Quotulatiousness

June 26, 2025

German police raid homes to counteract online “hate speech” by “digital arsonists”

Filed under: Germany, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Things are getting worse for free speech in Germany, as eugyppius reports:

Apollo News reports on the newest, most irregular German holiday, which consists of the police conducting coordinated raids on and interrogations of ordinary people who are alleged to have said rude things on the internet:

    On Tuesday morning police across Germany conducted raids targeting “hate speech and incitement” on the internet. According to the news agency dpa, there are currently 170 operations underway, including house searches and other measures. Those accused are charged with insulting politicians and inciting hatred …

    The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is in charge of the operation … In North Rhine-Westphalia, several police authorities struck simultaneously at 6 a.m. Police from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Bielefeld, Münster, Hagen, and Bonn are among those involved. Fourteen suspects are to be questioned and two search warrants executed.1 The individuals in question frequently express themselves on social media, such as on X.

    … The Action Day against alleged hate posts has been taking place regularly for years. On June 18, the BKA joined forces with the reporting center “REspect!” to participate in the “International Day Against Hate and Incitement”. People were called upon to report posts that allegedly spread hate.

Today was the twelfth such “Action Day against Hate and Incitement on the Internet”. That is only an approximate title; it varies slightly across press sources. This dubious ritual began in 2016, after Merkel opened the German borders to the entirety of the developing world and our politicians grew tired of people calling them imbeciles online. Police are very open that the goal of these coordinated Action Days is intimidation – or, as they put it, “deterrence”.

Our federal police love this holiday so much they often celebrate it twice a year, which is why are already on the twelfth such day, even though we have only had nine years since the establishment of this custom. Sometimes our betters even throw in bonus action days that for some reason don’t count, as during Covid when they conducted a special “Action Day against Political Hate Postings” after the seventh “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings” but before the eighth “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings”. Who knows how many such action days we have really had, especially considering that since 2020 the broader EU has adopted this sporadic holiday and occasionally coordinates its own Continent-wide “Action Day against Hatred and Incitement on the Internet”.

[…]

By calling these Action Days idiotic, I don’t mean to minimise them. They are borderline illegal, for they exploit what should be purely investigative tactics (interrogations, house searches) to scare and punish people in advance of any criminal conviction. The emphasis is not only on right-leaning posters, but invariably and most disgracefully on ordinary people with relatively little social media reach, whose posts in many cases have been seen a mere handful of times. The message is clear: They can get you, whoever you are; they can get anybody. Living in a country whose authorities amuse themselves by periodically harassing their own citizens in this way is disturbing. It’s an absolute scandal that all the major political parties support this, save for Alternative für Deutschland. It’s a reason to vote AfD all by itself.

June 16, 2025

The Machine of Terror: How the Soviet Secret Police Ruled – W2W 32

Filed under: Government, History, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 15 Jun 2025

From Tsarist Russia to Stalin and the Cold War, the Soviet secret police evolved through endless name changes — but their mission never wavered: repress, control, and terrify. Discover how these agencies — from the Okhrana to the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, and eventually the KGB, shaped Soviet life with ruthless efficiency. Torture, purges, and mass surveillance weren’t just tactics; they were the system.
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June 5, 2025

German judges seem to be dedicated to ensuring that the government never changes policy, regardless of voter preference

Filed under: Germany, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The times I despair of the pathetic Canadian government, I look to Germany where eugyppius helpfully explains that German judges are even more dedicated to thwarting the will of the voters than Canadian judges are (and that’s a major achievement):

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

At the start of May, CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt effectively abolished asylum as a path into Germany, empowering federal police to push back all illegal migrants at our national borders.

There ensued a period of messaging chaos, in which Chancellor Friedrich Merz assured our neighbours and the EU that nothing much was happening, while Dobrindt quietly insisted that yes, indeed, he was serious. He gave police orders to step up border checks and to send back all illegal migrants regardless of asylum claims – save for pregnant women, the underage and the sick.

These new borders policies have yet to exercise any significant influence on asylum statistics. It is relatively easy to cross into Germany despite the police spot checks, and we don’t yet know how many asylees are managing to evade them.

The deeper legal issues are much more significant right now. We want to know whether Dobrindt’s intervention is workable in theory, and whether our judges will swallow it. Unfortunately, he is already under siege from asylum advocates on the left and the broader migration industry, who have set and sprung a very telling trap, with the aim of getting courts to overturn even these preliminary and quite meagre interventions.

To understand the issues here, we need a brief legal primer: According to German law (the so-called Asylgesetz), foreigners who enter Germany from “secure” states do not get to claim asylum. They are to be sent straight back to wherever it is they came from. Because Germany is surrounded entirely by secure states, that should really be the end of this insane problem. Alas, this sensible law has been superseded since 1997 first by the Dublin Convention, and later by the Dublin II and now the Dublin III Regulation. The latter forbids the Federal Republic from using her own laws, holding that foreigners entering Germany from secure third states must be welcomed pending a procedure to establish which EU member state is actually responsible for them. Effectively, this means that almost all of these aspiring asylees remain in Germany indefinitely, because deporting people who do not belong here is beyond the meagre capacities of our enormous bureaucracy.

Dobrindt sought to get around Dublin by appealing to Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which allows member states to set aside EU regulations when this is necessary to maintain order and security.

Many have eyed this Article 72 strategy for a long time, but nothing is easy, particularly not in countries unduly enamoured of “the rule of law”, which is a lofty euphemism for “the rule of obscure crazy people in robes for whom nobody ever voted and who enjoy lifetime appointments”. These days the government cannot do anything at all except what it was already doing (and sometimes not even that), or unless it is obviously stupid, expensive and inadvisable, because lurking around every corner is a clinically insane judge eager to explain why sensible things are not allowed. In recent years, our extremely learned and far-sighed judiciary has explained why combating climate change is anchored in the German constitution and why basically everybody is entitled to exorbitant social welfare. All that remains for them is to explain why everybody on earth is also entitled to live in Germany and draw benefits from the state, and they will have completed their suicidal triad.

On Monday, 2 June, the Berlin Administrative Court struck the first blow in this direction. Effectively, they called the whole basis for Dobrindt’s new border policy into question, issuing what amounts to a preliminary injunction in the case of three Somalis (two men and one woman) who had crossed from Poland into Germany on 9 May. Federal police intercepted the trio at the train station in Frankfurt an der Oder; they claimed asylum and the police, in line with Dobrindt’s order, sent them back to Poland anyway. Lawyers from the advocacy organisation Pro Asyl then helped them bring suit in Berlin, and the court intervened in their favour. They get to be professional asylees in Germany now.

May 16, 2025

Those scary “Brexity books”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle on the sudden interest British police seem to be taking about what kind of books you may have on your shelves at home:

If the British police saw this collection, you’d be lucky to get out of prison in fifty years!

The UK police certainly seem to believe in that old aphorism that that “You can tell everything you need to know about a person from their bookshelf”. There has been much press coverage this week of the case of Julian Foulkes, a former policeman who was arrested at his home in Gillingham for tweetcrime. It took six officers to handcuff the pensioner and take him to a cell, and bodycam footage from the arrest shows them assessing the contents of his bookshelves. One was seen singling out The War on the West by Douglas Murray and another remarked that there were “very Brexity things”.

I have a fair few “Brexity” books on my shelf too. I have just as many “anti-Brexity” books, as it happens. It seems to have escaped the attention of these officers that it is possible to read multiple points of view without necessarily subscribing to any of them. They have also apparently forgotten that “Brexity” views are fairly commonplace, enough so to win the largest democratic mandate the country has ever seen. If it’s a majority view, is it really all that controversial?

I recall during the lockdown I was scheduled for a television interview and, having set up the webcam, I suddenly realised that the two volumes of Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography of Hitler were not only visible, but prominent. The design of the books’ spines is such that the word “HITLER” is displayed in huge letters. Very dramatic and marketable, but not so helpful if you’re about to appear on live television. I must confess that I repositioned my chair to ensure that the books were obscured.

But why? It isn’t as though any sensible person could possibly believe that my interest in the history of tyranny implies an endorsement of it. I could just as easily have a copy of Mein Kampf on the shelf and still retain my wholehearted opposition to its author and everything he stood for. If I owned a copy of the Koran, would that make me a Muslim? If I owned a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Riders, would that make me prone to passionate romps in stables? As a chronic hay fever sufferer, this hardly seems likely.

The assumption that the books we choose to read are a mirror-image of our private thoughts, or that we are so malleable that any opinion we encounter will automatically be assimilated, is very much a core tenet of faith in today’s woke mindset, one that has quite palpably infected the justice system. Those who are currently serving prison time for offensive tweets will be aware that the unevidenced belief that the public act on cue to the language they read has some very authoritarian consequences.

May 15, 2025

Remington Model 81 Special Police

Filed under: History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Sept 2016

The Remington Model 8 was one of the first successful self-loading rifles introduced to the commercial market, and it was designed by none other than John Browning. It was an expensive rifle, but popular for its power and reliability. In the 1920s, an entrepreneur founded the Peace Officer Equipment Company to sell police gear in St Joseph, Missouri. He would design a conversion to the Remington Model 8 to replace its fixed 5-round magazine with larger detachable magazines (5-, 10-, and 15-round, with 15-round being the most common by far).

POEC made and sold the conversion until about 1936, when Remington replaced the Model 8 with the slightly improved Model 81. At that point, Remington licensed the magazine conversion themselves, and offered it as a factory option, under the Special Police name. Remington had big hopes for the rifle, but only a few hundred were sold, with the LA County Sheriff being the single largest customer, ordering 200 of them. This rifle is one of the LA guns, number 40 of their order.

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

May 12, 2025

(A Few of) The Many Faces of the Dutch M95 Carbine

Filed under: Asia, Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jun 2015

When the Dutch military adopted the M95 Mannlicher rifle, they made a rifle for standard infantry, and a variety of carbines for specialist troops. These included artillery, cavalry, bicycle, engineers, and colonial service carbines. During World War I they attempted to standardize these and reduce the number of different designs, but met with only limited success. By the time World War II began, there were at least 13 different variants of M95 carbine in service with the Dutch military.

May 10, 2025

“Train how you fight” – British plod edition

Filed under: Britain, Government, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Restoration, Connor Tomlinson looks at how British police forces are training and what it tells us about who they think they’ll be fighting:

Britain’s police aren’t training to stop riots—they’re preparing to crush the public.

One of the infamous quotes from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever”. He forgot to add, “on TikTok”. Last Thursday, the Metropolitan Police posted a montage of officers at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Kent, undergoing riot training. The caption read, “Bricks, bottles and fire bombs – our officers prepare for every eventuality at the Met’s elite training centre in Gravesend so they can keep you safe. Stronger tactics means safer communities.” It seems they had one specific “eventuality” in mind, as the mock rioters were wearing the Union flag. There wasn’t a keffiyeh or “Only good TERF is a dead TERF” sign in sight.

But fear not. The same Met Police who defended now-proscribed group Hizb ut-Tahrir’s demonstration after October 7th, saying “The word jihad has a number of meanings“, now insist that “The fact one of the t-shirts has a union flag on it is entirely coincidental”. Well, that’s me convinced. In fact, the Met are exhausted by your conspiracy theories, writing that “It’s disappointing we are increasingly having to challenge this sort of misinformation which only serves to increase divisions and tensions”. But the plummeting public trust in Britain’s police and justice system are of its own making. Britain’s security state is setting itself in opposition to the largely law-abiding indigenous host majority, while gaslighting them about the non-existence of a two-tier justice system that favors tribal minorities.

One might think, as Sam Bidwell suggests, the police should preoccupy themselves with preventing street conflicts not between Britain’s indigenous host and immigrant populations, but between its Indian diaspora and Pakistani enclaves. On April 22, Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 26 and injured 20 more in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Both nations cancelled the other’s visas, and are in the process of expelling foreign nationals before they expire. Pakistan has suspended all trade with and air travel from India. Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Modi has warned, “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist, their handlers and their backers, [and] we will pursue them to the ends of the earth.”

Thanks to decades of mass immigration and multiculturalism, Britain is home to powerful Indian and Pakistani ethno-political lobbies. Around 3 million Indians and 1.9 million Pakistanis live legally in the UK. They are substantially younger than the white British host population, and already brought Leicester to an ungovernable standstill in 2022 when Muslims and Hindus rioted for a month over a cricket match. Last Friday, both factions gathered outside the Pakistani Embassy in London for a mixture of a protest and a dance-off, replete with Indian, Pakistani, Israeli, and Palestinian flags. Most alarming was when Colonel Taimur Rahat of the Pakistani military appeared to make a throat-slitting gesture toward Indian protestors.

Both subcontinental factions have sympathetic politicians. They weaponize domestic antidiscrimination law to pursue foreign policy goals: for example, listing the denial of an independent Palestine and Kashmir as an example of Islamophobia, in guidance adopted by local councils. Conservative-party candidates committed to a Hindu Manifesto at the last general election, promising to further liberalize visa rules for dependents and elderly parents of Hindus already in Britain. Indian-heritage cabinet ministers, like Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak, instigated an unprecedented rise in Indian migration after Brexit. Patel described these migrants as “living bridges”, using Prime Minister Modi’s term.

April 20, 2025

The essence of (most) modern western governments

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the paradox of how many western governments manage the alchemy of being both omnipresent and yet absent simultaneously:

Adding to my last post about covering language that masks the massive expansion of government behind performative language about limiting government: The most Los Angeles thing I have ever seen happened behind the Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.

See the alley between the Yoshinoya and the pharmacy? As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.

Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness”. So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.

Grand Guignol human depravity and ruin: no big deal. Minor traffic offenses: front and center.

This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented.

I forget who recently suggested this on I-still-call-it-Twitter, but go to Yelp and read some reviews for gas stations in Oakland:

April 18, 2025

SIG P320 Flux Legion / Flux Raider: The Best Pistol-PDW System Yet

Filed under: Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Dec 2024

The Flux Raider is a chassis system designed to turn the SIG P320 into a very compact PDW. The design concept began as a desire to improve the practical accuracy of a handgun by adding a collapsing stock while keeping the weapon holsterable. Flux’ first product, circa 2019, was a spring-loaded stock that could be attached to the back of a Glock pistol. This had some clear shortcomings, and it led to development of the MP17 in 2020. This was a SIG chassis, something made feasible by the use of a serialized fire control group in the P320 pistol. The MP17 used the same basic stock design as the original Flux brace, but added an optics mount and a space to store a space magazine.

Less than 400 MP17s were built before the design was refined into the Flux Raider, and the manufacturing changed from printing to molded polymer. Of particular significance was the choice of polymer compounds to use, as the typical glass-reinforced nylon is not rigid enough to keep a good optics zero. By opting for a much more rigid material (albeit a much more expensive one), Flux was able to remove the metal reinforcing in the chassis, lightening the system while still retaining an optics mount stable enough to hold zero under adverse conditions. The spare magazine system was also significantly improved in the Raider, and an ambidextrous manual safety added.

Today, Flux has partnered with SIG to produce the P320 Flux Legion. I am excited to see where Flux and SIG take the design from here!

[Published a day later, here’s Ian’s range trip with the P320 Flux Legion Raider.]
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April 11, 2025

Beretta 93R: The Best Machine Pistol?

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Dec 2024

The Beretta 93R (“Raffica”) was developed in the 1970s by Beretta engineer Paolo Parola at the request of Italian military special forces. It took the basic Beretta 92 pistol design and added a well-thought-out burst mechanism under the right-side grip panel. It does not have a plain full-auto setting, but only semiauto and 3-round burst. To help keep the gun controllable, it has a heavier slide to reduce cyclic rate, a detachable shoulder stock, and a folding front grip to help control the muzzle. It uses extended 20-round magazines and is actually remarkably controllable (or so I am told; I have not had a chance to shoot one myself).
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March 31, 2025

Berettas With Bayonets: The Very Early Model 38A SMG

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Nov 2024

The initial model of the Beretta 38A had a number of features that were dropped rather quickly once wartime production became a priority. Specifically, they included a lockout safety switch for just the rear full-auto trigger. This was in place primarily for police use, in which the guns were intended for semiautomatic use except on dire emergency (and the first batches of 38As in Italy went to the police and the Polizia dell’Africa Italiana). The first version of the 38A also included a bayonet lug to use a version of the folding bayonet also used on the Carcano rifles. This was a folding-blade bayonet, and the model for the 38A replaced the rifle muzzle ring with a special T-lug to attach to the muzzle brake of the SMG. These bayonets are extremely scarce today, as they were only used for a very limited time.
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February 26, 2025

QotD: The banality of crime

Filed under: Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I was still in grad school, there was a big pot bust in College Town. Big enough to merit statewide notice, anyway — a couple hundred pounds, something like that, obviously not El Chapo level but enough to where some kind of actual, organized smuggling was involved.

Cynical bastard that I am, I immediately wondered just how they’d managed this feat of law enforcement. College Town being, well, a college town, it had a surprisingly large police force, but the cops dealt overwhelmingly with quality-of-life stuff. I doubt they had more than one or two full time detectives (if that) chasing burglars; I don’t recall College Town ever having a homicide. They certainly didn’t have narcs on the force, is what I’m getting at, so how on earth did they disrupt this small-time, amateurish, yet still legit (on volume alone) drug smuggling operation?

I forget the details, but as you’d surmise from this story taking place in Clown World, they were fake and gay. I’m slightly fictionalizing, and slightly exaggerating, but it really was on the level of “A prowl car saw a guy driving erratically and pulled him over, at which point smoke started billowing out of the windows. The cop looked in and found a felony amount of pot sitting in a garbage bag on the front seat, and the driver copped a plea — he ratted out his supplier, and when the cops showed up with a warrant, that knucklehead, too, had his bales of marijuana sitting out in plain view on the living room couch.”

Most crime works like that, as it turns out. Even in the big cities, where police departments have bigger budgets and more combat power than a lot of European armies. Homicides, for instance, are 99% paperwork, I’m told. Everyone knows that Peanut shot Ray Ray over a pair of sneakers, not least because Peanut is walking around in the damn things, and probably still has the gun shoved in the waistband of his track suit, too. “Solving” the homicide is just a matter of putting the paperwork through. Stone cold whodunits, like big sophisticated undercover narcotics operations, are vanishingly rare, because the cost of enforcement, let’s call it, is extremely high.

I know, I know, The Wire was a tv show, but people I know who really do work in law enforcement say it’s close enough to the real thing for our purposes. Drug dealers down in the ‘hood aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated and above all self-disciplined as the Barksdale Crew, but the basic principle is the same: Since the low-level people are inevitably going to get busted, make sure that the low-level people don’t have anything on the guys one level higher, and your drug dealing operation is more or less safe. Just as Peanut could probably get away with blasting Ray Ray in broad daylight if he were smart enough not to wear the shoes around, so the pot dealers in College Town could’ve gotten away with their operation more or less forever, provided they weren’t stupid enough to be driving around high on their own supply, with said supply in plain view in the passenger seat.

Severian, “The Cost of Enforcement”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-29.

January 11, 2025

Euphemizing organized gang rapes of children as “grooming” won’t work much longer

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s possible that the current upswell of anger about the decade-long cover-up of organized child rape gangs in English towns and cities may come to nothing … or it could result in a complete breakdown of law and order:

Like professional basketball, those accused of being members of “grooming gangs” tend to be monocultural.

The grooming gang thing has really blown up in the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure wholly why myself but a couple of guesses.

One is that the media really couldn’t report all that much — and for the same reason that Tommy Robinson got jailed one time around. Because there have been multiple ongoing cases and full reporting of one could — and probably would too — prejudice a jury in subsequent cases. So, those ongoing cases mean that the subject is more or less sub judice and can’t, in volume or detail, be talked about.

Thus things like Guardian reporting. Where you get the news that a gang has been tried, found guilty, sent off to jail. And no comment on who they were. Well, except for a list of names all of which are, shall we say, less than Anglo Saxon or even Viking in origin. We all draw our own conclusions at that point.

[…]

The number of abused — which means children raped, recall, arses blown up with pumps so that adult dicks can multiply penetrate to be detailed — starts to be counted up into the thousands. The tens of thousands perhaps.

There’s a point there at which I don’t think that normal societal agreement to allow the authorities to handle things works any more. At some point along that spectrum then significant civil violence breaks out.

Which brings me to the two questions. What is that number which, when known, leads to actual riots? And no, I don’t mean 15 meatheads lobbing half bricks at the police. Actual real and sustained loss of civilian authority control. The second, obviously, is are we going to reach that number?

In short, what is the level of betrayal of these girls that leaves the mob triumphant over law and order?

What really worries me is that I have a horrible — even if still slight at this point — suspicion that there was enough vileness done to enough young girls that we’re going to find out.

On Substack, Francis Turner shares concerns about the mass rapes of children and young women over too many years:

The scandal has been going on for at least 25 years and probably a decade more. That means that every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs.

Every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs

There are roughly 300,000 girls of each year cohort in the UK so that means one in around 300 girls of any age group has been gang-raped. Given that there are large chunks of the UK which are not places where the ~50 identified rape gangs have operated and indeed are places without residents of the relevant ethnicity (primarily Pakistani and Somali in a couple of cases) that means that the number goes way up in those areas. It seems likely that in one those 50 areas the ratio of new victims to their year group is more like 1 in 100 or 1%, especially when you remove the Pakistani girls that probably weren’t targeted even if some of them were in fact abused at home.

In places like Telford if you see a school year group photo for any year in a Comprehensive school in the last 30+ years at least one of the girls in that photo was being gang-raped

If successful steps had been taken in ~2010 to stop the abuse then about 15,000 girls would not have been gang-raped.

The Tory party and civil service disgust of Tommy Robinson has had the result that about 5000 girls were gang raped between when Tommy Robinson started going about the issue in around 2018 and 2023 when Sunak finally set up the national Grooming Gangs Taskforce.

If Substack would let me do a table this would be easier. However here is a summary of girls gang-raped under the prime ministers of this century based on a simple linear model

Starmer: 500 (to date)
Sunak: 1700
Truss: <100
Johnson: 3000+
May: 3000
Cameron: 6000+
Brown: 3000-
Blair: 10,000

Probably half of Blair’s 10,000 was before anyone was aware that this was a systemic problem, but it was known to be a potential problem by at least 2004 when

    [a] Channel 4 documentary about claims young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex by Asian abusers is delayed as police forces warn it could inflame racial tensions. It was finally shown three months later.

If the UK had got serious about stopping grooming gangs back in 2004 then over half of the gang rape victims could have been saved from such a terrible experience.

Take that 35,000 number a different way. There are roughly 35 million women in the UK. So one in a 1000 women in the UK have been gang-raped over the decades.

January 9, 2025

“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):

It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.

And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.

This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.

Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.

Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.

The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.

This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.

Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.

By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:

November 15, 2024

“OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the current rate, future generations will have to be persuaded that Franz Kafka wasn’t actually and Englishman:

Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens with the novel’s protagonist, Josef K., being arrested early in the morning by two officers of the law. When he asks them to explain their reasons, one of the men tells him: “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.” He never finds out, of course. Even after the story’s abrupt and chilling end, the reader is none the wiser as to why any of this has occurred.

And so it is hardly surprising that Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson described it as “Kafkaesque” that she was visited by two police officers on the morning of Remembrance Sunday. She was informed that she had been accused of “stirring up racial hatred” by means of an unspecified social media post from a year ago. Anyone who is familiar with Allison’s writing will understand just how improbable this is. Her account of the discussion that followed could have been lifted directly from The Trial itself:

    “What did this post I wrote that offended someone say?” I asked. The constable said he wasn’t allowed to tell me that.

    “So what’s the name of the person who made the complaint against me?”

    He wasn’t allowed to tell me that either, he said.

    “You can’t give me my accuser’s name?”

    “It’s not ‘the accuser’,” the PC said, looking down at his notes. “They’re called ‘the victim’.”

    Ah, right. “OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”

The term “Kafkaesque”, like “Orwellian”, has become something of a cliché, precisely the kind of writing that Orwell continually urged us to avoid. But what else are we to call it? I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s account of his visit to Prague in 1988 to report on the Communist regime. He had decided in advance that he would be “the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka”. As it transpired, this resolution was impossible to fulfil. During one of Václav Havel’s “Charter 77” committee meetings, police burst into the building, threw Hitchens against a wall, and arrested him. When he asked for the details of the charge, he was told that he “had no need to know the reason”. How else could he describe this other than “Kafkaesque”? As he was later to say at a lecture at the University of Western Ontario: “They make you do it”.

This is all very well for the Státní bezpečnost, but I’m not sure even Hitchens could have imagined that such behaviour would become routine in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. I have written previously on my Substack about the phenomenon of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), but it’s worth repeating here the key points. Estimates suggest that the police in England and Wales have recorded over a quarter of a million NCHIs since the practice began in 2014. Those who are so branded are often not informed, and these can show up on DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks, thereby impeding their employment prospects. According to the Times, three thousand people are arrested each year in the UK for offensive comments posted online, even in cases where a joke had clearly been intended. This is because Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalises online speech that can be deemed “grossly offensive”. Whatever that means.

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