Reporting on sex abuse in Rotherham

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see this subsequent post on the British use of the word “Asian.”]

The Rotherham sex scandal, already bad enough, grows in scope:

The sex-trafficking ring in Rotherham may well be the worst in the West ever, or so one would hope. British officials have now identified at least three hundred suspects in a crime syndicate that raped and trafficked underage British girls for years, while local police ignored signs and clues for years…

Who are these perpetrators? Ask the Telegraph:

At least 300 possible suspects have been identified by investigators probing the Rotherham child sex exploitation scandal.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said most of the potential suspects were Asian men, while the vast majority of victims were young British girls.

The NCA launched a major investigation into the scandal after a damning report by Professor Alex Jay last year, revealed that as many as 1,400 children had been raped, trafficked and groomed by mainly Asian gangs in the South Yorkshire town between 1997 and 2013.

What comes to mind when you hear the word “Asian”? For me, it’s people from China, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and a few smaller countries right near them. But of course, “Asia” includes a lot more than that—everything in the Eastern Hemisphere that isn’t Africa, Europe, and Australia.

So Asia is a mighty huge place. Did the perpetrators hail from a mix of representative Asian countries? No. They were actually from an area known as South Asia, which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

So, were the perpetrators from a mixture of those countries? No. They were actually almost entirely from one country: Pakistan. And they were almost entirely from one religious group as well: Muslims.

Why do I bring this up? Because one of the major reasons the sex abuse ring wasn’t stopped earlier was that there was an active coverup due to the one-sided, non-PC nature of the criminals (the following is from an August 2014 article):

Sources revealed that the July 2001 race riots in Bradford, Burnley and Rochdale marked a “turning point” in the way that Mr Blair’s government responded to Britain’s Muslim communities, and that there were efforts ”“ more in “good faith” than in an attempted cover-up ”“ to play down examples of disunity.

David Blunkett, who was Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004, seemed to support this claim when he said yesterday that the 2001 riots “and the knock-on [effect] elsewhere had an impact on the way in which people saw these issues in race terms”.

At the same time, it is now known that a Home Office researcher was conducting an investigation into trafficking and underage prostitution by mainly Muslim gangs in Rotherham, but it was never published, and the files were seized in 2002 by the Labour-run council when she tried to blow the whistle. The researcher faced intimidation by the police and council officials, the report by Professor Jay revealed last week.

So an unknown but probably large number of girls suffered because of PC reluctance, and now that the extent of abuse is known, the reporting still reflects that PC reluctance. Even the Telegraph, a British paper that is not especially liberal, conforms to the rules.

The Guardian, a leftist paper, is little better. The Guardian offers a PC-tapdance while actually reporting on the racial controversy in the scandal, continuing to use the word “Asian” rather than “Pakistani” even while talking about the ethnicity issue:

After refusing to say if all of the potential suspects were of Asian background, Baldwin was accused by one reporter of not properly addressing the investigation’s race dimension in the investigation, just as Rotherham council had not acted for fear of upsetting racial sensitivities.

Baldwin denied the allegation, saying: “The majority of potential suspects appear to be of Asian appearance. However, we are still researching further suspects.”

The majority of readers could be forgiven if they’re picturing these suspects as being Chinese. The only mention of Pakistan in the entire article is the following sentence concerning a single suspect: “Last month a key suspect in a child exploitation case in Rotherham skipped bail and was reported to have fled to Pakistan.” Readers could also be forgiven for wondering, why Pakistan? And religion is not mentioned at all.

This is no accident. It is akin to the same protective impulse that allowed the crimes to proliferate in the first place.

The NY Times tries really, really hard…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to parse Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s latest remarks in a way that doesn’t make President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry look like fools, dupes, appeasers, or traitors.

It’s a difficult task, and I can’t say that the Times succeeds.

Time marches on, and the deadline for the talks is at the end of June, which is about a week from now. My guess is that it will probably be extended.

[NOTE: Khamenei has been pretty consistent in singing a more hardline tune than his negotiators do. He’s the one with the final say.]

More from Victor Klemperer

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some more quotes from Victor Klemperer’s journal I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941:

March 20, 1938:

The last few weeks have been the most wretched of our life so far.

The immense act of violence of the annexation of Austria, the immense increase in power both internally and externally, the defenseless trembling fear of England, France, etc. We shall not live to see the end of the Third Reich. The flags have been waving for eight days, since yesterday a broad yellow handbill with the Star of David has been stuck to every post of our fence: Jew. Warning against the unflagged plague barracks. Der Sturmer has dug up its usual ritual murder I would truly not be surprised if next I were to find the body of a child in the garden.

April 10, 1938

For some days now divine right has been given ever more prominence. Again and again in the newspaper: He [Hitler] is the instrument of Providence…[Klemperer than wonders why Wilhelm I only claimed to be a secular emperor]…that’s not what I find interesting here, but the question surfacing after I had taken the fact for granted for almost fifty years. I now so often ask myself questions about things…that I took for granted for fifty years. The main thing for tyrannies of any kind is the suppression of the urge to ask questions. And it is so easy to do. If I, a professor, schooled in thinking all my life, have not asked myself so many and such obvious questions in the course of fifty years, how should the people hit on asking questions? One hardly even needs to force them to do the opposite…

…half of [the German population] has been made stupid, and no one believes the ballot is secret, and everyone trembles.

August 24, 1938

But whatever work I do, think, the terrible pressure of the situation is always there. So very often a verse goes through my head, which I heard Father say a thousand times: “I would that it were time to sleep and everything were done.” I always laughed because Father clung so very fearfully to life. Now I know that it is possible to cling so very fearfully to life and simultaneously quote the verse with complete conviction and honesty. Only, I have more reason to quote it than Father ever could have had.

February 8, 1942

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life’s task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway…

I’m very glad he did.

[NOTE: Background on Klemperer here.]

The Confederate flag ruckus

The New Neo Posted on by

As a specific controversy, the Confederate flag ruckus doesn’t much interest me, so I haven’t written about it although it seems to be the story du jour. I’m not Southern, and I have absolutely no attachment to the Confederate flag. I’m with Mollie Hemingway when she writes:

For whatever it’s worth, I have no nostalgia for the Confederacy and zero positive feelings for flags that reference the Confederacy…

A lot of the surrounding media-led outrage over the flag seems somewhat cold, given the horror of what last week brought. We had nine black people brutally murdered because they were black and sitting in a church with a history of fighting white supremacy. With all due deference to hatred for a Confederate flag on a pole at the statehouse, this seems like an almost childlike attempt to miss the seriousness of the situation. It’s as if they expect us to say, “Congratulations! You oppose the flag of an army that was defeated 150 years ago. We’re all very proud of you, journalists!” This generation seems to excel at inventing controversies, weighing in on those invented controversies, and then patting itself on the back for being so courageous and open-minded…

Coverage has been oddly partisan ”” and in ways that counter reality ”” as the media rush to make this Confederate flag issue a problem for ”¦ Republicans. Funny how it always, always, always works out that way, isn’t it?…

And now the media are hopping all over the place. Within a few hours they had moved on from their noble campaign of (largely meaningless but whatever) flag justice/posturing/attention in South Carolina to every state but Arkansas [in order to exonerate Clinton they spare Arkansas] that is so tainted…

And then within a few minutes, they had moved on to renaming literally everything.

Hemingway describes suggestions by many writers and pundits that we should rename places that reference Jefferson Davis and even Robert E. Lee. Can reparations for a 150-year-old war be far behind?

Hemingway correctly identifies the impulse to obliterate any sort of respectful reference to any Southern hero of that war as being a leftist one:

Listen, it’s great that we’re aiming to be an anti-racist society. That’s very, very good! But it’s bad that we are slowly forgetting how to dislike something without seeking its utter destruction. Somehow we’ve abandoned the aesthetic of Abraham Lincoln for that of Mao Tse-Tung.

And somehow we’ve substituted symbolic gestures for reality, and self-congratulatory back-patting for constructive action. That’s true across the board, and not just in terms of the Confederate flag display.

[NOTE: In that second paragraph I quote from Hemingway, she writes, “this seems like an almost childlike attempt to miss the seriousness of the situation.” I’m not sure exactly what Hemingway meant when she referenced “the seriousness of the situation,” but this is the way I see its seriousness: it is serious because nine innocent (and exemplary) lives were lost to a racist murderer. It has caused serious anguish and grief. The charges against Roof are as serious and grave as they can be. His punishment should be equally serious, which is why so many people consider the death penalty the only reasonable sentence.

If Roof had been part of an organized group intent on carrying out more such murders, and acting on their behalf, that would have been even more serious (if such a thing be possible), but I see no indication of that. Roof’s actions, as I’ve written before, tell us about Roof, but they don’t tell us much (or rather, they don’t tell us anything) about the motivations of anyone else, nor about anyone else’s plans for the future. We have no idea (although I hope the FBI has an inkling) of how many other Roofs there might be, or how many of them are intent on murder rather than mere talk, and the media certainly isn’t able to tell us.

No doubt there are other racists—and even other neo-Nazis—around in this country and many other countries. But blaming all white people or all Republicans (without even knowing Roof’s politics) is a convenient way to make political hay out of the matter, which I deplore.]

Peter Singer and the trap of logic: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

Disability activists would very much like to see Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer lose his job. The reason is fairly obvious: Singer advocates the killing of disabled infants if the parents request it.

What’s less obvious is why Singer has a job as a bioethicist at Princeton in the first place—although of course I know the answer, and it lies in the politics of today’s universities.

“Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies,” Mr. Singer continued. “My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life support – which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection – but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.”

Interesting how Singer skips from situation A to situation B as though it represents merely a small and logical step, when in fact in the moral, legal, and spiritual sense it represents a gap the size of the Grand Canyon.

Singer’s stance is certainly a chilling one, because although the sort of infants Singer has in mind are so profoundly disabled and undergoing such suffering that we’re not talking about the “merely” blind or halt or lame, it still is a position that smacks of the Nazi “life unworthy of life” campaign and seems (despite his label as “ethicist”) to be just plain wrong:

“The day had to come, just as the day had to come when Copernicus proved that the earth is not at the center of the universe,” Singer told me…“It is ridiculous to pretend that the old ethics still make sense when plainly they do not.”…

“The notion that human life is sacred just because it’s human life is medieval,” he continued, talking about the treatment of the hopelessly ill. “The person that used to be there is gone. It doesn’t matter how sad it makes us. All I am saying is that it’s time to stop pretending that the world is not the way we know it to be.”

Singer clearly thinks of himself as logical and right. But what an odd and revealing analogy, and how much is left out and/or misunderstood! Singer is discussing the work of scientists who are trying to study and describe phenomena “out there” in the physical world, something that we can measure and describe, and is comparing that to rules to guide human behavior in the moral sense, something entirely different. I think it is telling that Singer says we are pretending the “old ethics still make sense,” as though it’s something we could know in that same, factual sense as astronomy. “Make sense” how? To whom? Based on what values?

What is Singer missing? Just about everything. He doesn’t appear to understand—not just human beings, although there’s that—but something about human life itself. He writes as though we are robotic automatons going by the numbers:

Singer argues that proximity means nothing when it comes to moral decisions, and that personal relationships don’t mean much either. Saving your daughter’s life is a fine thing to do, for example, but it can never measure up to saving the lives of ten strangers. If you were faced with the choice, Singer’s ethics would require you to save the strangers. “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away,” he wrote in his essay. Singer believes we are obliged to give money away until our sacrifice is of “comparable moral importance” to the agony of people starving to death. “This would mean, of course,” he continued, approvingly, “that one should reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.”

It is easy to recognize the leftist origins of such thinking, as well as the denial of nature. Even in animals the maternal instinct is extremely powerful. Why? We are constructed that way; it has survival value. Taking care of our own families first works when everybody does it; it is what love is about, for example, and communities, which also run on love and closeness. It’s not a numbers game, although the “do no harm” prohibition is a good one. But if humans uniformly followed his prescriptions, try to imagine the sum total of love and joy in the world: none. Life would be a sort of utilitarian statist re-education camp where all decisions must be based on maximizing numbers (until overpopulation would change the calculus to a priority for reducing numbers), and no human ties would matter in a crisis (all leftist dictatorships try to weaken family ties, and it’s no accident).

Singer would create incredible suffering to play his numbers game, and require of people that they be saints, which (among other things) has the flaw of being impossible because it goes against human nature and human emotion. If we are thinking of maximizing the good for humanity (based on what criteria? Happiness? Food? Number of lives saved? Or quality of life?) we have to take human nature into consideration and not try to twist mankind into some sort of machine it is not. That is the utopian impulse that always ALWAYS makes for a dystopia.

Here’s more about Singer’s philosophy:

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him. Few people will ever consider infants replaceable in the way that they consider free-range chickens replaceable, and Singer knows that…

His philosophy is called preference-utilitarianism. It has a more nuanced version of what Mill had in mind, with personal preferences taking the place of happiness. Singer’s thought is shaped by the assumption that the results of your behavior should agree with the preferences of anyone whom your behavior would affect. For Singer, killing is wrong because when you kill someone who wants to live you make it impossible for that person to fulfill his preferences.

Singer believes that killing those who are so severely disabled that (in his opinion) they can’t be said to have “preferences” is different in some basic way, and ethically okay in some circumstances. But why does he elevate preferences to such a lofty position? What about your own relationship to other humans you should be taking care of? And I won’t even ask what about your relations to God, because that’s a question Singer believes humanity has outgrown, like the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.

[Go to Part II.]

The pretend gun-free zone

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article about how it might have been a good thing had the attendees at the Bible study meeting in Charleston been armed. That’s not just a fanciful thought; mass murders, even mass murders at churches, have been thwarted before by a good guy wielding a gun and stopping the bad guy (and here I use the word “guy” in the completely non-PC sense that includes “woman”):

Murray had already shot and killed two people in the parking lot when he burst into the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Before he could pull the trigger again, however, the 24-year-old shooter was gunned down by Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard with a concealed-carry permit.

That was eight years ago, but even though Ms. Assam was credited for saving as many as 100 lives that day, a dozen states continue to restrict the carrying of concealed firearms in churches ”” including South Carolina.

There have been quite a few similar cases of a law-abiding citizen with a gun (often an ex- or off-duty police officer, but not always) stopping or even preventing a mass shooting. A list of similar incidents can be found here. That there are not even more is probably due to the fact that mass shootings are actually quite rare to begin with—despite our perceptions that they are common, and despite the fact that even a single one is too many—and so it is not surprising that there are not so very many cases where a witness pulled a gun and even tried to stop such a shooting. Another reason is likely to be that mass murderers understand that they will be more likely to achieve their goals if they attack people in a gun-free zone, and so many attacks occur in such places.

But the shoot-em-up fantasy of someone like MSNBC’s Bob Shrum appears to lack any real-world precedent:

“Now I cannot imagine the horror that could have occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started, and you have a full-scale gunfight,” said Democratic advisor Bob Shrum on Friday’s episode of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.”

“You might not even have three survivors,” said Mr. Shrum, a top campaign aide to now-Secretary of State John Kerry during his failed 2004 presidential bid.

So, a bunch of unarmed people who are sitting ducks, completely at the mercy of an armed predator bent on mass murder, would be better off that way than to take their chances having an armed defender? What’s the better percentage deal, do you think?

I actually haven’t been able to find a single instance (although I suppose they may exist) where anything resembling Shrum’s vision has actually occurred—where an armed citizen trying to stop a mass murder already in progress escalated the situation. Even an article appearing in the leftist Mother Jones could do no better than to discover two situations in which the would-be defender was also shot.

The entire idea of a gun-free zone is an odd one. After all, who is going to abide by the law? The only people it disarms are the law-abiding, who were not likely to suddenly slip into mass murderer mode. And the actual mass murderer could not care less about the rule, and what’s more he will gravitate to such venues for his massacre because he knows that’s where he’s likely to encounter the least resistance.

So most so-called gun-free zones are actually what Dave Kopel calls pretend gun-free zones, meaning that the only people without weapons there are likely to be those who wouldn’t think of using them to murder in the first place.

The only true gun-free zone would be one with highly effective metal detectors at the entrance, and even then, unless the entrance is protected by several armed guards (not just one), a determined shooter can just shoot his way past a guard before going through the detector, especially with the element of surprise. Since most venues cannot afford (or do not want) such a complex and expensive arrangement, that leaves us with pretend gun-free zones versus areas in which concealed carry is allowed.

Which would you choose, if you were a gunman bent on doing harm? The pretend gun-free zones, of course, which makes them (paradoxically) the most dangerous environment of all.

Another way to peel a hard-boiled egg

The New Neo Posted on by

In my continual quest to solve the Problem of How to Peel the Hard-Boiled Egg (see this and this), today I discovered this video (embedding disabled; you’ll have to use the link), which purports to show you how to peel five eggs at a time by putting them in a container with water, covering it, and shaking. Magic! The peel is pictured as coming off easily and mostly in one piece.

Does it work? Having a yen for deviled eggs today, I was determined to find out. It couldn’t be any worse than my usual experience, which is that, despite following all the myriad instructions—cold water, age of eggs, amount of time to sit after cooking—I still have incredible difficulty with the membrane sticking to the egg and mucking up the beauty of the peeled white, so that I often end up with a pock-marked, misshapen, and sorry mess.

So, how did the new method work? Not quite as in the video, but not bad. Out of five eggs, two went just about as smoothly as in the film; the shell came off pretty much in one fell swoop, membrane and all. Huzzah! A third one was close to that, although a bit more difficult. The remaining two were pretty much the same old same old: sticky membrane, laborious peeling, and a final product that won’t win any beauty prizes.

But they all taste good. I contend, however, that the ones with the smooth whites actually taste a bit better than the others.

Europe the wonderful vs. America the [fill in the blank]

The New Neo Posted on by

While thinking about my PJ post on Obama’s comparison of mass murders and gun control in the US to the same phenomena in Europe, it occurred to me that part of what Obama has done during his presidency is to capitalize on an already-existent attitude among liberals that everything European is better than everything American.

That’s one of the reasons he can get away with talking about how mass murder by gun is nonexistent in Europe because of gun control. Not too many liberals in this country are going to question that, because of the pre-existing idea that Europe has gotten its act together in so many respects while we falter far behind, alone among developed (or, as Obama said, “advanced”) countries in bitterly clinging to our troglodyte ways, our guns and our religion.

Other things we cling to, and which Obama would dearly like to free us of, include our American exceptionalism, our nationalism rather than internationalism, our rugged individualism, our income inequality, and our idea that “we built that.” Things he’s already greatly improved about America (i.e. Europeanized, at least to the extent we have allowed him, which is not to the extent he would like) are health insurance and our relations with the Muslim world and with Israel.

Not so many years ago the word “liberal” was the political kiss of death; people were running away from that designation as though from the plague. But now it’s back in vogue, according to Dana Milbank of the WaPo (and a number of polls). This is probably thanks in part to the wonders of the Obama years, as well as the maceration of the newer generations in the “progressive” ideology of our school system and MSM. But some of it comes from the notion that Europe is better than we are and we should emulate it in every way—rail system, small apartments and tiny washing machines, long vacations and all. So any change in this country that makes us more like Europe is considered to be a good thing by the growing number of Europhiles among us.

This ignores the profound economic and social troubles that Europe is having. It ignores the fact that Europe has been protected by our weapons and our military, which cost money. It ignores the fact that the demography of Europe is tremendously different from ours, as well as its geography. It ignores the fact that people from all over the world still flock to this country, or wish to.

When a was a schoolchild, our teachers used to make us memorize poetry, almost all of it doggerel and the best of it merely passable verse. But I had an ear for doggerel and verse, and much of what I memorized back then has stuck with me to this day. It is interesting and instructive to remember the sort of patriotic paean that was considered appropriate for an American child back then (even one like me, who went to school in New York City, and a public school at that), such as this poem by the Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke:

“AMERICA FOR ME”

‘TIS fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,””
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.

So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars!

Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home…

Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the bléssed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars

Antiquated, no doubt. But it meant something to me then, and it meant something to me when I traveled to Europe as a teenager and later, and it means something to me now. I think America still means a great deal to people, as I discovered from a curious video I came across the other day. Unfortunately, I can’t find it right now, despite close to an hour of searching and watching. But it featured short interviews with people all over the world who were asked to describe Americans and what distinguishes them from other people.

Their answers were quite consistent, and perhaps not exactly what you’d expect. I had imagined there would be more negative comments, but the remarks ran about 80% or more positive, and there was a certain unanimity of opinion. Americans were confident, and many people specifically mentioned that they could tell who was an American on the street because of the way they walked—with confident strides, head high, energetic and enthusiastic. You knew they were used to being free and speaking their minds. Many people also mentioned openness and friendliness, as well as kindness. They also sometimes said loud—as in loud voices—but they didn’t say it all that critically.

This video which features interviews in England is somewhat similar, and it’s the closest I could find: