That's correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.

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?

Feminists have already gotten the memo about rape and child abuse being difficult to report and get prosecuted.

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.

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'?

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.

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.

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.

This is a bit broader stuff than something reducible to a few stats. But on a basic common sense level, if the starting point is fewer people getting killed, the most basic solution is bodyguards and so on. So that is at least sensible as a starter instead of a Plan B rewiring everybody's brain to not be hateful.

As for status, come on, that is something that happens between real people, while DeVliegendeHollander, Acty and hairyfigment are mere accounts. For all people know it could even be the same person behind all three accounts. Playing status with accounts one could throw away at any second and register three new ones in its place would be really, really stupid, let's try to not accuse each other with at something that simplistic. At least if you want to assume evil, asssume a less banal kind. In fact I am thinking anyway that I should recycle DVH because it is getting too much karma and this account is developing something too much like a personality. I recycle on Reddit about every three weeks, maybe a three month or six month cycle would be good here. (The goal is of course to have ideas said by accounts that are not associated by former ideas said by accounts and thus their reception being less biased. Besides to not accumulate this completely ridiculous karma thing.)

This is getting more interesting now. To sum the history of things, you had this discussion with VoiceOfRa and you stressed primarily you want to save people from getting killed. I butted in and proposed you don't have to redesign the whole world to do that, it is possible in a traditional setup as well. Turned out we are optimizing for different things, I am trying to preserve older-time stuff while also changing them to the extent needed to address real, actual complaints of various people and work out compromises (calling it moderatism or moderate conservatism would be OK), while you are more interested in tearing things down and building them up. OK. But I think there are more interesting things here lurking under the surface.

An offer: retreat a few meta levels up, and get back to this object level later on.

IRL I discuss pretty much everything with people inside my age range (30-60), which means we rely not only on our intelligence and book knowledge (you obviously have immense amounts of both) but on our life experience as well. That is a difficult thing to convey because it is something that is not even learned in words (so there are no good books that sum it up, to my knowledge) but non-verbal pattern recognition. Yet it is pretty much this thing, this life experience that makes the difference between your meta level assumptions and mine. What can one do? I will try the impossible and try to translate it into words. Don't expect it to go very well, but maybe a glimpse will be transmitted. Also my tone will be uncomfortably personal and subjective because it is per definition something happening inside people's heads.

When I was 17 I assumed, expected and demanded the world to be logical and ethical. I vibrated between assuming it and angrily demanding it when I found it is not the case. University did not help - it was a very logical and sheltered environment.

When I started working (25) I had to realize how truly illogical the world is, and not because it was waiting for mr smart guy to reorganize it but because most people are plain simply idiots. I worked at implementing business software, like order processing, accounting and MRP. Still do. I had to face problems like when order processing employees did not know the price of an item, they just invoiced it at zero price. Gave away for free. The managers were no better, instead of doing something sensible (such as incentive pay or entering a price list for everything into the software and not letting the employees change them), they demanded us to make a technical solution like not allow a zero price, just give out an error message. From them on, the folks used a price of 1 currency when they did not know the correct price. The irony was really breath-taking - if there is one thing that is supposed to be efficient in this sorry world, it is corporations chasing profits: and they were incompetent at that very basic level of not giving away stuff for free. (They were selling fertilizers to farmers, in the kind of place where paved roads are rare.)

My first reaction was rage and complaining about humanity's idiocy. I was sort of similar to Reddit /r/atheism. Full of snark.

I would say the life experience part was not as much as learning the basic rule, namely that most folks are idiots, but really swallowing and digesting it, learning to resign myself to it, accept it, and see what can be done. That was what took long. I had to accept a Heideggerian "we are thrown into this shit and must cope, anyhow". This is my sorry species. These zombies are my peers. If I want to help people, I need to help them on their level.

First of all, I had to accept a change in my ethics: making most people happy is an impossible goal. The best I can do is supporting ideas that prevent the dumbass majority shooting themselves in the foot in the worst ways. Give a wild guess, will the majority those types of ideas be more often classified as "liberal" or "conservative" ?

Second, I had to realize that I was a selfish ass when I was young and "liberal". I wanted things to be logical, hence I wanted things to suit people who are logical. I wanted things to suit people like me. I wanted a world optimized for me and my folk, for intellectuals. That would be a horrible world for the vast majority of people who can't logic. They need really foolproof and dumbed-down systems that cut with the grain of their illogical instincts, not against it.

The corollary of this all was that I should support rules and systems that I hate and I would never obey them. I had to become a hypocrite e.g. to support keeping drugs illegal (because I saw fools i.e. normal people would only get more foolish from them) while being perfectly accepting and supporting of my intellectual friends who got great philosophical insights for them. The non-hypocritical solution would have been, of course, different rules for different people. Yes, that is actually one thing liberal democracy is not so good at making, so hypocrisy was the only way to deal with it.

It was during this, my rather horrified awakening process when I came accross as really unusual book, Theodore Dalrymple's Life At The Bottom. It is a book that probably would be classified "conservative", but it was refreshingly non-ideological, it was about the experiences collected by decades of working as a psychiatrist treating the underclass of Birmingham, UK. I was actually living there, attracted by the manufacturing prowess of the region, was good for me career-wise, and the book was actually able to explain the high levels of WTFery I experienced every day, such as I smoke a cig outside (I have my own idiotic side as well), a mother with a small kid in a pram and with an about 9 years old boy, and the boy walks up to me and asks for a cigarette. I look at the mom completely astonished. Blank face. WTF I do now? At any rate, Dalrymple said the basic issue is that intellectuals made rules that worked very well for themselves, such as atheism, sexual liberty and similar things. He was of course atheist too. But according to him this wrecked misery amongst the low-IQ underclass, they really needed their old churches and traditions and Gods Of The Copybook Headings to restrain their impulsivity and bad choices. Rules that work well for intellectuals ("liberal" rules) don't work well for everybody else, at all. Maybe if I wanted to offer a book that is life experience translated to words, even though it is not really possible, that is that book, I can only add it is not made up, I really saw these folks.I had to change my political and social views completely. I could no longer demand the kind of stuff that makes sense for ethical and intelligent people. I had to learn to demand stuff I would personally dislike.

I either have to demand really dumbing things down, or maybe designing things from the assumption of stupidity up. Which means either intellectuals sacrificing their own interests and accepting a world made of stupid, or publicly supporting rules but privately wiggling out of them (Victorian era) or different rules for different people (aristocracy). Cont. below