Douthat:

So instead of looking for ideological vindication in these stories, it’s better to draw a general lesson. Show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I’ll tell you who is likely to get away with rape.

The NCAA restored the bowl game eligibility of the Penn State football program yesterday.

It’s curious that the NCAA would agree to so radically mitigate sanctions stemming from what is the single most horrible scandal in its history...

Yes. Yes it is.


With every day that passes, I more deeply believe that nothing is more poisonous in human character than sanctimony.


"Cohesion" wouldn't mean so much to Brits if they'd maintained their aggressive posture of World War II, rather than assuming the United States would be cleaning the world's messes for the rest of history.

(That last paragraph is me being cranky about the rest of the world's ineptitude. America is having a couple of not-great decades... Is there no one else in the world who could handle some chores? Fold some laundry, wash some dishes?)

Are any of the lefty feminist sites saying anything about Rotherdam? I just checked Pharyngula and found nothing.

There were some boys, too, in the article I read.

They don't allow self defence in Britain either. Too bad about your children, but you get what you tolerate.

Groups protect themselves by putting people in place that value their position/culture over anything else.

These people then cultivate authorities in organizations that interact w/them that also value their position over anything else.

Anyone that interferes with these people are then singled out as "does not work well with others" work reviews. Anyone that works well with these people are promoted and praised. This is how it has been since the beginning of human interaction with each other.

There is no way to change this. Firing everyone from the top down may be possible but rarely works. (Regan's action against air traffic controllers seemingly worked out, but letting everyone go in Saddam Husseim's gov't did not.)

I honestly that only an individual's punitive action and subsequent trial can bring about change IF there are enough of these incidents in a short period of time.

Otherwise, MarkD's comment is spot on.

There are only two possible answers for the South Yorkshire police. They were paid off or they're afraid of the rapists.
The Brits should never have given up their guns. Who's gonna protect them now?

Great article.

This is so messed up and disturbing, and I think that Ross Douthat is right.

Allegations have also resurfaced, lately, pointing to evidence of a decades-old paedophile ring involving prestigious members of British Parliament.

Jezebel wrote about it a bit, I think, Rex.

It's unfortunate, but the fact of the matter is, we try to be decent human beings who defend human rights, but sometimes, peoples' rights conflict.

Peoples' right to practice their religion often conflicts with other peoples' rights to autonomy, as in child genital mutilation or stoning adulterers.

Peoples' right to live in their culture often conflicts with autonomy as well.

And there is a historic reality of brown people being stopped at random, brown people being accused of sexually desiring white women and then made to suffer, etc.

Striking the balance, as we've seen, is very difficult.

Feminism and multiculturalism are often at odds with each other, since so many cultures are just not feminist at all. So even when one wants to support multiculturalism, diversity, etc., it often means making a choice between which freedoms you protect.

Sometimes you have to choose... is religious freedom more important than preventing clitorectomies? Is diversity more important than the right of women in clubwear to walk around safely at night? etc. etc.

And different people will value different things, but the mistake is in thinking you can have it all. Because fact is, you have to choose. You let in large numbers of people from misogynistic cultures, you are going to backslide on feminist ideals. You can't have it both ways.

The problem is the people who say we can have it all, who won't acknowledge that massive immigration comes with problems. Who accuse anyone saying so of being racist. But realistically, it's important to try to anticipate those problems, because otherwise solutions aren't going to be found.

I can see the pendulum swinging back the other way, and now every person of Pakistani descent, no matter how well integrated, having to deal with all sorts of harassment, even those who would never be involved in anything so horrible, or even mildly illegal.

This is what happens when you don't think about potential problems, and thus, don't think about potential solutions.

NicoleK,

This had nothing to do with religious practice. It was about a large group of Muslim men taking advantage of Britain's attitude toward its own lower classes. The girls were all white came from what we here in America would call "white trash" homes. The police referred to these 11-14 year old girls as "slags" and felt they got what they deserved. It is disgusting and has nothing to do with the tension between religious rights and feminism. Read Douhat's article and then follow the links he provides to the British papers.

> This had nothing to do with religious
> practice. It was about a large group
> of Muslim men taking advantage of

Anyone still parsing that one?

This had nothing to do with religious practice. An enormous squad of marauding Catholics went on a rampage, and....

Law enforcement bungled things, but the prime mover in this evil is the criminal.

> Peoples' right to live in their
> culture often conflicts with
> autonomy as well.

What the fuck is "Peoples' right to live in their culture"?

Please get back to me on that. What the Hell are you talking about?

You pulled that out of your ass, right?

Listen, sometimes the cat hates to pounce, but that's the kind of muddled, clumsy thinking that lets things like this happen. Wording MATTERS, OK?

Do have any serious understanding of "human rights," or are you just pretending to feel things for other people?

"Peoples' right to live in their culture."

Rex,
"Are any of the lefty feminist sites saying anything about Rotherdam? I just checked Pharyngula and found nothing."

Well Pharyngula commenters probably couldn't find Rotherdam on a map, or if they did, they would think it was in the Netherlands. But there sure was a lefty feminist type who sounded off like a nuke:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/27/poor-children-seen-as-worthless-rotherham-abuse-scandal

Of she can always find a way to blame white men, but that's a recurring tic with her.

Crid,
"but the prime mover in this evil is the criminal."

Yes, but those prime movers would never have carried on as long as they did, never have victimized so many kids, if the secondary movers in this, the police, hadn't turned a blind eye for YEARS and enabled them. The prime movers aren't the only villains in this, and probably not the ones that realy amtters.

Scumbags gonna scum, but supposedly that's what we have police for. The issue here is that these kids didn't have the police doing their job when it came to them. The issue is why they didn't have the police on their side.

Not raping a child *always* supersedes 'living in your culture', whatever that culture otherwise claims.

Compare and Contrast

> Not raping a child *always* supersedes
> 'living in your culture', whatever that
> culture otherwise claims.

Tim COMPREHENDS ☑ (Ding!)

Jim DOESN'T COMPREHEND ☒ (Bzzt!)

Swear to God, the guy on the street just don't know how to discuss evil. He's so eager to add some special little muffin-crest of sugary insight that he forgets how courage requires us to sometimes STOP TALKING.

Say the truth: Let it squat there. Done.

What, did I scare everyone off?

(Oh well!)

Here's some more anyway.



> Scumbags gonna scum,

No! Some of them can and will learn not to. ALL OF THEM SHOULD. Reprehensible behavior should not be expected from people. And specifically....

> but supposedly that's what we
> have police for.

We have police because human beings occasionally experience crises & weakness, and need to be assisted, and sometimes stopped from hurting the rest of us. The "supposed" part isn't there to cap misbehavior at some level which the rest of us have decided to tolerate... The cops are not your Dad.

Yeah, the cops failed. But that excuses none of the criminality of the "Asians"... None of it.

At any time during the past 25(?)(!) years, these men could have started acting decently, and the problem would have stopped growing.

The police deserve to lose their jobs, and some probably deserve incarceration and other severe punishment. But they could never have done more than respond to evil already underway.

In the best world men behave. We should demand the best... No less of others than of ourselves.

(That's one of my deepest condemnations of the contemporary left: It excuses weakness in others while enjoying the fruits of its own discipline.)

I didn't express myself clearly because it seems my post was misread.

Sheep Mom... are you suggesting religion played a role here, and that the fact that the perps were Muslim Pakistanis is a coincidence? I don't believe it was. Yes, these were low-status girls even in England, but I do believe the perps' culture played a role.

As to the rest of my post, what I was trying to say was there is a "live and let live" mentality. Folks want to be accepting of different cultures... thinking "different cultures" mostly means the trappings, like food, dance/music, clothing, etc. People don't want to force people to give up cultural practices... which is fine when "cultural practices" means eating curry or playing the dafli, less fine when it means considering kids whores and fair game for rape if they are a different religion or culture.

We, as a culture, look back with shame on incidents like forced boarding schools for indigenous peoples. (Though I confess when I watched "rabbit proof fence" I did feel sympathetic for the social workers who wanted to get the young girls out before they were forcibly married to men three times their age). We don't like racial profiling, because it unjustly punishes innocent people who had nothing to do with anything.

Because of incidents like that, we have a tendency to let things slide, from borderline "Oh, they don't let their wives work, that's just their culture" "Oh, they don't let their daughters take gym class, that's just their culture"... to more serious, "Oh, they practice FGM, that's their culture, better we do it in a hospital than they do it at home"... and it becomes a slippery slope.

As someone who is binational and bicultural and also a weird non-mainstream religion, I benefit from the "live and let live" mentality. And I don't want to be accused of being a hypocrite, wanting the right to practice my faith and both cultures while denying it to someone else. At the same time, my practices don't impose on my neighbors. I'm not raping kids, forcing my fellow villagers to engage in X or Y, forbidding them from doing Z. My culture and faith don't ask me to treat others with disrespect.

Raping kids is so over the line, of course, that it should be a no-brainer. I say "should" because apparently some people lost their brains. But as I say, you let people in whose culture involves marrying young kids, low regard for women, disrespecting those of a different religion, etc... well, you're going to lose a certain amount of safety if you do that.

You can't have it all. You can't let in misogynists and then expect things to not get, well, misogynistic. It's nice to want to help people from other places, but it comes with a price, and if you think the only differences are language and the superficial trappings, you're gonna be in for a shock. Of course many people will assimilate just fine, but there's gonna be a segment that doesn't.

Crid: For the record, the police DID commit crimes by destroying evidence.

Nicely said, NicoleK.

A frog-legged walkback.

More later.

"Muslim men taking advantage of Britain's attitude toward its own lower"

If you don't know the brown Muslim mentality on white women is sluts who constantly want it.

I've tried to explain this to white women that white men are unique in their regard to viewing them as equals.

Grrr.

> I didn't express myself clearly
> because it seems my post was misread.

Quite literally, no. Being "misread" could not have been the cause of your failure to express yourself clearly.

More specifically, you weren't misread, and you said exactly what you wanted to say. The problem was that it was wrong. (And dim & hurtful.)

> People don't want to force people
> to give up cultural practices...

Who are these "people" of the first part of your sentence, and why are they such pussies about the people of the second part?

> We, as a culture, look back with
> shame on incidents like forced boarding
> schools for indigenous peoples

"We" are not a "culture."

I'm starting to think you don't talk out loud about things very much. This exactly the kind of loose language that needs to be discouraged. I am not a culture… Me and everyone I ever met are not a culture.

And now, just cresting the center of my sixth decade on this planet, I've not once felt seven milliseconds of "shame on incidents like forced boarding schools for indigenous peoples."

I think it's tragic that citizens of the United States owned slaves two hundred years before I was born.

But "forced boarding schools"? I've posted the link before: Do you seriously contend that your contemporaries, people nowhere near —neither temporally nor geographically— the cultural verges you're weeping about should feel shame because "indigenous peoples" were forcibly taught to read?… With room and board? By people we've never met?

AYFKM?

(And by the way, your plural "peoples" is dessicated and prissy, like something from a book... One written by someone dessicated and prissy. I think you're corralling clichés rather than marshaling judgments: You haven't thought this through carefully, and you don't want to have to. You just want to say indistinctly warm stuff and pretend to be tolerant at zero cost to yourself. What we learned last week was that posturing platitudes of that kind get little girls raped... It gets them "groomed" for rape.)

> Because of incidents like that,
> we have a tendency to let things
> slide

Your reasoning would greatly improve if you learned to speak only for yourself, rather than implying relentlessly that your befogged daydreams are the stuff of some shared & noble consciousness. Nothing slides with me… I'm spotlessly attentive.

Grrr. More, but it's late.

Also, "A frog-legged walkback" is fabulous" rhetoric. Isn't it? It's great. It's money in the bank.

I mean, it ought to be money in the bank.

Each of you should send me a dollar. For that.

Just mail it to Amy... Once the ledger crosses a certain interest-bearing potential, she'll have Gregg drive it over to my offices in his Corvette. We do this several times a year, so you can count on her to be honest about it.

And then, the next day...

"Peoples' right to live in their culture" is still pissing me off.

"forced boarding schools for indigenous peoples."

Hi Nicster!