Compelled speech by the New Woke Right: Grooming Gangs editions
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
The right-wing ‘X’ slop mob is crying for blood. They are asking to bring back the death penalty and to start deporting second and third-generation immigrants. These are all debates that have already been fought and won in the UK and in other European nations that pride themselves on having a better civic culture than, say, Pakistan. We stopped killing our criminals not because we stopped having criminals as bad as the ones that existed when we still had the death penalty but because, as a society, we decided that though murderers exist in our midst, we are not murderers ourselves. We apply human rights universally because, like free speech, you may not like it when they are granted to the sinners, but you hope that when the tables are turned (and history tells us there is very often a ‘when’, not just an ‘if’) the saints will be protected. Long enough to flip them again.
I am referring to the grooming gangs scandal, of course1 (I have a generous recap in the footnotes, but presumably, you have all read on this by now).
This scandal is a damning indictment of how institutions fail the most vulnerable. And while Musk’s tweets have added drama, the real focus should remain on ensuring such horrors never happen again.
There was plenty of time for techno-populist turbo autists to care about violence against women and girls, but it took their ring leader finding out about decades-old scandals about Pakistanis raping white girls for them to get animated.
Scott Alexander put it well in his essay this week, “Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up” - in which he was defending his own ‘ideological’ corner of effective altruism. Still, it equally well applies to my humanistic sensibilities:
Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.
[…]But since everyone else is talking about the criminal aspects of it, I hope it won’t be too inappropriate for me to make a philosophical point: all the people who claim a principled commitment to not caring about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries suddenly care a lot about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries.
Suddenly, people who are otherwise calling for a bonfire of the quangos, divestment of public services and the destruction of the superfluous third sector are asking for hundreds of millions of pounds to be spent on a review which has already taken place and whose recommendations have not been enacted by successive Conservative governments, primarily because they would cost billions of pounds. The compensations recommended in the Jay report could come down to £10 billion. That’s the entirety of the Chancellor’s budget headroom (which was scrapped by politically challenging cuts and tax rises) wiped out.
But this is not what they are really asking for. It’s been decades since the scandal was first uncovered, and the police, social services and court system have already reformed in significant ways to prevent the major failings from repeating themselves.
What has not changed is the number of immigrants from foreign cultures forming clusters of insular communities in downtrodden English towns.
What the new woke of the right is craving is for the old guards of the woke (the left) to admit that some cultures are better than others and publicly denounce multiculturalism and any other pretence that diversity is strength.
Not saying the quiet part loud (some cultures are more misogynist than others) triggers some right-wingers who transform into petulant children pointing at someone with a genetic deformity and demanding they tell them WHY DO THEY LOOK LIKE THAT?
If you look at the origins of political correctness, it started with good intentions, and as a result of us reckoning with human evils, we wanted to leave behind. For example, slavery or the Holocaust. Over the years, it has gone off a bit and as a free speech absolutist (though not free speech inconsequentialist) I have some sympathy for the oppressed coprolalia-sufferers.
I do not have a problem, in the intimacy of my substack, to say that yes, some cultures are better than others. The idea is that you use your judgement and take the best elements from each culture and disregard the worst ones.
To pick a milquetoast example, when I consider the two cultures I am most influenced by: the Greek (in which I was brought up) and the British (in which I live in), I can see elements superior and inferior in both. For example, British people have excellent manners, holding the door, queuing, using phrases to put people at ease and using humour to reduce tension. On the other hand, Greek people have a better blueprint for close relationships: they are more vocal about showing emotions, more generous with money and food, more inviting and less private. When I return to Greece, I hold the door for strangers and let them go through it first, even though they give me confused looks. In the UK, I tell English men I find them beautiful and talented and more delicious than cake despite them looking flustered and embarrassed when I do so.
Similarly, it is an immediately observable fact that Pakistani culture is more misogynist than British culture and that Western societies are less sexist than Asian or African ones. You don’t even have to worry about generalising on this point. If you can’t admit the simple fact that it is better being a woman born in the US or the UK than being a woman born anywhere on the African continent because ‘rapists have no nation’ then the woke mind virus truly has taken over your brain and you deserve to be submitted to right-wing Twitter slop for the entirety of Donald Trump’s second Presidency.