outgroup vs. ingroup) than to Assad the Elder blowing up Hama a few years later and massacring some tens of thousands of Sunni civilians (fargroup vs. fargroup).
For the right, elite antiracist leftists (outgroup) allying with third-world immigrants (outgroup) to facilitate the rape of native working-class English girls (ingroup) is something that hits viscerally, in a way that Hutus massacring Tutsis (fargroup vs. fargroup) does not.
Yep, no need to look for more and more convoluted slices of who deserves compassion and who doesn't. The ingroup victim/outgroup perpetrator is evident intuitively, verified in all cultures and explain differential outrage (and thus, care) in all cases I can think off. Sometimes the issue is to see who is ingroup and who is outgroup but not here, it's evident for all. Why Scott did not mention that is beyond me...
Yes, plays well to observations Scott has made before (hence our very using of these terms).
But part of the problem is no one ever frames their moral objections in these terms. In fact, we're heavily trained against it.
"This faraway issue is especially bothersome to me because the villains remind me of people I already hate and the victims remind me of myself, my friends, and/or my family!"
During the Ukraine invasion, I was talking with a friend who kept bringing up how unimaginable it was, how hard it hit, that this was happening in a *European* country in the 21st century. But for the life of me, I couldn't get him (an American in America, like me) to expand on the significance of "European" in his sentence; the best I could get was repeated mentions of Hitler and "World War 2. And this, in a private conversation between old friends.
You are right. The training is real against admitting it. But it does not make it less a factor. I guess for some (many) the training got so well integrated they even refuse to admit it to themselves. Which is not healthy: it's good to understand not to expose yourself socially, so in many situations (colleagues, acquaintances,...) lying is a good idea (or better yet, do not go there) but at least do not internalize the taboo, not knowing yourself is not a good place to be.
I've occasionally run into Ayn Rand-ish "based post-Christian vitalist" attitudes, but reading about them here tells me that there are enough of them they're actually worth dumping on.
Which reminds me that some sort of food fight has broken out on the far right, and it seems that there are would-be-supermen whining that The System has given all the good opportunities to women, minorities, and immigrants.
I think there are some deeper dives to be done about why people get so weirdly worked up about different forms of altruism. Like, yes I personally think there are best ways to do it, but other people think differently, and some don't invest in altruism at all. Beyond a civil conversation about what matters, what is there to gain by competing with people, and judging people, on the altruistic act they do want to perform? Why are people so aggressive about altruism?
Not in real life, no, at least not while they're actively not-empathizing against rape victims.
But I have seen the "She's a slut" justification in writing a lot. Both when the perpetrator attacked his victims in the streets (so he doesn't know her, but she was dressed in such and such ways), and when the perpetrator attacked his victims in the sheets (he knows her, they were supposed to be having some level of "fun" that doesn't include sex, he escalated against her will, drugs and/or alcohol may have been involved).
And of course, male rape victims are perhaps the single most populous category of un-empathized-with victims in the last 25 years ever, including by the vast majority of mainstream feminists and other men.
> how rare do you see this as?
It's important to realize how the vast majority of people never actually want to come right out and say, """I HATE $GOOD_THING, YOU'RE A LEFTIST CUCK FOR BELIEVING $GOOD_THING IS GOOD AND DESIRABLE""".
Pro-Genocide factions in Israel almost never say Peace is Bad, Genocide is Good, or Co-Existence is Cucked. They merely say that those things are the "unfortunate consequences" that their bad neighbors forced on them. If only they had better neighbors - they say wistfully as they call for another airstrike against an UNRWA school full of minors - they would have loved to make Peace and pursue Co-Existence. Alas, they don't.
**Some** of this is sincere, after all, most people are "good" (== not cartoonishly evil, almost never eviler than the least-resistance path would entail), and most evil is "boring" (== traceable to extremely widespread common-sense intuitions in all social animals, and inducible in most people given the right stimulus/brainwashing).
But some of this is also just good rhetoric, "Rape" and "Peace" are such ancient terms they're practically unattackable. Opposing Rape and wanting Peace is synonymous with goodness, and the reverse is synonymous with evil. Every non-terminally-online opponent to rape victims or peace advocates know that it's rhetorical suicide to come right out and say "Rape Is Good, Actually" or "Peace Is For Cucks". So they have to invent some other justification, some other terms, some other Corrective [1] to the Signal that they (claim to) to believe in. The Corrective to "Rape Is Bad" is "But some Sluts had it coming". The Corrective to "Genocide Is Bad" is "But some cultures/ethnicities deserve nothing else".
So in short, Rape Advocacy is very rare if you expect it will be as explicit and as blunt as Anti-Rape Advocacy, but very widespread if you keep your eyes open and see the various Correctives and Russel's Conjugate that people cock up.
I'm not really thinking about someone who argues in favor of rape (and agree with your analysis that it would be impossible to put forward in most contexts, and that some people may characteristically cover up their support of it by victim blaming).
I'm asking about people without the moral intuition at all, and must work their way through tedious system 2 reasoning to hit the obvious conclusion that it is bad.
> and must work their way through tedious system 2 reasoning to hit the obvious conclusion that it is bad
That wording implies that you believe in moral truths, which is... completely unsubstantiated. Why are you so confident that their suffering matters? You wouldn't be so confident if this was concerning the suffering of beasts.
If these folks were genuinely concerned about the welfare of children, they'd start at home by campaigning for laws in the US to protect minors from gun crime. Guns remain the leading cause of death fir children and teens.
> The report also illuminates the disproportionate impact of gun deaths among Black children and teens. In 2022, in the 1 to 17 age group, Black children and teens had a gun death rate 18 times higher than that of white children in the same age group.
There, you have your explanation of why nobody cares about this.
Yeah, but not because whites don't care about black kids. For a mix of practical and political reasons, nobody seems very interested in rounding up cheap concealable handguns in urban communities, and until they do that no dent will be made in gun deaths. A lot of energy is wasted by the gun control movement railing against expensive rifles that are used in only a few high profile shootings per year, because the people who own that kind of gun are rural and white and therefore not in the same political coalition of the gun control advocates. "I want to ban AR-15s" is politically palatable, "I want to ban the Raven Arms 9mm" ends in BLM protests. When Bloomberg had to run away from "stop and frisk" in the primary, it was over, nobody is going to do anything it.
I personally know some whites who don't care about black and/or brown kids, including some I am related to. What's changed in recent years outside of workplace contexts is that
(1) a non-trivial fraction of them will frankly say as much, and
(2) the presence of someone who they know will be outraged by that now _increases_ their willingness to say it.
You've built a weird straw man here. There are a lot of different types of people on this blog who argue against Singer's drowning child and MacAskill's barely happy future. There are also people in the wider world who want to stop mass rapes.
First, are these the same people? No, not always. Remember, the internet is a bunch of different people who you put into boxes. You can't ask for consistency from the boxes, because they are not actual people. Heck, you have a lot of British readers, and the American media often intertwines with the British media. Have you considered that they might be the ones driving this displeasure, against something that is actually in their backyard?
Second, are these people post-Christian vitalists? No, not always. I'll go out on a limb here and say I'm anti-Singer and pro-use-force-to-stop-rape. I'm post-Christian, I guess, but I'm not a vitalist, and I'm not based.
Third, and most important, are you sure people's anti-Singer position is so blunt, so axiomatic? Because... it's probably not. You seem to mistakenly believe people reach this position and universalize it. Instead, it is probably generally driven by deeper practical concerns that often apply, but not always.
Here, here's how a non-based non-vitalist *practical consequentialist* could object to Singer, MacAskill, and a lot of EA, but still say we should use force to stop the rapes:
In a universe of infinite surpluses, it would of course be good to save unbounded numbers of drowning children. In a universe where some permanent structural change could be made to stop having drowning children, it would of course be good to stop the thing that causes drowning children. In a universe where the happiness line where life is worth living is 0.0000001 units above neutral, it would be good to sacrifice right up to that line to save as many drowning children as possible.
This is not that universe. Practically, each drowning child is replaced by another drowning child, and many people who prioritize the drowning children over their own family and neighborhood end up miserably agonizing over dumb things like whether they can enjoy a hamburger, or have a child, and these people have fallen far below the happiness-makes-life-worth-living line, and usually don't know it. You may disagree, but I'm far from hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance here. It's a reasonable opinion.
However! That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to take *practical* far away actions. Collectively funding a faraway child to go to school, like we did in the 80s, seems to have a positive effect without wrecking anything *here*. It is measured. Building a new school in China seems to have a positive effect. It is nearly permanent.
In a healthy first world society, it is far easier to kick a bunch of rapists in the teeth, creating a semi-permanent chilling effect, than it would be to do sustained interventions in third world countries.
Where your straw men have made a mistake is in thinking that we have healthy first world society. Punishment is far harder than it should be. There isn't state capacity for the kind of punishment that creates a chilling effect.
I like this post, and it resonates a lot with me. But I can’t tell if it’s purely an argument against moral nihilism, or if it’s specifically an argument for people to “care about helping others” in some context. Because I think that for some people, the moral drive starts with other impulses, and “helping others” is more of an implicit drive/effect rather than the primary motivator.
For some people, I suspect this post is fairly apt. Plenty of people become resistant to the idea of charity/helping others/caring because they’ve been pressured again and again to give time/money/attention/care to people and causes that they do not care about (and may even consider harmful). Several people I know fit this category. Once you start talking about specific possibilities rather than generalized ideals, most of them have exceptions – for example, supporting veterans, or kids who have been raped. The argument is less about not caring at all, and more about who you actually care about.
But I think that in this case, people’s rage and drive to action is at least partially driven by other moral impulses, and not just the desire to help victims. E.g. the drive to *punish evildoers*. I think liberals (and EAs) tend to be dismissive about this, and basically can’t discuss it unless it’s in the context of downstream effects like determent, but for many people this is a strong moral impulse in its own right, and if you disagree with it you should probably acknowledge and address it head on.
Another impulse, which starts to get into fraught territory, is the desire to protect your society/culture. I suspect that for many of the people referenced in the post, anger about the Rotherham gangs is about protecting cultural values and social order that they care about (and that are perceived as shared between the US and UK) from threats. In this case, it is important that the threat is from perceived outsiders, and even more important that other members of society are ignoring and minimizing that threat because it is from those outsiders. In other cases, protecting your society/culture may be more about punishing in-group members *more harshly* when they commit crimes or violate norms.
Maybe you're trying to get at the idea that people can also use these moral impulses as starting points for charity or activism? These impulses certainly do reflect caring about things in the world, and in practice they do motivate people to take action frequently (sometimes in ways that I find extremely frustrating and difficult to relate to, but that's probably a separate issue). But the post seems to equivocate between “having moral impulses” and “wanting to help people”, and I guess I think that’s not always completely true. Sometimes the impulse is “destroy bad” rather than “help good”.
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.
Exasperated-but-remaining-calm Scott is, in terms of the actual writing, the best Scott.
I'm guessing that's because it's a match with some needed manner and skills in working with psychiatric patients? Anyway in this type of post you are very good at being cogent/clear/candid while stopping short (at least to my eye) of becoming a scold.
I think you really whiffed on this one, there's 2 incredibly obvious ways to reconcile it.
1. They don't actually care that much about the kids, but the scenario maps very well onto the US culture war. Islamic offenders, a government overly concerned with anti-Muslim backlash, a government cracking down on free speech, a government being soft on crime, giving lesser punishments to the abusers than they gave to patriots in a free speech protest. They care about those things, and only to the extent they can be a moral example of what ethnic pluralism and weak progressive prosecutors do to a society, a warning against that happening here.
(As an aside, this is the level of detachment on which I expect most people to experience a story like this, because it is not mentally healthy to think about it at the object level, what really happened. I prosecuted sexual abusers and had to hear young children talk about their abuse, for many years, so I had to be very close to it and cultivated an amazing sense of detachment to stay professional. I had to prep kids for testifying, and for example "penetration of the vagina" is an element of the crime, so I had to seriously sit there and tell a 7 year old kid in my office "make sure you say he penetrated your vagina with his penis" and I could not have done that if I was allowing myself to think about that as a thing that actually happened.)
2. Britain is on the fringe of the expanding circles of "I care about this" for an American, but it's much much closer than the Congo. Heritage, history, shared language, shared culture. I'm sipping my coffee out of a Beatles mug today listening to the SiriusXM weekly "British Invasion" 4 hour music program, the wife and I spent Sunday afternoon listening to Jane Eyre on audiobook. I'm in Middle America, have no British relatives and have only been to London once in my life, but it was easy to recall many intersections with British culture in a typical day. I think about British culture fondly numerous times every day, and about African cultural output rarely and with little affinity. (Not zero, I've recently been learning a Fela Kuti song, but in that regard I probably *am* an outlier among my peers.) If somebody wants to protect their community, maybe they value its culture, and British culture is interwoven with ours. That may put Britain within the outer circle of caring about them as people, and this story is partly about protecting that culture from a more primitive one.
"I don’t think you have to strain or lie or tie yourself into moral knots to justify being angry at child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. I think this is natural because there’s a part of you - the best part - which cares about suffering and injustice wherever in the world it happens, even in foreign countries, even to poor people who you’ll never meet."
This isn't some random event that happened in some far off country, completely disconnected from our lives. This is the result of mass immigration, which as an American I am very familiar with. I think part of the anger is because people are suffering from similar issues here.
> 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.
I think quite a large number, 20-50%, don't, really. There are a lot of people who have moral impulses the same way historical 'shame societies' had them: not any internal belief about morals, but a pseudomoral reaction to what others think about _them_. I'm a high-systematizing person of this type, and I found an intellectual argument about morality I found compelling. I've chosen to respond to this by surrounding myself with people who _do_ have strong moral feelings, so the shame/expectations point in the direction I intellectually endorse, but I expect this is very rare. Much more likely are people who care about the 'common-sense morality' they see modeled around them (in all its incoherence). This looks quite a lot like actually believing in it, except that they'll never extrapolate to caring about unusual scenarios unless pushed into doing so.
50% may seem very high, but this could be stable with even higher numbers. As long as they don't talk about it (And why would they? That would be morally suspect to admit to, and produce shame!), a community could be entirely 'reflectors' with no 'valuers', reflecting between themselves the last image of genuinely-felt morality they saw. And none would have to be the wiser; they'd all look like a perfectly cromulent 'guilt society' where everyone's moral feelings are fully internalized. Belief in God and divine morality is also a patch that keeps the distinction silent, as there is someone to mirror who cannot be argued with and is always watching; this could explain much of the backlash to atheism claiming it destroys morality - for some reflectors, it _would_.
That... makes a lot of sense, actually. I was just wondering why and how liberals managed to suppress so many people's malignant instincts for so long, and so effectively. ...It was never going to last. Entropy takes all.
Not necessarily. I think the share of humanity who are reflectors has been dropping, over historical time. Athens and Thebes were better than Mycenae, Rome was better than Athens and Alexander, the Han were better than the Shang. Renaissance cultures were better than Medieval ones, Liberalism better than the Renaissance. There's plenty of fluctuation and it doesn't uniformly improve, but on the whole it does. The child of valuers is usually a valuer and the the child of reflectors usually a reflector, but the error rate leans toward valuers. (And 'neithers', such as autistic people who build everything from parts as an intellectual exercise and do neither of the other things. Some of whom are responsible for the arguments most compelling to future valuers.)
A truly all-reflector society is only stable when unprecedented moral quandaries are rare. if two widely-separated reflector philosophers encounter similar new problems at close enough to the same time, and extrapolate different solutions, fault-lines and heresies form wherever the expanding waves of incompatible imitation overlap. Valuers can safely resolve such contradictions by re-deriving relative priorities from core principles.
Naturally, social media enabling antagonistically-constructed moral quandaries to spread faster than ever before has not been kind to that system. We've got top men working on the problem now, though - our very worst - and they're doing all they can to stress-test various underdeveloped spam filters, while making folks with genuine prosocial integrity easier to tell apart from unprincipled herd-followers. Hopefully it'll be sorted out soon.
Either rare or minor in impact or both. Small-impact moral quandaries can have bubbles of reflectors build up different views, as long as when they come into contact the conflict is somewhat lopsided and not vehement enough for acrimonious splits, and can instead drift toward the majority.
I do not think any society since the Bronze Age has actually been supermajority-reflector. But it isn't impossible, and moral drift could affect it much the same as an all-valuer society.
I also don't think such stress tests are actually all that good at distinguishing. A self-coherent reflector can be more prosocial and higher integrity than a great many valuers.
“since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before.” This seems like nonsense, the police and other authorities let themselves down badly, but AFAIK this case was not neglected due to social media censorship. Like the commenter above says it was a huge story. Unless he has persuasive evidence to the contrary, I think this borders on dishonesty from Scott.
I can't help but noticing that any trace of contradiction disappears if one models their actual moral axioms as "brown people bad", with a helping of "owning the libs good" for why they're also actively against caring about the suffering of poor white people, unless said suffering is brown people's fault, in which case the former axiom takes precedence.
I realize such a view is not exactly politically correct around these here parts, but it parsimoniously explains the observed data.
“Based post-Christian Vitalists” is an entirely new label to my hearing but I instantly recognized that personality type. And it's been true for some years now that when a left-leaning close friend or relative is having feelings about a shameless inconsistency such as Scott points out here, I point out the consistencies: brown people bad/white people better, and/or producing liberal tears. "Based" has for me come to mean simply prioritizing those two objectives above all else.
There hasn't yet been an instance in which that formulation failed to predict whatever stance or meme was sparking the reaction. Went through one of those scenarios not long ago with my wife and her MAGA brother. Managed to head her off, barely, by asking, "So you're going to go ahead and make him even _happier_?"
Can someone define "based post-Christian vitalist?" Post-Christian makes me think of atheists, but atheists are not vitalists. Neo-pagans are generally vitalists, too. Not sure what group Scott is criticizing. Is this some sort of rationalist sect?
I can't speak for Scott, but I think he's referring to people who are against the Christian moral framework wherein weakness (very broadly defined) is virtuous and strength (very broadly defined) is reviled. Note that the Christian moral framework includes its contemporary secularized evolutions (eg, social justice and woke beliefs)
I had the same impression. But the whole vitalism thing is confusing. Not sure how that applies to Pakistani rape gangs. It's all very confusing. I gather "They" refers to the PCVs, though, whoever "They" are. Is Noel Smuk a PCV?
The relevance of the rape gangs is that the powers-that-be, according to the PCV critics referred to by Scott, allowed the rape gangs to continue their raping ways for many years in large part because the rape gangs were disproportionately minorities (belonging to the virtuous weak side of Christian moral framework) and the victims were disproportionately white (therefore belonging to the contemptible strong side of the Christian moral framework). The problem, according to PCVs, is that the dominant ideology of our society, the Christian moral framework, leads to self-destructive behaviors, such as turning a blind eye to South Asian rape gangs because not doing so would further public opposition to social justice
Bad guys. He's saying that they're hypocrites because they claim to value strength and self-interest above all while also caring about rape victims in other countries.
...Of course, he's completely missing the point. The victims are completely irrelevant. This is about protecting western society from third-world savages.
I think he's trying to say that the PCVs care more about the weak and vulnerable than they want to admit. As others have also pointed out, I think he's missed the mark. I suspect it's because he sympathizes with a lot of what the PCVs say and really wants to believe that their moral framework can be reconciled with that of altruists
This is one of those alternate reality things where conservatives act all shocked pikachu, "what! Child rape in jolly old England!" and their monocles fall into their tea,
and anyone who lives there tells me "Not only child rape in England, everybody knows it happens and that it has been happening for hundreds of years, to the point that the most common joke is the 'formative experience' boys have in public schools*. It's usually just rich white aristos doing the rapping, so it's ok."
Basically, if you are a big man in town you can rape down the hierarchy, wherever you are, and it's fine. Your people will rally around you to call the teen you rapped a slut whore who deserved it, what was she wearing anyway?
The real issue here is people in the lower class presuming they had the gas to do shit that is reserved for their betters. You need to be a Trump or a Musk or a Clinton or Jay Z whoever else you see smiling by diddy and Epstein to get away with that shit, not a dirty fucking prole.
IT happens in england, it happens in the US, but nobody gives a shit if it happens to the right people. Occasionally a story breaks, and Epstein "commits suicide", and then somehow not a single person suffers any consequences whatsoever. Oh well!
*for complex reasons that boil down to (I assume) the English wanting to fuck with me specifically, public schools are the private domain of the upper crust in Engerland
Good post, but I feel sad that you have enough contact with “Based post-Christian Vitalists” to inspire you to write it.
They seem like insufferable antisocial edgelords that only exist online.
And it’s hard to imagine you’re genuinely misconstruing their moral premises such that you’re accusing them of being insufficiently consistent in their concern and compassion for suffering victims. Of course they’re operating on different premises, incorporating different drivers of moral concern and action.
Fear, hatred and lust for vengeance can spur moral action just as well as compassion. Apparent inconsistency in concern disappears when their moral framework never accepted the premise of universality to begin with, but rather particularism determined by kin, social or ethnic in/out groupings.
We all know that you know this and you know that we know you know this. So is the point that many self proclaimed BPCV are really some more garden variety reactionary when put to a moral test? Undeniable.
You can't prove a negative. Rape is illegal because of how icky it is. That level of violence and invasiveness repulses a civilized person. That's why it's illegal. Nothing to do with pregnancy, as pregnancy from rape is rare.
"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."
No they don't. They just care that this gives them an excuse to denounce brown people, Muslims, and immigrants (not necessarily in that order). That is why they are going on about grooming gangs specifically, not child sex abuse in general.
The backlash to the grooming scandal was less about grooming gangs qua grooming gangs, but more about how grooming gangs happened here*. Familial grooming gangs aren't new to places like Pakistan, but if they become commonplace in a culture, the culture has to become more restrictive and vigilant culture in order to adapt to them.
Low-crime, high-trust cultures (like contemporary England) are historically rare, and can only really exist under the assumption that they're not teeming with defectors. If grooming gangs become common, neighborhoods become less safe, passersby are less trustworthy, even cab drivers are unreliable? You can only have "free range kids" if the range is safe.
There's of course a racialized and religious angle to it (Muslims/kuffar as in-group/out-group), but the core clash with the grooming gangs is that they're defectors of a high-trust society. I feel similarly about the grooming gangs as I do about the stories in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, where 1950s Beat poets defected against high-trust social norms to rob random people, impregnate random women, etc., except that the grooming gangs were much more elaborate and gruesome, and we have the hindsight that could have been prevented by different immigration filters or restrictions.
* here = the diffuse grouping of WEIRD cultures, which tend to influence each other's policies, politics, and memes.
I followed the link to "Five Case Studies On Politicization" and, while I vaguely remembered the article, re-reading it made me realize something:
Holy shit, Slate Star Codex packed a punch!
I don't know exactly what changed, and I'm skeptical of any nostalgia-based narratives. I suspect it may be that Scott is now writing to his ingroup and trying to not offend the outgroup too much, rather than trying to draw lines in the sand. Or it might be something else entirely.
But man, (based on that N=1 sample,) it's amazing how much more aggressively the blog used to make its points.
Too many words and yet missed how most people think.
If there is gang activity in my state, I care a lot and even panic because there is a high probability of getting affected.
If there is gang activity in a neighbouring state, country or a culturally neighbouring country (Britain, in our case), I don't panic yet, but I still follow the situation because there is a non negligible probability of getting affected.
If there is gang activity in some distant (and culturally different) country, I feel sorry for them but I am not going to lose my sleep, because the probability it will affect me is much lower.
I feel like people spend too much time already arguing about whether Person X is *actually* a xenophobic nihilist or if he’s just doing it to own the libs.
Edit: Also, this was literally a headline story in British newspapers back in 2012, I hate to see Scott feeding into disinformation. It was seen as a major scandal and a Bad Thing at the time and there were lots of investigations. This has become an evergreen culture war topic and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about the grooming gangs again for the 2028 election.
I see the British tolerance for South Asian grooming gangs as more of a cautionary tale against the leftists trying to turn my community into castrated cuckholds who jail people for trying to stop brown people from raping their daughters. I don't particularly care about the victims there; I care about preventing the same cultural forces from doing the same thing here as they did in the UK. Talking about what happened in Brittanistan contributes to dissuading normies from leftism
"It’s hard to get as angry about kids suffering from some unpronounceable disease, as about kids suffering because a scary-looking person rapes them - even if the disease is horribly painful and disabling and terrifying, and realistically worse than the rape, and most people would pick the rape over the disease if they got a choice."
I'm glad you subsequently mentioned the distinction of suffering being due to human or a natural cause, as well as the charity.
I'll submit to you there's a very good reason people are more up-in-arms over rapists than diseases they're ignorant of: out of what we might call selfishness or group survival instinct, the former is likely to reoffend and hurt more people.
Indeed, a rapist who knows he'll get away with it - and has already gotten away with it repeatedly - is a mighty danger indeed. In terms of epidemiology, the R-nought number for such a person is very high. Even if I don't know how high it is, my gut instinct is it's higher than some disease I know nothing about. While I might even be wrong, this instinct is right often enough to be a useful rule to get passed down through the ages, even if indirectly.
I don't think outrage about rape gangs is as selfless as you do. England is about as close to America culturally as you're going to get, so I don't think we view what happens there the same way as what happens in poor African countries. If *England* can sweep rape gangs under the rug under some flimsy justification, then so can America, and next thing you know it's your niece being abducted. Such behavior cannot be tolerated in a liberal democracy, and it is decision-theoretic correct to be outraged about it and make sure such coruption remains taboo. It can still be rather self-interested outrage. If we hear about rape-gangs in Africa, we may think it sad, but we are not particualrly surprised or given to outrage, since we know that a lot of corrupt things go on over there, and it has little impact on us, and we wouldn't have any idea about what to do about it anyway.
>If _England_ can sweep rape gangs under the rug under some flimsy justification, then so can America, and next thing you know it's your niece being abducted. Such behavior cannot be tolerated in a liberal democracy, and it is decision-theoretic correct to be outraged about it and make sure such coruption remains taboo.
Which brings up the question: How is a supposedly liberal democracy managing to fail its citizens so spectacularly, and for so long (_multiple_ decades, if I understand correctly)?
And is the failure so severe that the _form_ of government no longer makes sense?
Would e.g. having a dictator for a year, if he or she managed to get the police to actually track down the rapists, and the judicial system to hang them, be better or worse?
Many Thanks! Umm... do you mean the USA (with Trump?) or UK? In the USA, I kind of don't expect Trump to e.g. pull an Andrew Jackson and flatly ignore a SCOTUS decision, so I mostly just seeing him as "pushing the envelope" as most POTUSs do. In the UK, is there some sort of constitutional crisis going on? I haven't seen reports of one, but I haven't been actively looking at UK politics.
>If the SCOTUS values their lives, they are not going to rule against him in the first place.
Hmm... I'm skeptical. Actually, I expect that SCOTUS probably will rule against him on birthright citizenship, and I really don't expect Trump to kill any justices as a result. We will see (albeit it might take on the order of a year...).
Can we mark your words on that, and remind you of them later? Because, for the record, I expect that SCOTUS will either rule in favor of birthright citizenship or do nothing because the appellate courts all ruled in favor of birthright citizenship, and that none of them will be killed because of it.
Sure, why not. I'm sure the SCOTUS is competent enough at reading the room to realize they should just follow orders (assuming they haven't also been offered positive incentives as well), but... it'll be interesting to see if there's any dissenters.
I should also point out that he only needs control of 5 justices. The other 4 are completely irrelevant.
>It’s fun to LARP as the Nietzschean superman, but ask Raskolnikov how far that gets you.
If you are going to keep citing Nietzsche, I beg of you to develop a more thorough understanding of his views. Raskolnikov is definitely *not* an example of a Nietzschean superman. Firstly, Nietzsche was quite clear that we current day humans could never be and would never be Ubermensch.
Secondly, Raskolnikov was written as a warning of what can happen in a world where "God is dead". Raskolnikov is full of resentment and nihilism, concepts Nietzsche rejected and spent hundreds of pages trying to convince his readers to reject. Nietzsche considered Dostoevsky to be the greatest psychologist he had ever read largely for identifying the dangers of our new world as described in Raskolnikov.
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both saw the societal changes coming to Europe and worried that nihilism would prevail. Dostoevsky's answer was for Europe to return to Christianity while Nietzsche compelled us to reassess all morals and over come them. They disagreed on the solution but were both very aligned against the nihilism, cynicism, resentment, and cruelty that Raskolnikov displays.
Just for fun, the Philosophize This! podcast is doing a series on Dostoevsky right now, talking about some of this.
It seems to me you agree with Scott. Both of you along with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche seem all to agree that young men cosplaying as Ubermenschen are inhabiting a delusion.
I disagree with Scott that Raskolnikov is a representation of a Nietzschean Ubermensch. Scott has consistently showed he doesn't have good grasp on Nietzsche's actual views and I thin that is to his detriment.
I read Scott as saying that cosplaying as a Nietzschian Ubermensch didn't work out for Raskolnikov because it was a delusion. Which is apparently what Dostoevsky was trying to say and Nietzsche agreed with. I don't hear Scott saying that Raskolnikov is a good representation, rather than he was a deluded man, which the plot of the book clearly lays out.
Dostoevsky didn't know Nietzsche at the time he wrote Crime and Punishment, so we're speaking about ideas and not terms here, yeah? Nietzsche didn't mention Ubermensch until 16 years after C & P was published, but we know Nietzsche admired D's ideas.
Ah I see, ok I can accept that interpretation. So I rescind my criticism on that point.
And yes very true that Dostoevsky and Nietzsche never met and Dostoevsky likely never read any of Nietzsche's writing. So yes just ideas not terms. I think Dostoevsky called the people who were the basis for Raskolnikov "exceptional men" which is not exactly Ubermensch, just in the same neighborhood.
This seems a little strange. I think the people in question talking about invading Britain to free them from gangs or whatever particulars of the suggestion are really actually meaning to communicate something like "This is a terrible thing to have let happen, a government that lets something like this happen is unfit to serve as sovereign, our society should heed this as a grave warning and thus my domestic political positions are best". They're not actually trying to argue that invading Britain would be a good idea.
I don't understand where the accusations of hypocrisy are coming from. People think children dying of malaria and grooming gangs are both bad. People think both of those things should be stopped by their respective countries. No one who's opposed to African aid thinks Americans should donate a potion of their income to help the victims of grooming gangs. Where's the contradiction?
Saying African malaria doesn't matter and we shouldn't waste resources on it isn't the same thing as saying it's good. All positive action in the world comes with a price tag, and many people (myself included) think that the value of helping Africa doesn't exceed the price. The value of stopping the progression of political correctness IS worth the price of ranting about grooming gangs on Twitter, at least in many people's estimation. People only do things that they think have positive value, so they rant about grooming gangs and don't send money to Africa. Where's the contradiction?
If there's a serial killer doctor who kills patients with insulin overdoses, it's very reasonable to be more upset about that doctor than about a painkiller that has a 0.001% risk of causing a heart attack, EVEN IF the painkiller results in a much higher number of actual deaths. It wouldn't make any sense to label people who were mad about the doctor as "hypocrites who don't care about people dying." More than one bad thing can exist in the world and it's perfectly reasonable to care more about one thing than another. Some things are worse than others, some things have simpler solutions, and some things can't be solved without unacceptable tradeoffs.
In your view, there is no contradiction. But I don't think it is the one Scott attacks. Your argument is pragmatic: you compare the price of the expected action to its expected value, and decide if it's worth it.
My understanding is that the people Scott are attacking are those that derided the very notion of charity on "moral" grounds (i.e. we shouldn't help Africa, it should pull itself by the bootstraps, if it can't then it deserves to rot), and then decide that, in fact, some American action ought to be taken to help the British girls victims of grooming gangs (what happened to "the communities pulling themselves by the bootstraps"?).
Of course, there are several possible defenses, as Scott elaborates: claim that you're a pragmatist, admit that you feel more kinship to British girls than to random African children, and so on.
The point is that if you decide that charity or helping victims is a "Christian cuck thing" (or whatever the expression is), this includes all attempts to help the victims in this case as well.
***
> The value of stopping the progression of political correctness IS worth the price of ranting about grooming gangs on Twitter, at least in many people's estimation.
I have a nitpick and a real objection here.
First, "in many people's estimation" is perhaps not as strong a reference as you would like. I'm sure I can find an equal amount of people believing various liberal-slanted (or mainstream assessments of the US by other countries) statements, both undeniable and vastly exaggerated claims. Or blood libels if I go for a different public.
My real objection is that calling what is happening a mere rant at groomer gangs (which are extremely bad, yes, and the failure of the authorities to act was appalling) is mistaken.
If this were the case, then maybe people could add some nuance. Or not have it grow to a mass at which the British government has to take notice (and notice that very few of the people involved in the echo chamber are British)...
Maybe they could act like they're not the ones bringing the issue to light. I don't know, preface this stuff with "yes, I'm aware this happened nine years ago, there has been a scandal, this has been investigated".
Blaming this on wokeness is a bit misleading (since the dynamics happened long before the Great Awokening, and "let the communities police themselves" is also a long-standing political approach).
Maybe the generalization to American political dynamics is plain wrong: the groomer gangs were mainly Pakistani, arrived by virtue of an immigration statute dating from the partition of India; Muslim immigration in the US is small (7% of immigrants, less than 10% of which is Pakistani), let alone from its southern border, where the alleged "border crisis" is happening. (Pakistanis and Central/Southern Americans may be brown-skinned and usually not US citizens, but there are quite a few differences otherwise).
Maybe they don't have to go along where this campaign’s actual goal seems to weaken Starmer's government (with statements floating around showing dubious regard for the facts of the case) and signal-boost some truly vile "political" figures as credible alternatives.
As a mirror example, I could get outraged at Trump's transparent frauds over decades, from Trump University to various accounts of him denying payment to contractors unless they came to court to fight for it. I'm sure I could get a lot of material: there's a reason why Biff Tannen in the "bad 1985" of "Back to the Future 2" is a Trump-expy and calling it "Trump Derangement Syndrome" would be a severe anachronism.
If, say, some liberal billionaire riled up a similar-sized shitstorm on Twitter for these facts (composed mostly of Europeans, and let's say conflating the true, the misleading, and the plainly false) aimed directly at destabilizing Trump, how would you react? Ask the Europeans to mind their business? Mock them for not having a life? Criticize them for coming up with old news as though they were fresh?
> If, say, some liberal billionaire riled up a similar-sized shitstorm on Twitter for these facts aimed directly at destabilizing Trump, how would you react?
...Why are you saying that like it's some kind of gotcha? Of course the right would be upset at evil people doing evil things. Do you still think there is any moral equivalence between right and left? This only ends with the complete destruction of one side.
I don’t think there is a moral equivalence between (edited: the leading politicians and programs) on today’s (edited: Republicans) and today’s (edited: Democrats).
(On reflection, the original sentence may have been a bit too broad. “Left” and “right” are meaningful notions outside the US as well and while the definitions overlap more than they used to, they’re still not quite universal.)
However:
1) quite a few people here believe that principles matter. I don’t remember whether Wanda is one of them, and I myself am not certain (I used to strongly believe so).
2) For someone genuinely committed as a matter of principle, it is useful to point out exactly what principles are at stake and where the opposition comes from. As such, framing things in the opposite direction can be helpful.
3) if I want to trash-talk and insult all American right-wingers, I can go talk with my (European) colleagues.
4) the right-wingers are convinced that the left spent the past decade or so high on its high supply of moral self-righteousness to the point of not caring about the consequences of their actions. (I think much the same about people voting for Trump on, say, trans rights). Put another way, a lot of right-wingers also think there is no question of moral equivalence between today’s right and today’s left, but their assessment goes in the opposite direction. If we want to go back to the days of civilization (to be precisely defined at a later date?), we need to reach across. Otherwise it’s all a race to the bottom. I’m not against pessimism on principle, but I do far too much of it, so it’s nice to try and snap out of it at times.
5) It is of course possible that the best strategy might not be to engage with the more literate (read: ideological and rationalizing, because that’s all we’re reduced to these days) folk here, but people who vote with their wallets. But I’m an ocean away, so they’re less convenient to reach out to.
Edited: 6) I have a terrible Internet addiction and I am struggling to effectively fight it. I have a sinking feeling this is Not The Way.
...What principles do you speak of? As far as the right is concerned, no principles are being broken. Why do you assume the collateral damage isn't intended? The only people being hurt are people that deserve to be hurt.
And for the record, people already voted with their wallets. They decided they want this. You support democracy and capitalism, right?
>The point is that if you decide that charity or helping victims is a "Christian cuck thing" (or whatever the expression is), this includes all attempts to help the victims in this case as well.
Yeah, this is kind of my central point: those people don't exist, at least not as far as I'm aware. Scott is attacking a non-existent strawman. The people ranting about grooming gangs aren't pro-charity. That's not the valence of that issue. People rant about grooming gangs because they hate progressivism and they view grooming gangs as useful fodder in that debate. That has absolutely zero to do with sending charity to Africa. The primary message wasn't (at least not that I ever heard) "we must send charity to those poor children," it was "we must stop insane progressive multiculturalism."
>First, "in many people's estimation" is perhaps not as strong a reference as you would like
I wasn't intending that to be an appeal to any kind of authority. It's just a version of "it could be argued."
>Blaming this on wokeness is a bit misleading (since the dynamics happened long before the Great Awokening, and "let the communities police themselves" is also a long-standing political approach).
Yeah I just disagree here. It's not woke proper (which I why I didn't use that word), but woke didn't come from nowhere and the grooming gangs definitely pattern-match to the insanely self-destructive multicultural ideology of pre-woke political correctness - particularly the reluctance to prosecute on the basis of perceived racism. That absolutely can be laid at the feet of progressivism. US conservatives, in my view, are completely correct to use it against US progressives. And even if they're not then that's just a straightforward error, not some global hypocrisy that calls into question the integrity of their worldview. Either way it has zero to do with charity, African or otherwise.
>If, say, some liberal billionaire riled up a similar-sized shitstorm on Twitter for these facts (composed mostly of Europeans, and let's say conflating the true, the misleading, and the plainly false) aimed directly at destabilizing Trump, how would you react?
The same way I react to US liberals who have been doing exactly that: agree that he's a bad person but thanks to progressive insanity (like the issue we're discussing) that he's currently the lesser of two evils. He might be the worse person (I mean, Kamala is almost certainly worse but that's neither here nor there) but he represents a better bundle of ideas, free speech being chief among them. I mean, people criticizing leaders is just politics. If you can't handle that then don't get involved.
"I don't understand where the accusations of hypocrisy are coming from. People think children dying of malaria and grooming gangs are both bad. People think both of those things should be stopped by their respective countries"
I think Scott is explicitly arguing against people who claim _not_ to think that children dying of malaria is bad; that's what makes them post-Christian vitalists as opposed to just people who have basically the same moral impulses but disagree on how to operationalize them. That's the whole point of observing that once you're arguing about the price and the value, you're basically doing moral philosophy--the right spreadsheet or RCT or whatever can in principle convince you that actually, malaria in Kenya actually _is_ a better value for money than stopping grooming gangs.
>I think Scott is explicitly arguing against people who claim _not_ to think that children dying of malaria is bad;
Maybe I'm wrong but I think Scott mischaracterizes those people. I don't think they think it's good, they just think it's not our problem and furthermore that it's actively harmful for our cultural values to assume it is. Like, if there was button that instantly solved Third World poverty for free then they would press it. They just don't want Third World problems to infect the First World moral calculus. Whether you agree with them or not, it's a perfectly reasonable and consistent position.
Caring about grooming gangs makes sense because it's much closer to home, culturally speaking. We share the same basic political and moral values and so defending Britain from moral rot or insane multiculturalism is really just expressing alarm about the potential for the same thing happening here. They're the canary in the coal mine from our perspective. Kenya definitely is not.
I'm not sure exactly who Scott is talking about, and there's definitely some throat-clearing in the post about how many such people there actually are, but I think there are definitely people who _talk_ as if that's their point of view, and I think part of what Scott is getting them to do is admit that they actually are operating on the same value system, because once you are on the same page then you can try have a productive argument about what the actual tradeoffs are.
But you can't do that while they keep asserting that they don't have to make positive arguments for why EA or whatever is less beneficial than whatever alternative because they're following a completely different set of values
Yeah maybe this is some ACX inside baseball stuff and Scott's arguing against some faction that I'm just not aware of. This was sort of a difficult post to read: I had a hard time understanding what his actual point was. If he's arguing against people who think you shouldn't care about the outgroup then I think he doesn't make sense: there are many ways in which Kenya is much more our outgroup than Britain is, so there's nothing hypocritical about caring more about Britain than Kenya. And if he's targeting folks who think we should invade Britain then he's definitely punching down because only fringe wingnuts say that. This still reads to me like he's hallucinating strawmen and then making bad arguments at them. But whatever, maybe it's over my head.
3. Almost none of us have this impulse, and everyone is faking it.
My money is not on number 3, though. Not with Scott's lifelong history of non-conformity. Why would he suddenly start doing this type of virtue-signalling now? Unless the really blatant strawmen and applause-lights are some kind of message that Scott's readership is meant to see through? But to what purpose?
No, I think Scott and other EAs are capable of tasting a flavour some of us cannot taste.
If that's the case, then Scott, and anybody else who cares about other people: I know it feels to you like everyone has this altruistic impulse buried deep inside. Like how it's hard for a straight person to imagine what it's like to be gay. But as rationalists and altruists you should really really be curious to find out if #2 is true.
Because if scenario #2 is true, you have the opportunity to vastly impact the world in a positive way by modelling the actual sociopath point of view well enough to find arguments in support of effective altruism that sociopaths will find convincing. How do you know it won't work if you've already assumed it can't?
If there is a potentially large population of supporters nobody else is trying to mobilize and you choose to ignore it, how is that effective or altruistic?
It may even be useful on some non-sociopaths. For example, someone whose circle of caring has the same area as yours but is shaped in a way that it doesn't overlap yours. For practical purposes, to you that person is a sociopath.
In other words, if you can convince a sociopath that it's strategic to be an effective altruist, then you can convince anybody else.
Perhaps this is one of the things you might find in a handbook for political change whenever someone finally writes one for you.
But... how do you even do that? You can't force people to care about things that they don't care about. You can try to lie that they will personally benefit in the long run, but nobody will even believe that in the first place. They know full well that those lives, their suffering, are completely meaningless. They aren't even useful as slaves anymore.
You could try to make EA appear high status, but everyone will fight against that because other charities help (or appear to help, anyways) causes that people do care about, while also building more status, because again, it's things people actually care about. The only thing EA would accomplish is making the benefits less relevant while increasing the costs of signalling.
EA simply has no path to relevancy. Their morality is aberrant, inhuman. They have no future.
This argument sounds great ... until you realize that the UK is not just a "far-off country" to the US, but very much the "motherland." So yes, for most Americans, what happens in the UK has to do with "us" in a way that what happens in an equally far-off, but more culturally distant country, does not.
Superb Piece, Scott - thank you - I think you nailed-it precisely!
I come from the left (grew up in a sixties commune) but have been horrified by excesses and shocking intellectual degeneration of the pop-leftist hordes over the years (not only is there no program anymore - they don't even recognize that as a legitimate aspiration - WTF is left except rationalization tribalism and complaint? - that is, three flavours of insular ignorant hypocrisy).
I still try to represent a sane left perspective (which means a tiny minority view - but actually always did - so why should I be surprised?) Refuse to concede the terriitory, despite the odds against.
BUT - I am voracious about reading outside my preferences now. I can say for sure that there is no sign of exciting and active thinking on the left (of the kind that might move people in great numbers), and I have a feeling I ended up reading a number of the same outsider voices as you, because even though they are wrong about several big and important intimate-scale things, they are actually reaching trying and daring on others, in an extremely useful way.
As best I can tell, the key imbalance of this group of paladin intellectuals (giving them credit for energy, which I do think they deserve) is they have way too many great books in their heads, and too little contact with lumpy/weird human reality.
I've seen you critique their misunderstanding of women, also (with fine precision) and there, I see the same problem. It comes down to "You wouldn't even want to say that, if you had ever been in love and been loved back."
I absolutely DO NOT share the scorn of some, insisting that these younger thinkers deserve their loneliness, because they refuse to conform - they had the misfortune to be born in a shockingly alienated and hostile moment - and then locked-down - injuries both (and both entirely outside their control). It is sad, not karma.
But the strangest thing about this, is that they are often at their intellectual best when critiquing the way the left gets caught inside dogma traps - doing logical operations on abstractions, and losing track of the underlying reality completely.
I can only wish wonky chaotic life for them (and lots of it!) and enchantment enough to help them leaven their own symbol obsessions with the yearnings they so clearly feel, leaving every trace of bitterness behind for gratitude.
(I mean gratitude in the most functional practical sense - no pollyanna needed)
Thank you sincerely for what you do. Reading for years, love your sense-seeking approach and wide-ranging interests - greatly appreciate the mental stimulation!
As a "based post-christian vitalist" the reason the rape of british girls matter but the rape of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram, or the Millions of Pakistani girls raped anually by the same men in their home country...
Is because they're white. Full stop.
They are the litteral kinsmen of America, the cousins in the mother country, and as our kinsmen we are correctly outraged at a root system level that precedes any modern or even ancient conception of "morality" as an abstraction.
And the more universalist, altruistic, anti-racist, rationalist, egalitarian, christian principles and ideas are summoned up to argue that that outrage is disproportionate or misplaced... The more of those are thrown out.
Troy was young when these instincts were ancient. These principles were antediluvian and heritages from times immemorial when Egypt was not yet a dream.
An argument written in a browser app is as likely to alter a BIOS kernel.
And I'm quite seen to see all these argument brought up now, because everytime some effective-altruist, or post-nuremberg human rights argument, or elighted egalitarian ideal, or even teaching of Jesus Christ is brought up against these instincts... They don't alter people's gut reaction, they aren't permitted to change the core-administrator protected systems, those patterns of thought just get force-stopped and hard locked from ever being able to run again, and a red hot instinct to "Force-stop" the person making those arguments flashes through peoples minds.
> And the more universalist, altruistic, anti-racist, rationalist, egalitarian, christian principles and ideas are summoned up to argue that that outrage is disproportionate or misplaced...
Scott is very emphatically not saying that the outrage over the grooming gangs is disproportionate or misplaced, but rather, that the level of outrage you feel over the Nigerian girls is insufficient, and you should feel *equally* strongly about them.
Personally I would more cautiously say, to similar effects, "alright, you may be right that you're hardwired to feel more sympathy for other white people, but do you really feel *zero* sympathy for the Nigerian girls? *really*? people feel sympathy for baby seals, but human beings whose last common ancestor with your kin is a little further up the family tree are a bridge too far?". If you look within yourself and find you fundamentally only care 10% as much as about the white girls, sure, I'll believe that. But I don't see you lot acting 10% as outraged about the Nigerian girls; you don't act outraged *at all*. I think Scott is right that if you look within your heart you'll find the amount you care is not zero.
Oh, be sensible. This is edgelordism of the worst kind, precisely the kind of LARPing-as-cartoon-villains-to-feel-big that Scott is reacting against. Google "Nigerian children" and the pictures that come up (aside from those of actively sick/starving kids) are self-evidently cute by conventional European standards of cuteness. Big soulful eyes, chubby cheeks, generally huggable proportions. Even being maximally charitable to the idea that they lack some specific quality that makes white kids scan to you as Kin Who Must Be Protected, no force on Earth can convince me that by some wicked quirk of genetics you are capable of caring about baby Yoda but not about a Nigerian baby.
...I don't find white children particularly cute either, but black skin is just aesthetically unpleasing. It looks like mud. Not to mention their facial structure...
I don't find frog-green skin particularly attractive, and yet: Baby Yoda. And if you want to talk facial structures, to be crude, most people also find baby monkeys cute.
The Edgelords are more right than the mainstream or the Moralists.
That's why you can guess the edgelord answer is some version of racism and "I do not value the lives of the unrelated foreigners"
If edgelordism was just random obscenity you wouldn't be able to guess what they'd say... They might say they wished the Grooming gangs had invited them or that white should set up their own grooming gangs, or that white girls just need to toughen up and start sex trafficking the pakistani men back... If just random obscenity and offense was the goal... Maybe the UK should have imported East Asians? Their members at smaller... The White girls might not have noticed as much.
You see you can't predict actual random obscenity and irreverent humor, the surprise is part of the obscenity.
But instead you can guess exactly what the "Edgelords" will say, because they aren't just suggesting random obscenities, they're saying exactly what any sane rational person in tune with their instincts and dismissive of 20 centuries of egalitarian abstractions meant to suppress those instincts would say.... And you know this because you have those instincts too, that's how you can guess, you're just supressing them with Universalist egalitarian liberal (and lineally Christian) copes and ideological repressions.
I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous argument. A certain set of people can be wrong in a consistent, predictable direction rather than random chaos, and that doesn't prove them right. I might as well say that egalitarian liberalism *has* to be correct because clearly *you* can anticipate the broad lines of *my* responses! Your point only makes sense as a refutation of the proposition "anomie is an edgelord", provided you define edgelords as people who spout "random obscenities". Which is not in fact how I was using the term.
More to the point, however, the specific point I was denouncing as insincere edgelording is the claim that Nigerian babies apparently wholly lack the quality of cuteness that (white) humans generally ascribe to everything from their own babies to puppies to cartoon characters, and even the occasional frog or goldfish. I think *that* demonstrates a shocking lack of being-in-tune-with-your-instincts. Finding a puppy cute, and being sad if it looks like it's hurting, are not culturally-learned reactions deriving from post-Christian brainwashing. They just aren't. Two-year-olds cry if they get it into their head that their teddy-bear — or indeed, other people's teddy-bears — is having a bad time.
I wasn't talking about philosophically "valuing foreigners' lives" anymore. I wasn't even talking about empathy. I was talking about *cuteness*. Now personally I also think most humans are biologically primed to feel sympathy for whatever they find cute, even a Volkswagen beetle or a bonzai tree. But never mind that. Maybe you deny that, and maybe you think finding Nigerian babies cute has no moral implications whatsoever. The point stands that it is ridiculous of anomie (and you) to pretend that no white man could innately find Nigerian children cute, and I feel very justified in my certainty that anomie said that out of a desire for shock value, not because he genuinely finds this girl https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-outdoor-close-up-portrait-cute-little-young-black-girl-smiling-african-people-image31226273 no cuter than a spider-crab. By all means say "yes, but there is a specific call-of-the-blood that makes me sympathize with children of my own race on a whole different level". It's at least plausible. But Nigerian toddlers are, nevertheless, cute. If someone insists they self-evidently aren't, then that person is either lying/trolling, or a wildly atypical human being who shouldn't be trying to tell the rest of us what our instincts are.
...Is it really so hard to imagine that humans just aren't that cute in the grand scheme of things?
I'm reminded of a blog post or something where someone noticed that, as a result of the anime industry ruthlessly optimizing for cuteness, they eventually converged on a facial structure that was incidentally identical to cats. ...Which carries the implication that cats have the cutest face imaginable to humans.
I'm sure there are some people who find these kids cute, but... they're just not that cute even compared to kids of other races. Especially when they're starving. And other animals are just significantly cuter, to the point where it makes up for the lack of kinship. And thus, those other causes are going to get prioritized, because cute things and things that are related to you are more lovable.
>If you look within yourself and find you fundamentally only care 10% as much as about the white girls, sure, I'll believe that.
A model I suggest is concern dropping off exponentially with the number of social links between oneself and the person to be concerned about. I had a comment about this earlier in the comments on this post:
Even if I terminally valued the lives of Nigerian or people who aren't related to my for hundreds of generations... Which I'm not sure I actually do...
I don't care about the suffering of guerillas and mice really and they're 10s or
100s of thousands of generations removed, I do care about Europeans who are less than a dozen generations removed... and its not really clear a Nigerian girl or Indian untouchable at upper hundreds to thousands of generations removed are closer in kind to the white Europeans than the Gorillas from a self interested moral perspective...
But beyond that, they're ethnic rivals. They're in the uncanny valley! They're far enough to not be kin, but close enough to want to raid you, kill your men, and rape your women because they're close enough that they can try to breed with you.
THEY'RE WORSE than cute mammals you might act caring about and have fun with until you wring their necks and eat them. A goat or pig or cow is basically always a positive sum value add... an ethnic enemy is always a threat.
To the extent I might care about the Nigerians or Pakistanis such that I allow their lives have positive value (which is almost entirely contingent on them being nowhere near me or minee)... Any honest assessment of what I actually believe and how I actually behave tells me that I do not value them less than my white kinsmen by a percentage, but by orders of Magnitudes. Fundamentally the TV reflects this accurately that a single homicide of a white person is as outrageous to me as 100 Indians dead in some industrial accident in Punjab.
Indeed 1000 Subcontinentals are worth less to me than one cute animal in my inner or even outer circle of concern... If I'm not being guilted or tying myself into abstract moral knots, but going purely off what I'd LIKE, there's not a chance in hell I'd willingly trade the live of my Neighbors dog who's obnoxious but friendly to me once a month for even 1000 permanently unemployed Nigerian slum-dwellers I've never met.
The signifigance of Rotherham, the migrant rape gangs, and all the crimes by illegals... and the Lesson RW post-christian vitalists take from this is that those instincts were correct and in fact more moral than the christian, enlightenment, and egalitarian abstractions that said you should try to value the poor brown foreigner more and feel guilty that you love your dog or a random white child's happy christmas 3 towns over more than the lives of 100 brown foriegners in countries you'd pay not to visit.
.
As a "Based RW Vitalist" Effective Altruism was the INVERSE of what actual morality is. You SHOULD value that the white neighbor 3 blocks over from you recovers from his broken leg and gets back to work, and donate money to his mere comfort... EVEN when you could spend the same amount of money on bug netting that'd save 10 black children.
Those children are utility monsters and ethnic enemies who will never repay it in a million years, whereas your white neighbor will actually remember your kindness and contribute to your community even if it's just by doing honest work and raising kids who will play with and someday marry the kids of your extended family.
Is it so hard to defend the view that we shouldn't care about child rape abroad, or at least that we should shut up about it? Foreigners denouncing the UK for not doing more about alleged grooming gangs might cause defensiveness in the authorities and prevent a good-faith inquiry. Also, in recent history public outrage about alleged misdeeds by foreign governments has turned out to have been misguided and to have only made things worse. Besides, foreign governments it would behoove us to be on friendly terms with are currently doing things much worse than failing to sufficiently investigate police coverups of child-rape conspiracies, so it's hypocritical to make a big deal of the failure to sufficiently investigate police coverups of child-rape conspiracies in the UK. And Americans denouncing the UK's handling of this issue probably haven't sufficiently researched the reasons cited for covering up the rapes in the first place: preventing the raising of racial tension by exposing rape gangs composed entirely or almost entirely of Pakistanis. Maybe prosecuting these rapes at the time really would have led to civil unrest, even race warfare, that would have destabilized the UK. In my lifetime the UK has seen ethnic tensions that have devolved into civil war, so it's not so crazy to fear it might happen again.
and predictably, too; both in the sense that coverups inevitably fall apart and that differential treatment in regard to crime means one group of people learn they can get away with the crime in question
This amounts to "It doesn't make sense to me so it's a delusion". Which *is* often a reasonable approach because it saves time debating perpetual motion machines or postmodernism etc. However, as I said, Scott has earned the benefit of a doubt. If there is some game-theoretic reason I haven't thought of for caring about remote strangers, then I definitely want to understand it.
Good general point, bad example. All the evidence actually indicates the official neglect of this issue was based on the class of the girls, not the ethnicity of the men. Also, rape whistles would be quite irrelevant since this affair was not about rape but rather "grooming," which is to say, behaviors that would have simply been called seduction if the girls had been a few years older.
I largely agree with you here. The only thing I would mention is the issue of class meaning being poor. It’s pimping and all related conduct. I don’t know the place, but I am assuming it is one of those rather poor Midland/ Northland, English towns.
In 1944, just after the allies had been victorious in Italy, it was estimated that 50% of the women in Naples engaged in prostitution. Hard times…
The people who literally follow the "non option" #4 probably couldn't create a society with much slack. But what about the more common type of person who has circles of caring, just narrow ones? One might expect such a person to do things with positive externalities for their community. For example volunteering to coach their child's soccer team thus benefiting everyone's children. Or donating money to research into a genetic disease they themselves have. Could a stable, pleasant society be created by selfish people's overlapped circles of caring? Might that society be more honest and transparent than ours because there would be no pretense of pure altruism
Ughhhhhh, don’t let the bros steal vitalism! Vitalism is generally linked to a “debunked” (read poorly understood, can’t make money off it in a clearly marketable and controllable way) health movement. The basic principles of vitalism are the basic principles of every traditional medicine system that i’ve ever learned and while i certainly don’t know even close everything, i have been studying herbal medicine for 20 years. The basic principles of vitalism is that the body would prefer to achieve homeostasis and it will always do its best to achieve that and we can help it along by either nourishing it or balancing it where it’s out of balance. It was a response to a lot of the cathartic and rather poisonous medicines and bloodlettings etc that were in vogue at the time. Vitalism is not about bros being muscley. I’m tired of them getting to have every good thing so please rescind your offer of giving them jurisdiction over vitalism, thank you!
Interestingly when I read the word “vitalism” I started thinking about Bergson’s élan vital or similar theories and wondering how the hell that could be related to grooming gangs. So I guess the word is quite overloaded with meaning.
…I think part of my push back is also that vitalism in herbal medicine/holistic health spheres is actively practiced today and has a long (hundreds of years) history. There are some quite rigorous practitioners that work within this framework, contemporary medical philosophy is actively being produced to expand the principles and it is the absolute opposite of this concept that’s being produced here. It’s literally a framework for nurturing wellness in the suffering and is often the work that people finally find after many years of being run around by the establishment medical complex that facilitates journeys back towards vitality from true and deep physical malaise. To note, i am not throwing the larger medical infrastructure out with the bath water, i’m just noting that these systems exist, are useful in contemporary society, are alive and evolving in contemporary society and utilizing this idea of vitalism to describe violent gangs of groomers will muddy waters that could lead to increased suffering of some of the more vulnerable members of society at large.
What i mean by that is, if people start to conflate vitalism with white supremicist christian nationalism, they may be likely to turn away in fear from a health paradigm that could support their well being, and that would be true, deep and lasting harm. So i am asking the author of this article to amend their language lest they be a participant in creating said harm. Please. You have a lot of power with this platform and the pen can cut more deeply, more broadly and more lastingly than the sword.
This is a very serious fight over what a word will mean. I don’t mean to trivialize it either. Who does not want to be vital? Capturing that idea as part of your political philosophy is very good branding.
I do not have moral impulses. I do not think this is a bit: when people describe things like 'moral impulses', I am not sure what they speak of. I have autism which might be related to this.
I feel empathy and sympathy. When I see someone suffering, I feel some amount of 'care' for them, which is usually mediated by the closeness of the relationship and how much I can identify with their suffering. I generally feel bad when I 'do harm' to people and positive when I help, but this is also mediated by the closeness of the relationship and how much I can identify with the suffering. I don't view these things as morals. Maybe if you were to make a collective list of all of my psychological impulses, and create a list including only the 'good' ones, you could call that list 'morals', but I would rather just call them all 'psychological impulses'.
I don't really care about kids in Britain. I don't not care, but I don't care very much. I could maybe quantify it as a 0.0000000000001 on a 100 point scale. That value is not a 0, so I do think that the British government should take action if children are being groomed, but the impact on my well-being will be very minimal if they don't. I feel like part of this type of discussion involves social pressure: nobody wants to be the guy who says 'I do not have psychological moral impulses'. People will trust you less. However, I have autism, so I am willing to say it.
(With that being said, I do respect EA types for being consistent about their principles. Most people aren't, as this article points out).
But in a more general sense, I feel like a lot of people in favor of objective morality can be manipulative. You have to care about having a 'good soul'! You have to care about people suffering in poor countries if the stories are tragic enough! You say there is no objective evil, but doesn't *The Rwandan Genocide* bother you? It's a social shame tactic. These things barely bother me at all. The value isn't precisely zero, but it's close enough to where you are practically round down. I am sympathetic to morality as a coordination strategy - a world that is 'better' in the ways that trigger my emotional responses is likely correlated to a world that does that for you - but I dislike shame that is meant to forcibly implant a policeman in my head.
Which of the numbered choices is "care about things that, when I care about them, motivate me to wrath and violence; don't care about things that, if I cared about them, would motivate me to kindness and charity"? That seems like a pretty good predictive model, though you might need to slice it a bit more (only violence against liberals/leftists/minorities?)
I think your list of options misses the most common, most stereotypically human position on the matter: Charity begins at home. Rape, child abuse, starvation, these are all bad things and when the subject turns to those topics we should say that they are bad and if there are specific examples of these things happening because of someone else's villainy or negligence we should maybe call them out on that, but our moral obligation is to our family, our friends, our immediate neighbors. and so on until you get to total strangers separated by a vast cultural and geographic gulf at the very bottom of that list.
Arguably this is a subset of your case 5 - admit that you are maybe a good person who wants to help your family, friends, and neighbors. It's a different sort of goodness than the person who wants to donate everything to feed starving Ethiopians because their need is greatest. But good consequentialists and utilitarians are so rare as to be a rounding error in the world's charity budget; it's the more parochial sorts of goodness that does most of the heavy lifting.
By this standard of goodness, Americans shouldn't be going all in on helping starving Africans because other Africans can handle most of that and there's *nobody* but us who's going to do anything about the suffering of Americans. Sure, no harm in hedging your bets with a few bednets or whatever if it seems like a particularly high-leverage intervention, but don't let it get in the way of helping your own people.
By this standard of goodness, Amercans *also* shouldn't be going all in on Rotherham or the feared Rotherham 2.0, and this time there isn't even the option of hedging your bets with a cheap high-leverage intervention because there aren't any(*); Britain is a rich country but it is one that (at least ten years ago) actively and effectively blocked attempts to solve the problem.
By this standard of goodness, we should still call out the starving Africans and the sexually abused Britons as victims of a Very Bad Thing if the discussion of the day turns in that direction, and maybe call out the people who let it happen when they were supposed to stop it as villains, but not as a call to decisive action.
And yes, if there are people who are calling for a literal invasion of the United Kingdom to prevent Rotherham 2.0, and those are the same exact people who are saying we shouldn't be helping the starving African kids, then there's probably a legit charge of hypocrisy there. But, A: mitigated by the fact that they may legitimately feel working-class British girls are at least within the outer circles of their generically Red Tribe Anglospheric ingroup. And, B: how many of those people are there, really, and are they really worth our attention?
* OK, cheap handguns for the underclass white girls of Rotherham would be a stereotypically American high-leverage intervention. But probably ill-advised.
I think the difference between kids being abused by grooming gangs and malaria or whatever is that as a white American British kids are actually much closer to me culturally and ethnically than kids from the 3rd world.
The grooming gang phenomenon is basically an attack by a different group (muslim immigrants) on a group I am part of (white westerners). While the same exact thing may not be happening in America, related things do happen here, and are handled badly by the state for the same reasons as the British government handles the grooming gangs badly.
I see it as part of a larger struggle which directly affects me and people I care about, and the ultimate outcome of the bigger picture grooming gangs thing in Britain is linked to the future of white westerners in general.
In the United States, this whole issue is handled quite quietly by the large number of Chinese and Korean women who shall we say cover the same territory?
I think a far simpler explanation is that some people are more important/better than others. So if Muslim darker-than-white immigrants rape white girls with impunity, this is outrageous, and if they do it to other Muslim darker-than-white girls back in Pakistan, this is business as usual, and if white rich people visit some hellhole to rape non-white girls... Well, here it breaks down because my model of this kind of person still might get a little angry at them.
I'm not saying it has to be about racism, if it was a Chechen rape gang instead of a Pakistani rape gang they might care the same amount even though Chechens are literally Caucasian. I'm not saying it's about religion, it could be similar with Armenian or Polish perpetrators. I'm not saying it's about being poor or uneducated or insignificant, a lot of people are angry at prince Andrew or whoever else was friends with Epstein. It's just that having some distance between you and the other people helps dehumanize them, and the more dimensions you can choose from, the easier. Especially but not necessarily if they are lower than you along some metric.
So the process is "hear about terrible things happening to some people" -> "see if the problem has easy solutions" -> (nope, some things help but it's a slow and gradual process at best, except for some easy cases like "stop being idiots who care about not appearing to be racist more than about regular child rape") -> "resolve the resulting horror by coming up with a way to not care about this so much". And with Pakistani men raping children in Pakistan it's easy to do, but a number of the ways it works just fine break down when Pakistani men arrive to Britain and rape British white non-Muslim girls. And it could be prevented easily, but doesn't, so the defense "at least this couldn't happen where I live" fails too.
Also, yeah, they could absolutely be racists, just being shy of admitting it because it seems to have become the ultimate evil in big parts of American cultural landscape. Not all people fighting wokeism (which does seem to be the principal reason behind the British authorities' fuck-ups here, whether they were themselves woke or not?) have the same reasons.
Even if you were equally outraged about, say, young boys being regularly sodomized in Afghanistan (which absolutely was and is a huge problem), we've already run the social experiment of trying to impose top-down cultural change in Afghanistan.
Admittedly, part of the problem in Iraq or Afghanistan was that liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms in a country where 80% of the population think homosexuals should be stoned to death. A secular dictator like the Shah of Iran or even Saddam Hussein was in some sense the more 'liberal' option there, but that just introduces a different set of contradictions.
Wasn't part of the problem there also the response to outrage by the soldiers etc. who encountered this being "no, sorry, we can't do anything to offend the warlords that we need to keep on side, besides bacha bazi is a cultural tradition"?
"In 2015, The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan were instructed by their commanders to ignore child sexual abuse being carried out by Afghan security forces, except "when rape is being used as a weapon of war". American soldiers have been instructed not to intervene—in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records. But the U.S. soldiers have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the U.S. military was arming them against the Taliban and placing them as the police commanders of villages—and doing little when they began abusing children. Military lawyer Annie Barry Bruton commented that "both the Pentagon and the White House declined to take responsibility for inaction on the part of the U.S. government and instead shifted the blame to the Afghan government".
It was a very inconsistent approach to nation-building or however you want to call it. It seems the most successful attempt was by the Taliban, but once they were ousted it started up again:
"In December 2010, a leaked diplomatic cable revealed that foreign contractors hired by the American military contractor DynCorp had spent money on bacha bazi in northern Afghanistan. Afghan Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar requested that the U.S. military assume control over DynCorp training centres in response, but the U.S. embassy claimed that this was not "legally possible under the DynCorp contract".
That kind of "oh sorry the contract says we can't interfere" weaselling out of any responsibility makes me very sympathetic to the "kill them all, let God sort them out" approach. Or at least "beat the living daylights out of the son of a bitch":
"In 2011, an Afghan mother in Kunduz Province reported that her 12-year-old son had been chained to a bed and raped for two weeks by an Afghan Local Police (ALP) commander named Abdul Rahman. When confronted, Rahman laughed and confessed. He was subsequently severely beaten by two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and thrown off the base. The soldiers were involuntarily separated from the military, but later reinstated after a lengthy legal case. As a direct result of this incident, legislation was created called the "Mandating America's Responsibility to Limit Abuse, Negligence and Depravity", or "Martland Act" named after Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland."
Yes, it was a particularly frustrating tangle of moral contradictions. If the Taliban were more successful at stamping out the practice that's certainly an argument in favour of leaving the Taliban in charge.
There are thousands of horrible things happening all around the world, and unless I want to spend 24/7 being outraged, I need to prioritize.
I think it makes sense to prioritize things that I can do something about. Not because they are somehow absolutely more important from God's perspective or something, but simply because the point of being outraged is to actually do something about it, so I better spend that emotion on things where I have some leverage.
For example, if something happens in my country, I can yell at my politicians, or something. If exactly the same thing happens in a foreign country, and I don't even speak their language, what am I supposed to do? Start google translator, and send them a message: "hey, some guy from a far away country you have no reason to care about, thinks that you suck"? What exactly is that going to achieve?
Pakistani men being Pakistani men in Pakistan... that sucks, but I don't know what to do about that, other than invading Pakistan, which would be problematic for various reasons. Pakistani men being Pakistani men in a civilized country... who knows, maybe putting some pressure on the police and on the politicians might change something. It is not guaranteed, but it's worth trying.
This. Admittedly, international pressure does work on foreign countries to some extent as well, but there are things you have more and less control over in the world.
"The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization."
You seem to be conflating two separate positions - prioritizing your family, social circle etc and prioritizing "the strong". I guess you are alluding to people who believe both things, but those are separate things that really don't have much in common.
As for the possible solutions, it's ok to be no more than "a bundle of incoherent preferences". You don't have to have a big theory of your own moral behavior. Your actions don't need to be justified from a small number of principles.
It's ok for you to fund mosquito nets, really. If this is what rocks your boat, do it. Just don't assume that this necessarily makes you a better person than those who don't care about that particular thing.
If you are a strong/good/smart/beautiful/whatever person, then your family and friends and relatives and offspring and cultural peers and so on are part of the extended genetic and memetic background which gave rise to your virtues, and you should seek to preserve and propagate them. It increases the probability of other strong/good/etc. people being generated in future.
This is true even from the perspective of long-term effective altruism. Only the able can provide, so if you want to provide for the vulnerable, you must cultivate strength. It's analogous to the notion of instrumental convergence as it comes up in AI alignment discussions.
The relative weighting you should assign to your bloodline vs. faith vs. economy vs. whatever is an empirical question, of course, but I think we have reasonable evidence by now that the social-conservative strategies in this area evolved for a reason.
It makes sense to devote the most energy to things within your sphere of influence. I help a few of the homeless guys who live around me a lot more than I help the starving child 10,000 miles away from me. It’s not really an issue of who I might care about more, it’s an issue of my limitations. Maybe that’s the hard thing about it right? Defining and accepting limitations. I really think focusing on the things that are close to you and in front of you are very important. But if your reach in the world comfortably exceeds those things then by all means go for it.
I don’t know. It might well be, depending on what one calculates as costs. Sphere of influence is a very flexible construct. That there are more things within our sphere of influence than we know is the challenge isn’t it? But it’s always good to start with the most concrete manifestation at hand. My wife gives to an extraordinary number of charities, and I kind of like developing relationships with the street people in my neighborhood. My name is Michael, and these two guys constantly hail her as “Mrs. Michael.” so I feel like the pope; it’s very hard to calculate the cost of that. One of them actually gave me five dollars as a Christmas present. I am not kidding. The finances of it are absurd, I realize, but the emotional value of that five dollar bill is very powerful.
I will say that if I had a better intervention for these two fellas, I would certainly look into it, but having lived in New York City for as long as I have, I don’t really think there is one.
The 'sphere of influence' consideration is also relevant, sure, and will in any case tend to overlap with spheres of cultural and genetic proximity.
But it's less true in the context of a modern world with rapid, low-cost transport and communications technology (it's not hard to send money to charities working in the global south, for example, and there's a utilitarian argument to be made that money will go a lot further in low-income countries.) There's no long-term utilitarian argument for ignoring the slow demographic extinction of the peoples that generate most of the money/tech/philanthropy in the first place, though.
This is might be the best SSC/ACX post in a decade. Further, it's so much of a kind with so many of the old greats, that it suggests to me that it's not so much that SSC/ACX lost its edge, but that what needed to be said back in 2013-2015 or so got said, and then times changed, and the exact conditions to which those incredible essays were responding were replaced by other conditions. But now we're in really quite a similar discursive space to 2013, in the midst of a rapid "vibe shift" in social mores and a changing of the guard in cultural high places, and it is time once again for SSC/ACX to cast its skeptical eye over the shifting landscape and comment on the wardrobe of this new Emperor, just as it did the last. Sorry I don't know where this bizzare register is coming from, but I hope the point is clear.
Yes, the point is clear. Namely, this is the second extremely generic comment made here in this thread. I'd assume ChatGPT if it wasn't for the typos/errors.
I think that this misses the mark. Part of the reason that people care more about the grooming gangs is because many people think the dynamics that lead to them can reasonably be assumed to exist in America. “It can happen here” is true of the grooming gangs, but not these other issues that people don’t care about. People care more about things that think might threaten them. I don’t see this as falling into any of the 1-5 points at the end.
I care about Rotherham because it was caused by an organized operation to pour radioactive waste into our memespace.
As a non-British member of Western civilization, I notice that my memespace links up very closely with the British memespace. Moreover, I notice that the same people are pouring the same waste into my memespace. I depend on that memespace because it generates a high-trust society which enables humans to flourish.
I am angry at the people who are pouring the radioactive waste, and I want them punished, not as revenge for what they did to British girls, but because I am genuinely afraid of what the underlying ideology will do to the fabric of our society. This is about self defense more than ethics.
I do in fact also care alot about humans who die in developing countries, and I would like to do something about that too. But that feels much less personal. I can totally imagine a coherent world view under which someone shares my opinion except for the part about caring about the non-Western world, and I don't think they should necessarily be described as racist
Why is not caring about other people a real option? It certainly seems to be an option many people take. In my own experience, I found it much easier to do than I expected.
This entire post is written against an imaginary horde of pure Randians, which I thought existed only in the minds of far leftists, and maybe also in the SF Bay area.
I have a hard time imagining a doctrinaire Randian calling on the United States to invade England, or any other country, to stop that country's rape gangs from raping that country's citizens. I'd expect them to pretty much universally say "Not my problem, go away now".
Which is the point of this entire post. s/"based-post-Christian-vitalist"/"Randian", and Scott is pointing out that there are a bunch of people who have been claiming to be doctrinaire Randians and are now calling for a very non-Randian policy and what's up with that?
An important element that I think the essay misses:
Outrage over the grooming scandal largely results from the belief that it is, in part, a result of wokeness. If I believe that wokeness operates in my society too, I might feel outraged because I fear that such things could happen here as well. So, (hypothetically) even if I don’t care about British girls, I could still be outraged by it.
Similarly, I might care much more about a terrible disease in a faraway land if I believed it could spread here and affect those around me—or myself.
I can explain why Based Post-Christian Vitalists care about Pakistanis raping white girls in the UK but not about domestic violence in Pakistan in 14 Words.
I’m sorry but this is a weird strawman argument to make that lends credence to everything BAP says about logocentrism. Not sure where to start - with that the people making these arguments are overwhelmingly obviously starting from a point of racial solidarity, or that they largely don’t subscribe to the same rules-and-principals-first thinking that you seem to. In any case this isn’t an argument designed at all to appeal to their sensibilities on their terms but to reiterate the principles of the author, in other words virtue signaling. Or at best this is a failure of literacy in the subject matter.
The only reason anyone is talking about this is because they want to use it as a cudgel against Muslims. That's the only context this ever comes up in and the only people who ever talk about it.
'I observe that you don't care about kids suffering, but when Muslims hurt kids you suddenly raise a huge outcry and demand their heads on pikes. I conclude that you were only pretending not to care about kids suffering and are actually secretly a good person.'
No, man, come on. If that were true you'd see them suddenly caring every other time kids are suffering. This is just racists promoting blood libel, in exactly the way you have called out in past essays.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people are talking about this because they want to use it as a cudgel against "wokeness" or DEI. They're not going to be picky about which particular outgroup is involved, when they take up that cudgel.
> They're not going to be picky about which particular outgroup is involved
They actually are going to be picky, because they're not going to pick outgroups that centrists mildly sympathize with, like gays, or even African Americans. They're going to pick people that everyone already hates, like brown immigrants.
> The only reason anyone is talking about this is because they want to use it as a cudgel against Muslims.
Why do you believe that? Are you unable to imagine that someone might actually care about children being abused? (Does it mean that you are incapable of such emotion, and therefore you cannot imagine anyone else being capable of it? Or if you are, then why do you believe that other people are not?)
> If that were true you'd see them suddenly caring every other time kids are suffering.
Scott is talking very specifically about a discrete population that says they don't care about foreigners and don't ussually react to children suffering in other nations but are going nuts over this specific story 10 years later.
Sure there are a lot of people who are mad about this story purely because they care about kids, but they don't match this very specific pattern. The people matching this pattern are just looking for blood libel material.
Yes, I am not very on-line so I can't quite visualise the population Scott is referring too -- people who don't care about kids going hungry in Africa but care a lot about kids being raped in England.
I suspect they are not a very big or influential group but obviously must have enough visibility to show up on Scott's radar.
I fall into the perhaps more common group which cares a great deal about kids being raped in England and cares relatively less (but still a good deal) about kids going sick or hungry in Africa. (And I have never donated to help abused kids in England but a lot to agriculture and health in Africa).
My relativistic approach to different coloured kids sounds horrendous if you take the Singer kid in a pond analogy at face value, and everyone should sacrifice their hundreds of dollars to save that one kid. But for me, my relativism is to me logically justified because:
a) undoubtedly I have some in-group bias and undoubtedly I am less prone to virtue signalling, because unlike most people I can say I care less about the out-group than my own kin. I don't feel guilty about this and believe it is an evolutionary sound strategy as opposed to the pathological-altruism common among the extreme-left.
b) I feel sadly pessimistic about the long-term impacts of development in Africa given all our best estimates of their IQ is around 80 and all their previous contributions to civilisation are entirely compatible with a low IQ, low executive function, high impulsivity etc. I sadly believe this is not a population which we should encourage their exponential growth especially in face of declining growth of the populations who have created most of what makes civilisation worthwhile.
>Scott is talking very specifically about a discrete population that says they don't care about foreigners and don't ussually react to children suffering in other nations but are going nuts over this specific story 10 years later.
Firstly, the abuse is still ongoing, so the "10 years later" framing doesn't make sense.
Secondly, at least 50 towns and cities have reported grooming gang activity, so describing it as "this specific story" is a bit misleading -- it's not a one-off incident, it's a nationwide pattern of abuse going on for decades.
Thirdly, a major aspect of the scandal is that the authorities actively colluded in the rapes, to the extent of arresting fathers who tried to rescue their daughters from their abusers (whilst letting the abusers themselves go free). So that's another reason, apart from simple racism, why people would be outraged.
I think the main thing to remember here is that whatever happened in that English city is a hell of a lot more complicated and nuanced than what is being discussed here or anywhere else. There is a really good book waiting to happen for anyone who wants to spend the time.
I think Scott is misunderstanding what is driving the zeitgeist with regard to the grooming gang issue. It's not about protecting the little girls, but rather about dysfunctional government. Public outcry can *actually* help prevent this tragedy from happening again and hold people accountable.
Dumb. RWers and Bapists don't consider all foreign countries the same. Obviously they care more about people of countries that are more genetically similar to them, which is evolved human instinct because it is successful evolutionary strategy to care more about those more genetically similar to you.
They consider indigenous brits their kin as fellow Europeans.
They wouldn't have reacted the same way to reading a story about boko haram mass raping nigerians. Does scott really have this little understanding of the basic psychology of RWers and BAPists or is he just playing dumb to mislead his audience about RW psychology? disappointingly wrong.
As a white Brit and "based (post) Christian vitalist" I don't see any problem with caring for those closest to me more than those different from me. FWIW, I distinctly reckon "closeness" as a function of :
My kin / ethnicity > Other ethnicity
My culture / values > Other culture/values
My nationality / polity > Other nationality
In roughly that order of importance.
Now, I have non-zero concern for all humanity (perhaps all sentient beings) and allocate charity accordingly. But I think professing EA "equal concern for all humanity" is pathological for any self-interested being operating under Darwinian pressure.
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.
Hey Scott, WTF even is this? There is almost nothing in my writing record that suggests you are responding to me. WTF even is this?
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.
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.)
---
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.
Political definitions are an outcome of political processes. Biden decided to make millions of illegals legal and Americans tossed his party out of all levels of government in large part due to it in favour of the party that wants to restrict illegal immigration honestly without snapping their fingers and pretending the problem disappears by slapping a 'legal' sticker on illegals
I said 'most' specifically with asylum in mind. In any case Trump was elected in large part due to Americans being fed up with asylum seekers
>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
H1Bs are given out by lottery to a restricted pool of applicants that meet some set of criteria. Just because it doesn't get down to the individual level of granularity does not mean that the H1B program is not meant to benefit America. Some specificity is sacrificed for expedience
> Additionally, there is no reason to believe that someone's spouse will be a bigger net benefit to the country
There are different types of benefits and they aren't all fungible. In this case, spousal sponsorship programs exist to benefit Americans who want to marry non-Americans
>How do we know that we aren't excluding the immigrants with the biggest net benefits just because they didn't apply first?
As above, some specificity is sacrificed for expedience. Policies not being exact does not mean it's not the central aim
>I am not a leftist.
If it walks like a leftist, quacks like a leftist...
> Biden decided to make millions of illegals legal
And yet he deported many times more people than Trump did.
> Some specificity is sacrificed for expedience
And yet wait times for all visa categories continue to grow and grow, so what expedience are we gaining here?
Cato has a long piece for 2019 about this exact issue: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/immigration-wait-times-quotas-have-doubled-green-card-backlogs-are-long#introduction
Reducing illegal immigration will have no impact on wait times for visas or green cards because immigration enforcement is handled by ICE and CBP while visas and green cards are handled by USCIS. Unsurprisingly, USCIS gets way less funding than ICE and CBP. Additionally, most of USCIS's budget is paid for through fees and not taxes.
I wont hold my breath for Trump's proposal on increasing funding and resources for USCIS to process the backlog for people trying to immigrate legally.
Well said. I have no strong opinion on whether the amount of legal immigration should go up or down. I _would_ like to see the paperwork for potential legal immigrants sped up, so those that pass should get cleanly in more quickly, and those that fail should get a firm "no" quickly.
And I would like the borders policed and something like e-verify used more consistently so that _il_legals don't make it in in the first place, and those that e.g. overstay visas should be located (probably through workplace screening) and deported.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/g__k__chesterton/poems/6724
Loving humanity in the abstract, but hating the person one is actually interacting with, is tragically common.
I admit, kicking and screaming, that I might be a good person. I do some moral philosophy, and see if it implies anything. And I find that what it implies is Option 1.
What, did you think there was an objective moral truth we could deduce via the power of pure logic?
“They” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting here…
I follow some “right wing” Twitter and I have seen precisely zero calls for invading Britain.
I think a better split here is that I have aggressively curated my feed to include only high rung posters, and you (have not?) And if you’re not exclusively following high rung thinkers, well what do you expect? Dumb, inconsistent ideas is what low rung thinkers DO!
I find myself (presumably not alone) in a sixth category where my moral responsibility regarding children in far off countries is vague and distant, but my moral responsibility toward my own children is primal, clear and immediate, and I am not wealthy enough to say that any given dollar I possess is not going to be needed for my children's well-being at some point. I would like to better the lives of people beyond my nuclear family and have done substantial donation in the past before having children, but my moral algorithm received a very disruptive update on becoming a parent. How do I make the calculation to know what I should spare from my own children to help others?
This is the most reasonable view. For almost everyone our resources are limited so we must make choices. If our resources were unlimited then maybe we can be condemned for not helping everyone we can.
Not your best.
Just chiming in to confirm that this one seems obvious, they see Britain as a part of their tribe, either due to a shared Anglosphere connection or - in cases like The Golden One, a Swedish account who seems to meet the "based post-Christian vitalist" definition with flying colors - because Britain is a part of EVROPA, its belonging or non-belonging to certain economic unions aside. It's what they would say themselves and it's what other people cognizant of the group would say (either in this form or, more probably, just by saying that they're racist - they might also say themselves that they're racist).
The fundamental mistake here is thinking that fantasies about invading Britain have anything to do with preventing sexual abuse. They're not about that, and although everyone else here is correctly emphasizing the racial dimensions of these fantasies, they're not really about preventing sexual abuse of white girls by Pakistani men, either.
These fantasies are primarily about retributive violence — that classic blind spot for consequentialists trying to make sense of politics. This is why directing attention to the question of "whether the suffering is because of a human bad actor or a natural cause" is a red herring. What's relevant here is not the "cause" of the suffering, it's the possibility of taking retribution against it. There's a reason why "War on X" rhetoric is so politically effective: even when "X" is something like "cancer," it activates the sense that we can wreak a terrible vengeance against X for all the pain it has caused us. A lot of people are always going to find this sort of thing more appeal at a fundamental level than an anodyne goal like "reducing suffering."
Bedari, for example, looks like a great charity, but a quick glance at their website shows that they engage in activities like "empowering women" and "youth engagement for peace." There's nothing there about programmes for beating up or lynching Pakistani men suspected of abuse. This suggests to me that donating to Bedari isn't going to be popular with the sort of Based Post-Christian Vitalists who are fantasizing about invading Britain (although I'd be very happy to be proved wrong!).
The BPCVs aren't thinking about what sorts of actions might make the world a better place. They're thinking about how an "honorable man" might act in response to the situation they perceive themselves to be facing. If you try to interpret the relevant moral impulses in terms of "what do they care about" rather than "how are they trying to preserve their own honor," you'll end up misconstruing the underlying logic of their position.
Retributive violence is not a selbstzweck, but serves a direct purpose. Putting someone in prison or hanging them is retributive violence. Civilizations rise and fall, based on their willingness to use it, against those in need of it. In the UK we see an absence of retributive violence, which systematically perpetuates the problem. Hang the first rapist and not only do you get a 0% recidivism rate, the second one may well get scared preventing further violence. Ergo this is absolutely 100% about preventing sexual abuse of white girls by Pakistani men.
But oh sure, hang none, refuse to even systematically hunt them down, not even imprison them for life when you catch one despite hardly trying, you not only encourage this, but you are protecting the grooming gangs and become complicit. Because vigilante killings? People self-organizing and helping themselves in the form of vigilante killings? The state would crush those. The affected families and communities are prevented from using the tool of violence themselves due to the state having a monopoly... one it deigns to only selectively enforce.
It's not empathy run amok, that motivates this blood thirst when hearing about the "far away land of Britain" (as if far away means anything in the age of plane travel, unenforced borders and the internet). It's the knowledge, that if such things are not challenged in places similar to ours, perpetuated by governments similar to ours, it may well happen to us.
[insert the obligatory "first they came for the X, but I was not X.... then they came for me"-cliché]
You are correct, that this is about honor. Violated honor demands satisfaction. Tit for tat, the most obvious game-theoretic logic underpins it. Honor is not only compatible with consequentialism, but absolutely required by it.
Well said. Weakness is a provocation. Practically everyone in the world who isn't a white liberal understands this.
“…finally getting some attention.”
Sorry, but you should qualify that with “in the US/on social media”. Here in the UK it’s been a well-known scandal for well over a decade, with arrests, inquiries and even a TV drama. Just because Captain Ketamine started tweeting about it in the early hours doesn’t mean it was previously unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
It got attention, but there is a widespread feeling it didn't get resolution.
That 1) the victims were never properly recognised or made whole;
2) the rapists got off extremely lightly (short or no sentences, no deportations);
3) the enablers (police, social services, councillors) got no punishment and were not accountable.
This was a horror that started in the 1960s, has affected at least 50 cities, and appears to be continuing to this day.
I don't think the online right's stance is inconsistent at all. You're missing that England is not just a random faraway country, it's the American Urheimat, the realm of Anglo-Saxons, the ancestral homeland of white people. It's not some random disadvantaged children suffering there, it's white children. If you take into account racial solidarity, it all makes sense. Surely the online right is not suggesting to invade Pakistan and help children in similar situations there.
>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.
No, that's not what happened. The stories are obviously awful, have been in the British news for years, but since Americans rarely pay attention to things happening beyond their shores, they didn't notice them. Then what happened last year? Musk got into a fight with the new British government, the right wing party, now in opposition, saw a chance to create a scandal, they fed it to Musk through certain contacts, and he blew it up. Nothing to do with the social media being less censored.
>This is pretty impressive, because the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm.
No, it isn't. I'd suggest you take some time to look into British politics before you go around making statements like this, and don't just believe what you read on X. There has plenty of action against the gangs, a lot of them are in prison for a long time and there have been investigations into the failings that allowed this to happen. And, also, much of this happened under the previous right wing government, which is now using their "inaction" to beat the new government.
Sorry, I couldn't get through the rest of it since by that point it appeared to be some obscure comment against random people I don't care about on X. The display of American ignorance about foreign politics is what has riled me up.
Was it a coincidence you posted this around midnight in Britain?
Until you guys free the political prisoners who posted mean things on social media and deport every single one of the Pakistani Muslims who raped children, the rest of the world will continue to not take you seriously
Peak American hubris and arrogance right here. Maybe we'll think about listening to you once you stop murdering little girls in schools.
Not American, joke’s on you
Musk drew attention to it for his own reasons but it blew up because millions of people in the UK and elsewhere are disgusted with the failure of elites and authorities to prevent an entirely foreseeable and preventable horror, to prevent its spread and perpetration over decades, and to deliver justice to the victims and consequences to the rapists and their enablers.
Some rapists went to prison sure but many did not or got ludicrously short sentences and are currently back in the communities where the raped and tortured girls live, and appear to be doing very well. This upsets people.
And yes, for those who lived through it, it was obvious the elites and authorities have always wanted to minimise the crimes committed by immigrants partly because they are emotionally and politically strongly in favour of immigrants (and against the English white working class) and partly because they feared riots and public disorder if they paid attention to the mass rapes. So yes, it is fair to say : they feared the consequences of acting against gangs.
Midnight in Britain is 4PM where Scott lives, so probably a coincidence, yes.
As a based post- Christian vitlaist, the answer is obvious. To many Americans the English are a sister people, and sharing language and much of the culture the moral circle naturally would include this - more than in other countries. The outrage in English internet would be less about an equivalent situation in the Czech Republic or Romania.
You're throwing Great Britain , a country close to the US in the same bag as Chad or Bangladesh, and it's the source of the mistake. 🙄
"the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm. All the experts are begging you not to do it"
Wait what? I thought the official position is that we're totally doing something about it, we've had an inquery, now we're in the process of implementing the recommendations. Which is bullshit, but still.
Who are those experts begging not to do it?
Doing something? Too little, too late. I will believe it when I see rapists and torturers deported.
Well written by Scott, as usual.
I have no beef with giving in to your altruistic impulses if you find yourself in a national-political context where the state is weak (Pakistan) or hopelessly divided against itself (present-day US?). But voluntary charity is unlikely to fix any social problems, in the US or elsewhere. Since Scott invites pondering Big Questions in this post, let me spell out some of the traditional counter-arguments to libertarian-style effective altruism:
Protection against poverty (and everything else that most people dislike, such as rape) can in principle be provided through voluntary charity. Let those who do not like to encounter dying people in the streets, or for other reasons think human suffering is something to avoid, voluntarily chip in to care for the poor & ufortunate. They can contribute to charity until they feel the level of unpleasantness is ”acceptable”. That is, until their felt unpleasantness becomes less than the (marginal) utility of instead spending money on themselves.
Unfortunately, attempting to provide relief against human suffering through voluntary charity alone runs into a collective action problem. Each well-to-do member of society may be tempted to free ride on the charitable contributions of others. While at the same time being afraid of ending up as a sucker if he/she/they are the only ones who voluntarily contribute. Voluntary charity then ends up in a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation, and in such situations the dominant strategy is not to contribute.
...bringing in the existence of post-Christian vitalists (and they exist) further boosts the problem. Such people make a point of shirking and are proud of it, and hence further reduce the likelihood of solving widespread problems on a voluntary basis.
However, Prisoner’s Dilemma situations can be remedied if an outside power – such as (although not limited to) the state – compels everybody to contribute. Those who shirk contributing to poverty relief are punished. This eliminates the free-rider problem.
This is particularly the case if one relies on voluntary charity to provide preventive care. The “psychic rewards” of voluntary contributing to the welfare of others – be it the warm internal glow; or the satisfaction of having performed one’s moral duty; or enjoying the reputational benefit of not being seen by others as an egoist; or assuming it rakes up good karma points - is clearly felt when giving food to a starving child or shelter to a family that is shivering from cold, since here there is a an easy-to-see connection between one’s charitable action and the observed result. The “psychic reward” is less salient if one instead spends one’s money preventing something bad from happening. Thus, getting people to voluntarily finance care for victims after a catastrophic flood is easier than getting them to voluntary donate sufficient funds to build dikes strong enough to prevent floods in the first place.
Concerning gang rape by Pakistani and other gangs, the rest of the population (or people who care in the US) may similarly in principle voluntarily finance a police force and child protection agencies. But voluntary financing runs into the same collective action-problem as when providing law and order more generally. Law and order are public goods. It is difficult to deny protection of the law to those who shirk contributing to the salaries of police officers and judges. At the same time, one person’s benefit from being protected by the law does not diminish other peoples’ benefit from also being protected. Add to this the negative externality that arises if children who are abused grow up, if their childhood traumas make them unpleasant or dangerous to others.
The latter is a social investment-arguments for state (coercive) social protection policies, in the UK, US, Pakistan and elsewhere. And there are a host of related social investment - arguments why a state that compels its citizens to care for the less fortunate of its members is likely to be more successful (and hence powerful) in today’s globalized market place that states which leave such stuff to voluntarism. That is also why a state peopled by post-Christian vitalists is likely to be a weaker and less powerful state than a state where people care about others, plus accept to be coerced by the state to do so. However, that collective power-argument is more distantly related to Scott’s defense of voluntary charity, and this comment is already long enough, so I’ll end here.
> It is difficult to deny protection of the law to those who shirk contributing to the salaries of police officers and judges
I don't think it was difficult in medieval Iceland to exclude people from protection. The police already have no legal obligation to protect people in the US, they could have a policy of not taking calls from people who aren't registered taxpayers.
I don’t think the suggestions to take over Britain were serious, and even people that won’t do anything for people in faraway lands are still allowed to have an opinion on those same lands without being considered hypocrites.
It’s not that I consider them a bastion of morality or an example anyone should follow, but bashing them for being inconsistent is silly IMO.
I was curious about the timeline of the child rape rings in Rotherham and other parts of UK and found it here...
https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-what-happened-what-inquiries-there-were-and-how-starmer-was-involved-after-elon-musks-accusations-13285021
As for me, I try to help the people who are in reach of my agency. But there's a vast world outside my agancy. I don't know enough about the Rothreham thing to comment sensibly.
The skew here is that the perps are Muslim immigrants obviously. There's a lot of people in the UK and US who like evidence that Muslim Pakistanis are exceptionally rapey. As a matter of fact I am just back from rural Pakistan and they seem pretty ordinary people, and the Church of England is helpfully giving us a "look here upon this picture, and on this" object lesson that English Christians are capable of equally awful behaviour. Privilege from investigation is the key to both cases.
The labour party doesn't have an official position other than "your lot didn't hold an investigation when you were in power". Their unofficial position is that an investigation would harm them with Muslims who vote labour overwhelmingly and corruptly, boost the right and throw doubt on the political philosophy which prevented investigation of the offences.
>There's a lot of people in the UK and US who like evidence that Muslim Pakistanis are exceptionally rapey. As a matter of fact I am just back from rural Pakistan and they seem pretty ordinary people, and the Church of England is helpfully giving us a "look here upon this picture, and on this" object lesson that English Christians are capable of equally awful behaviour. Privilege from investigation is the key to both cases.
"As Sophie tried to report Waites to police, officers dismissed her and told her to "re-attend [the station] with an adult when she was not drunk".
But, as she left, she was coaxed into a car by 39-year-old Shakil Chowdhury, and driven to a house where she was raped by five men over a number of hours.
She was sexually assaulted in a car, before being left near a park and raped in the house of man, Sarwar Ali, who she had asked for directions.
Sophie was then picked up by a man who was posing as a taxi driver, named Shakil Chowdhury, who had promised to help her.
Only Chowdhury and Ali were ever arrested, with Chowdhury jailed in 2007 for six years after pleading guilty to six counts of rape. Ali, was charged by fled the country.
During his trial Chowdhury named two other men involved in the rapes of Sophie as part of his mitigation, but these were not followed up by GMP at the time, the report states, and is branded "another serious failure"."
https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2022-06-20/teen-raped-multiple-times-after-being-abducted-from-police-station-failed?fbclid=IwY2xjawH_EFRleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHZw69YvPl0DFXOK3n0w4q0dfN4-LKwEv_mcqxYVMUOXQ6JCuUPE6freFmw_aem_l_OhgAlQVnBmCZyX-wtt2w
I think I can quite confidently say that there are no majority-English Christian areas where a 12-year-old girl would be opportunistically gang raped, not just once, not just twice, but three times in the course of a single night.
That's the wrong question. The question is whether it would happen in a majority English Christian area where the inhabitants believed they had effective immunity from the law.
Take into account the ethnicity of the perps in the Pelicot case.
Given the UK's religious demographics, a majority English Christian area would probably be quite middle-class, i.e., the sort of community where people can normally be trusted to obey the law without state coercion. Even if you went to a white British underclass area of the sort where the police don't generally get involved, I don't think you'd randomly come across three paedophilic rapists in one night, much less three paedophilic rapists who also happened to be friends with a load of other paedophilic rapists ready to come round on short notice for a bit of impromptu paedophilic rape.
You are getting over excited. Calm down. Who is talking about random selection? We are talking about networks built up over years as people realise what they can get away with. Like the network built up by Christian heritage white man Dominique Pelicot of other predominantly Christian heritage white men.
It's a very general principle that most people are pretty decent but there is always a minority who will take advantage. You are curiously determined to degeneralise the principle.
>You are getting over excited. Calm down.
I'm sorry, perhaps you could tell me what the appropriate level of excitement is for talking about paedophilic gang rape.
>Who is talking about random selection? We are talking about networks built up over years as people realise what they can get away with.
None of Sophie's encounters were premeditated, and she didn't know any of the people involved, but all three of the people she came across turned out to be rapists. That's not a case of a few bad apples or an anti-social minority, that's a case of a deeply misogynistic, deeply racist subculture, where abuse of outsiders has become normalised.
>You are curiously determined to degeneralise the principle.
Why don't you say what you actually mean instead of hiding behind passive-aggressive innuendoes?
What specifically is the Church of England doing? As an American, I tend to forget it exists.
It tolerated for decades a horrible abuser called John Smyth, and eventually exiled him to Zimbabwe where he carried on as usual in, again, Anglican institutions. Archbishop of Canterbury resigned to the issue at the beginning of the month.
resigned over the issue
Great article, thank you for writing it.
It's interesting to hear some vague echo of the snowball forming right now somewhere on the web about this. (I started hearing it a few days ago.)
- The Rotherham grooming gangs were a scandal years ago; it was abundantly reported by the mainstream print media, including the liberal media - New York Times, The Guardian (many times), etc. Why are some people hearing about it only now?
- AFAIK "don't prosecute them because they are a minority" wasn't the only or even the main dynamic. To wit (and no, none of this is to diminish how horrific this matter was):
These were not random kids suddenly grabbed from the street and raped in an alley. These were also not middle-class kids. Rather: children (mainly in their early teens, it seems) from the underclass were seduced, in part with alcohol and drugs, and then drawn into a hideously exploitative ring, sometimes with violence, threats and blackmail, and often with subtler methods.
There are obvious class prejudices at play in the reaction to this. Also at play: on the one side, the attitude that if something is not an obvious case of rape, it's not what the police should be worrying about; on the other side, an ever-expanding definition of rape (aren't post-Christian vitalists supposed to be against that?) - again, to judge from echoes, early work in exposing and trying to prevent the matter seems to have come in part from activists that erased the distinction between the (hideous, criminal, nauseating) goings-on and "classic" rape, thus the reaction from police that the activists were misunderstanding things and ignoring young girls' agency, etc.
Mind you, the bit about "ignoring young girls' agency" (a phrase that I'm quoting from memory as something that was cherry-picked by the media from an internal police report on the matter in the late 2000s or early 2010s) may have been a valid criticism in context, in that these distinctions matter when it comes to how to stop the problem, unravel these criminal networks and bring them to prosecution. It is not valid as a way to wash one's hands on the matter. (The same is true of complaints about how some ways to describe the problem could inflame racial tensions; UK media seems to have settled on "Asian men" as the culprit or as the right way to describe the culprits, weirdly.)
And that brings us to why I think Scott's parallel is actually a good one. Sure, as people have said here, there's a class of people that simply care about white victims everywhere (particularly if they are victims of rape or sexual exploitation at the hands of non-white men) and not about non-white children being maimed by hunger (or targeted for sexual exploitation, etc.). There's a class of people that do not care about hunger or poverty in the Third World because they are *complicated*; yes, more extreme and less expensive to address immediately and effectively than hunger or poverty in rich countries (... which they often don't want to address either), but complicated to solve permanently, in a way that does not require repeated outside intervention. But sexual exploitation is not a simple problem in this sense either!
>it was abundantly reported by the mainstream print media, including the liberal media
"Abundantly" was one of the points of contention- supposedly, UK newspapers published almost 10 times as many articles about BLM and George Floyd than they did about grooming gangs, despite the latter being over a much longer time period: https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1876673371103994305
Well, I wasn't living in the UK when things became widely known, and I'm only a very occasional reader of the Guardian/the Independent - and yet I came across many articles about the matter.
The reaction isn't purely about concern for the welfare of the children. It is also about the chance to take down the Labour government and also to win a hit against wokeness. If these people were really concerned about the welafre of children then, as you allude, they would care just as much about kids who are being abused in non-politically advantageous situations.
Hm, as someone who is more of a localist morally I feel like I should defend the "based post-christian vitalist" position but I actually come into it from a different direction and don't tend to get along with that cluster.
Swill FWIW - I think there are strong reasons to have models of morality that do not obligate you to resolve bottomless pits of suffering that you're not entangled with in any way (e.g. if we discovered a distant planet was inhabited by an alien race who for some reason evolved to feel chronic pain, I don't think we'd be morally obligated to develop interstellar travel to fly there and genetically engineer them out of it). Partly that's due to incentive issues (e.g. it makes us vulnerable to emotional blackmail), but partly as a philosophy of morality thing, it feels wrong to say that you are by default responsible for all suffering in the universe (I wrote some thoughts about an adjacent viewpoint to this here https://shakeddown.substack.com/p/the-two-sources-of-moral-value)
(There's also the practical issue where people working off sensationalist news articles that don't actually affect them directly have a tendency to react in counterproductive ways - in many cases there's a practical argument that uninvolved third parties involving themselves in conflict usually make things worse).
If you assume this, this implies you should care about problems like this to the extent that you're entangled with them. You can argue that it's correct to see ourselves as more entangled with british rape gang issues than third world deworming (e.g. we have a shared language and culture with effects that go both ways, and when we use our cultural influence to improve policing in Britain it makes the general anglosphere philosophy of policing better all around, while the cultural malaise that let this happen in the first place is a shared cultural illness we should all be fighting together). Or you can reasonably argue that this is wrong (the language similarities are superficial and make us overestimate the culture sharing, we're actually more entangled with third world illnesses than we think but unfairly dismiss it due to language distance or just plain old racism).
(I personally end up coming down that we are somewhat more entangled with the british thing for shared culture/problem reasons, but also third world EA involvement is much more likely to be net helpful and much more cost effective, which more than offsets the entanglement difference. For animal-related EA stuff though I have a much harder time deciding - we're multiplying a tiny number (our degree of entanglement) with a huge number (the amount of benefit that results), which means the error bars are huge).
I sometimes find Scott & I inhabit different experiential universes. I have been banging the drum about suffering in other countries for a long time, and I have never met any of these based post-Christian vitalists, despite being on the political right and an admirer of both Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.
It has been the ultra-cucked slave moralists (UCSM) who have been the issue. For instance, I have been taking the side of the Yazidi for at least ten years. I know exactly the kind of person who yells at me for bringing it up. I also know that it is the northern province of Cuckistan that deplatforms and shuts up survivors of slavery and genocide because Hurty Feelies (go look up Nadia Murad). I know I have heard this when I talk about the ethnic cleansing in Pakistan and Bangladesh, or of the genocide in the Sudan or or or...
And it is the ucsm that are still concealing and defending and enabling the child rape and torture gangs that operate throughout Britain (far more than Rotherham).
I don't think this is an accident, mind you. I think this is a logical consequence of the ideas underlying it. The idea is that you are supposed to be altruistic, not selfishly care about your own welfare. You are supposed to be "disinterested". This is why the ucsm went after me for defending the Yazidi. Because I'm being _selfish_, dontcherknow? I am doing it because they are facing the same filthy menace that is now attacking Europe. I am not being properly _altruistic_.
To which I say, Well, Yes. Duh. And I am proud of that.
Putting on my objectivist hat here, I think that the people Scott mentions who are suddenly furious about the grooming gangs are confused, but they have the right instincts. They sense that the ucsm fundamentally want them to abandon anything they value or hold dear (I'm old enough to remember the ucsm reactions to 9/11). They react against that, viciously, and sometimes wrongly, but I get the impulse.
The actual solution is - Objectivist hat on! - to recognise that the purpose of morality is to serve your life, to enable your life _and that defending others is inextricably part of that_. Solidarity, internationalism, compassion are all profoundly practical and selfish mental disciplines to cultivate and practice.
I am going to repeat that: if you want the best life you can have, developing as much Justice, as much solidarity and compassion as you can, is a really good strategy. And if you want your country and civilisation to do well, you should embrace internationalism. It's not complicated: those inflicting hideous injustice and suffering elsewhere in the world will gladly do it to _you_ if given half a chance.
When you see that, everything falls into place. For example I care more - in terms of emotional valance and effort and time spent - for the attacks happening in Europe than those currently being perpetrated against Hindus in Bangladesh. Because Europe is my home and such attacks are more likely to hit someone I know.
Is that disconnect a problem? I don't see how - I have Bangladeshi Hindu comrades who are pro Europe but, obviously, care more about their own country and people.
I suppose one could make some strange abstract utilitarian argument that this is depraved and morally sub-optimal. To which I can only respond: maybe. But in practice, in reality, it is a choice between this and between the ucsm types defending and enabling torture, rape, slavery and genocide (I have not forgotten nor forgiven those who enabled Darfur). So I find I can live with my choice.
Does anybody know these people in real life? It's easy to maintain a consistent extremist position online where you can pick your battles and your mom, spouse and children are not around. But in real life when you sit with your friends around the coffee table?
I know a few. They tend to be a lot more circumspect in real life interactions than online. Certainly they won't say to your face that they believe you in particular shouldn't exist, even as they post long screeds online about their opinion of groups of people that include you.
Ok, slow down a sec.
> the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist.
> since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before
> the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm.
I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt to signal to the right-wingers this post is aimed at that you're on their side and they should take your philosophical point seriously, but these just read like they're directly taken from far-right talking points. I could imagine Tommy Robinson saying these things if he was a bit more eloquent. I'm noy saying that everything Tommy Robinson says is wrong by default, but on these issues I got the impression there was some debate, with the far right on one side (and some well meaning but relatively uninformed people who have been caught up in the emotional tempest of it) and everybody who is both reasonable and informed on the other.
Am I wrong? I guess the main point I'm interested in hearing more about is the first one. The police spent years deliberately ignoring them because it might seem racist?? I know the police didn't act quickly enough, but wasn't that just plain old incompetence?
Also interested to know if there was really much meaningful censorship on social media a decade ago, and if this has substantively changed. I thought the main thing that had changed in that time was more ads and spambots, but I don't know much about social media.
Pretty sure the third point I quoted is just false. The UK government has announced several inquiries: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5l4vxv2qo
Actually, forget the enquiries. The quote included "acting against the gangs". I'm pretty sure the perpetrators are mostly in prison now. Isn't that "acting against" them?
It's not wrong, it's written in an entertaining way for emphasis.
1. There were immigrant child rape and torture gangs in at least 50 cities. The few that got a thorough investigation found around 1,000 girl victims many being raped hundreds of times by dozens of mens. This is millions of offences. The attention given to this was many times less than the attention given to criticising the immigrants or e.g. George Floyd. It wasn't censorship of the atrocity so much as neglect. Why? because elites and authorities sympathies were with immigrants rather than white working class and they feared drawing attention would cause unrest. The latter fear of being seen as racist or triggering reaction has been documented over and over again in the inquiries.
2. As to the inquiries, the problem is a) they were limited in scope covering only a minority of the rape gangs; b) they did not result in justice to the victims, punishment to the perpetrators or accountability for the enablers who looked the other way (police, social services); c) the recommendations have yet to be enacted. In this context, many saw the inquiries as not a genuine attempt to put the wrongs right, but rather an attempt to evade responsibility and once again ignore and cover-up the atrocity. And to disguise some truly horrific things such as returning victims to rapists, arresting the abused child and not the rapists she was with, preventing the abused child's father from removing her from her rapist.
3. Many of the perpetrators never went to court. Many who went to court got off because there were procedural errors or (in at least one case the rapist was old and ill). Many who had committed truly Mengele- level crimes (read the court records) got 3-10 year sentences which in practice meant 1-4 years in gaol. It appears none of the foreign-born and dual citizen rapists and torturers actually got deported and once released continue to live in the communities they terrorised and abused. Meanwhile people who say nasty things about Islam on social media get harassed by police, arrested and sent to prison for years. This gives people the feeling that justice was not done.
I was planning to do some more research on this and come back to you (either with counterargument or admission that you changed my mind) but life got in the way. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to reply, and assure you that your comment has been read and reflected on.
<i>I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt to signal to the right-wingers this post is aimed at that you're on their side and they should take your philosophical point seriously, but these just read like they're directly taken from far-right talking points.</i>
That's because, for years, the far-right were the only ones talking about the scandal. Scott's summary is basically accurate.
<i>Am I wrong? I guess the main point I'm interested in hearing more about is the first one. The police spent years deliberately ignoring them because it might seem racist?? I know the police didn't act quickly enough, but wasn't that just plain old incompetence?</i>
No, it wasn't:
"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/
<i>Also interested to know if there was really much meaningful censorship on social media a decade ago, and if this has substantively changed. I thought the main thing that had changed in that time was more ads and spambots, but I don't know much about social media.</i>
In pre-Musk Twitter, when moderation was generally more heavy-handed and had a distinct left-wing slant, the story would almost certainly not have been able to spread as far as it has done recently.
<i>Pretty sure the third point I quoted is just false. The UK government has announced several inquiries: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5l4vxv2qo</i>
Most victims' charities are calling for a nation-wide inquiry. The "several inquiries" the government's announced are laughably inadequate, for several reasons:
(1) The funding available is just £5m, to be split across five different investigations. By way of contrast, the Oldham investigation alone cost £8m.
(2) The funding is to help councils that choose to conduct their own investigations; those that don't, won't be forced to.
(3) A common theme in many accounts of grooming gangs is that local government turned a blind eye, so even those councils which choose to hold investigations will essentially be investigating themselves, with obvious implications for the integrity of the process.
The "several inquiries" thing is an obvious smokescreen designed to make it look as if the government's doing something when it's actually not, and the government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do even this much. So whilst "the government's official position is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm" may be literally false, it's directionally correct, insofar as, left to its own devices, the government almost certainly would refuse to do anything.
I was planning to do some more research on this and come back to you (either with counterargument or admission that you changed my mind) but life got in the way. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to reply, and assure you that your comment has been read and reflected on.
This starts out with such an incredibly credulous framing of events at top I read through assuming it was some sort of literary device about disingenuous framing that would be revealed at the end, but alas no.
The ideas its being discussed now because of lack of censorship in social media - what social media censorship prevented it being discussed previously, its a subject frequently in the UK news and often discussed in UK social media, were the US specifically being censored from discussing it? Or just Musk? And now he has freed himself from that censorship only he had, luckily just at the same time he is in dispute with the UK govt? Come on.
And some members of the police certainly said they ignored the crimes because they were afraid of being called racist... but there is not many investigations into incompetence/corruption where you just entirely take the investigateds word for what happened is there.
But of course its tempting to swallow something when thats the issue you personally care about.
Similarly if you were left wing you would probably pick the big issue that the victims were exclusively the underclass, poor people from broken homes or already in social care. People who when seeking help are ignored even when not related to non white people, then its obvious to you this is a class issue and a failure of sufficient govt regulation because everything is that to you.
Maybe both groups should perhaps look at the facts more objectively, maybe a major inquiry could gather those facts and write a report on them.
Oh one did, years ago - it had 20 core recommendations, none of which the last govt considered or put in despite suddenly deciding they care now in opposition and none of which the current govt has so far. None of which this furore on US social media seems to care about either, because its not really about facts or fixing things I might suspect.
<i>The ideas its being discussed now because of lack of censorship in social media - what social media censorship prevented it being discussed previously, its a subject frequently in the UK news and often discussed in UK social media, were the US specifically being censored from discussing it? Or just Musk? And now he has freed himself from that censorship only he had, luckily just at the same time he is in dispute with the UK govt? Come on.</i>
Pre-Musk Twitter was more heavily moderated, and the moderation had a stronger left-wing slant, meaning that, at least on Twitter, the scandal wouldn't have been able to blow up like it has recently.
<i>And some members of the police certainly said they ignored the crimes because they were afraid of being called racist... but there is not many investigations into incompetence/corruption where you just entirely take the investigateds word for what happened is there.</i>
When multiple independent witnesses say "We were told not to draw attention to this out of fear of seeming racist," it's generally best to assume they're telling the truth absent strong evidence to the contrary.
While it's tangential to the point you're making, this is potentially misleading as to what happened in Rotherham and the response of the British state.
Firstly, you say, "the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm." This is incorrect. There has already been a independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. The report was published in 2014 and you can read it here: https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham. There were also more limited enquiries by the Home Affairs Committee and Louise Casey. A week ago, the Home Secretary announced a further review (also headed by Louise Casey): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5l4vxv2qo. Various criticisms could be made of these various investigations, but the British government certainly has done something.
Secondly, reading from the executive summary of the Jay Report, this says, "Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant... Seminars for elected members and senior officers in 2004-05 presented the abuse in the most explicit terms. After these events, nobody could say 'we didn't know'. In 2005, the present Council Leader chaired a group to take forward the issues, but there is no record of its meetings or conclusions, apart from one minute. By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."
This is certainly very bad, but it isn't fairly summarised by saying, "the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist." That characterisation confuses two separate points (both of which are dreadful): firstly, the relevant authorities failed to get a grip on the problem and, secondly, people were reluctant to identify the ethnic origins of perpetrators. Probably the reluctance to describe the problem accurately was an obstacle to dealing with it, but there's no credible evidence that anybody in authority *deliberately* ignored the problem.
Thirdly, nobody was censoring anyone in the 2010s. The story was widely reported. As you note, you commented on it yourself. I don't know why it's gone viral recently: this seems to happen fairly randomly, as with the Post Office scandal, but it's not because we're less censored. If anything, I would guess that it's because it now aligns more squarely with culture wars in the US.
Thanks. I too would object to Scott's characterisation of the UK government's position - it's a pretty shallow caricature.
As a side point, I always find it interesting when a British issue breaks out, and we get hot takes from other counties. Sometimes it's helpful to get a different perspective, but often it's surprising how weak that perspective is. I can only assume that our hot takes about foreign shores are equally bad.*
If anyone wants to explain to me why this has blown up recently, I'd be interested. Is it because the new info on the Southport killer has reignited discussion about "two tier policing", of which Rotherham etc is the most obvious example?
*Excepting the USA. Their politics is the world's politics, and we all pay attention, whether we want to or not.
>Is it because the new info on the Southport killer has reignited discussion about "two tier policing", of which Rotherham etc is the most obvious example?
In relation to the Southport riots, someone was convicted of "incitement" for tweeting and sentenced to 3 years, 2 months; there were convicted rapists involved with the gangs sentenced to 3 years or less.
Also Elon decided to pick a fight with Labour/the UK government for other reasons, and this is really big convenient stick to bash anyone with.
>The story was widely reported.
It's been suggested that UK newspapers published 10x articles on George Floyd than on grooming gangs, despite the latter being relevant for a much longer time period, but I have no way of independently verifying that: https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1876673371103994305
If there's a degree of truth to this, that's the reason people so vehemently disagree that it was "widely" reported.
How about the social democrat who would say:
6. Yes, this suffering in faraway countries is terrible, but what should I do about it? Why must I spend my money on helping anybody? Can't my government take care of all that? Our ministers can visit the faraway countries and bring them development aid, apologize for colonial crimes committed a hundred years ago, and gain the moral high ground.
Same thing, why are there even food banks? Can't the government simply pay the poor enough welfare so they can lead a dignified life?
Whether this "let the government take care of this" necessarily leads to "invade a country which doesn't properly punish child abuse", well I don't know.
"while hastily burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under the bedsheets where we can’t see it"
<3
I think many of the comments here are interesting, and that your basic intuition about this is still spot on. The wise intuitive heart knows that compassion does not make it weaker and is thus free to burst with it for everyone. But of course our fear-based predictive pain-avoidant minds can't know this - because their only mode of knowing is understanding, and maybe it doesn't make sense and is just true -, and so, understandably, try their very best to hold the reigns on all that compassion, to the point of denying it.
In any case, I think it just doesn't matter so much if this view of people is true. It is the view that makes it easiest to be kind and do good, and frees up mental energy to find out how to do those.
Related topic: DEI vs DUI, a quantification of harms. Or, I dunno, any quantification of the harms of woke culture vs virtually any other issue. Sure there are problems resulting from this stuff but I'm pretty certain they'll pale in comparison with a host of other issues that based post-Christian vitalists ignore.
What a wholesome post
In all of this it needs to be remembered that the South Yorkshire constabulary has never been the most impressive law enforcement agency. It did laps of honour back in 198(?1) when it caught the Ripper, after the lads up the M1 had bungled it for years. But the post-Hillsborough cover up was grim.
It also needs to be remembered that much of the incompetence among operational staff at Rotherham was by relatively junior staff who had been immersed in a need to avoid offence etc and who were treading - of course misguidedly - on eggshells, no doubt after one training course too many.
It's this sort of soup of uselessness, feebleness, and poor leadership which makes me suspicious of attempts twenty years later to fit any kind of theoretical framework around what happened.
Perhaps I've the wrong read of Americans, but based on the reaction to the grooming gangs scandal my sense is that white British children are well within the circle of concern for many of you. This may be especially true of the right, which still retains some attachment to America's original mother country (notwithstanding that the conservatives would trample over the UK without even realising it, and never feel bad). The fact we all speak English and you like watching Harry Potter doesn't hurt.
People are wired to care more about people that resemble them, both racially and culturally. When a white American sees a white British kid suffering he'll feel more empathy than if it's an African or Pakistani kid and that is ok.
I tend to think though that in a case like this, the demographic detail that has the most punch is that the abuse victims are female children. The idea of little girls being sexually abused by mulitiple adult males is so pathetic and horrifying that I think most people's distress and rage maxes out. Knowing that the kids were white would add little or nothing to the strength of their response.
I think we need to take a step back in our logical analysis to understand the grooming gang position.
Calls for action in this crisis, one that affects a population of greater affinity to our own than nearly any other, actually advances the “help the local” position.
The argument being that charity towards Pakistani migrants and tolerance toward refugees has led to this issue, said charity arisen out of the position that supports helping everyone everywhere including starving children you’ll never meet.
Now regardless of whether action is taken, highlighting the issue cements one of the main concerns the “help the local” stance has towards the global priest army “every soul years to be free” position - that charity towards the unknown can often prove disastrous for what you already hold dear.
In your link about your own writing on Rotherham, you have a link to HBD Chick, whose blog post is now gone but fortunately archived https://web.archive.org/web/20141117084220/https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/response-to-scott-alexander/ In it she says she cares about Rotherham because she used to live near there, while she doesn't care as much about FGM in other countries because those are other countries. I send all of my charitable donations to the Third World via GiveWell's recommended charities, but I will submit that HBD Chick was actually correct and the Americans talking about how Britain should be invaded are wrong. A basic part of politics going back to the decline of the wars of religion and the rise of the Weberian state is that each polity gets to govern itself, and those policies are not the business of outsiders to interfere with.
I do find it interesting that Scott is not comparing it to the contemporary Neil Gaiman scandal argued about in the most recent Open Thread https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-365/comment/87313136
Scott, you’re straw manning them. They see Britain as being fundamentally different from Somalia because they feel ancestral ties to Briton. They see poor Britons as their cousins, poor Somalians as someone else’s problem.
This seems a fair critique.
I propose to you that Scott knows exactly what he’s doing and has good reasons for going about it in this matter
I also think this is totally possible, but I can't come up with any specific possibilities that make sense...any guesses?
To my read, he doesn’t want to simply accuse people of being hypocritical raging jerks, so he reframes it as everyone wanting to be good in order to get his point across.
The list of “suddenly” sentences is the tell.
Having circles of concern and being more concerned by people perceived to be culturally similar isn't hypocrisy. It's only hypocrisy if you assume that caring for people implies caring for all people equally.
It’s hypocrisy if you say, “Only the people close to you,” and then when you don’t like something elsewhere suddenly you redefine what “close to you” means. This is Scott’s “finely sliced” thing.
"circles of concern" does not mean a simple binary "close" vs "not close".
For a charge of hypocrisy, you need to show that, of the two contrasting cases, they are showing more concern for the "distant" than the "close" case, not by *your* standard of closeness but by their own. Which you would need some evidence or understanding of.
That's a tall order in this particular case.
Yes
You left off option 6: consider that the bundle of feelings and impulses actually map to something real, and then try to fit your map to the territory. With this option, moral philosophy becomes something like science without experiments. History becomes your empirical data source and the various wisdom traditions and schools of thoughts become hypothesis, with the sole test being, “does this belief structure produce human thriving at scale for a long time.” This is what good rationalists ought to do.
" burying your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under the bedsheets"
I wish I were half or a quarter as good a person as this. I really do incline towards option number four (do not care about anyone) because I don't like people. But religion, drat it, forces me to care! "Love your neighbour as yourself". Okay, who is my neighbour? What, you mean *everybody*? Can't I just bury my head under the bedsheets instead?
God bless you, Scott, for being a good person.
Yes
I suspect that most of the people you are describing didn't really mean to include protection against crime in the kinds of help that backfire. What they meant was attempts to help others by offering them a hand up (money, training, housing) tends to backfire but protecting them from being physically harmed or robbed is extremely effective and important.
And they have to mean something like that since, taken literally, all of civilization is in some sense benefiting, so technically helping, all sorts of strangers and they approve of civilization.
You're being a bit unfair to reflective equilibrium and logic as offering resolutions -- at least to the things they have ever been purported to resolve.
Of course they can't clear away your messy human emotions of sympathy and outrage. But why would you think they should? But plenty of people have used them to reach perfectly coherent conclusions -- I believe that, to the extent moral claims can be true or false, act utilitarianism is the correct moral theory (bit bullets on repugnant conclusion and experience machine) so how can you say that reflective equilibrium has failed for me?
Am I always going to act like a perfect utilitarian, of course not and sometimes moral emotions will be part of what sways me (don't want to feel guilty, feel sympathy etc) but that's never been what reflective equilibrium was supposed to address.
--
In short I think you're doing a bit of conflation between moral feelings and moral beliefs.
Also surely if there aren't any moral facts that seems like the kind of thing you could know via pure logic.
I think this is projecting somewhat. These people don't care about foreign children. They care about the culture war. Abused foreign children are weapons for their arguments-as-soldiers
So do you care about abused foreign children?
Yes, but only a little bit
One reason people tend to deny any moral benefit from helping strangers is that many people think of morals as a set of duties. And on that picture if they admit a moral reason to help anyone all the sudden they are obliged to meet the insatiable need of the whole world. I think what's needed there is a explanation of the concept of supererogation or just the idea of morals w/o duties.
Though since outrage at violations of rules comes from a different moral foundation than sympathy so it may be that some such people are just much more moved by outrage than empathy,
That is a good point, more people should frame problems in terms of positive and negative rights creating positive and negative obligations. Most common moral values should be interpreted to create only obligations to refrain from action. Libertarians are about the only big group who even remember there IS a moral distinction being act and omission, the political left have obliterated it with a laundry list of positive rights, Christians never really had it in the first place, and all the Singer-ite consequentialists here refuse the distinction.
You quite simply need some way to ignore most of what happens in the world in order to enjoy your life, and "I'll fix problems that I have assumed a duty to fix" + "I didn't cause that so it's not my problem" is about the easiest way that feels capable of consistent application.
You shouldn't assume that if you can successfully predict the outputs of a black box, that you know what's in the box. If you understand the concepts of "race", "a people", "a nation", "a sphere" the way based gigathad post-post-christian vitalists do, then this analysis just reads like a failed attempt at solving a math problem from somebody who doesn't understand the material. The error is assuming that you can accurately model the outgroup using your own terms at the level of persuasion, which requires an internal model. You can model whoever you want in your own terms in order to predict them. But to *persuade* them you must speak their language.
That is to say, don't take a concept from the outgroup, translate it into ingroup language, dissect it, and assume that dissection still maps to the original concept.
Maybe the post-chad dark gigas terms are wrong because they resist reduction into terms you can model. Or maybe you just lack basic intuitions about the world that they see very obviously. It's like hearing an asexual give you their theory of sex. They might be good reasoners, but lacking direct knowledge of the nouns involved, bootstrapping from on hand proxies to ape understanding, their language is basically gibberish.
I’m not sure I count as a “based post-Christian vitalist”. I don’t self-describe that way, but I do have broadly right-libertarian politics, am post-Christian in both the cultural and personal senses, and *Where’s My Flying Car?* is a strong contender for my favorite book. So, if I can be so arrogant as to speak for the group with those caveats in place:
Option 1, giving up on ever being more than a bundle of incoherent preferences, sounds pretty good to me. Mike Heumer calls it “moral intuitionism”, if you want to look up the long-form argument in favor. But the tl;dr is that it’s a fundamental mistake of rationalist culture, as well as many of its precursor cultures, to view moral reasoning as deductive rather than inductive (in the middle-school logic (and is there any better indication of my at least fitting the “post-Christian” part of the label than that “middle-school logic” feels like a natural category to me?) sense of “applying general rules to specific cases”/“reasoning from specific cases to general rules”). We don’t view “have a rule you can near-losslessly summarize on a business card and follow it in every case” as desirable, and we don’t view “you do X in situation A, and Y in situation B, which seems like you’re following a complex and possibly inconsistent moral rule!” as a devastating blow. Indeed, I personally would respond to the latter with a confused “you only follow one moral rule?”
As a matter of a philosophical academic (meant in both senses) interest, I don’t mind you trying to follow the inductive chain on my/our moral intuitions and trying to figure out the rule(s) I/we are following. That seems like at least as good a use of your time as playing Sudoku. But arguing from the premise of “you don’t have a consistent moral rule!” will be as fruitless as arguing to, I dunno, Pakistani grooming gang members in Britain that raping children is bad. There’s a fundamental cultural mismatch there.
I also object to the whole “objectively I think I’d rather have malaria than be raped” thing, since human-caused violence does seem special even in your own framework. I don’t know if any cases of, say, PTSD (real PTSD, not “I read the n-word in an antiracist novel from the 1800’s” PTSD) from a serious illness outside the context of a pandemic. Though your point about this being inconsistent with not caring about domestic abuse in Pakistan is well taken. But this is all a side-issue, me indulging in my own academic project.
Perhaps helping and having empathy with strangers is more complicated. I have higher confidence in the hypothesis that if police and social services would act strongly against child gang rapists, we would get less child gang rape and that would be a good thing. And also that is not a very difficult thing in a high income country to provide incentives so police and social workers do their jobs.
It is less obvious that if I donate money to malaria charities in Africa this will be an un-mitigated good thing. 1. The money may not get to the intended beneficiaries or do the intended good or have a lot of unintended adverse consequences. 2. Merely having more and healthier Africans may be great in the short term but not in the long term interests of Africa or the world. Both propositions have a lot of arguments on both sides whereas strongly objecting to authorities neglecting child rape and torture in the UK has fewer potential downsides.
So if someone had evidence of those two things being false, would you donate money?
For sure. In fact I do donate to improving agriculture, education and health in Africa because I hope it helps. But I am not very sure that it actually does help and think there is some non-zero probability by donations are actually making things worse.
Incisive as usual. I face the basic issue regularly, because I'm into charitable giving. I sympathize with the effective altruism movement. I think there's something flawed in the "every human life has equal value" concept notwithstanding its abstract appeal, but I've found no compelling alternative. My current compromise is to balance between the notion of equally-weighted humanity and some kind of moral inverse-square law.
I think the EA stance is sufficiently compatible with an unequal weighing of lives, because there are several orders of magnitude wrt to cost for extending X number of children lives for Y years in poorer countries compared to spending 1000X for equivalent +EV in the US. Yes, EA would be incredibly demanding if they asked you to run into every burning building to save a child. But what would you think of a person who wouldn't press a single button to save a building full of children, even if they are foreign and that this is an isolated incident? (I.e. doing this once wouldn't cause the button to pop up again etc)?
I'm not saying we're anywhere close to the button pressing universe, but there are people who use the former burning building example as if that's the only life saving intervention that can be done and there are no cheaper, less impactful on your QoL interventions.
You describe it as if it began and ended in the 2010s. It started earlier and is STILL HAPPENING!
I'm not aware of the argument you're describing, but the thing that springs to mind is that Americans that are usually against foreign intervention may be more interested in this case because it hits close to home.
1. The people doing it came through open borders policies (there's no possibility they entered through the aggressively unfriendly legal immigration scheme for professionals) -- which are the same policies (being pushed by the same groups) the US is struggling with.
2. Ditto the mechanisms making it impossible to deport them.
3. Ditto the culture of political correctness suppressing reporting about it and branding anyone who objects as far right.
4. Ditto the horrifyingly amoral deep state who did everything they could to not simply ignore but also to facilitate it. (I read the other day a case where a young girl was taken from her family by social services because she was pregnant, so clearly being abused, and the chosen foster family was her abuser, who promptly married her in an Islamic ceremony, attended by the social worker...)
I hear you've got similar problems; so these people may see it as part of the same fight.
British grooming gangs, however horrible they are, are not really worse than what is routinely happening to christians in Pakistan, or muslims in India, or yezidi and alawites in the Middle East. The honest reason why they elicit a much more intense response from the American Twitter is that these events appear to be closer to twitter-americans than other atrocities. Why would they be closer if the events took place in a different country.
A charitable explanation of this closeness is that these events are happening in the same media-space. British media is definitely pre-occupied by the US events as if they were happening almost in the same country. For example, stories about the recent LA fires were more popular than all other contemporaneous stories combined, while German floods of 2024 received much less coverage. It would be only natural if the american media space reciprocated if only a little.
A less charitable explanation would be that the victims happened to have skin of just the right color.
I will not be guessing here which explanation carries more weight in which case.
There’s a simple explanation: It’s not a matter of caring or not caring; it’s a matter of how much one cares. Moral issues are rarely black and white; they’re on a continuum.
Yeah this may be banworthy, but they definitely just like that they have an excuse to hurt Pakistanis and fortunately some are worthy of hurting. The kids don't factor in.
Really low-value post, except for the first 5 words, which are honest and perceptive.
The extent to which I'm sick of entertaining convoluted explanations of why some standard applies one way to brown people and another to white people would be hard to convey in mere words. I try to live by the charitable principle as best as a mortal can. But this is 2,000 words about why a philosophy that is white supremacist in impact if not in belief might have different values when victims are white and perpetrators aren't vs. other configurations. Sometimes Occam is right.
I see how Scott's choice to focus on this particular piece of injustice, one with brown villains and white victims, could be seen as white supremacist in impact if not in belief. But how is the philosophy espoused supportive of white supremacy?
1) Scott is focusing on this particular piece of injustice because it's an aberration in Vitalist philosophy.
2) This comments section is full of self-proclaimed Vitalists explaining that this situation is different than the situation in developing countries because the victims are white, or British, or European, or "kin" in some abstract sense and the perpetrators aren't.
Oh, it's not Scott you're complaining about, it's the Vitalists here who are pushing back? Is that right?
<But this is 2,000 words about why a philosophy that is white supremacist in impact if not in belief might have different values when victims are white and perpetrators aren't vs. other configurations
So what you mean here is that Scott is busting the Vitalists who hang out here by pointing out that even they show some interest in the welfare of poor folks when the poor folks are white and their abusers are not? Is that right?
Scott's point with this article is to claim that Vitalists are inconsistent in their philosophy - that they sometimes support altruism given the right circumstances. I think he hopes to convince them that their reasoning is faulty based on their stated principles and to either change the reasoning or change the principles.
Based on Vitalist writing I don't think any such inconsistency exists. If an action serves the goals of white nationalism, they support it. The fact that it also happens to be altruistic isn't a downside for them, but isn't part of the reasoning (except insofar as it gives them a way to advocate white supremacy that falls inside the Overton Window). Scott's argument will not convince because it assumes the wrong premises - that there's some spark of human empathy in these people.
Looking at the old SSC post is, as usual, an interesting and surprising experience.
1) the discussion about pandemics (especially foreign-imported) and quarantine could use a COVID update,
2) the dynamic about “local questions becoming referenda (referendums?) on Everything”, or “[member of tribe X] puts [member of tribe Y] on the spot to publicly criticize [genuinely horrifying stuff that tribe Y tends to not invoke as part of its discourse downplays], [member of tribe Y] refuse to give [member of tribe X] satisfaction” seems to have worsened a lot.
Of course, 2) is exclusively the responsibility of the alt-right’s industrial-scale bullshit signal-boosting machine that never saw a fire it didn’t like to add fuel to… (wait, am I doing it again?)
This is a nice starter defense of the practice and belief in Catholicism. You'd like the current Catechism for its coherence, depth, and nuance.
It seems that you are mistaking tribal loyalty for moral empathy. These people don't care about rape or crime. Quite a few of them actually want society to collapse so that THEY can form gangs that raid villages and take women and so on. They care that a bunch of foreigners are attacking their extended family. "Vita" means life, and the core of life (and vitalism) is genetics.
This reads like a failure to decouple. It's perfectly possible to realize that your evolutionary response is a misfire, still feel really bad about something, and then endeavor to do nothing about it and let the locals deal with their own issues.
> Resolve the contradiction by ceasing to care about child sexual assault victims or anyone else. THIS IS NOT A REAL OPTION, SORRY.
This is very much an option. Pretty sure it’s the only option on the table, actually, if you want reflective equilibrium and still desire to have some kind of diversity in human values.
*Traditional Low-Tech Lifestyle Sphere of Influence, 2060 A.D.*
— Elder Alice, do you have a moment ?
— Always, Friend Bob. Is there a problem ?
— It’s about the news you shared from beyond the Boundary. In the England Sphere. Those poor little girls…
— What about them ?
— Can’t we help them ?
— We know the Rules. The Boundaries are Sacred. The People of the England Sphere do not want help. More precisely, they value their Sovereignty and Responsibility more than they want help in this situation. This is a Correct and Healthy preference, and the meta-preference to respect that preference is Correct and Healthy too — indeed the foundation of all Existence. We can’t help and we must learn not to want to.
— But… why ? How can not helping here be… correct ? Forget the People of the England Sphere. Surely those poor little girls want to be helped ?
— Remember when you broke your left foot two years ago ?
— Yes. Are you changing the subject ?
— I’m not. This suffering was avoidable. Of your own doing, by your own admission, remember ? "I should have paid more attention to the stability of that heavy hammer". There are Spheres where people are genetically engineered to dissociate the physical sensation of pain and the qualia of suffering. There are Spheres where people wear an earring¹ that direct their actions, who would have instructed you to stabilize that hammer first. There are Spheres where it is flatly illegal to put yourself or another human in a situation where there is such a danger of injury, like being close to a heavy hammer.
— Dangerous situation ? I was at work in my own workshop ! It was just a stupid mistake ! And you’re changing the subject.
— And in those Spheres your work is highly Illegal due to unacceptably high risks of injury. I’m not changing subjet. I’m saying that, seeing you suffer for your mistake, the people of those Spheres would react like you just did : "Such avoidable suffering ! We should help him ! By genetically engineering him. Or forcing him to accept that Earring. Or by forbidding him to work in that dangerous occupation." Do you want that earring ? Or be genetically re-engineered to not experience suffering ? Our Sphere allow unconditional emigration and those particular Spheres allow immigration if you desire so.
— Well, no, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. In that Sphere, I mean. I enjoy being here.
— So be happy that the people of those other Spheres are not allowed and unable to "help" you. Accept that you can’t help those little girls, the same way you couldn’t be "helped". The two situations are, in the grand scheme of things, exactly the same — some people want the Boundaries to be breached for helpful reasons, but this is not allowed, for good reasons.
— But why did your share that story then ? If we can’t help ? Just to… teach us that acceptance ? I would rather have not known at all.
— No. It was a lesson, yes, but not that lesson.
— What lesson ?
— The England Sphere is very similar to us. Much more technologically advanced, granted, without any Law preventing technological progress, but with unaugmented, unmodified humans, and with purely human governance. What happened there can happen here. It is what happen when the People fail at their responsibility of Maintaining their Community and Institutions. But that possibility of failure is what we accept when we decide to live in a Sphere where the Responsibility of Governance is left in our human hands. This is why I decided to let the news cross the Boundary, as is my prerogative. Let not forget the importance of that responsibility, just because we happen to live in good times.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121009031822/http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html
The thing is that most "based post-Christian vitalists" consider that white people are natural allies of other white people.
Since the kids being groomed are white, it suddenly becomes very based, post-Christian and vitalist to care about them.
If the kids being raped were brown, the gangs wouldn't matter, the kids would be loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed. Which is why these people would call you a cucked soy idiot if you do something like donating to Bedari.
These people are all for supporting people who advance civilization. It's just that they believe that advancing civilization is inherently tied to being white.
The idea that we all have the same sorta moral impulses seems 1) an empirical questions and 2) unbacked by empirical evidence. What makes you believe this broadly?
It seems like the people that still live in tribes in low income countries (say, certain parts of Africa) probably aren’t really egalitarian at all. While one can say that we have better access to the correct moral impulses (by whatever your chosen moral mechanism is), this seems hard to justify — at what point do the correct views about who to care about interact with our beliefs about them such that those people that don’t believe in egalitarianism are missing out.
To pump this intuition a little more, imagine you go to one of these African tribes and are attempting to convince them to start caring about their outgroup. I think you would have quite a hard time doing this - despite any argument that you give that relies on a sort of western intuition that people usually already accept and are trying to justify.
While you can argue that these people in the west actually don’t have these moral intuitions and are just confused — this seems much more implausible to me than saying that they actually don’t have it at all (especially given that we have cases where humans don’t know it all).
Not here to argue for the vitalists (which despite being in these circles, I'm still a bit fuzzy on what exactly that actually means)... I agree that's it's normal and good to care about suffering and injustice anywhere in the world, and I have no objections to anyone who wants to spend their money on malaria nets or whatever (although I think we have a duty to prioritize our own families, as a government has a duty to prioritize its citizens).
But I don't think you have to be a hardcore white nationalist to feel that the UK isn't just the same as any a random distant foreign country. Most of us in these spaces are Anglos. Certainly culturally if not ethnically/genetically, although I'm pretty sure most of us are the latter as well. As Americans, our political traditions are distinctly British as well. My 10 years in SE Asia really made me realize how much of a shared culture we Anglophones have, whether we're from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (I had friends from each of the above).
So not only is it totally normal (and I think perfectly fine) to more easily empathize with people who are similar to ourselves... Our cultures are very similar and afflicted by similar pathologies. If it were to happen in say Haiti, we still think it's tragedy, but we wouldn't be surprised as we all know it has long been and will probably continue to be a deeply dysfunctional society by our standards, so it doesn't have any implications for us.
OTOH, throughout the Angloshpere, the professional managerial class, those in academia, media, bureaucracy, the "elites" or however you want to say, IQW almost everyone who matters in terms of shaping public opinion and policy, are afflicted by the same mind virus. And to see undeniable evidence of it leading to what would otherwise be dismissed as the most outlandish, extreme (and of course racist) slippery slope argument, where hostile invaders are gang-raping native girls who are specifically targeted on the bases of their race, and to have it actually covered up by authorities because it counteracts the official narrative about which race is the victimizer race and which races are the victim races... When a similar dynamic recently resulted in Americas news media cheerleading the violent race riots they triggered with their distorted reporting on the basis of that same ideology... It's not surprising that many people find it not only deeply shocking but alarming. It contributes to the impression that our institutions are not merely corrupt and delusional, but in fact actively hostile to many of us.
There's a category difference between giving to charity and invading a country to fix its way of life. The former is altruistic, the latter is more of a "fair deal" where I make things better for people by making them my responsibility, but with that responsibility comes control (and spoils? at the discretion of the conqueror). Christians (and EAs?) never go for deals like that.
IF a Nietzschean were going to solve the UK's problems, conquering it would be the only righteous way.
The main reason they care isn’t because of generic impulse that suffering is bad. It’s because they believe that the same kind of reasoning that made it happen there(don’t look in to criminal cases of minorities because it fuels racism) could cause it to happen here.
I think the obvious intuition is that everyone hates it when a recognizable outgroup is oppressing a recognizable ingroup. When a fargroup is oppressing another fargroup, then our objections are usually, at best, far more intellectual than visceral.
The same applies to the left, by the way. I recall a few decades ago, Bernard Lewis observing that the US left reacted far, far more strongly to Franco jailing some leftists late in his regime (outgroup vs. ingroup) than to Assad the Elder blowing up Hama a few years later and massacring some tens of thousands of Sunni civilians (fargroup vs. fargroup).
For the right, elite antiracist leftists (outgroup) allying with third-world immigrants (outgroup) to facilitate the rape of native working-class English girls (ingroup) is something that hits viscerally, in a way that Hutus massacring Tutsis (fargroup vs. fargroup) does not.
Yep, no need to look for more and more convoluted slices of who deserves compassion and who doesn't. The ingroup victim/outgroup perpetrator is evident intuitively, verified in all cultures and explain differential outrage (and thus, care) in all cases I can think off. Sometimes the issue is to see who is ingroup and who is outgroup but not here, it's evident for all. Why Scott did not mention that is beyond me...
Yes, plays well to observations Scott has made before (hence our very using of these terms).
But part of the problem is no one ever frames their moral objections in these terms. In fact, we're heavily trained against it.
"This faraway issue is especially bothersome to me because the villains remind me of people I already hate and the victims remind me of myself, my friends, and/or my family!"
During the Ukraine invasion, I was talking with a friend who kept bringing up how unimaginable it was, how hard it hit, that this was happening in a *European* country in the 21st century. But for the life of me, I couldn't get him (an American in America, like me) to expand on the significance of "European" in his sentence; the best I could get was repeated mentions of Hitler and "World War 2. And this, in a private conversation between old friends.
You are right. The training is real against admitting it. But it does not make it less a factor. I guess for some (many) the training got so well integrated they even refuse to admit it to themselves. Which is not healthy: it's good to understand not to expose yourself socially, so in many situations (colleagues, acquaintances,...) lying is a good idea (or better yet, do not go there) but at least do not internalize the taboo, not knowing yourself is not a good place to be.
I've occasionally run into Ayn Rand-ish "based post-Christian vitalist" attitudes, but reading about them here tells me that there are enough of them they're actually worth dumping on.
Which reminds me that some sort of food fight has broken out on the far right, and it seems that there are would-be-supermen whining that The System has given all the good opportunities to women, minorities, and immigrants.
I think there are some deeper dives to be done about why people get so weirdly worked up about different forms of altruism. Like, yes I personally think there are best ways to do it, but other people think differently, and some don't invest in altruism at all. Beyond a civil conversation about what matters, what is there to gain by competing with people, and judging people, on the altruistic act they do want to perform? Why are people so aggressive about altruism?
Because if everybody was altruistic the world would be enormously different.
> It’s hard to get as angry about kids suffering from some unpronounceable disease, as about kids suffering because a scary-looking person rapes them
question for anyone who reads this: have you met anyone who doesn't emphatise with rape victims? how rare do you see this as?
Not in real life, no, at least not while they're actively not-empathizing against rape victims.
But I have seen the "She's a slut" justification in writing a lot. Both when the perpetrator attacked his victims in the streets (so he doesn't know her, but she was dressed in such and such ways), and when the perpetrator attacked his victims in the sheets (he knows her, they were supposed to be having some level of "fun" that doesn't include sex, he escalated against her will, drugs and/or alcohol may have been involved).
And of course, male rape victims are perhaps the single most populous category of un-empathized-with victims in the last 25 years ever, including by the vast majority of mainstream feminists and other men.
> how rare do you see this as?
It's important to realize how the vast majority of people never actually want to come right out and say, """I HATE $GOOD_THING, YOU'RE A LEFTIST CUCK FOR BELIEVING $GOOD_THING IS GOOD AND DESIRABLE""".
Pro-Genocide factions in Israel almost never say Peace is Bad, Genocide is Good, or Co-Existence is Cucked. They merely say that those things are the "unfortunate consequences" that their bad neighbors forced on them. If only they had better neighbors - they say wistfully as they call for another airstrike against an UNRWA school full of minors - they would have loved to make Peace and pursue Co-Existence. Alas, they don't.
**Some** of this is sincere, after all, most people are "good" (== not cartoonishly evil, almost never eviler than the least-resistance path would entail), and most evil is "boring" (== traceable to extremely widespread common-sense intuitions in all social animals, and inducible in most people given the right stimulus/brainwashing).
But some of this is also just good rhetoric, "Rape" and "Peace" are such ancient terms they're practically unattackable. Opposing Rape and wanting Peace is synonymous with goodness, and the reverse is synonymous with evil. Every non-terminally-online opponent to rape victims or peace advocates know that it's rhetorical suicide to come right out and say "Rape Is Good, Actually" or "Peace Is For Cucks". So they have to invent some other justification, some other terms, some other Corrective [1] to the Signal that they (claim to) to believe in. The Corrective to "Rape Is Bad" is "But some Sluts had it coming". The Corrective to "Genocide Is Bad" is "But some cultures/ethnicities deserve nothing else".
So in short, Rape Advocacy is very rare if you expect it will be as explicit and as blunt as Anti-Rape Advocacy, but very widespread if you keep your eyes open and see the various Correctives and Russel's Conjugate that people cock up.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ahPGSupYDZYHezvB/the-signal-and-the-corrective
I'm not really thinking about someone who argues in favor of rape (and agree with your analysis that it would be impossible to put forward in most contexts, and that some people may characteristically cover up their support of it by victim blaming).
I'm asking about people without the moral intuition at all, and must work their way through tedious system 2 reasoning to hit the obvious conclusion that it is bad.
> and must work their way through tedious system 2 reasoning to hit the obvious conclusion that it is bad
That wording implies that you believe in moral truths, which is... completely unsubstantiated. Why are you so confident that their suffering matters? You wouldn't be so confident if this was concerning the suffering of beasts.
oh I don't. I just figured the person I was replying to would prefer that frame
If these folks were genuinely concerned about the welfare of children, they'd start at home by campaigning for laws in the US to protect minors from gun crime. Guns remain the leading cause of death fir children and teens.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-of-death-for-children-and-teens#:~:text=There%20were%202%2C526%20gun%20deaths,homicide%20than%20their%20white%20counterparts.
> The report also illuminates the disproportionate impact of gun deaths among Black children and teens. In 2022, in the 1 to 17 age group, Black children and teens had a gun death rate 18 times higher than that of white children in the same age group.
There, you have your explanation of why nobody cares about this.
Yeah, but not because whites don't care about black kids. For a mix of practical and political reasons, nobody seems very interested in rounding up cheap concealable handguns in urban communities, and until they do that no dent will be made in gun deaths. A lot of energy is wasted by the gun control movement railing against expensive rifles that are used in only a few high profile shootings per year, because the people who own that kind of gun are rural and white and therefore not in the same political coalition of the gun control advocates. "I want to ban AR-15s" is politically palatable, "I want to ban the Raven Arms 9mm" ends in BLM protests. When Bloomberg had to run away from "stop and frisk" in the primary, it was over, nobody is going to do anything it.
I personally know some whites who don't care about black and/or brown kids, including some I am related to. What's changed in recent years outside of workplace contexts is that
(1) a non-trivial fraction of them will frankly say as much, and
(2) the presence of someone who they know will be outraged by that now _increases_ their willingness to say it.
You've built a weird straw man here. There are a lot of different types of people on this blog who argue against Singer's drowning child and MacAskill's barely happy future. There are also people in the wider world who want to stop mass rapes.
First, are these the same people? No, not always. Remember, the internet is a bunch of different people who you put into boxes. You can't ask for consistency from the boxes, because they are not actual people. Heck, you have a lot of British readers, and the American media often intertwines with the British media. Have you considered that they might be the ones driving this displeasure, against something that is actually in their backyard?
Second, are these people post-Christian vitalists? No, not always. I'll go out on a limb here and say I'm anti-Singer and pro-use-force-to-stop-rape. I'm post-Christian, I guess, but I'm not a vitalist, and I'm not based.
Third, and most important, are you sure people's anti-Singer position is so blunt, so axiomatic? Because... it's probably not. You seem to mistakenly believe people reach this position and universalize it. Instead, it is probably generally driven by deeper practical concerns that often apply, but not always.
Here, here's how a non-based non-vitalist *practical consequentialist* could object to Singer, MacAskill, and a lot of EA, but still say we should use force to stop the rapes:
In a universe of infinite surpluses, it would of course be good to save unbounded numbers of drowning children. In a universe where some permanent structural change could be made to stop having drowning children, it would of course be good to stop the thing that causes drowning children. In a universe where the happiness line where life is worth living is 0.0000001 units above neutral, it would be good to sacrifice right up to that line to save as many drowning children as possible.
This is not that universe. Practically, each drowning child is replaced by another drowning child, and many people who prioritize the drowning children over their own family and neighborhood end up miserably agonizing over dumb things like whether they can enjoy a hamburger, or have a child, and these people have fallen far below the happiness-makes-life-worth-living line, and usually don't know it. You may disagree, but I'm far from hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance here. It's a reasonable opinion.
However! That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to take *practical* far away actions. Collectively funding a faraway child to go to school, like we did in the 80s, seems to have a positive effect without wrecking anything *here*. It is measured. Building a new school in China seems to have a positive effect. It is nearly permanent.
In a healthy first world society, it is far easier to kick a bunch of rapists in the teeth, creating a semi-permanent chilling effect, than it would be to do sustained interventions in third world countries.
Where your straw men have made a mistake is in thinking that we have healthy first world society. Punishment is far harder than it should be. There isn't state capacity for the kind of punishment that creates a chilling effect.
Well, Westerners feel close to other Westerners. What's the deal?
I like this post, and it resonates a lot with me. But I can’t tell if it’s purely an argument against moral nihilism, or if it’s specifically an argument for people to “care about helping others” in some context. Because I think that for some people, the moral drive starts with other impulses, and “helping others” is more of an implicit drive/effect rather than the primary motivator.
For some people, I suspect this post is fairly apt. Plenty of people become resistant to the idea of charity/helping others/caring because they’ve been pressured again and again to give time/money/attention/care to people and causes that they do not care about (and may even consider harmful). Several people I know fit this category. Once you start talking about specific possibilities rather than generalized ideals, most of them have exceptions – for example, supporting veterans, or kids who have been raped. The argument is less about not caring at all, and more about who you actually care about.
But I think that in this case, people’s rage and drive to action is at least partially driven by other moral impulses, and not just the desire to help victims. E.g. the drive to *punish evildoers*. I think liberals (and EAs) tend to be dismissive about this, and basically can’t discuss it unless it’s in the context of downstream effects like determent, but for many people this is a strong moral impulse in its own right, and if you disagree with it you should probably acknowledge and address it head on.
Another impulse, which starts to get into fraught territory, is the desire to protect your society/culture. I suspect that for many of the people referenced in the post, anger about the Rotherham gangs is about protecting cultural values and social order that they care about (and that are perceived as shared between the US and UK) from threats. In this case, it is important that the threat is from perceived outsiders, and even more important that other members of society are ignoring and minimizing that threat because it is from those outsiders. In other cases, protecting your society/culture may be more about punishing in-group members *more harshly* when they commit crimes or violate norms.
Maybe you're trying to get at the idea that people can also use these moral impulses as starting points for charity or activism? These impulses certainly do reflect caring about things in the world, and in practice they do motivate people to take action frequently (sometimes in ways that I find extremely frustrating and difficult to relate to, but that's probably a separate issue). But the post seems to equivocate between “having moral impulses” and “wanting to help people”, and I guess I think that’s not always completely true. Sometimes the impulse is “destroy bad” rather than “help good”.
You hit the nail on the head. Compassion is only one of several motives people have for moral concern and action.
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.
Exasperated-but-remaining-calm Scott is, in terms of the actual writing, the best Scott.
I'm guessing that's because it's a match with some needed manner and skills in working with psychiatric patients? Anyway in this type of post you are very good at being cogent/clear/candid while stopping short (at least to my eye) of becoming a scold.
I think you really whiffed on this one, there's 2 incredibly obvious ways to reconcile it.
1. They don't actually care that much about the kids, but the scenario maps very well onto the US culture war. Islamic offenders, a government overly concerned with anti-Muslim backlash, a government cracking down on free speech, a government being soft on crime, giving lesser punishments to the abusers than they gave to patriots in a free speech protest. They care about those things, and only to the extent they can be a moral example of what ethnic pluralism and weak progressive prosecutors do to a society, a warning against that happening here.
(As an aside, this is the level of detachment on which I expect most people to experience a story like this, because it is not mentally healthy to think about it at the object level, what really happened. I prosecuted sexual abusers and had to hear young children talk about their abuse, for many years, so I had to be very close to it and cultivated an amazing sense of detachment to stay professional. I had to prep kids for testifying, and for example "penetration of the vagina" is an element of the crime, so I had to seriously sit there and tell a 7 year old kid in my office "make sure you say he penetrated your vagina with his penis" and I could not have done that if I was allowing myself to think about that as a thing that actually happened.)
2. Britain is on the fringe of the expanding circles of "I care about this" for an American, but it's much much closer than the Congo. Heritage, history, shared language, shared culture. I'm sipping my coffee out of a Beatles mug today listening to the SiriusXM weekly "British Invasion" 4 hour music program, the wife and I spent Sunday afternoon listening to Jane Eyre on audiobook. I'm in Middle America, have no British relatives and have only been to London once in my life, but it was easy to recall many intersections with British culture in a typical day. I think about British culture fondly numerous times every day, and about African cultural output rarely and with little affinity. (Not zero, I've recently been learning a Fela Kuti song, but in that regard I probably *am* an outlier among my peers.) If somebody wants to protect their community, maybe they value its culture, and British culture is interwoven with ours. That may put Britain within the outer circle of caring about them as people, and this story is partly about protecting that culture from a more primitive one.
"I don’t think you have to strain or lie or tie yourself into moral knots to justify being angry at child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. I think this is natural because there’s a part of you - the best part - which cares about suffering and injustice wherever in the world it happens, even in foreign countries, even to poor people who you’ll never meet."
This isn't some random event that happened in some far off country, completely disconnected from our lives. This is the result of mass immigration, which as an American I am very familiar with. I think part of the anger is because people are suffering from similar issues here.
> 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.
I think quite a large number, 20-50%, don't, really. There are a lot of people who have moral impulses the same way historical 'shame societies' had them: not any internal belief about morals, but a pseudomoral reaction to what others think about _them_. I'm a high-systematizing person of this type, and I found an intellectual argument about morality I found compelling. I've chosen to respond to this by surrounding myself with people who _do_ have strong moral feelings, so the shame/expectations point in the direction I intellectually endorse, but I expect this is very rare. Much more likely are people who care about the 'common-sense morality' they see modeled around them (in all its incoherence). This looks quite a lot like actually believing in it, except that they'll never extrapolate to caring about unusual scenarios unless pushed into doing so.
50% may seem very high, but this could be stable with even higher numbers. As long as they don't talk about it (And why would they? That would be morally suspect to admit to, and produce shame!), a community could be entirely 'reflectors' with no 'valuers', reflecting between themselves the last image of genuinely-felt morality they saw. And none would have to be the wiser; they'd all look like a perfectly cromulent 'guilt society' where everyone's moral feelings are fully internalized. Belief in God and divine morality is also a patch that keeps the distinction silent, as there is someone to mirror who cannot be argued with and is always watching; this could explain much of the backlash to atheism claiming it destroys morality - for some reflectors, it _would_.
That... makes a lot of sense, actually. I was just wondering why and how liberals managed to suppress so many people's malignant instincts for so long, and so effectively. ...It was never going to last. Entropy takes all.
Not necessarily. I think the share of humanity who are reflectors has been dropping, over historical time. Athens and Thebes were better than Mycenae, Rome was better than Athens and Alexander, the Han were better than the Shang. Renaissance cultures were better than Medieval ones, Liberalism better than the Renaissance. There's plenty of fluctuation and it doesn't uniformly improve, but on the whole it does. The child of valuers is usually a valuer and the the child of reflectors usually a reflector, but the error rate leans toward valuers. (And 'neithers', such as autistic people who build everything from parts as an intellectual exercise and do neither of the other things. Some of whom are responsible for the arguments most compelling to future valuers.)
A truly all-reflector society is only stable when unprecedented moral quandaries are rare. if two widely-separated reflector philosophers encounter similar new problems at close enough to the same time, and extrapolate different solutions, fault-lines and heresies form wherever the expanding waves of incompatible imitation overlap. Valuers can safely resolve such contradictions by re-deriving relative priorities from core principles.
Naturally, social media enabling antagonistically-constructed moral quandaries to spread faster than ever before has not been kind to that system. We've got top men working on the problem now, though - our very worst - and they're doing all they can to stress-test various underdeveloped spam filters, while making folks with genuine prosocial integrity easier to tell apart from unprincipled herd-followers. Hopefully it'll be sorted out soon.
Either rare or minor in impact or both. Small-impact moral quandaries can have bubbles of reflectors build up different views, as long as when they come into contact the conflict is somewhat lopsided and not vehement enough for acrimonious splits, and can instead drift toward the majority.
I do not think any society since the Bronze Age has actually been supermajority-reflector. But it isn't impossible, and moral drift could affect it much the same as an all-valuer society.
I also don't think such stress tests are actually all that good at distinguishing. A self-coherent reflector can be more prosocial and higher integrity than a great many valuers.
Excellent comment, hits the nail on the head.
“since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before.” This seems like nonsense, the police and other authorities let themselves down badly, but AFAIK this case was not neglected due to social media censorship. Like the commenter above says it was a huge story. Unless he has persuasive evidence to the contrary, I think this borders on dishonesty from Scott.
I can't help but noticing that any trace of contradiction disappears if one models their actual moral axioms as "brown people bad", with a helping of "owning the libs good" for why they're also actively against caring about the suffering of poor white people, unless said suffering is brown people's fault, in which case the former axiom takes precedence.
I realize such a view is not exactly politically correct around these here parts, but it parsimoniously explains the observed data.
Yeah, I think the root issue here is Scott is not modeling their premises accurately.
Yep.
“Based post-Christian Vitalists” is an entirely new label to my hearing but I instantly recognized that personality type. And it's been true for some years now that when a left-leaning close friend or relative is having feelings about a shameless inconsistency such as Scott points out here, I point out the consistencies: brown people bad/white people better, and/or producing liberal tears. "Based" has for me come to mean simply prioritizing those two objectives above all else.
There hasn't yet been an instance in which that formulation failed to predict whatever stance or meme was sparking the reaction. Went through one of those scenarios not long ago with my wife and her MAGA brother. Managed to head her off, barely, by asking, "So you're going to go ahead and make him even _happier_?"
Can someone define "based post-Christian vitalist?" Post-Christian makes me think of atheists, but atheists are not vitalists. Neo-pagans are generally vitalists, too. Not sure what group Scott is criticizing. Is this some sort of rationalist sect?
I can't speak for Scott, but I think he's referring to people who are against the Christian moral framework wherein weakness (very broadly defined) is virtuous and strength (very broadly defined) is reviled. Note that the Christian moral framework includes its contemporary secularized evolutions (eg, social justice and woke beliefs)
I had the same impression. But the whole vitalism thing is confusing. Not sure how that applies to Pakistani rape gangs. It's all very confusing. I gather "They" refers to the PCVs, though, whoever "They" are. Is Noel Smuk a PCV?
The relevance of the rape gangs is that the powers-that-be, according to the PCV critics referred to by Scott, allowed the rape gangs to continue their raping ways for many years in large part because the rape gangs were disproportionately minorities (belonging to the virtuous weak side of Christian moral framework) and the victims were disproportionately white (therefore belonging to the contemptible strong side of the Christian moral framework). The problem, according to PCVs, is that the dominant ideology of our society, the Christian moral framework, leads to self-destructive behaviors, such as turning a blind eye to South Asian rape gangs because not doing so would further public opposition to social justice
I have no idea who Noel Smuk is
One of the derogatory acronyms for Elon.
So, are the PCVs the good guys or the bad guys in Scott's polemic? Honestly, I really don't know who he's polemicking against. .-)
Bad guys. He's saying that they're hypocrites because they claim to value strength and self-interest above all while also caring about rape victims in other countries.
...Of course, he's completely missing the point. The victims are completely irrelevant. This is about protecting western society from third-world savages.
I think he's trying to say that the PCVs care more about the weak and vulnerable than they want to admit. As others have also pointed out, I think he's missed the mark. I suspect it's because he sympathizes with a lot of what the PCVs say and really wants to believe that their moral framework can be reconciled with that of altruists
This is one of those alternate reality things where conservatives act all shocked pikachu, "what! Child rape in jolly old England!" and their monocles fall into their tea,
and anyone who lives there tells me "Not only child rape in England, everybody knows it happens and that it has been happening for hundreds of years, to the point that the most common joke is the 'formative experience' boys have in public schools*. It's usually just rich white aristos doing the rapping, so it's ok."
Basically, if you are a big man in town you can rape down the hierarchy, wherever you are, and it's fine. Your people will rally around you to call the teen you rapped a slut whore who deserved it, what was she wearing anyway?
The real issue here is people in the lower class presuming they had the gas to do shit that is reserved for their betters. You need to be a Trump or a Musk or a Clinton or Jay Z whoever else you see smiling by diddy and Epstein to get away with that shit, not a dirty fucking prole.
IT happens in england, it happens in the US, but nobody gives a shit if it happens to the right people. Occasionally a story breaks, and Epstein "commits suicide", and then somehow not a single person suffers any consequences whatsoever. Oh well!
*for complex reasons that boil down to (I assume) the English wanting to fuck with me specifically, public schools are the private domain of the upper crust in Engerland
Good post, but I feel sad that you have enough contact with “Based post-Christian Vitalists” to inspire you to write it.
They seem like insufferable antisocial edgelords that only exist online.
And it’s hard to imagine you’re genuinely misconstruing their moral premises such that you’re accusing them of being insufficiently consistent in their concern and compassion for suffering victims. Of course they’re operating on different premises, incorporating different drivers of moral concern and action.
Fear, hatred and lust for vengeance can spur moral action just as well as compassion. Apparent inconsistency in concern disappears when their moral framework never accepted the premise of universality to begin with, but rather particularism determined by kin, social or ethnic in/out groupings.
We all know that you know this and you know that we know you know this. So is the point that many self proclaimed BPCV are really some more garden variety reactionary when put to a moral test? Undeniable.
It’s about defense of the Germ Line from collateral attack.
Foreigners can successfully dilute and weaken Based Vitalists over time by grooming away their eligible mates.
Based Vitalists should logically have no problem with internal benevolent grooming. That would be pro-Germ Line in their view.
Murder and rape are the only crimes without statutes of limitations in most U.S. states.
Offending the Germ Line is as bad as death in the eyes of society. It must be.
It’s how we weed out psychopathy, unwarranted aggression, and misplaced dominance (hubristic pride).
Rape isn't illegal because of its implications of heredity or progeny.
Yes, it is. Prove otherwise.
You can't prove a negative. Rape is illegal because of how icky it is. That level of violence and invasiveness repulses a civilized person. That's why it's illegal. Nothing to do with pregnancy, as pregnancy from rape is rare.
"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."
No they don't. They just care that this gives them an excuse to denounce brown people, Muslims, and immigrants (not necessarily in that order). That is why they are going on about grooming gangs specifically, not child sex abuse in general.
The backlash to the grooming scandal was less about grooming gangs qua grooming gangs, but more about how grooming gangs happened here*. Familial grooming gangs aren't new to places like Pakistan, but if they become commonplace in a culture, the culture has to become more restrictive and vigilant culture in order to adapt to them.
Low-crime, high-trust cultures (like contemporary England) are historically rare, and can only really exist under the assumption that they're not teeming with defectors. If grooming gangs become common, neighborhoods become less safe, passersby are less trustworthy, even cab drivers are unreliable? You can only have "free range kids" if the range is safe.
There's of course a racialized and religious angle to it (Muslims/kuffar as in-group/out-group), but the core clash with the grooming gangs is that they're defectors of a high-trust society. I feel similarly about the grooming gangs as I do about the stories in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, where 1950s Beat poets defected against high-trust social norms to rob random people, impregnate random women, etc., except that the grooming gangs were much more elaborate and gruesome, and we have the hindsight that could have been prevented by different immigration filters or restrictions.
* here = the diffuse grouping of WEIRD cultures, which tend to influence each other's policies, politics, and memes.
I followed the link to "Five Case Studies On Politicization" and, while I vaguely remembered the article, re-reading it made me realize something:
Holy shit, Slate Star Codex packed a punch!
I don't know exactly what changed, and I'm skeptical of any nostalgia-based narratives. I suspect it may be that Scott is now writing to his ingroup and trying to not offend the outgroup too much, rather than trying to draw lines in the sand. Or it might be something else entirely.
But man, (based on that N=1 sample,) it's amazing how much more aggressively the blog used to make its points.
Too many words and yet missed how most people think.
If there is gang activity in my state, I care a lot and even panic because there is a high probability of getting affected.
If there is gang activity in a neighbouring state, country or a culturally neighbouring country (Britain, in our case), I don't panic yet, but I still follow the situation because there is a non negligible probability of getting affected.
If there is gang activity in some distant (and culturally different) country, I feel sorry for them but I am not going to lose my sleep, because the probability it will affect me is much lower.
I feel like people spend too much time already arguing about whether Person X is *actually* a xenophobic nihilist or if he’s just doing it to own the libs.
Edit: Also, this was literally a headline story in British newspapers back in 2012, I hate to see Scott feeding into disinformation. It was seen as a major scandal and a Bad Thing at the time and there were lots of investigations. This has become an evergreen culture war topic and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about the grooming gangs again for the 2028 election.
I see the British tolerance for South Asian grooming gangs as more of a cautionary tale against the leftists trying to turn my community into castrated cuckholds who jail people for trying to stop brown people from raping their daughters. I don't particularly care about the victims there; I care about preventing the same cultural forces from doing the same thing here as they did in the UK. Talking about what happened in Brittanistan contributes to dissuading normies from leftism
I think my principle here is abhorrence regarding active violent/sexual acts against, and exploitation of, children.
So I should’ve been much more irked by Assad in Syria 10 years ago. And by what’s happening in Sudan right now.
"It’s hard to get as angry about kids suffering from some unpronounceable disease, as about kids suffering because a scary-looking person rapes them - even if the disease is horribly painful and disabling and terrifying, and realistically worse than the rape, and most people would pick the rape over the disease if they got a choice."
I'm glad you subsequently mentioned the distinction of suffering being due to human or a natural cause, as well as the charity.
I'll submit to you there's a very good reason people are more up-in-arms over rapists than diseases they're ignorant of: out of what we might call selfishness or group survival instinct, the former is likely to reoffend and hurt more people.
Indeed, a rapist who knows he'll get away with it - and has already gotten away with it repeatedly - is a mighty danger indeed. In terms of epidemiology, the R-nought number for such a person is very high. Even if I don't know how high it is, my gut instinct is it's higher than some disease I know nothing about. While I might even be wrong, this instinct is right often enough to be a useful rule to get passed down through the ages, even if indirectly.
I don't think outrage about rape gangs is as selfless as you do. England is about as close to America culturally as you're going to get, so I don't think we view what happens there the same way as what happens in poor African countries. If *England* can sweep rape gangs under the rug under some flimsy justification, then so can America, and next thing you know it's your niece being abducted. Such behavior cannot be tolerated in a liberal democracy, and it is decision-theoretic correct to be outraged about it and make sure such coruption remains taboo. It can still be rather self-interested outrage. If we hear about rape-gangs in Africa, we may think it sad, but we are not particualrly surprised or given to outrage, since we know that a lot of corrupt things go on over there, and it has little impact on us, and we wouldn't have any idea about what to do about it anyway.
>If _England_ can sweep rape gangs under the rug under some flimsy justification, then so can America, and next thing you know it's your niece being abducted. Such behavior cannot be tolerated in a liberal democracy, and it is decision-theoretic correct to be outraged about it and make sure such coruption remains taboo.
Which brings up the question: How is a supposedly liberal democracy managing to fail its citizens so spectacularly, and for so long (_multiple_ decades, if I understand correctly)?
And is the failure so severe that the _form_ of government no longer makes sense?
Would e.g. having a dictator for a year, if he or she managed to get the police to actually track down the rapists, and the judicial system to hang them, be better or worse?
Well, we're about to find out, aren't we?
Many Thanks! Umm... do you mean the USA (with Trump?) or UK? In the USA, I kind of don't expect Trump to e.g. pull an Andrew Jackson and flatly ignore a SCOTUS decision, so I mostly just seeing him as "pushing the envelope" as most POTUSs do. In the UK, is there some sort of constitutional crisis going on? I haven't seen reports of one, but I haven't been actively looking at UK politics.
In the US yes. If the SCOTUS values their lives, they are not going to rule against him in the first place.
Many Thanks!
>If the SCOTUS values their lives, they are not going to rule against him in the first place.
Hmm... I'm skeptical. Actually, I expect that SCOTUS probably will rule against him on birthright citizenship, and I really don't expect Trump to kill any justices as a result. We will see (albeit it might take on the order of a year...).
Can we mark your words on that, and remind you of them later? Because, for the record, I expect that SCOTUS will either rule in favor of birthright citizenship or do nothing because the appellate courts all ruled in favor of birthright citizenship, and that none of them will be killed because of it.
Sure, why not. I'm sure the SCOTUS is competent enough at reading the room to realize they should just follow orders (assuming they haven't also been offered positive incentives as well), but... it'll be interesting to see if there's any dissenters.
I should also point out that he only needs control of 5 justices. The other 4 are completely irrelevant.
>It’s fun to LARP as the Nietzschean superman, but ask Raskolnikov how far that gets you.
If you are going to keep citing Nietzsche, I beg of you to develop a more thorough understanding of his views. Raskolnikov is definitely *not* an example of a Nietzschean superman. Firstly, Nietzsche was quite clear that we current day humans could never be and would never be Ubermensch.
Secondly, Raskolnikov was written as a warning of what can happen in a world where "God is dead". Raskolnikov is full of resentment and nihilism, concepts Nietzsche rejected and spent hundreds of pages trying to convince his readers to reject. Nietzsche considered Dostoevsky to be the greatest psychologist he had ever read largely for identifying the dangers of our new world as described in Raskolnikov.
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both saw the societal changes coming to Europe and worried that nihilism would prevail. Dostoevsky's answer was for Europe to return to Christianity while Nietzsche compelled us to reassess all morals and over come them. They disagreed on the solution but were both very aligned against the nihilism, cynicism, resentment, and cruelty that Raskolnikov displays.
Just for fun, the Philosophize This! podcast is doing a series on Dostoevsky right now, talking about some of this.
It seems to me you agree with Scott. Both of you along with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche seem all to agree that young men cosplaying as Ubermenschen are inhabiting a delusion.
Interesting, I will checkout that podcast.
I disagree with Scott that Raskolnikov is a representation of a Nietzschean Ubermensch. Scott has consistently showed he doesn't have good grasp on Nietzsche's actual views and I thin that is to his detriment.
I read Scott as saying that cosplaying as a Nietzschian Ubermensch didn't work out for Raskolnikov because it was a delusion. Which is apparently what Dostoevsky was trying to say and Nietzsche agreed with. I don't hear Scott saying that Raskolnikov is a good representation, rather than he was a deluded man, which the plot of the book clearly lays out.
Dostoevsky didn't know Nietzsche at the time he wrote Crime and Punishment, so we're speaking about ideas and not terms here, yeah? Nietzsche didn't mention Ubermensch until 16 years after C & P was published, but we know Nietzsche admired D's ideas.
Ah I see, ok I can accept that interpretation. So I rescind my criticism on that point.
And yes very true that Dostoevsky and Nietzsche never met and Dostoevsky likely never read any of Nietzsche's writing. So yes just ideas not terms. I think Dostoevsky called the people who were the basis for Raskolnikov "exceptional men" which is not exactly Ubermensch, just in the same neighborhood.
This seems a little strange. I think the people in question talking about invading Britain to free them from gangs or whatever particulars of the suggestion are really actually meaning to communicate something like "This is a terrible thing to have let happen, a government that lets something like this happen is unfit to serve as sovereign, our society should heed this as a grave warning and thus my domestic political positions are best". They're not actually trying to argue that invading Britain would be a good idea.
I don't understand where the accusations of hypocrisy are coming from. People think children dying of malaria and grooming gangs are both bad. People think both of those things should be stopped by their respective countries. No one who's opposed to African aid thinks Americans should donate a potion of their income to help the victims of grooming gangs. Where's the contradiction?
Saying African malaria doesn't matter and we shouldn't waste resources on it isn't the same thing as saying it's good. All positive action in the world comes with a price tag, and many people (myself included) think that the value of helping Africa doesn't exceed the price. The value of stopping the progression of political correctness IS worth the price of ranting about grooming gangs on Twitter, at least in many people's estimation. People only do things that they think have positive value, so they rant about grooming gangs and don't send money to Africa. Where's the contradiction?
If there's a serial killer doctor who kills patients with insulin overdoses, it's very reasonable to be more upset about that doctor than about a painkiller that has a 0.001% risk of causing a heart attack, EVEN IF the painkiller results in a much higher number of actual deaths. It wouldn't make any sense to label people who were mad about the doctor as "hypocrites who don't care about people dying." More than one bad thing can exist in the world and it's perfectly reasonable to care more about one thing than another. Some things are worse than others, some things have simpler solutions, and some things can't be solved without unacceptable tradeoffs.
In your view, there is no contradiction. But I don't think it is the one Scott attacks. Your argument is pragmatic: you compare the price of the expected action to its expected value, and decide if it's worth it.
My understanding is that the people Scott are attacking are those that derided the very notion of charity on "moral" grounds (i.e. we shouldn't help Africa, it should pull itself by the bootstraps, if it can't then it deserves to rot), and then decide that, in fact, some American action ought to be taken to help the British girls victims of grooming gangs (what happened to "the communities pulling themselves by the bootstraps"?).
Of course, there are several possible defenses, as Scott elaborates: claim that you're a pragmatist, admit that you feel more kinship to British girls than to random African children, and so on.
The point is that if you decide that charity or helping victims is a "Christian cuck thing" (or whatever the expression is), this includes all attempts to help the victims in this case as well.
***
> The value of stopping the progression of political correctness IS worth the price of ranting about grooming gangs on Twitter, at least in many people's estimation.
I have a nitpick and a real objection here.
First, "in many people's estimation" is perhaps not as strong a reference as you would like. I'm sure I can find an equal amount of people believing various liberal-slanted (or mainstream assessments of the US by other countries) statements, both undeniable and vastly exaggerated claims. Or blood libels if I go for a different public.
My real objection is that calling what is happening a mere rant at groomer gangs (which are extremely bad, yes, and the failure of the authorities to act was appalling) is mistaken.
If this were the case, then maybe people could add some nuance. Or not have it grow to a mass at which the British government has to take notice (and notice that very few of the people involved in the echo chamber are British)...
Maybe they could act like they're not the ones bringing the issue to light. I don't know, preface this stuff with "yes, I'm aware this happened nine years ago, there has been a scandal, this has been investigated".
Blaming this on wokeness is a bit misleading (since the dynamics happened long before the Great Awokening, and "let the communities police themselves" is also a long-standing political approach).
Maybe the generalization to American political dynamics is plain wrong: the groomer gangs were mainly Pakistani, arrived by virtue of an immigration statute dating from the partition of India; Muslim immigration in the US is small (7% of immigrants, less than 10% of which is Pakistani), let alone from its southern border, where the alleged "border crisis" is happening. (Pakistanis and Central/Southern Americans may be brown-skinned and usually not US citizens, but there are quite a few differences otherwise).
Maybe they don't have to go along where this campaign’s actual goal seems to weaken Starmer's government (with statements floating around showing dubious regard for the facts of the case) and signal-boost some truly vile "political" figures as credible alternatives.
As a mirror example, I could get outraged at Trump's transparent frauds over decades, from Trump University to various accounts of him denying payment to contractors unless they came to court to fight for it. I'm sure I could get a lot of material: there's a reason why Biff Tannen in the "bad 1985" of "Back to the Future 2" is a Trump-expy and calling it "Trump Derangement Syndrome" would be a severe anachronism.
If, say, some liberal billionaire riled up a similar-sized shitstorm on Twitter for these facts (composed mostly of Europeans, and let's say conflating the true, the misleading, and the plainly false) aimed directly at destabilizing Trump, how would you react? Ask the Europeans to mind their business? Mock them for not having a life? Criticize them for coming up with old news as though they were fresh?
> If, say, some liberal billionaire riled up a similar-sized shitstorm on Twitter for these facts aimed directly at destabilizing Trump, how would you react?
...Why are you saying that like it's some kind of gotcha? Of course the right would be upset at evil people doing evil things. Do you still think there is any moral equivalence between right and left? This only ends with the complete destruction of one side.
I don’t think there is a moral equivalence between (edited: the leading politicians and programs) on today’s (edited: Republicans) and today’s (edited: Democrats).
(On reflection, the original sentence may have been a bit too broad. “Left” and “right” are meaningful notions outside the US as well and while the definitions overlap more than they used to, they’re still not quite universal.)
However:
1) quite a few people here believe that principles matter. I don’t remember whether Wanda is one of them, and I myself am not certain (I used to strongly believe so).
2) For someone genuinely committed as a matter of principle, it is useful to point out exactly what principles are at stake and where the opposition comes from. As such, framing things in the opposite direction can be helpful.
3) if I want to trash-talk and insult all American right-wingers, I can go talk with my (European) colleagues.
4) the right-wingers are convinced that the left spent the past decade or so high on its high supply of moral self-righteousness to the point of not caring about the consequences of their actions. (I think much the same about people voting for Trump on, say, trans rights). Put another way, a lot of right-wingers also think there is no question of moral equivalence between today’s right and today’s left, but their assessment goes in the opposite direction. If we want to go back to the days of civilization (to be precisely defined at a later date?), we need to reach across. Otherwise it’s all a race to the bottom. I’m not against pessimism on principle, but I do far too much of it, so it’s nice to try and snap out of it at times.
5) It is of course possible that the best strategy might not be to engage with the more literate (read: ideological and rationalizing, because that’s all we’re reduced to these days) folk here, but people who vote with their wallets. But I’m an ocean away, so they’re less convenient to reach out to.
Edited: 6) I have a terrible Internet addiction and I am struggling to effectively fight it. I have a sinking feeling this is Not The Way.
...What principles do you speak of? As far as the right is concerned, no principles are being broken. Why do you assume the collateral damage isn't intended? The only people being hurt are people that deserve to be hurt.
And for the record, people already voted with their wallets. They decided they want this. You support democracy and capitalism, right?
>The point is that if you decide that charity or helping victims is a "Christian cuck thing" (or whatever the expression is), this includes all attempts to help the victims in this case as well.
Yeah, this is kind of my central point: those people don't exist, at least not as far as I'm aware. Scott is attacking a non-existent strawman. The people ranting about grooming gangs aren't pro-charity. That's not the valence of that issue. People rant about grooming gangs because they hate progressivism and they view grooming gangs as useful fodder in that debate. That has absolutely zero to do with sending charity to Africa. The primary message wasn't (at least not that I ever heard) "we must send charity to those poor children," it was "we must stop insane progressive multiculturalism."
>First, "in many people's estimation" is perhaps not as strong a reference as you would like
I wasn't intending that to be an appeal to any kind of authority. It's just a version of "it could be argued."
>Blaming this on wokeness is a bit misleading (since the dynamics happened long before the Great Awokening, and "let the communities police themselves" is also a long-standing political approach).
Yeah I just disagree here. It's not woke proper (which I why I didn't use that word), but woke didn't come from nowhere and the grooming gangs definitely pattern-match to the insanely self-destructive multicultural ideology of pre-woke political correctness - particularly the reluctance to prosecute on the basis of perceived racism. That absolutely can be laid at the feet of progressivism. US conservatives, in my view, are completely correct to use it against US progressives. And even if they're not then that's just a straightforward error, not some global hypocrisy that calls into question the integrity of their worldview. Either way it has zero to do with charity, African or otherwise.
>If, say, some liberal billionaire riled up a similar-sized shitstorm on Twitter for these facts (composed mostly of Europeans, and let's say conflating the true, the misleading, and the plainly false) aimed directly at destabilizing Trump, how would you react?
The same way I react to US liberals who have been doing exactly that: agree that he's a bad person but thanks to progressive insanity (like the issue we're discussing) that he's currently the lesser of two evils. He might be the worse person (I mean, Kamala is almost certainly worse but that's neither here nor there) but he represents a better bundle of ideas, free speech being chief among them. I mean, people criticizing leaders is just politics. If you can't handle that then don't get involved.
"I don't understand where the accusations of hypocrisy are coming from. People think children dying of malaria and grooming gangs are both bad. People think both of those things should be stopped by their respective countries"
I think Scott is explicitly arguing against people who claim _not_ to think that children dying of malaria is bad; that's what makes them post-Christian vitalists as opposed to just people who have basically the same moral impulses but disagree on how to operationalize them. That's the whole point of observing that once you're arguing about the price and the value, you're basically doing moral philosophy--the right spreadsheet or RCT or whatever can in principle convince you that actually, malaria in Kenya actually _is_ a better value for money than stopping grooming gangs.
See for instance https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers
>I think Scott is explicitly arguing against people who claim _not_ to think that children dying of malaria is bad;
Maybe I'm wrong but I think Scott mischaracterizes those people. I don't think they think it's good, they just think it's not our problem and furthermore that it's actively harmful for our cultural values to assume it is. Like, if there was button that instantly solved Third World poverty for free then they would press it. They just don't want Third World problems to infect the First World moral calculus. Whether you agree with them or not, it's a perfectly reasonable and consistent position.
Caring about grooming gangs makes sense because it's much closer to home, culturally speaking. We share the same basic political and moral values and so defending Britain from moral rot or insane multiculturalism is really just expressing alarm about the potential for the same thing happening here. They're the canary in the coal mine from our perspective. Kenya definitely is not.
I'm not sure exactly who Scott is talking about, and there's definitely some throat-clearing in the post about how many such people there actually are, but I think there are definitely people who _talk_ as if that's their point of view, and I think part of what Scott is getting them to do is admit that they actually are operating on the same value system, because once you are on the same page then you can try have a productive argument about what the actual tradeoffs are.
But you can't do that while they keep asserting that they don't have to make positive arguments for why EA or whatever is less beneficial than whatever alternative because they're following a completely different set of values
Yeah maybe this is some ACX inside baseball stuff and Scott's arguing against some faction that I'm just not aware of. This was sort of a difficult post to read: I had a hard time understanding what his actual point was. If he's arguing against people who think you shouldn't care about the outgroup then I think he doesn't make sense: there are many ways in which Kenya is much more our outgroup than Britain is, so there's nothing hypocritical about caring more about Britain than Kenya. And if he's targeting folks who think we should invade Britain then he's definitely punching down because only fringe wingnuts say that. This still reads to me like he's hallucinating strawmen and then making bad arguments at them. But whatever, maybe it's over my head.
A bonfire of straw men.
Why is neither Scott nor anybody else engaging with objections to option 4 (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/88003042) and debunking those objections, instead of mentioning not-caring only to immediately take it off the table? The silence is deafening.
As an intuition-pump for not-caring, think of your point of view toward beings on your own outermost circle-of-caring-- insects, space aliens outside our Hubble volume, simulations, parallel universes... whatever occupies that circle for you. A not-carer (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87986661) or "psychopath" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87997576) or member of that 20-50% (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/88126238) is simply a person whose outermost circle has a much shorter radius than yours. I don't know of anything that would make such people nonexistent or so rare that they can be ignored in a post attempting to defend the concept of altruism. Do you? I see several possibilities:
1. We all have an innate impulse to care about other people. Some of us pretend that we do not. This is Scott's position.
2. Some of us have this innate impulse to care about others, and some do not but pretend to have that impulse. This is kind of what jisk is describing (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/88126238)
3. Almost none of us have this impulse, and everyone is faking it.
My money is not on number 3, though. Not with Scott's lifelong history of non-conformity. Why would he suddenly start doing this type of virtue-signalling now? Unless the really blatant strawmen and applause-lights are some kind of message that Scott's readership is meant to see through? But to what purpose?
No, I think Scott and other EAs are capable of tasting a flavour some of us cannot taste.
If that's the case, then Scott, and anybody else who cares about other people: I know it feels to you like everyone has this altruistic impulse buried deep inside. Like how it's hard for a straight person to imagine what it's like to be gay. But as rationalists and altruists you should really really be curious to find out if #2 is true.
Because if scenario #2 is true, you have the opportunity to vastly impact the world in a positive way by modelling the actual sociopath point of view well enough to find arguments in support of effective altruism that sociopaths will find convincing. How do you know it won't work if you've already assumed it can't?
If there is a potentially large population of supporters nobody else is trying to mobilize and you choose to ignore it, how is that effective or altruistic?
It may even be useful on some non-sociopaths. For example, someone whose circle of caring has the same area as yours but is shaped in a way that it doesn't overlap yours. For practical purposes, to you that person is a sociopath.
In other words, if you can convince a sociopath that it's strategic to be an effective altruist, then you can convince anybody else.
Perhaps this is one of the things you might find in a handbook for political change whenever someone finally writes one for you.
But... how do you even do that? You can't force people to care about things that they don't care about. You can try to lie that they will personally benefit in the long run, but nobody will even believe that in the first place. They know full well that those lives, their suffering, are completely meaningless. They aren't even useful as slaves anymore.
You could try to make EA appear high status, but everyone will fight against that because other charities help (or appear to help, anyways) causes that people do care about, while also building more status, because again, it's things people actually care about. The only thing EA would accomplish is making the benefits less relevant while increasing the costs of signalling.
EA simply has no path to relevancy. Their morality is aberrant, inhuman. They have no future.
This argument sounds great ... until you realize that the UK is not just a "far-off country" to the US, but very much the "motherland." So yes, for most Americans, what happens in the UK has to do with "us" in a way that what happens in an equally far-off, but more culturally distant country, does not.
Superb Piece, Scott - thank you - I think you nailed-it precisely!
I come from the left (grew up in a sixties commune) but have been horrified by excesses and shocking intellectual degeneration of the pop-leftist hordes over the years (not only is there no program anymore - they don't even recognize that as a legitimate aspiration - WTF is left except rationalization tribalism and complaint? - that is, three flavours of insular ignorant hypocrisy).
I still try to represent a sane left perspective (which means a tiny minority view - but actually always did - so why should I be surprised?) Refuse to concede the terriitory, despite the odds against.
BUT - I am voracious about reading outside my preferences now. I can say for sure that there is no sign of exciting and active thinking on the left (of the kind that might move people in great numbers), and I have a feeling I ended up reading a number of the same outsider voices as you, because even though they are wrong about several big and important intimate-scale things, they are actually reaching trying and daring on others, in an extremely useful way.
As best I can tell, the key imbalance of this group of paladin intellectuals (giving them credit for energy, which I do think they deserve) is they have way too many great books in their heads, and too little contact with lumpy/weird human reality.
I've seen you critique their misunderstanding of women, also (with fine precision) and there, I see the same problem. It comes down to "You wouldn't even want to say that, if you had ever been in love and been loved back."
I absolutely DO NOT share the scorn of some, insisting that these younger thinkers deserve their loneliness, because they refuse to conform - they had the misfortune to be born in a shockingly alienated and hostile moment - and then locked-down - injuries both (and both entirely outside their control). It is sad, not karma.
But the strangest thing about this, is that they are often at their intellectual best when critiquing the way the left gets caught inside dogma traps - doing logical operations on abstractions, and losing track of the underlying reality completely.
I can only wish wonky chaotic life for them (and lots of it!) and enchantment enough to help them leaven their own symbol obsessions with the yearnings they so clearly feel, leaving every trace of bitterness behind for gratitude.
(I mean gratitude in the most functional practical sense - no pollyanna needed)
Thank you sincerely for what you do. Reading for years, love your sense-seeking approach and wide-ranging interests - greatly appreciate the mental stimulation!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is an extremely generic comment that could pretend to be about almost any article here, and has nothing connecting it to this specific post.
Eh. This post seems to criticise an imaginary weak-man opponent. Scott, you've just constructed someone with contrary beliefs...
As a "based post-christian vitalist" the reason the rape of british girls matter but the rape of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram, or the Millions of Pakistani girls raped anually by the same men in their home country...
Is because they're white. Full stop.
They are the litteral kinsmen of America, the cousins in the mother country, and as our kinsmen we are correctly outraged at a root system level that precedes any modern or even ancient conception of "morality" as an abstraction.
And the more universalist, altruistic, anti-racist, rationalist, egalitarian, christian principles and ideas are summoned up to argue that that outrage is disproportionate or misplaced... The more of those are thrown out.
Troy was young when these instincts were ancient. These principles were antediluvian and heritages from times immemorial when Egypt was not yet a dream.
An argument written in a browser app is as likely to alter a BIOS kernel.
And I'm quite seen to see all these argument brought up now, because everytime some effective-altruist, or post-nuremberg human rights argument, or elighted egalitarian ideal, or even teaching of Jesus Christ is brought up against these instincts... They don't alter people's gut reaction, they aren't permitted to change the core-administrator protected systems, those patterns of thought just get force-stopped and hard locked from ever being able to run again, and a red hot instinct to "Force-stop" the person making those arguments flashes through peoples minds.
...Well damn, I think you've said everything that needs to be said concerning this topic.
I'm curious, though... do you think this state of affairs is good? If you could change humanity to stop being like this... would you?
> And the more universalist, altruistic, anti-racist, rationalist, egalitarian, christian principles and ideas are summoned up to argue that that outrage is disproportionate or misplaced...
Scott is very emphatically not saying that the outrage over the grooming gangs is disproportionate or misplaced, but rather, that the level of outrage you feel over the Nigerian girls is insufficient, and you should feel *equally* strongly about them.
Personally I would more cautiously say, to similar effects, "alright, you may be right that you're hardwired to feel more sympathy for other white people, but do you really feel *zero* sympathy for the Nigerian girls? *really*? people feel sympathy for baby seals, but human beings whose last common ancestor with your kin is a little further up the family tree are a bridge too far?". If you look within yourself and find you fundamentally only care 10% as much as about the white girls, sure, I'll believe that. But I don't see you lot acting 10% as outraged about the Nigerian girls; you don't act outraged *at all*. I think Scott is right that if you look within your heart you'll find the amount you care is not zero.
> people feel sympathy for baby seals
Yes, because they're cute. The same cannot be said for Nigerians.
Oh, be sensible. This is edgelordism of the worst kind, precisely the kind of LARPing-as-cartoon-villains-to-feel-big that Scott is reacting against. Google "Nigerian children" and the pictures that come up (aside from those of actively sick/starving kids) are self-evidently cute by conventional European standards of cuteness. Big soulful eyes, chubby cheeks, generally huggable proportions. Even being maximally charitable to the idea that they lack some specific quality that makes white kids scan to you as Kin Who Must Be Protected, no force on Earth can convince me that by some wicked quirk of genetics you are capable of caring about baby Yoda but not about a Nigerian baby.
...I don't find white children particularly cute either, but black skin is just aesthetically unpleasing. It looks like mud. Not to mention their facial structure...
I don't find frog-green skin particularly attractive, and yet: Baby Yoda. And if you want to talk facial structures, to be crude, most people also find baby monkeys cute.
The Edgelords are more right than the mainstream or the Moralists.
That's why you can guess the edgelord answer is some version of racism and "I do not value the lives of the unrelated foreigners"
If edgelordism was just random obscenity you wouldn't be able to guess what they'd say... They might say they wished the Grooming gangs had invited them or that white should set up their own grooming gangs, or that white girls just need to toughen up and start sex trafficking the pakistani men back... If just random obscenity and offense was the goal... Maybe the UK should have imported East Asians? Their members at smaller... The White girls might not have noticed as much.
You see you can't predict actual random obscenity and irreverent humor, the surprise is part of the obscenity.
But instead you can guess exactly what the "Edgelords" will say, because they aren't just suggesting random obscenities, they're saying exactly what any sane rational person in tune with their instincts and dismissive of 20 centuries of egalitarian abstractions meant to suppress those instincts would say.... And you know this because you have those instincts too, that's how you can guess, you're just supressing them with Universalist egalitarian liberal (and lineally Christian) copes and ideological repressions.
I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous argument. A certain set of people can be wrong in a consistent, predictable direction rather than random chaos, and that doesn't prove them right. I might as well say that egalitarian liberalism *has* to be correct because clearly *you* can anticipate the broad lines of *my* responses! Your point only makes sense as a refutation of the proposition "anomie is an edgelord", provided you define edgelords as people who spout "random obscenities". Which is not in fact how I was using the term.
More to the point, however, the specific point I was denouncing as insincere edgelording is the claim that Nigerian babies apparently wholly lack the quality of cuteness that (white) humans generally ascribe to everything from their own babies to puppies to cartoon characters, and even the occasional frog or goldfish. I think *that* demonstrates a shocking lack of being-in-tune-with-your-instincts. Finding a puppy cute, and being sad if it looks like it's hurting, are not culturally-learned reactions deriving from post-Christian brainwashing. They just aren't. Two-year-olds cry if they get it into their head that their teddy-bear — or indeed, other people's teddy-bears — is having a bad time.
I wasn't talking about philosophically "valuing foreigners' lives" anymore. I wasn't even talking about empathy. I was talking about *cuteness*. Now personally I also think most humans are biologically primed to feel sympathy for whatever they find cute, even a Volkswagen beetle or a bonzai tree. But never mind that. Maybe you deny that, and maybe you think finding Nigerian babies cute has no moral implications whatsoever. The point stands that it is ridiculous of anomie (and you) to pretend that no white man could innately find Nigerian children cute, and I feel very justified in my certainty that anomie said that out of a desire for shock value, not because he genuinely finds this girl https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-outdoor-close-up-portrait-cute-little-young-black-girl-smiling-african-people-image31226273 no cuter than a spider-crab. By all means say "yes, but there is a specific call-of-the-blood that makes me sympathize with children of my own race on a whole different level". It's at least plausible. But Nigerian toddlers are, nevertheless, cute. If someone insists they self-evidently aren't, then that person is either lying/trolling, or a wildly atypical human being who shouldn't be trying to tell the rest of us what our instincts are.
...Is it really so hard to imagine that humans just aren't that cute in the grand scheme of things?
I'm reminded of a blog post or something where someone noticed that, as a result of the anime industry ruthlessly optimizing for cuteness, they eventually converged on a facial structure that was incidentally identical to cats. ...Which carries the implication that cats have the cutest face imaginable to humans.
I'm sure there are some people who find these kids cute, but... they're just not that cute even compared to kids of other races. Especially when they're starving. And other animals are just significantly cuter, to the point where it makes up for the lack of kinship. And thus, those other causes are going to get prioritized, because cute things and things that are related to you are more lovable.
>If you look within yourself and find you fundamentally only care 10% as much as about the white girls, sure, I'll believe that.
A model I suggest is concern dropping off exponentially with the number of social links between oneself and the person to be concerned about. I had a comment about this earlier in the comments on this post:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/88250022
Even if I terminally valued the lives of Nigerian or people who aren't related to my for hundreds of generations... Which I'm not sure I actually do...
I don't care about the suffering of guerillas and mice really and they're 10s or
100s of thousands of generations removed, I do care about Europeans who are less than a dozen generations removed... and its not really clear a Nigerian girl or Indian untouchable at upper hundreds to thousands of generations removed are closer in kind to the white Europeans than the Gorillas from a self interested moral perspective...
But beyond that, they're ethnic rivals. They're in the uncanny valley! They're far enough to not be kin, but close enough to want to raid you, kill your men, and rape your women because they're close enough that they can try to breed with you.
THEY'RE WORSE than cute mammals you might act caring about and have fun with until you wring their necks and eat them. A goat or pig or cow is basically always a positive sum value add... an ethnic enemy is always a threat.
To the extent I might care about the Nigerians or Pakistanis such that I allow their lives have positive value (which is almost entirely contingent on them being nowhere near me or minee)... Any honest assessment of what I actually believe and how I actually behave tells me that I do not value them less than my white kinsmen by a percentage, but by orders of Magnitudes. Fundamentally the TV reflects this accurately that a single homicide of a white person is as outrageous to me as 100 Indians dead in some industrial accident in Punjab.
Indeed 1000 Subcontinentals are worth less to me than one cute animal in my inner or even outer circle of concern... If I'm not being guilted or tying myself into abstract moral knots, but going purely off what I'd LIKE, there's not a chance in hell I'd willingly trade the live of my Neighbors dog who's obnoxious but friendly to me once a month for even 1000 permanently unemployed Nigerian slum-dwellers I've never met.
The signifigance of Rotherham, the migrant rape gangs, and all the crimes by illegals... and the Lesson RW post-christian vitalists take from this is that those instincts were correct and in fact more moral than the christian, enlightenment, and egalitarian abstractions that said you should try to value the poor brown foreigner more and feel guilty that you love your dog or a random white child's happy christmas 3 towns over more than the lives of 100 brown foriegners in countries you'd pay not to visit.
.
As a "Based RW Vitalist" Effective Altruism was the INVERSE of what actual morality is. You SHOULD value that the white neighbor 3 blocks over from you recovers from his broken leg and gets back to work, and donate money to his mere comfort... EVEN when you could spend the same amount of money on bug netting that'd save 10 black children.
Those children are utility monsters and ethnic enemies who will never repay it in a million years, whereas your white neighbor will actually remember your kindness and contribute to your community even if it's just by doing honest work and raising kids who will play with and someday marry the kids of your extended family.
> and raising kids who will play with and someday marry the kids of your extended family
...Or they will grow up to see you as an irredeemable monster, and seek to put an end to you and your ideology.
It's not just about genetics, is it? There's more factors at play here. Gender and morality, specifically.
Is it so hard to defend the view that we shouldn't care about child rape abroad, or at least that we should shut up about it? Foreigners denouncing the UK for not doing more about alleged grooming gangs might cause defensiveness in the authorities and prevent a good-faith inquiry. Also, in recent history public outrage about alleged misdeeds by foreign governments has turned out to have been misguided and to have only made things worse. Besides, foreign governments it would behoove us to be on friendly terms with are currently doing things much worse than failing to sufficiently investigate police coverups of child-rape conspiracies, so it's hypocritical to make a big deal of the failure to sufficiently investigate police coverups of child-rape conspiracies in the UK. And Americans denouncing the UK's handling of this issue probably haven't sufficiently researched the reasons cited for covering up the rapes in the first place: preventing the raising of racial tension by exposing rape gangs composed entirely or almost entirely of Pakistanis. Maybe prosecuting these rapes at the time really would have led to civil unrest, even race warfare, that would have destabilized the UK. In my lifetime the UK has seen ethnic tensions that have devolved into civil war, so it's not so crazy to fear it might happen again.
>preventing the raising of racial tension
if this was the goal it massively backfired
and predictably, too; both in the sense that coverups inevitably fall apart and that differential treatment in regard to crime means one group of people learn they can get away with the crime in question
This amounts to "It doesn't make sense to me so it's a delusion". Which *is* often a reasonable approach because it saves time debating perpetual motion machines or postmodernism etc. However, as I said, Scott has earned the benefit of a doubt. If there is some game-theoretic reason I haven't thought of for caring about remote strangers, then I definitely want to understand it.
Good general point, bad example. All the evidence actually indicates the official neglect of this issue was based on the class of the girls, not the ethnicity of the men. Also, rape whistles would be quite irrelevant since this affair was not about rape but rather "grooming," which is to say, behaviors that would have simply been called seduction if the girls had been a few years older.
I largely agree with you here. The only thing I would mention is the issue of class meaning being poor. It’s pimping and all related conduct. I don’t know the place, but I am assuming it is one of those rather poor Midland/ Northland, English towns.
In 1944, just after the allies had been victorious in Italy, it was estimated that 50% of the women in Naples engaged in prostitution. Hard times…
>All the evidence actually indicates the official neglect of this issue was based on the class of the girls, not the ethnicity of the men.
Actually there's plenty of evidence that the authorities covered up the issue because of the perpetrators' ethnicity; see here for some examples: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover-up-oldham-telford-rotherham/
The people who literally follow the "non option" #4 probably couldn't create a society with much slack. But what about the more common type of person who has circles of caring, just narrow ones? One might expect such a person to do things with positive externalities for their community. For example volunteering to coach their child's soccer team thus benefiting everyone's children. Or donating money to research into a genetic disease they themselves have. Could a stable, pleasant society be created by selfish people's overlapped circles of caring? Might that society be more honest and transparent than ours because there would be no pretense of pure altruism
Ughhhhhh, don’t let the bros steal vitalism! Vitalism is generally linked to a “debunked” (read poorly understood, can’t make money off it in a clearly marketable and controllable way) health movement. The basic principles of vitalism are the basic principles of every traditional medicine system that i’ve ever learned and while i certainly don’t know even close everything, i have been studying herbal medicine for 20 years. The basic principles of vitalism is that the body would prefer to achieve homeostasis and it will always do its best to achieve that and we can help it along by either nourishing it or balancing it where it’s out of balance. It was a response to a lot of the cathartic and rather poisonous medicines and bloodlettings etc that were in vogue at the time. Vitalism is not about bros being muscley. I’m tired of them getting to have every good thing so please rescind your offer of giving them jurisdiction over vitalism, thank you!
Interestingly when I read the word “vitalism” I started thinking about Bergson’s élan vital or similar theories and wondering how the hell that could be related to grooming gangs. So I guess the word is quite overloaded with meaning.
…I think part of my push back is also that vitalism in herbal medicine/holistic health spheres is actively practiced today and has a long (hundreds of years) history. There are some quite rigorous practitioners that work within this framework, contemporary medical philosophy is actively being produced to expand the principles and it is the absolute opposite of this concept that’s being produced here. It’s literally a framework for nurturing wellness in the suffering and is often the work that people finally find after many years of being run around by the establishment medical complex that facilitates journeys back towards vitality from true and deep physical malaise. To note, i am not throwing the larger medical infrastructure out with the bath water, i’m just noting that these systems exist, are useful in contemporary society, are alive and evolving in contemporary society and utilizing this idea of vitalism to describe violent gangs of groomers will muddy waters that could lead to increased suffering of some of the more vulnerable members of society at large.
What i mean by that is, if people start to conflate vitalism with white supremicist christian nationalism, they may be likely to turn away in fear from a health paradigm that could support their well being, and that would be true, deep and lasting harm. So i am asking the author of this article to amend their language lest they be a participant in creating said harm. Please. You have a lot of power with this platform and the pen can cut more deeply, more broadly and more lastingly than the sword.
This is a very serious fight over what a word will mean. I don’t mean to trivialize it either. Who does not want to be vital? Capturing that idea as part of your political philosophy is very good branding.
I do not have moral impulses. I do not think this is a bit: when people describe things like 'moral impulses', I am not sure what they speak of. I have autism which might be related to this.
I feel empathy and sympathy. When I see someone suffering, I feel some amount of 'care' for them, which is usually mediated by the closeness of the relationship and how much I can identify with their suffering. I generally feel bad when I 'do harm' to people and positive when I help, but this is also mediated by the closeness of the relationship and how much I can identify with the suffering. I don't view these things as morals. Maybe if you were to make a collective list of all of my psychological impulses, and create a list including only the 'good' ones, you could call that list 'morals', but I would rather just call them all 'psychological impulses'.
I don't really care about kids in Britain. I don't not care, but I don't care very much. I could maybe quantify it as a 0.0000000000001 on a 100 point scale. That value is not a 0, so I do think that the British government should take action if children are being groomed, but the impact on my well-being will be very minimal if they don't. I feel like part of this type of discussion involves social pressure: nobody wants to be the guy who says 'I do not have psychological moral impulses'. People will trust you less. However, I have autism, so I am willing to say it.
(With that being said, I do respect EA types for being consistent about their principles. Most people aren't, as this article points out).
But in a more general sense, I feel like a lot of people in favor of objective morality can be manipulative. You have to care about having a 'good soul'! You have to care about people suffering in poor countries if the stories are tragic enough! You say there is no objective evil, but doesn't *The Rwandan Genocide* bother you? It's a social shame tactic. These things barely bother me at all. The value isn't precisely zero, but it's close enough to where you are practically round down. I am sympathetic to morality as a coordination strategy - a world that is 'better' in the ways that trigger my emotional responses is likely correlated to a world that does that for you - but I dislike shame that is meant to forcibly implant a policeman in my head.
Which of the numbered choices is "care about things that, when I care about them, motivate me to wrath and violence; don't care about things that, if I cared about them, would motivate me to kindness and charity"? That seems like a pretty good predictive model, though you might need to slice it a bit more (only violence against liberals/leftists/minorities?)
I think your list of options misses the most common, most stereotypically human position on the matter: Charity begins at home. Rape, child abuse, starvation, these are all bad things and when the subject turns to those topics we should say that they are bad and if there are specific examples of these things happening because of someone else's villainy or negligence we should maybe call them out on that, but our moral obligation is to our family, our friends, our immediate neighbors. and so on until you get to total strangers separated by a vast cultural and geographic gulf at the very bottom of that list.
Arguably this is a subset of your case 5 - admit that you are maybe a good person who wants to help your family, friends, and neighbors. It's a different sort of goodness than the person who wants to donate everything to feed starving Ethiopians because their need is greatest. But good consequentialists and utilitarians are so rare as to be a rounding error in the world's charity budget; it's the more parochial sorts of goodness that does most of the heavy lifting.
By this standard of goodness, Americans shouldn't be going all in on helping starving Africans because other Africans can handle most of that and there's *nobody* but us who's going to do anything about the suffering of Americans. Sure, no harm in hedging your bets with a few bednets or whatever if it seems like a particularly high-leverage intervention, but don't let it get in the way of helping your own people.
By this standard of goodness, Amercans *also* shouldn't be going all in on Rotherham or the feared Rotherham 2.0, and this time there isn't even the option of hedging your bets with a cheap high-leverage intervention because there aren't any(*); Britain is a rich country but it is one that (at least ten years ago) actively and effectively blocked attempts to solve the problem.
By this standard of goodness, we should still call out the starving Africans and the sexually abused Britons as victims of a Very Bad Thing if the discussion of the day turns in that direction, and maybe call out the people who let it happen when they were supposed to stop it as villains, but not as a call to decisive action.
And yes, if there are people who are calling for a literal invasion of the United Kingdom to prevent Rotherham 2.0, and those are the same exact people who are saying we shouldn't be helping the starving African kids, then there's probably a legit charge of hypocrisy there. But, A: mitigated by the fact that they may legitimately feel working-class British girls are at least within the outer circles of their generically Red Tribe Anglospheric ingroup. And, B: how many of those people are there, really, and are they really worth our attention?
* OK, cheap handguns for the underclass white girls of Rotherham would be a stereotypically American high-leverage intervention. But probably ill-advised.
I think the difference between kids being abused by grooming gangs and malaria or whatever is that as a white American British kids are actually much closer to me culturally and ethnically than kids from the 3rd world.
The grooming gang phenomenon is basically an attack by a different group (muslim immigrants) on a group I am part of (white westerners). While the same exact thing may not be happening in America, related things do happen here, and are handled badly by the state for the same reasons as the British government handles the grooming gangs badly.
I see it as part of a larger struggle which directly affects me and people I care about, and the ultimate outcome of the bigger picture grooming gangs thing in Britain is linked to the future of white westerners in general.
In the United States, this whole issue is handled quite quietly by the large number of Chinese and Korean women who shall we say cover the same territory?
I think a far simpler explanation is that some people are more important/better than others. So if Muslim darker-than-white immigrants rape white girls with impunity, this is outrageous, and if they do it to other Muslim darker-than-white girls back in Pakistan, this is business as usual, and if white rich people visit some hellhole to rape non-white girls... Well, here it breaks down because my model of this kind of person still might get a little angry at them.
I'm not saying it has to be about racism, if it was a Chechen rape gang instead of a Pakistani rape gang they might care the same amount even though Chechens are literally Caucasian. I'm not saying it's about religion, it could be similar with Armenian or Polish perpetrators. I'm not saying it's about being poor or uneducated or insignificant, a lot of people are angry at prince Andrew or whoever else was friends with Epstein. It's just that having some distance between you and the other people helps dehumanize them, and the more dimensions you can choose from, the easier. Especially but not necessarily if they are lower than you along some metric.
So the process is "hear about terrible things happening to some people" -> "see if the problem has easy solutions" -> (nope, some things help but it's a slow and gradual process at best, except for some easy cases like "stop being idiots who care about not appearing to be racist more than about regular child rape") -> "resolve the resulting horror by coming up with a way to not care about this so much". And with Pakistani men raping children in Pakistan it's easy to do, but a number of the ways it works just fine break down when Pakistani men arrive to Britain and rape British white non-Muslim girls. And it could be prevented easily, but doesn't, so the defense "at least this couldn't happen where I live" fails too.
Also, yeah, they could absolutely be racists, just being shy of admitting it because it seems to have become the ultimate evil in big parts of American cultural landscape. Not all people fighting wokeism (which does seem to be the principal reason behind the British authorities' fuck-ups here, whether they were themselves woke or not?) have the same reasons.
Even if you were equally outraged about, say, young boys being regularly sodomized in Afghanistan (which absolutely was and is a huge problem), we've already run the social experiment of trying to impose top-down cultural change in Afghanistan.
Admittedly, part of the problem in Iraq or Afghanistan was that liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms in a country where 80% of the population think homosexuals should be stoned to death. A secular dictator like the Shah of Iran or even Saddam Hussein was in some sense the more 'liberal' option there, but that just introduces a different set of contradictions.
Wasn't part of the problem there also the response to outrage by the soldiers etc. who encountered this being "no, sorry, we can't do anything to offend the warlords that we need to keep on side, besides bacha bazi is a cultural tradition"?
"In 2015, The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan were instructed by their commanders to ignore child sexual abuse being carried out by Afghan security forces, except "when rape is being used as a weapon of war". American soldiers have been instructed not to intervene—in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records. But the U.S. soldiers have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the U.S. military was arming them against the Taliban and placing them as the police commanders of villages—and doing little when they began abusing children. Military lawyer Annie Barry Bruton commented that "both the Pentagon and the White House declined to take responsibility for inaction on the part of the U.S. government and instead shifted the blame to the Afghan government".
It was a very inconsistent approach to nation-building or however you want to call it. It seems the most successful attempt was by the Taliban, but once they were ousted it started up again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi
"In December 2010, a leaked diplomatic cable revealed that foreign contractors hired by the American military contractor DynCorp had spent money on bacha bazi in northern Afghanistan. Afghan Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar requested that the U.S. military assume control over DynCorp training centres in response, but the U.S. embassy claimed that this was not "legally possible under the DynCorp contract".
That kind of "oh sorry the contract says we can't interfere" weaselling out of any responsibility makes me very sympathetic to the "kill them all, let God sort them out" approach. Or at least "beat the living daylights out of the son of a bitch":
"In 2011, an Afghan mother in Kunduz Province reported that her 12-year-old son had been chained to a bed and raped for two weeks by an Afghan Local Police (ALP) commander named Abdul Rahman. When confronted, Rahman laughed and confessed. He was subsequently severely beaten by two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and thrown off the base. The soldiers were involuntarily separated from the military, but later reinstated after a lengthy legal case. As a direct result of this incident, legislation was created called the "Mandating America's Responsibility to Limit Abuse, Negligence and Depravity", or "Martland Act" named after Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland."
Yes, it was a particularly frustrating tangle of moral contradictions. If the Taliban were more successful at stamping out the practice that's certainly an argument in favour of leaving the Taliban in charge.
There are thousands of horrible things happening all around the world, and unless I want to spend 24/7 being outraged, I need to prioritize.
I think it makes sense to prioritize things that I can do something about. Not because they are somehow absolutely more important from God's perspective or something, but simply because the point of being outraged is to actually do something about it, so I better spend that emotion on things where I have some leverage.
For example, if something happens in my country, I can yell at my politicians, or something. If exactly the same thing happens in a foreign country, and I don't even speak their language, what am I supposed to do? Start google translator, and send them a message: "hey, some guy from a far away country you have no reason to care about, thinks that you suck"? What exactly is that going to achieve?
Pakistani men being Pakistani men in Pakistan... that sucks, but I don't know what to do about that, other than invading Pakistan, which would be problematic for various reasons. Pakistani men being Pakistani men in a civilized country... who knows, maybe putting some pressure on the police and on the politicians might change something. It is not guaranteed, but it's worth trying.
This. Admittedly, international pressure does work on foreign countries to some extent as well, but there are things you have more and less control over in the world.
"The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization."
You seem to be conflating two separate positions - prioritizing your family, social circle etc and prioritizing "the strong". I guess you are alluding to people who believe both things, but those are separate things that really don't have much in common.
As for the possible solutions, it's ok to be no more than "a bundle of incoherent preferences". You don't have to have a big theory of your own moral behavior. Your actions don't need to be justified from a small number of principles.
It's ok for you to fund mosquito nets, really. If this is what rocks your boat, do it. Just don't assume that this necessarily makes you a better person than those who don't care about that particular thing.
If you are a strong/good/smart/beautiful/whatever person, then your family and friends and relatives and offspring and cultural peers and so on are part of the extended genetic and memetic background which gave rise to your virtues, and you should seek to preserve and propagate them. It increases the probability of other strong/good/etc. people being generated in future.
This is true even from the perspective of long-term effective altruism. Only the able can provide, so if you want to provide for the vulnerable, you must cultivate strength. It's analogous to the notion of instrumental convergence as it comes up in AI alignment discussions.
The relative weighting you should assign to your bloodline vs. faith vs. economy vs. whatever is an empirical question, of course, but I think we have reasonable evidence by now that the social-conservative strategies in this area evolved for a reason.
It makes sense to devote the most energy to things within your sphere of influence. I help a few of the homeless guys who live around me a lot more than I help the starving child 10,000 miles away from me. It’s not really an issue of who I might care about more, it’s an issue of my limitations. Maybe that’s the hard thing about it right? Defining and accepting limitations. I really think focusing on the things that are close to you and in front of you are very important. But if your reach in the world comfortably exceeds those things then by all means go for it.
Wouldn't it be more cost effective to move those homeless people out of your sphere of influence?
I don’t know. It might well be, depending on what one calculates as costs. Sphere of influence is a very flexible construct. That there are more things within our sphere of influence than we know is the challenge isn’t it? But it’s always good to start with the most concrete manifestation at hand. My wife gives to an extraordinary number of charities, and I kind of like developing relationships with the street people in my neighborhood. My name is Michael, and these two guys constantly hail her as “Mrs. Michael.” so I feel like the pope; it’s very hard to calculate the cost of that. One of them actually gave me five dollars as a Christmas present. I am not kidding. The finances of it are absurd, I realize, but the emotional value of that five dollar bill is very powerful.
I see. Well, if it's making you happy, that's more important than anything else. It's good to see people appreciate the true value of charity.
Hmm
I will say that if I had a better intervention for these two fellas, I would certainly look into it, but having lived in New York City for as long as I have, I don’t really think there is one.
The 'sphere of influence' consideration is also relevant, sure, and will in any case tend to overlap with spheres of cultural and genetic proximity.
But it's less true in the context of a modern world with rapid, low-cost transport and communications technology (it's not hard to send money to charities working in the global south, for example, and there's a utilitarian argument to be made that money will go a lot further in low-income countries.) There's no long-term utilitarian argument for ignoring the slow demographic extinction of the peoples that generate most of the money/tech/philanthropy in the first place, though.
Absolutely. See my other comment in this thread.
This is might be the best SSC/ACX post in a decade. Further, it's so much of a kind with so many of the old greats, that it suggests to me that it's not so much that SSC/ACX lost its edge, but that what needed to be said back in 2013-2015 or so got said, and then times changed, and the exact conditions to which those incredible essays were responding were replaced by other conditions. But now we're in really quite a similar discursive space to 2013, in the midst of a rapid "vibe shift" in social mores and a changing of the guard in cultural high places, and it is time once again for SSC/ACX to cast its skeptical eye over the shifting landscape and comment on the wardrobe of this new Emperor, just as it did the last. Sorry I don't know where this bizzare register is coming from, but I hope the point is clear.
Yes, the point is clear. Namely, this is the second extremely generic comment made here in this thread. I'd assume ChatGPT if it wasn't for the typos/errors.
I actually wasn't making a point about the nature of my own comment; that would be intensely meta.
I think that this misses the mark. Part of the reason that people care more about the grooming gangs is because many people think the dynamics that lead to them can reasonably be assumed to exist in America. “It can happen here” is true of the grooming gangs, but not these other issues that people don’t care about. People care more about things that think might threaten them. I don’t see this as falling into any of the 1-5 points at the end.
I care about Rotherham because it was caused by an organized operation to pour radioactive waste into our memespace.
As a non-British member of Western civilization, I notice that my memespace links up very closely with the British memespace. Moreover, I notice that the same people are pouring the same waste into my memespace. I depend on that memespace because it generates a high-trust society which enables humans to flourish.
I am angry at the people who are pouring the radioactive waste, and I want them punished, not as revenge for what they did to British girls, but because I am genuinely afraid of what the underlying ideology will do to the fabric of our society. This is about self defense more than ethics.
I do in fact also care alot about humans who die in developing countries, and I would like to do something about that too. But that feels much less personal. I can totally imagine a coherent world view under which someone shares my opinion except for the part about caring about the non-Western world, and I don't think they should necessarily be described as racist
Why is not caring about other people a real option? It certainly seems to be an option many people take. In my own experience, I found it much easier to do than I expected.
This entire post is written against an imaginary horde of pure Randians, which I thought existed only in the minds of far leftists, and maybe also in the SF Bay area.
I have a hard time imagining a doctrinaire Randian calling on the United States to invade England, or any other country, to stop that country's rape gangs from raping that country's citizens. I'd expect them to pretty much universally say "Not my problem, go away now".
Which is the point of this entire post. s/"based-post-Christian-vitalist"/"Randian", and Scott is pointing out that there are a bunch of people who have been claiming to be doctrinaire Randians and are now calling for a very non-Randian policy and what's up with that?
An important element that I think the essay misses:
Outrage over the grooming scandal largely results from the belief that it is, in part, a result of wokeness. If I believe that wokeness operates in my society too, I might feel outraged because I fear that such things could happen here as well. So, (hypothetically) even if I don’t care about British girls, I could still be outraged by it.
Similarly, I might care much more about a terrible disease in a faraway land if I believed it could spread here and affect those around me—or myself.
I can explain why Based Post-Christian Vitalists care about Pakistanis raping white girls in the UK but not about domestic violence in Pakistan in 14 Words.
Banned for this comment.
I've read hundreds of books by Brits. They seem pretty related to me.
Dishonest
I’m sorry but this is a weird strawman argument to make that lends credence to everything BAP says about logocentrism. Not sure where to start - with that the people making these arguments are overwhelmingly obviously starting from a point of racial solidarity, or that they largely don’t subscribe to the same rules-and-principals-first thinking that you seem to. In any case this isn’t an argument designed at all to appeal to their sensibilities on their terms but to reiterate the principles of the author, in other words virtue signaling. Or at best this is a failure of literacy in the subject matter.
...You can't be this naive though, right?
The only reason anyone is talking about this is because they want to use it as a cudgel against Muslims. That's the only context this ever comes up in and the only people who ever talk about it.
'I observe that you don't care about kids suffering, but when Muslims hurt kids you suddenly raise a huge outcry and demand their heads on pikes. I conclude that you were only pretending not to care about kids suffering and are actually secretly a good person.'
No, man, come on. If that were true you'd see them suddenly caring every other time kids are suffering. This is just racists promoting blood libel, in exactly the way you have called out in past essays.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people are talking about this because they want to use it as a cudgel against "wokeness" or DEI. They're not going to be picky about which particular outgroup is involved, when they take up that cudgel.
> They're not going to be picky about which particular outgroup is involved
They actually are going to be picky, because they're not going to pick outgroups that centrists mildly sympathize with, like gays, or even African Americans. They're going to pick people that everyone already hates, like brown immigrants.
> The only reason anyone is talking about this is because they want to use it as a cudgel against Muslims.
Why do you believe that? Are you unable to imagine that someone might actually care about children being abused? (Does it mean that you are incapable of such emotion, and therefore you cannot imagine anyone else being capable of it? Or if you are, then why do you believe that other people are not?)
Read the whole comment:
> If that were true you'd see them suddenly caring every other time kids are suffering.
Scott is talking very specifically about a discrete population that says they don't care about foreigners and don't ussually react to children suffering in other nations but are going nuts over this specific story 10 years later.
Sure there are a lot of people who are mad about this story purely because they care about kids, but they don't match this very specific pattern. The people matching this pattern are just looking for blood libel material.
Yes, I am not very on-line so I can't quite visualise the population Scott is referring too -- people who don't care about kids going hungry in Africa but care a lot about kids being raped in England.
I suspect they are not a very big or influential group but obviously must have enough visibility to show up on Scott's radar.
I fall into the perhaps more common group which cares a great deal about kids being raped in England and cares relatively less (but still a good deal) about kids going sick or hungry in Africa. (And I have never donated to help abused kids in England but a lot to agriculture and health in Africa).
My relativistic approach to different coloured kids sounds horrendous if you take the Singer kid in a pond analogy at face value, and everyone should sacrifice their hundreds of dollars to save that one kid. But for me, my relativism is to me logically justified because:
a) undoubtedly I have some in-group bias and undoubtedly I am less prone to virtue signalling, because unlike most people I can say I care less about the out-group than my own kin. I don't feel guilty about this and believe it is an evolutionary sound strategy as opposed to the pathological-altruism common among the extreme-left.
b) I feel sadly pessimistic about the long-term impacts of development in Africa given all our best estimates of their IQ is around 80 and all their previous contributions to civilisation are entirely compatible with a low IQ, low executive function, high impulsivity etc. I sadly believe this is not a population which we should encourage their exponential growth especially in face of declining growth of the populations who have created most of what makes civilisation worthwhile.
>Scott is talking very specifically about a discrete population that says they don't care about foreigners and don't ussually react to children suffering in other nations but are going nuts over this specific story 10 years later.
Firstly, the abuse is still ongoing, so the "10 years later" framing doesn't make sense.
Secondly, at least 50 towns and cities have reported grooming gang activity, so describing it as "this specific story" is a bit misleading -- it's not a one-off incident, it's a nationwide pattern of abuse going on for decades.
Thirdly, a major aspect of the scandal is that the authorities actively colluded in the rapes, to the extent of arresting fathers who tried to rescue their daughters from their abusers (whilst letting the abusers themselves go free). So that's another reason, apart from simple racism, why people would be outraged.
I think the main thing to remember here is that whatever happened in that English city is a hell of a lot more complicated and nuanced than what is being discussed here or anywhere else. There is a really good book waiting to happen for anyone who wants to spend the time.
The best book so far is "Easy Meat" by Peter McLoughlin.
Thx
I think Scott is misunderstanding what is driving the zeitgeist with regard to the grooming gang issue. It's not about protecting the little girls, but rather about dysfunctional government. Public outcry can *actually* help prevent this tragedy from happening again and hold people accountable.
Dumb. RWers and Bapists don't consider all foreign countries the same. Obviously they care more about people of countries that are more genetically similar to them, which is evolved human instinct because it is successful evolutionary strategy to care more about those more genetically similar to you.
They consider indigenous brits their kin as fellow Europeans.
They wouldn't have reacted the same way to reading a story about boko haram mass raping nigerians. Does scott really have this little understanding of the basic psychology of RWers and BAPists or is he just playing dumb to mislead his audience about RW psychology? disappointingly wrong.
As a white Brit and "based (post) Christian vitalist" I don't see any problem with caring for those closest to me more than those different from me. FWIW, I distinctly reckon "closeness" as a function of :
My kin / ethnicity > Other ethnicity
My culture / values > Other culture/values
My nationality / polity > Other nationality
In roughly that order of importance.
Now, I have non-zero concern for all humanity (perhaps all sentient beings) and allocate charity accordingly. But I think professing EA "equal concern for all humanity" is pathological for any self-interested being operating under Darwinian pressure.