The last time I read an article on Rotherham even the Telegraph said that the officers in question were highly chauvinistic and therefore don’t really follow the usual ideal of being PC.
At the same time reading articles about Rotherham is still registers me: “This story doesn’t make sense, the facts on the ground are likely to be different than the mainstream media reports I’m reading” instincts.
Have you read the actual report about it in-depth?
(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)
The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it’s not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.
What we know:
Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls
Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it seems like other Middle-Eastern and Roma men were also involved
The political and multiculturalist environment slowed down the reporting of this tragedy until eventually it got out
To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham’s council website:
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. …
The issue of race, regardless of ethnic group, should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is known to be a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised abuse in any local community. There was little evidence of such action being taken in Rotherham in the earlier years. Councillors can play an effective role in this, especially those representing the communities in question, but only if they act as facilitators of communication rather than barriers to it. One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers...
In her 2006 report, she stated that ‘it is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue [CSE] being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators’.
She 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.
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. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators...
Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report, and the report of the Children’s Commissioner. Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE. In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to ‘downplay’ the ethnic dimensions_ of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as ‘racist’. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.
And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.
When a story is true, but it doesn’t “make sense,” that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can’t be true. I think that’s a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.
No, I’m fairly confident the neoreactionaries, for whatever reason you brought them up, would happily join in the plan to strip out the objectionable bits of Pakistani culture and replace it with something better. Also, demanding more integration and acculturation from immigrants. What they probably wouldn’t listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
What they probably wouldn’t listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
You guys are arguing over the definition of “culture”.
I’ll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.
As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.
But for now, let’s pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?
In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?
Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It’s supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It’s not enough to say “that’s wrong” after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It’s also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.
Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard.
When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as “racist” by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam’s infringement of women’s rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.
After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.
Could better immigration policies select for immigrants who are on board with Western ideas about consent?
Could Muslim immigrants to Europe be encouraged to assimilate faster towards Western ideas about women’s rights?
Are feminism and progressivism truly aligned in their goals? Is women’s safety compatible with importing large groups of people who have very different ideas about women’s rights?
If you found out about Rotherham from me, not from feminist or progressive sources, what else about the world have they not told you?
If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.
This doesn’t say much unless we know the corresponding fraction among Muslims worldwide is not much larger than 11%.
I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn’t just about a delta, it’s also about the end state: assimilation isn’t complete until Muslims adopt Western values.
Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France’s Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.
Well, Acty’s hypothesis was that they have started assimilating but still haven’t finished doing so. But thanks for the data.
(Who on Earth thought that that bulleted list of sentences in that Wikipedia article is a decent way of presenting those data, anyway? I hope I’ll have the time to make a bar chart, or at least a table. And how comes my spell checker doesn’t like either “bulleted” or “bulletted”?)
Redistributing the world’s rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you’re suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.
Factually, it’s unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like “whores” and are considered to not have bodily sovereignty. To use the feminist term, they are considered “rapable.” Additionally, if British police fail to adequately investigate rape by Muslim men, whether due to chauvinism or fear of being seen as racist, then the rapists won’t actually go to jail in a timely fashion. The Rotherham authorities couldn’t keep up with the volume of complaints. I have no idea whether the Rotherham sex gangs would have been able to operate so brazenly in a Muslim country, where they would risk violent reprisals from the fathers and brothers of their victims. So the notion of reducing rape by jailing immigrant rapists is really, really speculative, and I think it’s really careless for you to be making moral arguments based on it.
Even if spreading around the world’s rapists actually helps jail them and eventually reduce rape, it’s still morally repugnant. I’m trying to figure out what your moral framework is, but the only thing I can come up with is naive utilitarianism. In fact, I think redistributing the world’s rapists is so counter-intuitive that it highlights the problems with naive utilitarianism (or whatever your framework is). There are many lines of objection:
From a deontological perspective, or from a rule/act utilitarian perspective, inflicting a greater risk of rape upon your female neighbors would be a bad practice. It really doesn’t seem very altruistic. What about lower-class British people who don’t want their daughters to risk elevated levels of rape and don’t have the money to take flight to all-white areas? What if they aren’t on board with your plans?
Naive utilitarianism treats humans and human groups interchangeably, and lacks any concept of moral responsibility. Why should the British people be responsible for imprisoning rapists from other countries? They aren’t. They are responsible for handling their own rapists, but why should they be responsible for other people’s rapists? I really disagree that British people should view Muslim women raped in Muslim countries as equivalent to British women raped by British people. When British women are raped in Britain, that represents a failure of British socialization and rule of law, but British people don’t have control over Muslim socialization or law enforcement and shouldn’t have to pick up the pieces when those things fail.
Nations have a moral responsibility to their citizens to defend their citizens from crime and to enforce rule-of-law. If nations fail to protect their own people from crime, people may get pissed off and engage in vigilantism or voting in fascist parties. A utilitarian needs to factor in these backlash scenarios in calculating the utility of rapist redistribution. You could say “well, British people should just take it lying down instead of becoming vigilantes or fascists” but that steps into a different moral framework (like deontology or rule/act utilitarianism) where you would have to answer my previous objections.
Even from a utilitarian perspective, I am not convinced that rapist redistribution actually is good for human welfare. I don’t think it’s utility-promoting to cause members of Culture A to risk harm to fix another Culture’s B crime problems. If you take the world’s biggest problems are redistribute them, then it just turns the whole world shitty instead of just certain parts of it. Importing crime overburdens the police force, resulting in a weakening of rule-of-law, which will only be followed by general civilizational decline.
If you really want to use British law-and-order against rapists from other countries, the other solution would be to export British rule of law to those countries instead of importing immigrants from them. Britain used to try this approach, but nowadays it’s considered unpopular.
If you are going to say that it’s The White Man’s Burden to fix other nation’s problems, then at least go whole hog.
If you are trying to stop rape from a utilitarian perspective, and you want to reeducate Muslims about consent, then you should become a colonialist: export Western rule to the Muslim world, encourage feminism, punish rape, and stop female genital mutilation. What if Muslims resist this utilitarian plan? Well, what if British people resist your utilitarian plan? If you think British people should lie down and accept Muslim immigrant crime cuz utility, then it’s possible to respond that Muslim countries should lie down and accept British rule plus feminism cuz utility.
I am very stunned to see someone coming from a feminist perspective who is knowingly willing to advocate a policy that would increase the risk of rape of women in her society. I think this stance is based on very shaky factual and moral grounds, putting it at odds with any claims of being altruistic and trying to help reduce suffering. I have female relatives in England and I am very distressed by the idea of them risking elevated levels of sexual violence due to political and moral idea that I consider repugnant. If I’m interpreting you wrong then please tell me.
I think you’re being a little hard on Acty. I agree her positions aren’t super well thought out, but it feels like we should make a special effort to keep things friendly in the welcome thread.
Here’s how I would have put similar points (having only followed part of your discussion):
You’re right that the cultural transmission between Muslims and English people will be 2-way—feminists will attempt to impose their ideas on Muslims the same way Muslims will attempt to impose their ideas on feminists. But there are reasons to think that the ideas will disproportionately go the wrong way, from feminists to Muslims. For example, it’s verboten in the feminist community to criticize Muslims, but it’s not verboten in the Muslim community to criticize feminists.
It’d be great if what Acty describes could happen and the police of Britain could cut down on the Muslim rape rate. But Rothertam is a perfect demonstration that this process may not go as well as intended.
My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty’s position “repugnant” and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty’s position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.
I think Acty is a fundamentally good person who is misled by poor moral frameworks. I do not know any way to communicate the depth of my moral disagreement without showing some level of my authentic emotional reaction (though very restrained). Being super-nice about it would fail to represent my degree of moral disagreement, and essentially slash her tires and everyone else’s. I realize that it might be tough for her to face so much criticism in a welcome thread, especially considering that some of the critics are harsher than me. But there is also potential upside: on LW, she might find higher quality debate over her ideas than she has before.
Your hypothetical response is a good start, but it fails to supply moral criticism of her stance that I consider necessary. Maybe something in between yours and mine would have been ideal. Being welcoming is a good thing, but if “welcoming” results in a pass on really perverse moral philosophy, then perhaps it’s going too far… I guess it depends on your goals.
I think locking out anyone who might be a criminal, when you have the power to potentially stop them being a criminal and their home country doesn’t, is morally negligent. (I’m your standard no-frills utilitarian; the worth of an action is decided purely by whether you satisfied people’s preferences and made them happy. Forget “state’s duty to the citizens”, the only talk of ‘duty’ I really entertain is each of our duty to our fellow humans. “The White Man’s Burden” is a really stupid idea because it’s every human’s responsibility to help out their fellow humans regardless of skin colour.) I think it doesn’t matter whether you decreased or increased crime on either side of a border, since borders are neither happiness nor preferences and mean nothing to your standard no-frills utilitarian type. I just care about whether you decrease crime in total, globally.
Let me try to briefly convince you of why there should be a state’s duty to citizens from a utilitarian perspective, also corresponding greater concern about internal than external crime:
1) A state resembles a form of corporate organization with its citizens as shareholders. It has special obligations by contract to those shareholders who got a stake on the assumption that they would have special rights in the corporation. Suddenly creating new stock and giving it to to non-shareholders, thereby creating new shareholders, would increase the utility of new shareholders and decrease the utility of old shareholders to roughly the same extent because there is the same amount of company being redistributed, but would have the additional negative effect of decreasing rule of law, and rule of law is a very very good thing because it lets people engage in long-term planning and live stable lives. (There is no such problem if the shareholders come together and decide to create and distribute new stock by agreement—and to translate back the metaphor, this means that immigration should be controlled by existing citizens, rather than borders being declared to “mean nothing” in general.)
2) A state is often an overlay on a nation. To cash those terms out: A governing entity with major features usually including a legal code and a geographically defined and sharply edged region of influence is often an overlay on a cluster of people grouped by social, cultural, biological, and other shared features. (“Nation” derives from those who shared a natus.) Different clusters of people have different clusters of utility functions, and should therefore live under differing legal codes, which should also be administrated by members of those clusters whom one can reasonably expect to have a particularly good understanding of how their fellow cluster-members will be happiest.
3) Particularly where not overlaid on nations, separate states function as testbeds for experiments in policy; the closest thing one has to large-scale controlled experiments in sociology. Redistributing populations across states would be akin to redistributing test subjects across trial arms. The utilitarian thing to do is therefore to instead copy the policies of the most successful nations to the least successful nations, then branch again on previously unexplored policy areas, which each state maintaining its own branch.
Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
If you are a kid facing persecution and a high possibility of being murdered in your home country, coming to the UK and receiving an education here and going on to a career here is a massive utility gain, and if you go on to a successful and altruistic career it’s an even bigger utility gain. The disutility of the kid coming here—maybe the teacher in the local state school has to split their attention between 31 pupils instead of the original 30 - is only a very small disutility.
Um, that style of logic doesn’t work. You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society. This is the kind of computation that’s impossible to do intuitively (and probably impossible to do directly at all since we have no way to directly measure utility). It is, however, easy to see what the implications of a large scale population transfer are and to see that they are negative. You assert that there exists a threshold below which immigration is positive utility. However, you have no way to calculate it’s value or show we are below it (or even show that it’s not zero), without resorting to what looks like wishful thinking.
You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society.
That’s reason for Pigovian taxes, not outright bans. There are plenty of other things which have diffuse negative externalities, e.g. anything which causes air pollution, and we don’t just ban them all.
Except neither Acty nor anyone currently in politics is proposing Pigovian taxes. Also, since most of the would-be immigrants wouldn’t be able to afford them, this wouldn’t be an acceptable policy for the pro-immigration forces.
I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.
In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how to act under uncertainty, which decreases the chance of falling into some attractive, world-saving utilitarian scheme that backfires and hurts people: some sacrifices are just considered unacceptable.
Speaking of utilitarian schemes, British colonialism to the Muslim world would cause a lot of suffering, but so does current immigration policies that bring in Muslims. Why is one type of suffering acceptable, but another isn’t? Utilitarianism can have some really perverse consequences.
What if British-ruled Pakistan of 2050 was dramatically lower in crime, lower in violence towards women in both countries, and more peaceful, such that the violence of imposing that situation is offset? What if the status quo of immigration, or an open borders scenario would lead to a bloodier future that is more oppressive to women in both countries? What if assimilation and fixing immigrant isn’t feasible on an acceptable timescale, especially given that new immigrants are constantly streaming in and reinforcing their culture?
My point about British vs. Muslim rape survivors is about responsibility, not sympathy or worthiness as a human being. As a practical matter, people who live nearer each other and have shared cultural / community ties are better positioned to stop local crime and discourage criminals. Expecting them to use their local legal system to arrest imported criminals will stretch their resources to the point of failure, like we saw in Rotherham.
It’s both impractical and unfair to expect people to clean up other people’s messes. Moral responsibility and duty is a general moral principle that’s easy to translate into rule-utilitarianism. A moral requirement to bail out other people’s crime problems would mean there is no incentive for groups to fix their own crime problems.
Borders, rule of law, and nations are obviously important for utility, happiness, and preferences, or we wouldn’t have them (see ErikM’s comment also). Historically, any nation that didn’t defend its borders would have been invaded, destroyed, or had its population replaced from the inside.
Imagine we invited to LW hundreds of people from Reddit, Jezebel, and Stormfront to educate them. The result would not be pretty, and it wouldn’t make any of these communities happier. LW enforcing borders makes it possible for this place to exist and be productive. Same thing with national borders. If you cannot have a fence on your garden, then you cannot maintain gardens, and there is no incentive to make them. Which means that people cannot benefit from gardens.
Open borders are a terrible idea because they mix together people with different cultures and crime rates, causing conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Certain elements of civilization, like women being able to walk around wearing what they want, can only occur in low-crime societies.
Historically, despite some missteps, the West has been responsible for an immense amount of medicine, science, and foreign aid due to a particular civilization based on rule of law, low crime, high trust, and yes, borders. If the West had lacked those things, it would not have been able to contribute to humanity in the past. And if those things are destroyed by unselective immigration, then the West will turn into a place like Brazil, or worse, South Africa: a world of ethnic distrust, gated communities, fascist parties and women scared to travel alone in public. That doesn’t sound like a very happy place to me.
If you are hoping that the outcome of unselective immigration and open borders would be beneficial, then you would need some pretty strong evidence, because the consequences of being wrong are really scary. You would need to be looking at current events, historical precedents, population projections, crime trends, and a lot of other stuff. The early indicators are not looking good, like Rotherham-style gangs all over England, plus Sharia Patrols, and these events should result in updating of priors.
But of course, neoreactionaries hate feminists, so I suppose they’ll all stop listening as soon as I use the word.
Do you think that anyone who is against multiculturalism is a neoreactionary?
But the problem isn’t Pakistani people, the problem is that the culture they were brought up in is sexist. We don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism; there’s a lot of evidence that second-generation and third-generation immigrants’ views shift, as the generations go by, towards egalitarian.
I.e. the immigrants adopt the culture of the host country. Are you sure you don’t mean ‘We don’t need to get rid of multiracialism’?
To some extent. Increase or decrease the rate of immigration, require criteria to be met for immigration or not, enforce speaking the native language or not, ban or allow faith schools, ban or allow child circumcision & FGM and so forth. Obviously, not all people on each side of the debate agree on which policies to pursue, but that’s true of all politics.
The author of the grandparent mentioned Moldbug not long ago; the sockpuppeteer who seems to be downvoting Acty is likely neoreactionary. Update, and then consider apologizing.
Well hairyfigment’s definition of “sockpuppet” appears to be anyone who disagrees with him, so by his definition however downvoted you wasn’t a “sockpuppet”.
So there is at least one person in this thread who has read Moldbug, and might be using sockpuppets (which is wrong, of course). Yet Acty’s comment says “they’ll all stop listening”. Plural.
Plus Acty assumes that people who have a different ideology to her hate her and will just stop reading, which isn’t very charitable when we should all be trying to avoid confirmation bias.
Yes, I think that subconsciously I have an assumption that all conservatives are either idiots or extreme neoreactionary types, based mostly on my personal experience of a) knowing lots of idiot conservatives IRL whose opinions amount to “an immigrant looked at me the wrong way once!!!11!!1!” and b) arguing really loudly with extreme neoreactionaries online. I’m not assuming you hate me, I’ve just somehow managed to subconsciously accumulate a really low prior for someone I’m arguing with being a smart normal conservative. I will update and endeavour to correct that.
I’m not sure I would class myself as a conservative, but I can understand your assumption that conservatives are idiots, in that there was a time when I would have said that anyone who is against gay rights is a fascist theocrat. Now I realise, on a more intuitive level, that just because many arguments for a position are idiotic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a somewhat intelligent argument out there.
Oddly enough, IRL I mostly meet fairly intelligent people with opinions that amount to “anyone who disagrees with my left-wing politics is evil! That person supports a right wing party, I’d like to burn their house down!”
My theory is that facebook and twitter have ruined discourse because people can’t fit opinions more complex into 140 characters.
I’ve been refreshing my page ten times a minute to check my karma hasn’t gone down any further and that is a really terrible use of my time.
You’re new here, I guess you’ll get used to the karma system in time? In the meantime, have an upvote :)
knowing lots of idiot conservatives IRL whose opinions amount to “an immigrant looked at me the wrong way once!!!11!!1!”
I seriously doubt this. Rather I suspect you’re, either intentionally or unconsciously, replacing opinions disagreeing with yours with ones that are easier for you to dismiss.
I think you and Acty each live in your own filter bubbles, constructed mostly through subconscious intent. (Beware of believing your enemies are innately evil and intentionally causing themselves to be biased.) Everyone is subconsciously inclined to read authors they agree with; it’s more pleasurable and less painful. In your filter bubble, you read thoughtful conservative thinkers, along with cherry-picked bits of poorly-reasoned liberal extremist thinking, that those conservatives tear apart. And the reverse is true for Acty.
I suspect the internet is increasing the ease of forming these sort of bubbles, which seems like a huge problem.
FWIW, I am disappointed to see political discussion drift from object-level political disagreements to person-level disagreements about who is more biased. I virtually never see a good outcome from such a discussion. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard participating in discussions on a website about bias.
You could have said something to the effect of “not all conservatives have such dumb opinions, they aren’t representative of all conservatism, and there also are liberals with even dumber opinions, and anyway it’s not a good idea to judge memeplexes from their worst members”—but no, you chose to go for James A. Donald-level asshattery—“if you say you know conservatives with dumb opinions, you’re probably lying or confabulating”. (And somehow even got seven upvotes for that.) What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions? Are you familiar with all groups of conservatives worldwide?
Because those vectors of argument are insufficiently patronizing, I’m guessing.
But in all seriousness, the “judging memeplexes from their worst members” issue is pretty interesting, because politicized ideologies and really any ideology that someone has a name for and integrates into their identity (“I am a conservative” or “I am a feminist” or “I am an objectivist” or whatever) are really fuzzily defined.
To use the example we’re talking about: Is conservatism about traditional values and bolstering the nuclear family? Is conservatism about defunding the government and encouraging private industry to flourish? Is conservatism about biblical literalism and establishing god’s law on earth? Is conservatism about privacy and individual liberties? Is conservatism about nationalism and purity and wariness of immigrants? I’ve encountered conservatives who care about all of these things. I’ve encountered conservatives who only care about some of them. I’ve encountered at least one conservative who has defined conservatism to me in terms of each of those things.
So when I go to my internal dictionary of terms-to-describe-ideologies, which conservatism do I pull? I know plenty of techie-libertarian-cluster people who call themselves conservatives who are atheists. I know plenty of religious people who call themselves conservatives who think that cryptography is a scary terrorist thing and should be outlawed. I know self-identified conservatives who think that the recent revelations about NSA surveillance are proof that the government is overreaching, and self-identified conservatives who think that if you have nothing to hide from the NSA then you have nothing to fear, so what’s the big deal?
I do not identify as a conservative. I can steelman lots of kinds of conservatism extremely well. Honestly I have some beliefs that some of my conservative-identifying friends would consider core conservative tenets. I still don’t know what the fuck a conservative is, because the term gets used by a ton of people who believe very strongly in its value but mean different things when they say it.
So I have no doubt that not only has Acty encountered conservatives who are stupid, but that their particular flavor of stupid are core tenets of what they consider conservatism. The problem is that this colors her beliefs about other kinds of conservatives, some of whom might only be in the same cluster in person-ideology-identity space because they use the same word. This is not an Acty-specific problem by any means. I know arguably no one who completely succeeds at not doing this, the labels are just that bad. Who gets to use the label? If I meet someone and they volunteer the information that they identify as a conservative, what conclusions should I draw about their ideological positions?
I think the problem has to stem from sticking the ideology-label onto one’s identity, because then when an individual has opinions, it’s really hard for them to separate their opinions from their ideology-identity-label, especially when they’re arguing with a standard enemy of that ideology-label, and thus can easily view themselves as standing in for the ideology itself. The conclusion I draw is that as soon as an ideology is an identity-label, it quickly becomes pretty close to useless as a bit of information by itself, and that the speed at which this happens is somewhat correlated to the popularity of the label.
I’d argue that that little one-off comment was less patronizing and more… sarcastic and mean.
Yeah, not all that productive either way. My bad. I apologize.
But I think the larger point stands about how these ideological labels are super leaky and way too schizophrenically defined by way too many people to really even be able to meaningfully say something like “That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”
“That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”
One of those statements refers to a concrete event (or series of events), the other depends on the exact definition of conservative.
What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions?
Well the fact that Acty has a tendency to not read/listen to what her opponents say and replace it with something easy to dismiss, as she has previously demonstrated in this very thread.
What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions?
What makes you think it’s so unlikely that Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments?
What makes you think it’s so unlikely that Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments?
I don’t. I think both P(Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions) and P(Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments) are sizeable.
I’m going to be cynical here, and say that most conservative opinions are idiotic, and most liberal opinions are idiotic. Its an instance of the ’90% of everything is shit’ principle.
We have little reason to think Journeyman is the same as Eugine Nier, who is almost certainly calling himself VoiceOfRa. Here is the puppeteer’s previous account, ending 7 April. Here is VR’s first comment on the site, jumping right into a discussion of decision theory. Here he is the same week talking about the purpose of LW/MIRI, linking an old thread in which he was active as Eugine Nier, repeating his old political views, and posting quotes as Nier was wont to do. Here is the dishonest piece of shit defector claiming I call anyone who disagrees with me a sockpuppet, rather than just him and his sockpuppets.
I downvoted your last couple of posts on the “vote down what you like to see less of” principle. I would like to see less whining and ideological witchhunts.
The downvotes will continue until the morale improves.
But the problem isn’t Pakistani people, the problem is that the culture they were brought up in is sexist. We don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism; there’s a lot of evidence that second-generation and third-generation immigrants’ views shift, as the generations go by, towards egalitarian.
And how would we define “Pakistani culture” in such a way that it doesn’t necessarily include patriarchy? Cultural evolution in response to moral imperative is a thing.
You say “immigrants” but in every case you mention it’s specifically Muslims. I’ve not heard of Hindu or Buddhist or atheist immigrants causing the same problems.
some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers
That a sentence that poses more question than it answers. What kind of influence do those councillors have? How many councillors of Pakistani heritage does Rotherham have? How many councillors of other heritage does it have?
If a powerful politician tries to prevent friends from being persecuted that’s not what the standard concern about policemen being too PC is about. It’s straight misuse of power.
Sexual violence by immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on.
To what extend is this simply a problem of British politicians having too much power to cover up crimes and impede police work?
Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from immigrant backgrounds.
The idea that there are people from Immigrant backgrounds isn’t what’s surprising about the story of Rotherham or even that politicians act in a way to prevent reporting of tragedy. Politicians trying to keep tragedies away from the public is a common occurrence.
The thing that’s surprising is the allegation of police inaction due to them being Muslim. Which happens something that you didn’t list in your “what we know” list. It would have to be true for the claim that PC policeman don’t do their job properly to be true.
If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it’s clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it’s clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
Here’s another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:
Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover- up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.
So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It’s not just politicians, it’s not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it’s obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.
In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.
You correctly note that there were factors beyond “PC”, but fail to address the horrific corruption. At least two councilors and a police officer face charges of sex with abuse victims.
The police officer has been also accused of passing information on to abusers in the town. A colleague of the officer has reportedly been accused of failing to take appropriate action after receiving information about the officer’s conduct. Both have been reported to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Another police officer, seen here being white, supposedly had an extensive child pornography collection. No word on whether this was related or whether the department just attracted pedophiles for some bizarre reason.
While I didn’t predict this beforehand (nor, I think, did you) it seems both more credible, and more likely to protect the rape-gang, than does the idea of people seeing strong evidence of the crimes and somehow deciding that arresting immigrants was more likely to hurt their careers than ignoring a story which was bound to come out eventually. The “political correctness” you speak of apparently refers to people not wanting to believe their fellow police officers and council members were implausibly evil criminals.
Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn’t encountered. I don’t think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story. These people would need to be supervillains if they were the ringleaders since 1997, and the failure of investigation was just about them.
It is already established by my quotes from the report that political correctness about race was a factor in the coverup and failure of the investigation. Certainly the corruption and participation of council members and police is a disturbing addition to this story. With such a vast tragedy, it’s quite likely that the coverup was due to multiple motivations and lots of things went wrong.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story.
It seems like we have a perfect control case with the pedophiles in Westminster which didn’t involve multiculturalism. They also engaged in it for a long time and managed to suppress it.
and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
There a huge difference between persecuting someone and then not writing his race or ethnicity into an official report and avoiding to prosecute them.
It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
From what you quoted from the report the those Pakistani council members were influential people.
Just like the politicians who covered up the child abuse in Westminster also were influential people.
In general politicians also never want that scandals and tragedy under their watch get public.
At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.
Regarding child victims with contempt does suggest a dysfunctional police but it’s not about multiculturalism.
In general the heuristic of not trusting mainstream media reports to accurately reflect reality is well based on what I know about how it works.
Without a direction to the bias that’s a universal counterargument. I’m perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
Without a direction to the bias that’s a universal counterargument.
It’s a universal counterargument when a newspaper stories that don’t appear to make sense and you don’t know the facts on the ground. You shouldn’t believe those stories.
I’m perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
I haven’t said anything about biases of reporting. I have spoken about journalists getting stories wrong. That quite often doesn’t have anything to do with bias. Journalists in Berlin from time to time get the idea that it’s the parliament and only the parliament that passes laws in Berlin wrong. That doesn’t have anything to do with left or right bias.
Thinking in terms of bias isn’t useful. My basic sense was that the story likely involves some form of corruption that didn’t make it into the news articles I read.
Garbage in Garbage out. You can’t correct bad reporting by correcting for bias.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn’t make sense. On the other hand corruption can prevent crimes from being persecuted.
The UK is not a country where a newspaper can freely report on a story like this. But not because of multiculturalism. You can’t sue a newspaper in the UK for that. The UK’s insane defamation laws result in articles speaking about “influential Pakistani councilors” instead of naming the individuals in question. A US newspaper would have never done this and actually named the politicians who seem to have obstructed a rape investigation if this happened in any US city.
Of course you actually need to practice critical reading to get that. If you just take the story at face value and then try to correct a systematic bias you miss the juicy bits.
Given that the newspaper is effectively censored in speaking about the real story about corruption they make up a bullshit story about how it’s multiculturalism that makes police officers afraid to go after Muslims.
That’s not to say that multiculturalism didn’t do anything in that case. It reduced the reporting of the fact that the people were Muslim, but it very likely didn’t prevent them from being persecuted.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn’t make sense.
People make decisions at the margin, and it’s entirely possible that the additional negative effect of being accused of racism pushes him over the edge in decisionmaking.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist.
First of all, police officers don’t prosecute anyone, prosecutors do. As for fear of being called racist, well some police officers complained when they noticed something was happening, and were promptly sent to cultural sensitivity training.
Policeman don’t need fighting spirit to be able to go after violent criminals. Being PC is no problem for them.
Eh… Rotherham?
The last time I read an article on Rotherham even the Telegraph said that the officers in question were highly chauvinistic and therefore don’t really follow the usual ideal of being PC.
At the same time reading articles about Rotherham is still registers me: “This story doesn’t make sense, the facts on the ground are likely to be different than the mainstream media reports I’m reading” instincts. Have you read the actual report about it in-depth?
(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)
The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it’s not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.
What we know:
Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls
Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it seems like other Middle-Eastern and Roma men were also involved
The political and multiculturalist environment slowed down the reporting of this tragedy until eventually it got out
To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham’s council website:
And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.
When a story is true, but it doesn’t “make sense,” that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can’t be true. I think that’s a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.
--
No, I’m fairly confident the neoreactionaries, for whatever reason you brought them up, would happily join in the plan to strip out the objectionable bits of Pakistani culture and replace it with something better. Also, demanding more integration and acculturation from immigrants. What they probably wouldn’t listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
You guys are arguing over the definition of “culture”.
I’ll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.
As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.
But for now, let’s pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?
In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?
Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It’s supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It’s not enough to say “that’s wrong” after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It’s also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.
Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard. When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as “racist” by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam’s infringement of women’s rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.
After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.
Could better immigration policies select for immigrants who are on board with Western ideas about consent?
Could Muslim immigrants to Europe be encouraged to assimilate faster towards Western ideas about women’s rights?
Are feminism and progressivism truly aligned in their goals? Is women’s safety compatible with importing large groups of people who have very different ideas about women’s rights?
If you found out about Rotherham from me, not from feminist or progressive sources, what else about the world have they not told you?
This doesn’t say much unless we know the corresponding fraction among Muslims worldwide is not much larger than 11%.
I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn’t just about a delta, it’s also about the end state: assimilation isn’t complete until Muslims adopt Western values.
Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France’s Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.
Well, Acty’s hypothesis was that they have started assimilating but still haven’t finished doing so. But thanks for the data.
(Who on Earth thought that that bulleted list of sentences in that Wikipedia article is a decent way of presenting those data, anyway? I hope I’ll have the time to make a bar chart, or at least a table. And how comes my spell checker doesn’t like either “bulleted” or “bulletted”?)
--
Redistributing the world’s rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you’re suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.
Factually, it’s unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like “whores” and are considered to not have bodily sovereignty. To use the feminist term, they are considered “rapable.” Additionally, if British police fail to adequately investigate rape by Muslim men, whether due to chauvinism or fear of being seen as racist, then the rapists won’t actually go to jail in a timely fashion. The Rotherham authorities couldn’t keep up with the volume of complaints. I have no idea whether the Rotherham sex gangs would have been able to operate so brazenly in a Muslim country, where they would risk violent reprisals from the fathers and brothers of their victims. So the notion of reducing rape by jailing immigrant rapists is really, really speculative, and I think it’s really careless for you to be making moral arguments based on it.
Even if spreading around the world’s rapists actually helps jail them and eventually reduce rape, it’s still morally repugnant. I’m trying to figure out what your moral framework is, but the only thing I can come up with is naive utilitarianism. In fact, I think redistributing the world’s rapists is so counter-intuitive that it highlights the problems with naive utilitarianism (or whatever your framework is). There are many lines of objection:
From a deontological perspective, or from a rule/act utilitarian perspective, inflicting a greater risk of rape upon your female neighbors would be a bad practice. It really doesn’t seem very altruistic. What about lower-class British people who don’t want their daughters to risk elevated levels of rape and don’t have the money to take flight to all-white areas? What if they aren’t on board with your plans?
Naive utilitarianism treats humans and human groups interchangeably, and lacks any concept of moral responsibility. Why should the British people be responsible for imprisoning rapists from other countries? They aren’t. They are responsible for handling their own rapists, but why should they be responsible for other people’s rapists? I really disagree that British people should view Muslim women raped in Muslim countries as equivalent to British women raped by British people. When British women are raped in Britain, that represents a failure of British socialization and rule of law, but British people don’t have control over Muslim socialization or law enforcement and shouldn’t have to pick up the pieces when those things fail.
Nations have a moral responsibility to their citizens to defend their citizens from crime and to enforce rule-of-law. If nations fail to protect their own people from crime, people may get pissed off and engage in vigilantism or voting in fascist parties. A utilitarian needs to factor in these backlash scenarios in calculating the utility of rapist redistribution. You could say “well, British people should just take it lying down instead of becoming vigilantes or fascists” but that steps into a different moral framework (like deontology or rule/act utilitarianism) where you would have to answer my previous objections.
Even from a utilitarian perspective, I am not convinced that rapist redistribution actually is good for human welfare. I don’t think it’s utility-promoting to cause members of Culture A to risk harm to fix another Culture’s B crime problems. If you take the world’s biggest problems are redistribute them, then it just turns the whole world shitty instead of just certain parts of it. Importing crime overburdens the police force, resulting in a weakening of rule-of-law, which will only be followed by general civilizational decline.
If you really want to use British law-and-order against rapists from other countries, the other solution would be to export British rule of law to those countries instead of importing immigrants from them. Britain used to try this approach, but nowadays it’s considered unpopular.
If you are going to say that it’s The White Man’s Burden to fix other nation’s problems, then at least go whole hog.
If you are trying to stop rape from a utilitarian perspective, and you want to reeducate Muslims about consent, then you should become a colonialist: export Western rule to the Muslim world, encourage feminism, punish rape, and stop female genital mutilation. What if Muslims resist this utilitarian plan? Well, what if British people resist your utilitarian plan? If you think British people should lie down and accept Muslim immigrant crime cuz utility, then it’s possible to respond that Muslim countries should lie down and accept British rule plus feminism cuz utility.
I am very stunned to see someone coming from a feminist perspective who is knowingly willing to advocate a policy that would increase the risk of rape of women in her society. I think this stance is based on very shaky factual and moral grounds, putting it at odds with any claims of being altruistic and trying to help reduce suffering. I have female relatives in England and I am very distressed by the idea of them risking elevated levels of sexual violence due to political and moral idea that I consider repugnant. If I’m interpreting you wrong then please tell me.
I think you’re being a little hard on Acty. I agree her positions aren’t super well thought out, but it feels like we should make a special effort to keep things friendly in the welcome thread.
Here’s how I would have put similar points (having only followed part of your discussion):
You’re right that the cultural transmission between Muslims and English people will be 2-way—feminists will attempt to impose their ideas on Muslims the same way Muslims will attempt to impose their ideas on feminists. But there are reasons to think that the ideas will disproportionately go the wrong way, from feminists to Muslims. For example, it’s verboten in the feminist community to criticize Muslims, but it’s not verboten in the Muslim community to criticize feminists.
It’d be great if what Acty describes could happen and the police of Britain could cut down on the Muslim rape rate. But Rothertam is a perfect demonstration that this process may not go as well as intended.
My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty’s position “repugnant” and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty’s position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.
I think Acty is a fundamentally good person who is misled by poor moral frameworks. I do not know any way to communicate the depth of my moral disagreement without showing some level of my authentic emotional reaction (though very restrained). Being super-nice about it would fail to represent my degree of moral disagreement, and essentially slash her tires and everyone else’s. I realize that it might be tough for her to face so much criticism in a welcome thread, especially considering that some of the critics are harsher than me. But there is also potential upside: on LW, she might find higher quality debate over her ideas than she has before.
Your hypothetical response is a good start, but it fails to supply moral criticism of her stance that I consider necessary. Maybe something in between yours and mine would have been ideal. Being welcoming is a good thing, but if “welcoming” results in a pass on really perverse moral philosophy, then perhaps it’s going too far… I guess it depends on your goals.
--
Let me try to briefly convince you of why there should be a state’s duty to citizens from a utilitarian perspective, also corresponding greater concern about internal than external crime:
1) A state resembles a form of corporate organization with its citizens as shareholders. It has special obligations by contract to those shareholders who got a stake on the assumption that they would have special rights in the corporation. Suddenly creating new stock and giving it to to non-shareholders, thereby creating new shareholders, would increase the utility of new shareholders and decrease the utility of old shareholders to roughly the same extent because there is the same amount of company being redistributed, but would have the additional negative effect of decreasing rule of law, and rule of law is a very very good thing because it lets people engage in long-term planning and live stable lives. (There is no such problem if the shareholders come together and decide to create and distribute new stock by agreement—and to translate back the metaphor, this means that immigration should be controlled by existing citizens, rather than borders being declared to “mean nothing” in general.)
2) A state is often an overlay on a nation. To cash those terms out: A governing entity with major features usually including a legal code and a geographically defined and sharply edged region of influence is often an overlay on a cluster of people grouped by social, cultural, biological, and other shared features. (“Nation” derives from those who shared a natus.) Different clusters of people have different clusters of utility functions, and should therefore live under differing legal codes, which should also be administrated by members of those clusters whom one can reasonably expect to have a particularly good understanding of how their fellow cluster-members will be happiest.
3) Particularly where not overlaid on nations, separate states function as testbeds for experiments in policy; the closest thing one has to large-scale controlled experiments in sociology. Redistributing populations across states would be akin to redistributing test subjects across trial arms. The utilitarian thing to do is therefore to instead copy the policies of the most successful nations to the least successful nations, then branch again on previously unexplored policy areas, which each state maintaining its own branch.
--
Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
Um, that style of logic doesn’t work. You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society. This is the kind of computation that’s impossible to do intuitively (and probably impossible to do directly at all since we have no way to directly measure utility). It is, however, easy to see what the implications of a large scale population transfer are and to see that they are negative. You assert that there exists a threshold below which immigration is positive utility. However, you have no way to calculate it’s value or show we are below it (or even show that it’s not zero), without resorting to what looks like wishful thinking.
That’s reason for Pigovian taxes, not outright bans. There are plenty of other things which have diffuse negative externalities, e.g. anything which causes air pollution, and we don’t just ban them all.
Except neither Acty nor anyone currently in politics is proposing Pigovian taxes. Also, since most of the would-be immigrants wouldn’t be able to afford them, this wouldn’t be an acceptable policy for the pro-immigration forces.
I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.
In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how to act under uncertainty, which decreases the chance of falling into some attractive, world-saving utilitarian scheme that backfires and hurts people: some sacrifices are just considered unacceptable.
Speaking of utilitarian schemes, British colonialism to the Muslim world would cause a lot of suffering, but so does current immigration policies that bring in Muslims. Why is one type of suffering acceptable, but another isn’t? Utilitarianism can have some really perverse consequences.
What if British-ruled Pakistan of 2050 was dramatically lower in crime, lower in violence towards women in both countries, and more peaceful, such that the violence of imposing that situation is offset? What if the status quo of immigration, or an open borders scenario would lead to a bloodier future that is more oppressive to women in both countries? What if assimilation and fixing immigrant isn’t feasible on an acceptable timescale, especially given that new immigrants are constantly streaming in and reinforcing their culture?
My point about British vs. Muslim rape survivors is about responsibility, not sympathy or worthiness as a human being. As a practical matter, people who live nearer each other and have shared cultural / community ties are better positioned to stop local crime and discourage criminals. Expecting them to use their local legal system to arrest imported criminals will stretch their resources to the point of failure, like we saw in Rotherham.
It’s both impractical and unfair to expect people to clean up other people’s messes. Moral responsibility and duty is a general moral principle that’s easy to translate into rule-utilitarianism. A moral requirement to bail out other people’s crime problems would mean there is no incentive for groups to fix their own crime problems.
Borders, rule of law, and nations are obviously important for utility, happiness, and preferences, or we wouldn’t have them (see ErikM’s comment also). Historically, any nation that didn’t defend its borders would have been invaded, destroyed, or had its population replaced from the inside.
Imagine we invited to LW hundreds of people from Reddit, Jezebel, and Stormfront to educate them. The result would not be pretty, and it wouldn’t make any of these communities happier. LW enforcing borders makes it possible for this place to exist and be productive. Same thing with national borders. If you cannot have a fence on your garden, then you cannot maintain gardens, and there is no incentive to make them. Which means that people cannot benefit from gardens.
Open borders are a terrible idea because they mix together people with different cultures and crime rates, causing conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Certain elements of civilization, like women being able to walk around wearing what they want, can only occur in low-crime societies.
Historically, despite some missteps, the West has been responsible for an immense amount of medicine, science, and foreign aid due to a particular civilization based on rule of law, low crime, high trust, and yes, borders. If the West had lacked those things, it would not have been able to contribute to humanity in the past. And if those things are destroyed by unselective immigration, then the West will turn into a place like Brazil, or worse, South Africa: a world of ethnic distrust, gated communities, fascist parties and women scared to travel alone in public. That doesn’t sound like a very happy place to me.
If you are hoping that the outcome of unselective immigration and open borders would be beneficial, then you would need some pretty strong evidence, because the consequences of being wrong are really scary. You would need to be looking at current events, historical precedents, population projections, crime trends, and a lot of other stuff. The early indicators are not looking good, like Rotherham-style gangs all over England, plus Sharia Patrols, and these events should result in updating of priors.
And yet, they were remarkably uninterested in this story when it came out.
Do you think that anyone who is against multiculturalism is a neoreactionary?
I.e. the immigrants adopt the culture of the host country. Are you sure you don’t mean ‘We don’t need to get rid of multiracialism’?
Do you really think that proponents or opponents of “multiculturalism” are arguing over a well-defined program of action?
To some extent. Increase or decrease the rate of immigration, require criteria to be met for immigration or not, enforce speaking the native language or not, ban or allow faith schools, ban or allow child circumcision & FGM and so forth. Obviously, not all people on each side of the debate agree on which policies to pursue, but that’s true of all politics.
The author of the grandparent mentioned Moldbug not long ago; the sockpuppeteer who seems to be downvoting Acty is likely neoreactionary. Update, and then consider apologizing.
I’ve been objecting to what Acty said and I get downvoted too.
Well hairyfigment’s definition of “sockpuppet” appears to be anyone who disagrees with him, so by his definition however downvoted you wasn’t a “sockpuppet”.
So there is at least one person in this thread who has read Moldbug, and might be using sockpuppets (which is wrong, of course). Yet Acty’s comment says “they’ll all stop listening”. Plural.
Plus Acty assumes that people who have a different ideology to her hate her and will just stop reading, which isn’t very charitable when we should all be trying to avoid confirmation bias.
--
I’m not sure I would class myself as a conservative, but I can understand your assumption that conservatives are idiots, in that there was a time when I would have said that anyone who is against gay rights is a fascist theocrat. Now I realise, on a more intuitive level, that just because many arguments for a position are idiotic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a somewhat intelligent argument out there.
Oddly enough, IRL I mostly meet fairly intelligent people with opinions that amount to “anyone who disagrees with my left-wing politics is evil! That person supports a right wing party, I’d like to burn their house down!”
My theory is that facebook and twitter have ruined discourse because people can’t fit opinions more complex into 140 characters.
You’re new here, I guess you’ll get used to the karma system in time? In the meantime, have an upvote :)
I seriously doubt this. Rather I suspect you’re, either intentionally or unconsciously, replacing opinions disagreeing with yours with ones that are easier for you to dismiss.
I think you and Acty each live in your own filter bubbles, constructed mostly through subconscious intent. (Beware of believing your enemies are innately evil and intentionally causing themselves to be biased.) Everyone is subconsciously inclined to read authors they agree with; it’s more pleasurable and less painful. In your filter bubble, you read thoughtful conservative thinkers, along with cherry-picked bits of poorly-reasoned liberal extremist thinking, that those conservatives tear apart. And the reverse is true for Acty.
I suspect the internet is increasing the ease of forming these sort of bubbles, which seems like a huge problem.
FWIW, I am disappointed to see political discussion drift from object-level political disagreements to person-level disagreements about who is more biased. I virtually never see a good outcome from such a discussion. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard participating in discussions on a website about bias.
You could have said something to the effect of “not all conservatives have such dumb opinions, they aren’t representative of all conservatism, and there also are liberals with even dumber opinions, and anyway it’s not a good idea to judge memeplexes from their worst members”—but no, you chose to go for James A. Donald-level asshattery—“if you say you know conservatives with dumb opinions, you’re probably lying or confabulating”. (And somehow even got seven upvotes for that.) What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions? Are you familiar with all groups of conservatives worldwide?
Because those vectors of argument are insufficiently patronizing, I’m guessing.
But in all seriousness, the “judging memeplexes from their worst members” issue is pretty interesting, because politicized ideologies and really any ideology that someone has a name for and integrates into their identity (“I am a conservative” or “I am a feminist” or “I am an objectivist” or whatever) are really fuzzily defined.
To use the example we’re talking about: Is conservatism about traditional values and bolstering the nuclear family? Is conservatism about defunding the government and encouraging private industry to flourish? Is conservatism about biblical literalism and establishing god’s law on earth? Is conservatism about privacy and individual liberties? Is conservatism about nationalism and purity and wariness of immigrants? I’ve encountered conservatives who care about all of these things. I’ve encountered conservatives who only care about some of them. I’ve encountered at least one conservative who has defined conservatism to me in terms of each of those things.
So when I go to my internal dictionary of terms-to-describe-ideologies, which conservatism do I pull? I know plenty of techie-libertarian-cluster people who call themselves conservatives who are atheists. I know plenty of religious people who call themselves conservatives who think that cryptography is a scary terrorist thing and should be outlawed. I know self-identified conservatives who think that the recent revelations about NSA surveillance are proof that the government is overreaching, and self-identified conservatives who think that if you have nothing to hide from the NSA then you have nothing to fear, so what’s the big deal?
I do not identify as a conservative. I can steelman lots of kinds of conservatism extremely well. Honestly I have some beliefs that some of my conservative-identifying friends would consider core conservative tenets. I still don’t know what the fuck a conservative is, because the term gets used by a ton of people who believe very strongly in its value but mean different things when they say it.
So I have no doubt that not only has Acty encountered conservatives who are stupid, but that their particular flavor of stupid are core tenets of what they consider conservatism. The problem is that this colors her beliefs about other kinds of conservatives, some of whom might only be in the same cluster in person-ideology-identity space because they use the same word. This is not an Acty-specific problem by any means. I know arguably no one who completely succeeds at not doing this, the labels are just that bad. Who gets to use the label? If I meet someone and they volunteer the information that they identify as a conservative, what conclusions should I draw about their ideological positions?
I think the problem has to stem from sticking the ideology-label onto one’s identity, because then when an individual has opinions, it’s really hard for them to separate their opinions from their ideology-identity-label, especially when they’re arguing with a standard enemy of that ideology-label, and thus can easily view themselves as standing in for the ideology itself. The conclusion I draw is that as soon as an ideology is an identity-label, it quickly becomes pretty close to useless as a bit of information by itself, and that the speed at which this happens is somewhat correlated to the popularity of the label.
Right, it’s only OK to be patronizing to people who aren’t present to defend themselves.
I’d argue that that little one-off comment was less patronizing and more… sarcastic and mean.
Yeah, not all that productive either way. My bad. I apologize.
But I think the larger point stands about how these ideological labels are super leaky and way too schizophrenically defined by way too many people to really even be able to meaningfully say something like “That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”
One of those statements refers to a concrete event (or series of events), the other depends on the exact definition of conservative.
Well the fact that Acty has a tendency to not read/listen to what her opponents say and replace it with something easy to dismiss, as she has previously demonstrated in this very thread.
What makes you think it’s so unlikely that Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments?
I don’t. I think both P(Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions) and P(Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments) are sizeable.
I’m going to be cynical here, and say that most conservative opinions are idiotic, and most liberal opinions are idiotic. Its an instance of the ’90% of everything is shit’ principle.
We have little reason to think Journeyman is the same as Eugine Nier, who is almost certainly calling himself VoiceOfRa. Here is the puppeteer’s previous account, ending 7 April. Here is VR’s first comment on the site, jumping right into a discussion of decision theory. Here he is the same week talking about the purpose of LW/MIRI, linking an old thread in which he was active as Eugine Nier, repeating his old political views, and posting quotes as Nier was wont to do. Here is the dishonest piece of shit defector claiming I call anyone who disagrees with me a sockpuppet, rather than just him and his sockpuppets.
Can we skip the middle-school drama?
I downvoted your last couple of posts on the “vote down what you like to see less of” principle. I would like to see less whining and ideological witchhunts.
The downvotes will continue until the morale improves.
A fine example of how trying to stop “politics” can serve as a political move in favor of the status quo. You’re not treating the cause.
I am not trying to stop “politics”. Evidently I was insufficiently explicit, let me quote myself, now with bolded parts:
And how would we define “Pakistani culture” in such a way that it doesn’t necessarily include patriarchy? Cultural evolution in response to moral imperative is a thing.
You say “immigrants” but in every case you mention it’s specifically Muslims. I’ve not heard of Hindu or Buddhist or atheist immigrants causing the same problems.
That’s correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.
That a sentence that poses more question than it answers. What kind of influence do those councillors have? How many councillors of Pakistani heritage does Rotherham have? How many councillors of other heritage does it have?
If a powerful politician tries to prevent friends from being persecuted that’s not what the standard concern about policemen being too PC is about. It’s straight misuse of power.
Sexual violence by British MPs seems also to be a problem: http://www.rt.com/uk/170672-uk-politicians-pedophile-ring/
To what extend is this simply a problem of British politicians having too much power to cover up crimes and impede police work?
The idea that there are people from Immigrant backgrounds isn’t what’s surprising about the story of Rotherham or even that politicians act in a way to prevent reporting of tragedy. Politicians trying to keep tragedies away from the public is a common occurrence.
The thing that’s surprising is the allegation of police inaction due to them being Muslim. Which happens something that you didn’t list in your “what we know” list.
It would have to be true for the claim that PC policeman don’t do their job properly to be true.
If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it’s clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it’s clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
Here’s another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:
So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It’s not just politicians, it’s not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it’s obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.
In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.
You correctly note that there were factors beyond “PC”, but fail to address the horrific corruption. At least two councilors and a police officer face charges of sex with abuse victims.
Another police officer, seen here being white, supposedly had an extensive child pornography collection. No word on whether this was related or whether the department just attracted pedophiles for some bizarre reason.
While I didn’t predict this beforehand (nor, I think, did you) it seems both more credible, and more likely to protect the rape-gang, than does the idea of people seeing strong evidence of the crimes and somehow deciding that arresting immigrants was more likely to hurt their careers than ignoring a story which was bound to come out eventually. The “political correctness” you speak of apparently refers to people not wanting to believe their fellow police officers and council members were implausibly evil criminals.
Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn’t encountered. I don’t think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story. These people would need to be supervillains if they were the ringleaders since 1997, and the failure of investigation was just about them.
It is already established by my quotes from the report that political correctness about race was a factor in the coverup and failure of the investigation. Certainly the corruption and participation of council members and police is a disturbing addition to this story. With such a vast tragedy, it’s quite likely that the coverup was due to multiple motivations and lots of things went wrong.
It seems like we have a perfect control case with the pedophiles in Westminster which didn’t involve multiculturalism. They also engaged in it for a long time and managed to suppress it.
I might add that I did speak about chauvinistic police officers as a problem and also that corruption is likely a cause over at Omnilibrium.
There a huge difference between persecuting someone and then not writing his race or ethnicity into an official report and avoiding to prosecute them.
From what you quoted from the report the those Pakistani council members were influential people. Just like the politicians who covered up the child abuse in Westminster also were influential people.
In general politicians also never want that scandals and tragedy under their watch get public.
Regarding child victims with contempt does suggest a dysfunctional police but it’s not about multiculturalism.
Have you tried updating your model to reflect reality?
In general the heuristic of not trusting mainstream media reports to accurately reflect reality is well based on what I know about how it works.
I gave enough interviews to have an idea of how what the journalist writes differs from what was said in the interview in those cases.
I frequently read reports on scientific studies that don’t match reality.
In the past I knew the background of quite a bunch of political stories in Berlin and how it differs from facts on the ground.
Without a direction to the bias that’s a universal counterargument. I’m perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
It’s a universal counterargument when a newspaper stories that don’t appear to make sense and you don’t know the facts on the ground. You shouldn’t believe those stories.
I haven’t said anything about biases of reporting. I have spoken about journalists getting stories wrong. That quite often doesn’t have anything to do with bias. Journalists in Berlin from time to time get the idea that it’s the parliament and only the parliament that passes laws in Berlin wrong. That doesn’t have anything to do with left or right bias.
Thinking in terms of bias isn’t useful. My basic sense was that the story likely involves some form of corruption that didn’t make it into the news articles I read. Garbage in Garbage out. You can’t correct bad reporting by correcting for bias.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn’t make sense. On the other hand corruption can prevent crimes from being persecuted.
The UK is not a country where a newspaper can freely report on a story like this. But not because of multiculturalism. You can’t sue a newspaper in the UK for that. The UK’s insane defamation laws result in articles speaking about “influential Pakistani councilors” instead of naming the individuals in question. A US newspaper would have never done this and actually named the politicians who seem to have obstructed a rape investigation if this happened in any US city.
Of course you actually need to practice critical reading to get that. If you just take the story at face value and then try to correct a systematic bias you miss the juicy bits.
Given that the newspaper is effectively censored in speaking about the real story about corruption they make up a bullshit story about how it’s multiculturalism that makes police officers afraid to go after Muslims. That’s not to say that multiculturalism didn’t do anything in that case. It reduced the reporting of the fact that the people were Muslim, but it very likely didn’t prevent them from being persecuted.
People make decisions at the margin, and it’s entirely possible that the additional negative effect of being accused of racism pushes him over the edge in decisionmaking.
First of all, police officers don’t prosecute anyone, prosecutors do. As for fear of being called racist, well some police officers complained when they noticed something was happening, and were promptly sent to cultural sensitivity training.
Er.....Rotherham?
Typo fixed, thanks.