It’s interesting that the people who believe that throwing a milkshake in someone’s face shouldn’t be considered assault are often the same people who believe that ‘saying things’ should be.
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 1st, 2019 |
 64 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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And the study showing this is where?
Pure bullshit, I’m pretty extreme towards free speech but throwing anything over anyone is not comparable.
Steve, I think Mr. Gervais is talking about articles like this, which could be read as saying that having a milkshake lobbed at you is fair game for “telling blatant lies” (quoted from the milkshake thrower).
Mr. Gervais is rightly disagreeing with this, and saying that throwing things is assault, but saying things is not – but that the milkshake throwers are likely to be the ones supporting criminalisation of speech.
Steve: They’re not comparable, that’s the point. It’s just that the “Antifa” crowd thinks very silly things here.
Things have moved on…
‘A freelance journalist with bylines in Spectator USA and the National Review, Andy was covering an Antifa protest in his home town of Portland yesterday when he was set upon by a group of about 20 masked thugs.’
‘The protest in Portland last night was billed by the organisers as ‘milkshake themed’ and one of the most sinister aspects of the attack is that milkshakes thrown at the event contained quick-drying cement, a chemical substance that can cause serious harm, including severe burns.’
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/portland-antifa-are-the-real-fascists/?fbclid=IwAR02W_NKdSi4Va5IrnPG6ffHIbxB5uHtHa_VqJxoUfF8zXh9SIzRziRP1Ro
The point is being missed here, the milkshake throwing is a natural extension of the “punch a nazi” mentality, whereupon you just nominate someone as being a “nazi” and then you can freely assault them.
Antifa do much worse things than throw milkshakes, and this has been going on for years, but a section of the “no platforming” mob seem to think this is fine.
The real problem is purportedly civilized people thinking it is fine to ban, assault, even kill others who they disagree with, no wonder they lionize Che Guevara and regimes who aim to copy his revolution.
steve lindsey…
Yep, sounds like Gervais is making an anecdotal but essentially legitimate point, as we here are all prone to.
It is all too predictable that those who criminalised speech they disagree with are now trying to legalise (as far as they can) assaulting people who disagree with them.
neonsnake (July 1, 2019 at 10:27 am), I suppose the very first commenter in this thread allows a comical example of the contrast between various approaches to an unknown challenger discussed in recent threads.
– You responded with the kindly assumption that he just misunderstood the OP quote. (You may of course be correct.)
– I noted that his ambiguous phrasing is wholly compatible with being extremely negative towards free speech when un-PC, and thinking that throwing milkshakes is not comparably bad. So my response is to ask (pointedly!) in which direction his claimed extremeness towards free speech tends. 🙂
A third commenter could yet advise both of us, “Don’t feed the troll”. Time may tell. 🙂
I read the first quote through several times trying to work out what he is trying to say. I still don’t know.
Niall – practicing what I’ve been preaching (and I’d concede a counter-argument that I don’t always do so…) strikes me as a good idea, otherwise I don’t have a leg to stand on 😉
Conspiracy theory time: the “quick drying cement” thing is a hoax.
Now, here’s the interesting bit: who by?
The Proud Boys, obviously! To get us riled up against antifa. Right?
(The Proud Boys make me giggle a bit. It’s all a bit ridiculous)
But…what if it’s a hoax by antifa?
What if, it’s meant to get us all riled up about milkshake shaped blocks of cement? (It wouldn’t work, incidentally, cement won’t set if mixed with milkshake), and distract us from the actual fact that Andy Ngo got the shit kicked out of him and was hospitalised? Because that’s not a hoax, that’s on video.
Because that’s the important bit here.
Never mind milkshakes. These are often the people who are prepared to overlook child sex abuse if it suits their ideology.
*blink*
Uh, come again, Pete?
As the saying goes, “your speech is violence, our violence is speech”.
“*blink* Uh, come again, Pete?”
Please don’t. Pete is possibly referring to the observation that even though between 80 and 85% of all child abuse cases in Britain are perpetrated by white men, certain people are prepared to overlook all those cases and concentrate exclusively and obsessively on the 5-10% carried out by Asian Muslims. Because of ideology.
Possibly, but not likely…
“A third commenter could yet advise both of us, “Don’t feed the troll”. Time may tell.”
Good advice! I rarely take it myself, though.
Pete is referring to the fact that, in West Yorkshire, gangs of Muslim men were grooming and raping under aged white girls on an industrial scale, while the police deliberately looked the other way because they were terrified of being accused of being racist.
Nullious, you need to include the proportion of the population that are white guys and are Asian Muslims in your statistics for your point to stand.
Oh. Joy.
Can’t we pretend it’s 2019 and get past that bullshit?
It may.
I had a moment this afternoon where I was going to post “guys, let’s not dogpile the poor chap”. My softer side coming out, surely. I’m proper cuddly, me.
Possibly, we’ve sent the poor lad running.
Yay us?
“while the police deliberately looked the other way because they were terrified of being accused of being racist”
The police often couldn’t act until the girls were willing to make official complaints or to stand as witnesses, which very often they weren’t for a variety of reasons.
According to the enquiry, there was no evidence that front-line services (police and social services) did anything to minimise it because of fears of looking racist. But there were reports of more senior managers and politicians in both organisations dismissing it because they feared it was a case of false rumours and accusations being made up by racists who had scant regard for truth or evidence. A case of “crying wolf”.
“Nullious, you need to include the proportion of the population that are white guys and are Asian Muslims in your statistics for your point to stand.”
No problem. At the last count, 86% were white, and 8% Asian.
“Oh. Joy. Can’t we pretend it’s 2019 and get past that bullshit?”
Freedom of belief necessarily includes the freedom to believe bullshit.
And thank goodness! Or we’d all be in trouble!
Great. We’re screwed then, surely?
I’m not being sarky. Im beginning to think that, genuinely, we’re past any point of being able to reign ourselves back in.
Is that where we’re at now?
The Ricky Gervais tweet was in response to this, BTW. Gay Asian non-leftist Andy Ngo getting roughed up by ‘Antifa’ caused much hilarity amongst Leftist-twitter (he ended up in hospital with a brain bleed)
I read the quote through several times as a result of this comment as well as the first comment here, and I can’t figure out how anyone can’t figure out what it means 😆
And now we know that the milkshakes are mixed with cement – to create toxic burns (via the alkaline), soon they will follow the advice of the BBC’s Joe Brand and use Battery Acid – and it will still “not” be assault (because it is “punch a Nazi” and anyone who opposes the left is a National Socialist), and Twitter and Facebook (and so on) will only ban people who OPPOSE it, not those who advocate it.
A small Vietnamese-American Gay Man is a “Nazi” and a “White Supremacist” – if you are an “Anti Fascist” (“Atifa”) mob supported by the Mayor of Portland (whose creature, the Police Commissioner, has been ordering the police not to interfere with “Antifa” for YEARS).
And the BBC reports nothing – just as did not report the systematic RIGGING by the Google search engine in the 2018 Congressional elections – in fact all the “mainstream” media (ABC, CBS, NBC….) ignored this “hacking of an election” (because reporting the rigged Google Search engine did fit their agenda). Type in the name of Democrat candidate’s for Congress in the 2018 elections – and Google would lead you to nice stuff about them, type in the name of the Republican candidate and Google would lead you to hostile stuff about them. The rigging of the search engine was as blatant as that – and the “mainstream” media do not care, and some of our libertarian brothers and sisters just chant the mantra “it is a private company” as if that is a justification for fraud and political corruption.
The expression of conservative opinions is “violence” (is “hate speech”) – Herbert Marcuse (“repressive tolerance”) now dominates the conduct of much of Big Business – well where did people think those “liberal” [Marxist] students would end up – they did not become plumbers and brick layers, they became Corporate Managers.
And actual violence is “not violence” – not when it is for the Progressive cause, pretending that every anti Collectivist is a “Nazi” to be killed.
I read the OP and all of the comments through several times as a result of these comments, and I can’t figure out how anyone can’t see that the poor guy simply read the OP wrong.
They don’t mix in cement for it’s hardening properties. If you leave wet cement on your skin for more than a few minutes, it creates serious burns. If you take being milkshaked* as a joke and fail to wash it off of your face quickly, you may well end up with facial scarring.
(YOU WERE THERE! when “milkshake” became a verb.)
“Great. We’re screwed then, surely?”
No. Because people disagree on what constitutes “bullshit”, and we don’t want society deciding that *our* beliefs are “bullshit” and banning them. We would rather let twenty obnoxious and heretical beliefs go free than wrongly condemn a single true belief, as William Blackstone might have put it. There is no belief more dangerous than thinking that we can or should get rid of dangerous beliefs.
People are free to believe what they want, so that we may be free to disagree with them. Those particular beliefs are disappearing gradually, but trying to pretend that they’re not still around only grants them the gloss of martyrdom.
Most of the things humans have believed throughout all history are wrong. I doubt today is any different. We’ve survived it so far.
Looks like I misread the OP
Sorry you got dogpiled, mate.
Of course, and I didn’t mean to imply I think they should be banned. It was more an expression of dismay that, increasingly, fringe beliefs are becoming commonplace – or maybe they’re not commonplace, and I’m misinterpreting the amount of people who believe them. I’m not sure.
The quick drying cement thing is an example, actually – there’s no actual evidence for it, and yet it’s being taken as proven fact (note: not saying it definitely didn’t happen, just that no-one has actual proof).
On Andy Ngo, recipient of cement-laden (per Portland PD) milkshake and beating in Portland:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/06/portland-police-milkshakes-thrown-by-antifa-reportedly-made-with-quick-drying-cement/
This account seems a little more detailed than the others that I’ve seen. However, as you say, I wouldn’t take it to the bank just yet.
Yet again I join with the many who wail, “Whom can we believe ??!”
We all do it at times. Text lacks intonation, so we either fill that in (sometimes wrongly) or else note potential ambiguities (sometimes rather distant ones) left by its absence. Had I heard you saying, “I’m pretty extreme towards free speech but throwing anything over anyone is not comparable”, I would have known which you preferred and which you did not. In its absence, I noticed the mere text left potential for a joke. “I’m pretty extreme(ly hostile) towards free speech but throwing anything over anyone is not comparable(ly bad).” Such are the hazards of free commenting. 🙂
In the thread above, I see that the passing reference to Rotherham by pete (July 1, 2019 at 5:46 pm), placed in its (obvious) context by Stonyground (July 1, 2019 at 6:26 pm), was mocked (July 1, 2019 at 6:20 pm) and denied (July 1, 2019 at 7:20 pm) by Nullius, while neonsnake asked, “Can’t we pretend it’s 2019 and get past that bullshit?” (by which neonsnake meant pete’s remark, IIUC).
I think ‘pretend’ is indeed the word. 🙂 While pete either defends himself or (perhaps wisely) does not bother, let me offer nullius and neonsnake a better target for their barbs – this post and this poem of mine. In both, I suggest that host culture and immigrant culture differ in their crime rates (and, unlike the unintentionally ambiguous phrasing referred to in my comment above, I leave no doubt of the direction in which I think that difference tends 🙂 ). So guys, why not leave pete alone and try explaining to me that I am just another ‘bullshitter’, just another ‘case of “crying wolf” ‘ as you put it – and presumably all the more so when I allege “a lingering desire to virtue signal” (as I put it in my post).
As for the enquiry Niullius mentioned, that assured us it was not “fears of looking racist” (or islamophobic) that made the front-line police detain the fathers of some Rotherham girls for trying to rescue them from muslim gang houses, well, I have observed a certain prejudice on samizdata against those nothing-(much)-to-see-here enquiries that our elites hold after nothing-(at-all)-to-see-here coverups wilt at the edges, and my continuing to hang out here may mean that I share this prejudice.
As my phrasing may hint ( 🙂 ), I also share the view that “bullshit” and “cry wolf” are strong terms to use against someone who merely remarked that people who throw milkshakes but think words are crimes would also prefer we forgot Rotherham happened.
Let’s not imitate them in any of that.
BTW, neonsnake wrote b***t in full and I did likewise when quoting him, but if you want to comment on any of it, be aware the spam checker is not overfond of swearwords – use a euphemism, as I do here, or be prepared to wait (patiently) for moderation, should the smitebot decide our language is getting past a joke. 🙂
“It’s interesting that the same people who believe that ANYTHING THEY DO shouldn’t be considered assault are often the same people who believe that ANYTHING YOU DO should be.”
– Fixed it for ya!
Another simple case of “Rights for ME but not for THEE, rules for THEE but not for ME”.
Why? My stance on Islam is already clear. I don’t support Islamists in any way whatsoever; not all Muslims are Islamist. In my experience of living and working with Muslims, an overwhelming majority in the UK are not Islamist; therefore, I will not hold them responsible for the sins of others that share their religion, any more than I would with any other group that shares characteristics.
But you already know that, and you disagree.
I also don’t believe that saying that “lefties” are giving a pass to child abuse is correct – that’s the part I was calling b*llsh*t.
Most simply share the view expressed above, that one shouldn’t judge people on characteristics, they should judge people on behaviour, and are observing that there are some on the “right” that don’t share that view, and instead use every chance to virtue signal their opposition to Muslims, under the guise of an opposition to Islam, by concentrating on the acts of a very small amount of people – while ignoring the same acts when carried out by those who are “like them” – and attempting to say that it’s inherent to their religion.
But you already know that, and you disagree.
And I already know your stance, that you believe there’s something about Muslims which makes them more likely to be sexual criminals; further, that a majority of Muslims in the UK are likely to be Islamists – and this does not match my observations, so I disagree.
After reading responses to my comments on the matter, I feel that I have been guilty of believing a rather tabloidy take on an issue which is really very complex. Still, I see this blog as a great place to learn and, in addition, start to appreciate the limits of what I think is my own knowledge.
I think that the harmless believers are a problem because they make it much more difficult to deal with the dangerous fanatics. This isn’t their fault but it is a problem nevertheless. Islam is the nasty religion du jour, but I think that the problem has applied to other religions through history. Islam when taken at face value is a pretty nasty ideology and has a lot in common with facism. Ordinary Muslims presumably ignore the nasty parts of the Koran in the same way that Christians ignore the nasty parts of the Bible. I rather doubt that we would tolerate Hitler worshippers who ignore the nasty parts of Mein kampf.
That’s my entire experience of Muslims.
Anecdotal, I know, but I lived with a Muslim guy when I was at Uni, and his parents used to send him back to us with food, because they knew we were all struggling for money; there’s something in the Koran which indicates that they should, apparently.
Same in Christianity, and in fact most parents did the same – my experience says that all religions ignore the crappy parts and concentrate on the good parts.
On the whole, I believe (NIV has said similar) that Islam is maybe a hundred or two years behind Christianity on rejecting the crappy parts – but are absolutely moving in the right direction. Muslims in the UK are much closer to it, obviously, than in Brunei, say.
They feel the same, in my experience.
I’m not keen on religion of any stripe at all (I’m a born-again atheist), but I try to understand and recognise that it’s part of people’s cultural identity. It’s not quite a “characteristic” in the same way as race, sexual preference etc, but it’s very difficult to change or reject (the only thing socially less acceptable to change in the UK is your football team, right?). So, in many ways, it can be viewed as a characteristic.
I was working in East London in a very Muslim community on 9/11. They were horrified and petrified in equal measure. We since gave them reason to be, which is amongst the reasons why I’m a little less keen to support anti-Muslim sentiment than some.
Actually, you know what? That should be quote of the day, Stonyground.
We can all learn from that comment. Respect to you for posting it.
“In the thread above, I see that the passing reference to Rotherham by pete (July 1, 2019 at 5:46 pm), placed in its (obvious) context by Stonyground (July 1, 2019 at 6:26 pm), was mocked (July 1, 2019 at 6:20 pm) and denied (July 1, 2019 at 7:20 pm) by Nullius”
I’m not denying anything. I’m just pointing out the rest of the picture – the bit that the people constantly bringing up Rotherham are so seemingly oblivious to. The way some people talk, you’d think it was only Muslims who ever did it. Many seem genuinely surprised to find out it’s not.
“I suggest that host culture and immigrant culture differ in their crime rates (and, unlike the unintentionally ambiguous phrasing referred to in my comment above, I leave no doubt of the direction in which I think that difference tends 🙂 ).”
This relationship has a long history. It’s well known that crime generally and the formation of organised criminal gangs specifically is associated with poverty, and recent immigrants tend to be poor. When you had poor Italian immigrants move to America, they famously formed the Italian Mafia. The phrase “gang bang” to describe the common gang-culture practice of group rape dates from this time. I do not think that had anything to do with Italians being Catholic.
There are lots of different categories the criminals in these high-profile cases belong to. They’re men. They’re gang members. They’re poor. They live in northern cities. We could equally well choose to identify the problem with any of those groups. The choice to make the association with this particular group is down to ideology. The people who constantly bring the subject up express absolutely no interest in the majority of other child abuse cases that don’t fit with their target demographic. And if a radical feminist uses exactly the same tactic to take a swipe at all men and toxic male culture (which is arguably a far more relevant characteristic), they’re rightly annoyed at the fallacy. They’ll go on about the “war on men” being waged by the social justice warriors. But it seems that everyone becomes totally blind to the logical fallacy when it’s one of their own shibboleth groups in the crosshairs.
I wasn’t mocking, I was making a serious point. This behaviour is almost universally driven by ideology. People are perfectly prepared to overlook the 80%+ majority of cases of child sex abuse that don’t fit their target group if it suits their ideology. In a post about double-standards – people setting one standard for their own side and another for their enemies – it seemed to me like the observation was particularly on topic.
I mean, it’s just as bad when we do it too, right? We’re all only human.
“As for the enquiry Niullius mentioned, that assured us it was not “fears of looking racist” (or islamophobic) that made the front-line police detain the fathers of some Rotherham girls for trying to rescue them from muslim gang houses”
That’s what’s known as “taking the law into your own hands” and “breach of the peace”. When the police do it, there are all sorts of protections and requirements in place to prevent harm to the innocent. They have to have sufficient evidence. They have to have presented it to a judge and obtained a warrant. They have to observe limits on force used and damage done, and respect people’s privacy and freedom as much as they can. It’s all very well figuring it’s justified when used against evil criminals like that, but you’ve always got to consider what happens when the same power is used against the innocent – when it’s used against you. Do you want for anyone to be able to break into your house if they suspect you of a crime without any solid evidence of such? Without any need for a warrant, or following procedure? Because if so, I think you’ll find the police would just love that! They find the rules frustrating. too.
“I also share the view that “bullshit” and “cry wolf” are strong terms to use against someone”
I’m not using “cry wolf” against anyone. It’s not my intention to have a go at anybody. This sort of stuff is common, and like I said, we’re all human and fallible. It was a general observation on a common problem with these situations, that when you get a rise in the noise-level of idealogically-driven accusations based on low standards of evidence, the signal-to-noise ratio drops, and the police have to raise their thresholds of evidence before they’ll act to keep the false alarm rate constant. If people cry wolf too frequently, the villagers will demand more evidence of an actual wolf before they’ll come out and investigate, and that can have tragic consequences. And given the sort of cases we have here, that’s a terrible guilt to lay at the door of any ideology. But that’s how it goes.
It’s almost as if there were two differing narratives surrounding this episode.
When I look to Wikipedia – woke, SJW-loving Wikipedia – the entry entitled Rotherham Child Exploitation Scandal expends a great deal of words noting that the police and governmental response to reports of missing and abused children was deliberately tamped down because of fears of antagonizing one certain religious group, and fears of being called racist.
The entire article is chilling and enraging, and exists on a platform that normally has no truck with anti-Muslim racism/religionism.
Not being from there, I have only whatever information people care to deliver to me about all of this, but almost everything I remember reading and hearing back then excoriated the powers-that-be on exactly the grounds Mr. Kilmartin suggests and at which NiV scoffs.
So, color me puzzled.
Is almost as if it’s more nuanced than we give it credit for!
Well; there’s child rape and exploitation on a scale unrivalled outside of an African war zone and then there’s apologists who say: “Yeah well, most child rapists still come from the majority population” and laughably claim there was no cover-up. Even now, 20 years after the first allegations emerged and were rejected by the bien-pensants, newspaper reports of the convictions of these gangs is sketchy at best (The Mirror is an honourable exception).
Doesn’t do to upset the applecart; we must continue with the delusion that all immigration is good immigration and those who say otherwise are racists.
Surely, the big story in Rotherham was not what the Muslim gangs did, but the fact that police and social workers let them get away with it. In view of this fact, i fail to see the relevance of stats about the percentage of child abuse in different ethnic groups.
What make police negligence in Rotherham look even worse, are stories about British police arresting schoolchildren for speech crimes.
There used to be jokes about Paradise being a place in which the police is British etc, and Hell a place in which the police is German etc. Nowadays, i think that i’d prefer German police to British police. But only as the lesser evil.
British police is still preferable to Portland police, however.
I think this is exactly correct. The main problem is not ‘Muslims’ but the fact that lunatic identity politics has so debased key media & state institutions that this kind of problem can develop, without being stamped on from a great height at the first indication it is happening. The problem is the Plod, local authorities & the media’s disinclination to be brutally honest until they are forced to by circumstance. Dozens of third parties should either have ended up in jail for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, or at the very least been drummed out of public life. THAT is the problem.
Nowadays, hell is a place in which the police are French.
I agree with Perry de Havilland (London) (July 2, 2019 at 9:46 pm). And it is indeed the kind of people who think words are crimes (but milkshakes are not) who “stamped from a great height” on early attempts to warn that the problem was developing. It was exactly those ‘words are crimes’ people who creating a culture in which it seemed frighteningly ‘islamophobic’ to raise concerns.
Which was precisely the point that pete originally made. To quote his comment in its entirety.
‘These’ of course meaning ‘the people who think words are crimes but milkshakes are not’ – that is what the OP is about.
And for making that remark he was given a load of PC boilerplate to the effect that most muslims do not commit such crimes and some non-muslims do – exactly the kind of stuff that would have garnished the “shut up, you islamophobe” push in Rotherham when this was starting up. This was served up to him as if he might not already know that.
Nullius, who this blog do you think could be ‘genuinely surprised’ to learn that sex crimes were not unknown in the UK before large-scale muslim immigration? For that matter of that, who do you imagine outside the asylums would be ‘genuinely surprised’ to be told that.
We have all been trained by the PC to confabulate absurd prejudice when we encounter unPC remarks. In today’s world of detective stories, horror films and on and on, where exactly, Nullius, are you going to find an adult British citizen who is ‘genuinely surprised’ to discover that not every sex crime in the UK’s long history was committed in the last few decades by Arab immigrants?
In the days when Negros were lynched in the south, most murders were nothing to do with that. But most murders were pursued by the police – the concern about the lynchings was not that they were common but that the police avoided pursuing them.
“Well; there’s child rape and exploitation on a scale unrivalled outside of an African war zone”
In terms of numbers, it’s certainly rivalled by the Catholic abuse scandal.
I’m not saying that to have a go at Catholics. I’m saying it just to point out that nobody else here is saying it.
“and then there’s apologists who say: “Yeah well, most child rapists still come from the majority population””
You’re missing the point. I’m *not* apologising for it, or excusing it, or minimising it. *All* child rape is a horrific crime. What I’m complaining about is when people only make a fuss when the perpetrators are of one ethnic group, and are silent about cases perpetrated by their own ethnic group.
It’s like the way the “Black Lives Matter” slogan was replied to by people who said “*All* Lives Matter”. That *not* apologism or support for shooting blacks! It’s pointing out that only making a fuss about one ideologically supported set and ignoring all the ideologically inconvenient ones isn’t about fighting crime, it’s about exploting public sympathy for the victims to support the ideological campaign. Because victims whose cases don’t support the ideology are being ignored.
I’m saying “*All* Lives Matter”. If child rape is really the issue, then you should care about *all* cases of child rape, in proportion to the numbers – *whatever* the ethnicity of the perpetrator. I’m not saying anyone should let the Rotherham rapists off or excuse their behaviour. But *neither* can you let the white child-rapists off by never mentioning them, just because they’re not as helpful to your political campaign.
NiV, if it could be shown that the police and their supervisors attempted to quash investigations into ALL child abuse allegations during that time period, you might be making sense.
But so far it seems that they only tried to quash the allegations involving the “Asian” gang in Rotherham.
The “Asians” involved receive an amount of contempt proportional to all other child rapers.
The “police” who failed to do their jobs for racist reasons – to the injury of many more 12-15-year-olds – get much more. It’s their role that raises ire here. This isn’t about how it’s worse for the kids when Muslims rape them – it’s that it’s worse for the kids when the “police” won’t help them because their rapists were Muslim.
“The main problem is not ‘Muslims’ but the fact that lunatic identity politics has so debased key media & state institutions that this kind of problem can develop, without being stamped on from a great height at the first indication it is happening.”
That’s a problem the police have always faced, and not just with Muslims.
The police know that crimes happen. They – like everyone else in town – know exactly where they’re happening. They know who most of the criminals are. They know how they operate. They know all about the gangs – characteristic clothes, tattoos, hand-signs, slang, teritories, meeting places, members, associates. They know exactly where they live. They know their mothers, who regularly pick them up on bail. They know where they like to go for a pint with their criminal mates.
And yet crime continues to happen, and criminals continue to get away with it.
The way gangs operate is so well-known (in general terms) that they show it on TV police dramas and crime fiction. They’re filled with scads of small-time drug-dealers who beat their girlfriends up but the girl won’t leave him, or make an official complaint, because the alternative to staying with him is usually something even worse. (A story also told in Bill Sikes and Nancy, in Oliver Twist.) The world-weary copper goes to talk to his informant, who he *knows* is a criminal, but it’s far harder to *prove* that in a court of law, and takes far more time and taxpayers money than it’s worth, and so horrendous personal situations are knowingly allowed to continue by the police every day. That’s life.
We *know* from crime surveys that about 11% of women in Britain were sexually abused as children. 43% of rape attempts were by a family member, 30% by a friend or aquaintance. And that happens across all races and ethnicities.
So we’ve obviously more than seen the “first indication” that this happens. 11% of adult women today have known it for many years. So why haven’t we “stamped on it from a great height” and stopped it years ago?
11% of women is a horrific statistic. And we don’t talk about it. So why do we let it happen?
“NiV, if it could be shown that the police and their supervisors attempted to quash investigations into ALL child abuse allegations during that time period, you might be making sense.”
Has anyone checked?
That is true but only to a point, and you were more on the money pointing out the ‘whoopsie’ of countless Catholic molestation scandals.
There will always be a ‘background count’ of rape and other such unpleasantness. But Rotherham (et al.) are actually are a bit different, and whilst a priestly kiddie-fiddler here and there might avoid mutually uncomfortable official scrutiny by virtue of his role in the community, large organised predatory criminal gangs of ethnically cohesive working class rapists are qualitatively & qualitatively a newish development. Also rather interesting, the disinclination of the state to suppress this stands in marked contrast to how willing it is to stamp on organised crime of a financial nature (and not just crime but also business that is hard to tax and might sometimes be useful to criminals). In short, identity politics trumps worrying about working class female victims, but identity politics has proven scant protection when the state wanted to make hawala harder and place it under more surveillance. I find that morbidly fascinating.
If it were true that the police were indifferent to ALL allegations of kiddie rape, such data as supports and proves this would have been offered up, in order to mute the anti-Muslim aspects of the news. (“See, it’s not just us!”)
But I’ve seen no such data or claims, so my assumption is that the police indifference isn’t the norm.
I realize that it would be a stretch to expect the police themselves to come up with this (“This proves we’re awful at our job all of the time, not just when the perps are Muslim”), but someone would consider this to be useful data for their cause.
Niall, at 12:34 pm: Quite right.
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Paul, this is a very good observation:
Applying the principle to another situation, we see that no members of a subgroup of group X, which might be seen as a “protected group,” should be investigated of wrongdoing; because to believe that the subgroup of a certain group is or might be guilty of wrongdoing is obviously to believe that the entire membership of the group is guilty, which belief is certainly bigotry of the first order.
That’s also why to disapprove of Black Lives Matter is to disapprove of all Negroes, you can take that to the bank.
Some life happened that took me away from Samizdata for awhile after I started the comment above. I see that meanwhile, Niall, Perry, and bobby made further good comments on various issues.
“If it were true that the police were indifferent to ALL allegations of kiddie rape, such data as supports and proves this would have been offered up, in order to mute the anti-Muslim aspects of the news.”
But what if nobody collects any data on it? Under what circumstances would the police voluntarily admit to being indifferent to child-rape?
The problem is that it concerns events going on in private, out of sight of bystanders, so the only witnesses are the perpetrators and the girls themselves. And the girls usually don’t want to act as witnesses – because they’re emotionally attached to their boyfriend, or because there’s a muddled and complicated picture of partial consent, or for complicated cultural reasons of shaming, or because they’re scared of what will happen to them or their friends/family when it becomes known they went to the police, or because going through a court case as a victim is a deeply traumatic process for anyone let alone a vulnerable child, or because they’re deeply involved in crime themselves and vulnerable to being counter-prosecuted. It’s the word of one person against many, none of them especially reputable. Why should we believe her? Where’s the actual evidence? Do you want for any girl to be able to make random unprovable accusations of rape and be automatically believed?
So with cases tricky to prosecute, and with limited resources, the police only pursue cases where there’s solid evidence made available to them that they can build a case on. Hearsay doesn’t count. Will she make an official complaint, and a witness statement, and then stand by them in court? If not, they’re not going to spend several hundred grand of taxpayers money on a fishing expedition looking for evidence. So even though everyone knows it’s going on, among all races and ethnicities, they’re not going to pursue it.
Then the EDL launch a massive publicity campaign against a particular subset of the gangs. Public awareness and sympathy is raised. So some of the girls figure they’re more likely to be believed and defended, and so come forward. The police get solid evidence, investigate, and prosecute. They come under pressure to investigate more marginal cases – resources are diverted to the area. Momentum builds. And you suddenly get a large cluster of cases being prosecuted following the publicity campaign.
However, that doesn’t imply that the state of affairs there before the campaign, of oblivious inaction, doesn’t continue to exist elsewhere. The police collect no statistics on investigations that never started, or on crimes that have not yet been discovered. Consider that 11% statistic I mentioned – we don’t know about that because of police statistics on the number of cases of child abuse they chose to suppress or not prosecute – as if the police would collect statistics on that! We only know about them because the victims told us about it years later when asked in a survey. We know that most such crimes are never prosecuted. We know that there’s a lot going on that isn’t visible in the police statistics.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We don’t know what is going on, because no data can be collected on it. Most people are only aware of the newspaper headlines, and don’t even know about the data we do have on sex crime. But we’re all very good at picking up the bits and pieces of the picture we can see and filling in the rest based on our prior beliefs.
Niall, I just went back and re-read your posting from 2017, to which you linked above.
I’m glad I did. Really excellent, and so were the comments. Thanks.
Did news of Operation Yewtree ever cross the Atlantic to the US? Are you familiar with it?
Yewtree (investigating Jimmy Saville and others) has some overlap with Harvey Weinstein et al. Such scandals showed the beeb and Hollywood covering up for their own by parading a public wokeness the better to hide its private exploitation. However Perry correctly puts his finger on a key one (of several) non-comparabilities:
The powerful politically-connected beeb, like powerful politically-connected Hollywood, privately covered for some of their own, while preaching a public ethic of intersectional wokeness – feminist, antiracist, anti-islamophobic, etc. Meanwhile, this same public ethic – not a concealed private disregard of it – was used to cover for personally less-well-connected not-so-powerful people doing the like on a large scale in their humbler sphere.
What bobby b was asking about, I take it, was any cases where working-class white gangs assaulted comparable numbers of Arab girls while the local authorities, eagerly aided by the media, worked hard to suppress all mention of it and to eradicate the vile anti-British prejudices of the immigrants that alone could cause them to allege it was happening (by making them fear arrest for any britophobic statements about it and the like).
What we find, on the contrary, is a great eagerness to publicise any incident that fits the narrative (as the natural counterpart of hiding Rotherham-style off-narrative incidents). Sadly, the biasedbbc website lost its first two years of archives when it moved platform, which took with it one interesting post from 2002, when a white man murdered a black girl, and a black man murdered a white girl, at somewhat similar times. My memory for numbers tells me it found that Greg Dyke’s BBC mentioned the first case in 942 reports, invariably including the racial angle, while the second case got 42 mentions of which 25 included speculation that the murderer might not have been black.
Under Greg Dyke, the BBC was peculiarly biased, but today is better only in comparison with that appalling baseline. So the point at issue remains very much the case. Libertarians are not surprised when unintentionally-inept government fails to prevent all crime. Libertarians notice when intentionally-biased government discriminates through one of its more powerful methods – unequal enforcement of the laws.
bobby b, if what you are asking for are cases that, as Niall suggests, are exactly the same as the Rotherham case, but with only the skin colour/religion changed, then that will be quite difficult, and will require a large amount of coincidence.
If not, then there are plenty of instances that, while not exactly the same, show a level of state cover-up. The nature of the beast being what it is, it’s impossible to know the whole truth, and we clearly will never know of other cases which were successfully covered up.
Yewtree, Dickens, Wanless, Operation Hydrant, the IICSA and so on.
Amongst other things, the scope of the later investigations included:
Children in the care of Lambeth Council
Children in the care of Nottinghamshire councils
Cambridge House, Knowl View and Rochdale Council
Child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church
Child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church
The sexual abuse of children in custodial institutions
Child sexual abuse in residential schools
The internet and child sexual abuse
Child exploitation by organised networks
The protection of children outside the United Kingdom
Accountability and reparations for victims and survivors
Allegations of child sexual abuse linked to Westminster
(source:wikipedia)
Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on any of these things and that I know all the details. I’m not about to start spending my life researching child sex abuse on the internet, but there are deeply disturbing signs that there are cover-ups of paedophilia by the powers that be, be that the BBC, Westminster, the police, or simply people attempting to protect celebrities.
It is, of course and quite rightly, an enormously emotive subject, and revolts anyone with half a sense of decency, as it should. But my point is simply that it’s not restricted to Pakistani gangs, and that cover-ups have happened across a broad spectrum of society, very much including white celebrities, politicians and others.
Neonsnake, I’m going to sit on the bulk of your comment for a bit – on the road, you know – but I do want to jump on one aspect of it (that is quite off-topic from what you were saying.).
It’s the irony, of course.
100 years ago, your comment would have been a generally-accepted statement of society’s view of any sexual practice outside of the missionary position between a married man and woman. 80 years ago, it would have been a generally-accepted statement of society’s view of interracial sex. 60 years ago, it would have been a generally-accepted statement of society’s view of homosexuality. 30 years ago, it would have been a generally-accepted statement of society’s view of gender dysphorics.
Say in thirty years, people erect statutes in your honor. Are they going to be tearing them down in one hundred years, citing your hateful speech about adults who have sexual relationships with children?
As NiV has pointed out frequently, people seem to assume that the sexual norms of now, today, represent the arrival at absolute truth.
Like I said, waaaaay off topic from what you were saying, but it just struck me as I read it. It goes to why I have difficulty applying contemporary mores to dead people.
(More on-point: years ago, I defended a number of people busted on kiddie porn possession charges. I never saw a more energized and motivated bunch of coppers and prosecutors than the people handling those cases. I can believe that there might be institutional coverups – people looking to protect a church, a BBC, or some other revered institution – but the zeal of the legal system to catch and punish people who sexually abuse kids dwarfs even cases of murder, in my experience. If anything, I think Rotherham was another such institutional case, with the powers-that-be looking to protect the institution of diversity.)
Oops. Statues, not statutes. It’s my built-in lawyer’s auto-correct.
The same effect occurs here wherever the PC do not have other fish to fry. Indeed, this eagerness sometimes becomes ‘over-zealous’ (to steal a phrase from an old comedy sketch). The record over here includes time and resource devoted to investigating accusations made by (not too hard to spot, or so it afterwards seemed) fabulists, along with the more real stuff. I also vaguely recall Natalie posting about a distressing case where someone merely appeared to be being checked for such and ended up dead.