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Vaniver comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - Less Wrong
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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:
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.
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.
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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.
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"?)
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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.
And yet, they were remarkably uninterested in this story when it came out.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Er.....Rotherham?
Typo fixed, thanks.