> A small town in england had a serious problem, a group of men where grooming and hurting little girls.
The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns. It wasn't just Rotherham. This is trivially provable by simply going to the Wikipedia page. It's also still ongoing.
> the unfounded lie that the police did not chase them due to fear of being called racist
This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists, but what was actually found in the council report.
> The report found: "Several 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."
I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this and still post about it. I do think this is one of those stories that is so horrifying it's better not to think about it. But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.
> The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns.
and most cases, as the scottish one the perpetrators were white, so the case did nt become a part of the "mass grooming brown people" narrative.
The issue is not minor and the reasons why it happened were apparent, from lack of care, to institutional pride to just abject neglect. Girls in underfunded council homes, at risk of homelessness, in orphanages being taken advantage with video evidence sent to the council, a channel 4 documentary from 2004 and still took a decade and a journalist uncovering it AGAIN for it to finally be tackled.
That is not the result of "staff being nervous bout identifying the origings of the perpetrators" because that came after the thing was uncovered. There was a video, sent to the council that was ignored.
> This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists
It was constantly, uncessantily repeated by Tommy Robinson and his ilk. Some lovely "reporters" from some online media also tweeted about it, they now have jobs in places like GB News.
> what was actually found in the council report.
the report that came after the trial? The report that could use that excuse to ignore their decade of abject neglect to the suffering of those girls?
Yeah I am sure there are plenty of other excuses in the report, you know where there was 0 mention of the "fear of being racist", in the channel 4 documentary from 2004 that dealt with it while it was happening.
> what was actually found in the council report.
Here just if we are quoting the report let me just jump to the conclusions
"The Jay report found no evidence of children's child social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators".
Individual reports of people feeling nervous do not somehow make the racist narrative true, the systemic review of 1400 cases showed that it was not the cause of the mishandling. A judge IGNORED a letter from an abused girl, like being scared of being called racist never was the reason
> You can also find stories featuring the very words of police chiefs
The police were found REPEATEDLY fucking up the case beyond recognition, the initial inquiery in 2001, the weir report, literally stopped reporting to the police finding their intervention from "poor professionalism practice from early stages" to end up not even sharing information due to "police response being so often inappropiate".
The Jay report in 2013 found that the police dismissed victims deeming them "undesirebles" and staff who reported the issue where met with indifference and scorn.
The police that ignored 1400 kids being hurt in their town want you to believe they were too scared to stop it?
Btw the report was so damming that the chief of police was "asked to step down". so yeah def it was the woke people not letting him prosecute that was the issue.
> I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this
I am not. The narrative has been taken 20 years to build, the reports bring up "fear of racial tension" in increasing order, from not appearing in weird report in 2001 to being the subject of most of the complaints the iopc found in 2021. That gradual build up of "oh we wouldve stopped it but we didnt wanna upset the pakistanis" is not but the increasing deflection of responsabilities by members of councils and police who had the means and simply did not care. They let girsl in vulnerable posiitons be hurt, knowing full well it was happening and then they scrambled for a scapegoat, and the scapegoat was "we would be called racist".
Again there are plenty of grooming cases in the UK, the glasgow case, the well cathedral case etc. all long loong case, all with the police knowing, all ignored. But those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men, which is unsurprising as they are the mayority in the country. Most of the victims of CSA are kids in vulnerable positions, drugs, lack of parents, behavioural issues, homeless and those are the groups least likely to be helped by police. Put 2 and 2 together and you see why they get hurt and why the police fail. Then when it all goes public, they scramble and in this case Tommy Robinson came up with the Asian grooming gangs moniker and the tabloids repeated it and now a decade later suddenly every cop wants to say it was the fear of being called racist why they did not answer to the people in danger.
You can check the weir report and see that it's not there. and then in 2014 AFTER the media blackout and the tommy robinson campaign it appears for the first time. and suddenly in 2020 it is mentioned multiple times.
> But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.
Its not dismissing it. It just about the ACTUAL changes needed to affect change. The inquiry found that social care staff was underfunded, that the police routinely ignored evidence, that they ignored video evidence, that their behaviour was unprofessional and inadequate. The Sarah Evrand report found the same failings, a completely inadequate police force full of racist, mysoginistic behaviour that leads to poor performance.
You could kick out every asian person of the UK and you will still have 16 year long grooming cases if the police do not implement needed changes. Because the glassgow case was also almost a decade long and just as bad as Rotherham in the most harrowing cases. And despite being white as snow they were monsters and the police failed to protect those kids too
Most of the dozens of towns in the scandals have the same perpetrators. It is a qualitatively different issue: we’re talking about organized gangs of foreign-origin perpetrators raping thousands of girls in each of these towns.
This is clearly not the same sort of thing as the “usual” case of individuals abusing their power and trust over children in their care.
It takes very little work to find more and more examples. Why are you pretending they don’t exist?
The list goes on and on and reading through the cases, most of the convictions/arrests got only the tip of the iceberg, as they themselves say.
Edit: I just looked up this Glasgow case and it’s not even close to the same scale, Rotherham was literally three orders of magnitude worse in terms of victims. Of course a criminal ring that victimizes 1000x the number of children will get more attention.
Edit2: of course, you can google almost any UK city and find a grooming gang story - here’s one where asylum seekers ran a massive grooming gang in Glasgow, much bigger than the case you mentioned: https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5215881/police-scotlan...
> those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men
I’m not sure why you mention this given you immediately dismiss it. The per capita rate is not even comparable. To take Rotherham, Wikipedia reports it’s only 5% Pakistani and the population is about 100k. And the “conservative estimate” is that the gang there abused more than a thousand girls. Of course taken over the whole country we would expect the main perpetrators of any general crime category to be the native people - but that’s an absolutely bonkers per capita discrepancy and for some reason people are afraid to point out there’s an obvious cultural problem relating to one specific group of people. Instead you just want to say “well English people do it too” (almost never in these organized gangs vs single abusers) and “well if the cops were better” instead of “our policies introducing these people here in combination with our attitudes about policing and race caused this.”
You certainly don't have to convince me British police are among the worst in the world, it's obvious the British institutions hate lower class British people and there's plenty of videos of police going hard after people for not paying their TV license, criticizing the school board, or livestreaming unapproved opinions while ignoring murders, rapes etc. It certainly isn't just these cases, they apparently also let e.g., the Russian mob murder people, but god forbid you press send on a bad tweet.
> Most of the dozens of towns in the scandals have the same perpetrators
The police disagree. The reports on the issue find that the most common race reported is white man.
> It is a qualitatively different issue: we’re talking about organized gangs of foreign-origin perpetrators raping thousands of girls in each of these towns.
just to be clear most of those cases the perpetraros were british, they were just of asian origin. Foreign born is the kind of dog whistle that makes the discussion complicated cause its hard to believe in good faith when the alarm bells of bad faith show up so early.
> Why are you pretending they don’t exist?
no one is pretending they dont exist. The issue is not whether they exist, the issue is whether race is WHY they happen, and both reports show it's not. Its police, and council negligence and none of the towns have had systemic overhauls on either of those institutions.
Grooming is not less bad if the person apprehended is white somehow. And most of them are, and the only difference is not in scale, its in reporting. Reporting largely following national interest based on,no small part, the narrative set during the rotherdam case by Tommy Robinson.
> most of the convictions/arrests got only the tip of the iceberg, as they themselves say.
yes and you will also find in those reports that they think one of the highest affected groups are asian women, who simply do not go to the police due to being routinely ignored. If they are systematically ignoring white girls imagine how little of a shit they would give if an indian looking girl came saying a white guy did it. (As per the sarah everand report they would give negative fucks, they might even hurt her more and get away with it)
> The per capita rate is not even comparable.
It is comparable, and the only two inquiries on it disagree, the internal police report says there is a disproportionate number of asian men, the goverment inquiry says there isn't. What they both agree on is that most cases do not have a listed ethnicity for the perpetrator and that some police departments wrote the same one for all the accused, regardless of their actual race so groups of half pakistani ethnicity half white, all got asian as their ethnicity which was corrected after the Jay report. This was systemic to some of the police departments surveryed.
> To take Rotherham, Wikipedia reports it’s only 5% Pakistani and the population is about 100k. And the “conservative estimate” is that the gang there abused more than a thousand girls.
the borough has 250,000 people and the cases date back to the 1970s. It was not 5 guys doing 1400 girls out of 100k people in successsion. It was a systemic failiong of council,judges and police to take seriously the findings of the weir, hail report and the repeated and conclusive pleas of Jayne Senior.
The police not once said they were scared of being racist when Jayne Senior brought up the abuse she was seeing, they dismissed her and met her with indifference and scorn, she brought it up countless times between 2002 and 2007, she was awarded an MBE for not giving up on those girls. None of the police officers were individually named in the Jay report about how shit they treated her and how little they cared about the girls.
There is more on the report about their dismissal to aid working class girls (regardless of crime being reported) than there is about the ethnicity of any perpetrator.
> Of course taken over the whole country we would expect the main perpetrators of any general crime category to be the native people
the mayority opinion of reform voters is that this is not the case. Something you just say "of course" to, is not the widely accepted belief of a large voting block of the country despite the facts agreeing. And part of the reason they believe that is because of a narrative built around the Rotherdam case.
> for some reason people are afraid to point out there’s an obvious cultural problem relating to one specific group of people.
9.3% of the UK is asian. if it was an obvious cultural problem there would be much much bigger consequences. The asian community is incredibly well integrated in british life, we have every kind of person from hard working, working class people owning off license stores to billionaire banker wankers like Rishi Sunak. You can go any thursday afternoon to Bank station and half the guys in vests and shirts are of Asian descent. You can go to any pub when england is playing at cricket or football and find countless asian people.
Saying there is an "obvious cultural problem" seems like another dogwhistle to generalise racial tension rather than address the findings of the reports which all highlight cultural indiference at every mayor british institution, clasicism, racism and mysoginy in the police and over reporting of the racial aspect by the media.
> Instead you just want to say “well English people do it too” (they don’t)
THE GUYS AT ROTHERDAM WERE BRITISH. having a pakistani grandma does not make someone not british...
Also you said "of course the mayority are native people" (btw white != native) and now youre saying they dont do it? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
> “well if the cops were better
im not shrugging and saying if the police were better. I am actively repeating the findings of all the large scale inquiries on the police. weir, Jay, Casey and Sarah everand reports all found the police to be inadequate, unprofessional, and in many cases actively malicious. Not only not helping but making things much much worse.
How many more millions spent, how many more 300 page reports, how many more embarrased chief of police resignings do you need to witness to figure out what everyone else already knows, that the police are not fit for purpose.
> instead of “our policies introducing these people here in combination with our attitudes about policing and race caused this.”
6 reports on the case and none came to that conclusion. Also "introducing these people here"? Do you not know WHY and HOW asian people are in the UK?
Like you invade a country, make them part of the common wealth, force your language on them, make their country poor and endlessly brag about how britain is the gem of the empire and youre surprised some might wanna come over?
I know racist people tend to be thick as pig shit but you might not pass a citizenship test if you really know so little about england. You could be deported if you had to actually show you understand the country you think you belong to before getting your passport.
They are there because the British government made a deliberate policy decision to bring them there. It is perfectly reasonable to ask if this policy decision was in the best interests of the populace at large. Immigration (and emigration) are not sacred cows above political debate. Nor did the existence of the British Empire necessitate it; that's simply a post-hoc rationalization of the policies that British politicians implemented.
I realize that in England you are not allowed to think in these terms - it's all unmitigated good and beyond the pale to even consider it as anything but the just deserts of...whoever, but that doesn't actually make it so.
I also don't think it's productive to pretend British is not an ethnicity as well as a nationality. Being born in England does not make you ethnically English and isn't racist to say so, anymore than being born in India made Kipling Indian. Even in terms of culture or nationality it seems pretty meaningless when you don't have strict assimilationist policies.
jesus so you do not actually know the history of your own country. Travel and emigration between Commonwealth states has a number of conditions, that while easier to navigate that complete immigration are still conditional on a huge number of factors.
> It is perfectly reasonable to ask if this policy decision was in the best interests of the populace at large.
considering every economic metric has increased since the 1950s and that since the 2008 recession economic growth is basically linear with immigration numbers, one would easily argue that yes. the primary interest of the population is the economy, the economy grows with immigration thus those two are convergent interests.
> Immigration (and emigration) are not sacred cows above political debate
sure, but not understanding why there are asian people in the UK, not understanding colonialism, not understanding migration patterns, or how immigration ACTUALLY works (they do not bring them over, they come themselves). Means that it is less of a debate and more of a class I would have to teach to get you up to speed first.
The reason you do not debate quantum physics with a 4 year old are not because they are beyond debate
> Nor did the existence of the British Empire necessitate it
it is debatable whether there is a moral requierement over conquered countries. Many empires would argue that citizenship is inarguable, as you are a colony, you are roman or macedonian. other empires would not allow full citizenship but allow travel and belonging to the empire, such as the spanish and british empires. Some more critical political actors would argue that once you conquer someone and subjogate them you have a responsability and a debt to that people.
however you cut it, the existance of the british rule over india and pakistan inexcusably link both countries, to the point where people moving between them is so expected it might as well be a necessity.
> that's simply a post-hoc rationalization of the policies that British politicians implemented.
no the discussions of the structure, and belonging of the countries and citizens of the commonwealth predate the political policies that increased migration by centuries
> I realize that in England you are not allowed to think in these terms
reform was ahead of the polls last year, the daily mirror and the sun are the most read newspapers. Why are you all so absurdly whinny about how you are not allowed to do what you actiively do and think and say every day.
> it's all unmitigated good and beyond the pale to even consider it
In what universe is this the case? Anti immigration platforms have had a strong support in the uk for decades. This country started the skin head movement as a far right, nativist, racist violent subculture. None of that makes any sense in a country where people cant even consider immigration as nothing but positive
> I also don't think it's productive to pretend British is not an ethnicity as well as a nationality.
and you can think that, but that does not make people not native or not english. you can say they are culturally not english, or have asian heritage. But that does not make someone foreign born, or not native.
Most british people now are way less "ethnically" british than 50 years ago. Cockney is gone, chinese and indian have replaced chippies and eel pies as working class takeaways, the conservative party has had 3 women and an indian guy in a row, the mayor of the city which brings all the money in has indian heritage.
And you can feel threatened by that, but Southport and Costwolds bring fuck all to the economy nowadays, regardless of how much you mystithise the posh brit with his hunting jacket and greyhound.
> Even in terms of culture or nationality it seems pretty meaningless when you don't have strict assimilationist policies.
yeah no, none of them have assimilated, there is no way you can find asian people in british pubs, running pubs, running councils, running the country, heading banks and hospitals. You will never find a british indian doctor, its crazy all they do is dance bollywood songs and make grooming gangs. If not for you and your brave opinions no one would have ever said anythign. How brave of you to just repeat racist lies, say that 10% of the people of the country cant assimilate and take no pride in the history of your own country or understanding of the history and significance of the commonwealth agreements
The UK on a per capita GDP PPP basis is as poor, or poorer, than the poorest US state, Mississippi. [1] Immigration, trade policy, privatization, and financialization have cut the working class population off at the knees. It's an economically miserable country temporarily sustained only by the continued extraction of wealth in London, activity that continues only through inertia. This should be shocking given the starting point.
Even side from that, I think the view that a country's good is defined by GDP is entirely wrong.
Re: your migration comments, immigration is a matter of public policy. It is not possible unless the state encourages and allows it. It isn’t something that just happens because other people want to come.
> The UK on a per capita GDP PPP basis is as poor, or poorer, than the poorest US state, Mississippi.
Lets go through some basics, 40% of missippi's budget comes from federal money. California aint paying the tab of the UK, so yeah numbers look worse.
the UK budget for a person includes healthcare, and rent is cheaper (except london). On average UK residents have more disposable income and higher quality of life (longer life, fewer jail time, less child and mother deaths).
No one in the UK would trade their life for the same money, way more driving, worse food, no healthcare and a opioid epidemic all over the place.
> Immigration, trade policy, privatization, and financialization have cut the working class population off at the knees
the highest spending of the working class is housing which was cut by a conservative goverment to entrench purchasing power on the boomer generation. Cutting council house builds in the 70s was the biggest mistake in the recent history of the country
the idea of those kind of trade offs, similar to the US becoming a world currency is that the population would up skill. Replace mines with modern industries and services, which have higher quality of life and lower risk.
> It's an economically miserable country temporarily sustained only by the continued extraction of wealth in London, activity that continues only through inertia. This should be shocking given the starting point.
cool theory, but london is not continuing through inertia, it got ahead of wall street as a financial hub. We are literally the worlds largest financial centre. The fact that its not shared properly is an issue, but no country gets to be numebr 1 in such an incredibly competitive industry "through inertia"
> I think the view that a country's good is defined by GDP is entirely wrong.
why bring up missisippis then?
> immigration is a matter of public policy. It is not possible unless the state encourages and allows it. It isn’t something that just happens because other people want to come.
yeah an there is a need for immigrants. Between the lack of births, the lack of university spaces etc we need way more nurses than the UK can graduate per year for example. You also have the historical context of the UK being an empire and still having relationships with the countries it owned. There are plenty of people in Australia, Canda, Nigeria, India whose grandparents were born in UK, then moved to a different country and now their grandkids might wanna come back. Or grew up in an ex colony and think of the UK like many UK students think of europe, as somewhere to go an study or visit or dream of moving to some day.
You can make immigration harder or easier as public policy but it is also something that just happens. Outside of like north korea pretty much every country has people who come in and go out, for a myriad of reasons
I don't think you understand how GDP PPP works, but you understand this makes the UK look even worse, right? At any rate the point is the fact this comparison can even be made is grim: the UK as a whole's best argument for "we're better off than Mississippi" is "well, we uh, have the NHS." Yeah, basically every country has universal health care - it's not impressive...especially when wages and benefits are so poor in the UK that you have to import people to man it rather than drawing in the people you already have. Even the average Mississippian probably gets equivalent care through the byzantine US "universal" system (a quick Google shows 25% of the population is on Medicaid plus another 15% on Medicare, many hospital systems are owned by the government, etc.)
> and rent is cheaper (except london).
The average rent excluding London is 1341 pounds[1], or about $1800. The average rent in Mississippi is $1150. [2]
> No one in the UK would trade their life for the same money, way more driving, worse food, no healthcare and a opioid epidemic all over the place.
The article I linked was from someone who emigrated from the UK to Mississippi. I've also never, ever heard anyone compare UK good favorably to US Southern food. Or any food, really.
Perhaps most importantly, the government of Mississippi and the police don’t have hatred and resentment for the lower classes. Lower class ethnic British people are clearly reviled by their government and the upper classes, regardless of what party is in charge. Even excluding the racial angle, you yourself mention that with how the police spoke of and treated the girls in those scandals.
> the highest spending of the working class is housing which was cut by a conservative goverment to entrench purchasing power on the boomer generation. Cutting council house builds in the 70s was the biggest mistake in the recent history of the country
I don't care whether the "conservatives" or the "liberals" or the "greens" or anyone else did it (do you think I like Thatcher?), the fact is the UK has been horrifically mismanaged and went from one of the wealthiest countries in the world to one for whom the average person is more badly off than the average person in most advanced countries.
> it got ahead of wall street as a financial hub.
Being a financial hub is not great for anyone except the 1%, but nevertheless NYC is a larger financial hub than London, despite, once again, the enormous advantage London should have had. [3]
However, I would agree: if the US doesn't do something soon, it will end up like the UK: the elite and the rich do great, while financialization, free trade, and migration destroy the middle and lower classes. That's what we're already seeing. If we don't wake up, the dystopia seen in the UK is our future.
> yeah an there is a need for immigrants.
Yes, capitalists love cheap labor. We always have labor "shortages" that magically can only be solved by dumping supply on the labor market. The birthrate argument is particularly silly, since immigration depresses native births. [4] It's also a worldwide problem except in some developing countries, so the "we have to be nice" argument is ultimately hollowing out the countries the migrants come from.
> but it is also something that just happens. Outside of like north korea pretty much every country has people who come in and go out, for a myriad of reasons
Migrants come because the can get money. They can get money because of government policies that specifically enable them to get jobs and benefits. In other words, they are incentivized to come and policies are developed to support and assist them. Without these carrots, migration plummets. UK political leadership made a deliberate choice to pump the UK full of migrants, one that would have been opposed by the population had it been a referendum. Indeed in the UK case, it's been particularly obvious that voting for politicians that claim to oppose migration just gets you even more immigration.
There doesn't appear to be any evidence the story was passed down from the time it occurred. It's more likely the they, like other peoples throughout the world, were able to see that clearly some time in the past a major geological event had occurred and made up a story to explain it.
I wouldn't totally rule it out, but the basis for this claim is very, very thin.
Oral transmission of historical events is obviously real. That doesn't mean oral transmission of this particular event for 7700 years is real. Do you also think that two men stopped the eruption by leaping into the volcano? Or that it was actually a fight between gods?
There are several other problems with the story that should make you suspicious:
- There are several "tells" that if this is even a real story it has been heavily edited. Neither of the links provides a reliable narrative from an indigenous source. Also note that the "klamathtribenews" link says there are many stories about how it was formed but only tells us the one that we want to hear.
- One of the articles claims the same people has occupied the area for 13k years. This is extremely unlikely, has little evidence backing it, and suggests the story is being used as part of the political justification for territorial claims.
Meanwhile, we know peoples from other areas were perfectly capable of coming to a new area, then making inferences and drawing conclusions about what they saw geographically - we have lots of examples of the Greeks doing this, for example. The ideas behind geology didn't spring out of a vacuum in the 1800s. Anyone who understands the idea behind "volcano" would have also understood why a crater lake existed, even if they had never seen that eruption.
The point is there is no evidence for your happenstance version of events.
You believe it based on your own (very mainstream) biases of “primitive” cultures. There is no evidence of your position, it’s a fantasy you have wrapped around something you don’t understand or appreciate.
There's also no evidence for your belief that this represents unbroken oral tradition from eyewitnesses who actually saw the eruption. I also imagine you are cherry-picking what parts of the story you're taking as proof of this: as I said, do you believe that the volcano stopped erupting because two men sacrificed themselves? Why are you erasing the existence of the two giants hurling hot rocks at each other? Why do they say there are "many stories" about how the lake was formed but only tell us this one? What are the others? If they are not about events that can be interpreted as eruptions, what does that mean?
> You believe it based on your own (very mainstream) biases of “primitive” cultures.
Usually I have been accused of precisely the opposite, particularly in this case, where I commonly assert that people hugely underestimate the technological and social capacity of Native Americans, particularly in North America. If anything, I am suggesting you are underestimating the peoples in the area by suggesting they could not have applied their understanding of natural processes to understand a past event they did not personally witness.
> , it’s a fantasy you have wrapped around something you don’t understand or appreciate.
I understand perfectly well. But when people make absurd claims like "our people have been here for 13k years", this is a religious claim, not a historical claim (it would be an absurd one), and you should understand when I take what you say alongside that with a huge grain of salt.
I disagree. There is plenty of evidence of oral traditions being passed down through the different indo european languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German etc.) that date back to before the split 8100 years ago. Granted the specifics details and names get changed over the years but there is amazing similarities at can only be explained through oral traditions.
Just because they're a-okay now doesn't mean they weren't once controversial. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that something like To Kill a Mockingbird was probably wildly controversial before integration.
A lot of those books received a complaint by some parents or were maybe even possibly removed from a school library in one of the thousands of schools in the US. That's what they mean by "banned." It's just a way to market approved books to kids who have to read them anyway as if they were edgy.
In TKAM's particular case, a lot of the complaints came from across the spectrum because of the use of racial slurs, so it was often not even controversial for the reason you might think. Frankly the book is not even good outside of its propaganda value for fighting racism. At any rate, even then it wasn't meaningfully a "banned book", even in the south.
Sometimes "banned" is a complete misnomer, as when back in 2017 it was simply removed from the required reading list in one Mississippi school district because people complained about reading racial slurs out loud. But the reporting, as you can see from Google, almost all says "banned."
If you want to ban a book that deals with racism in a meaningful way because you are actually for the racism, this is the argument you would make in public.
Reading racial slurs and understanding how the character felt and feeling bad about it is the entire point. If your only exposure is casual racism on the worst parts of the internet then you just normalize that way of thinking.
> The Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously to remove the book from the required reading list on Monday evening, The Everett Herald reported.
> Michael Simmons, the board's president and an African American, told Newsweek that he and other board members made their decision after "seriously considering" the information provided
You can find story after story like this. I don’t think people like Michael Simmons are secretly for racism. I think your mental model may need adjustment.
The biggest thing is probably that in 2025 there are a lot of people who are genuinely not comfortable with anyone reading certain racial slurs, even when though they’re quoting. A lot of style guides and editorial policies also reflect this. The second most common complaint is probably that it is an example of “white savior” literature.
You and I can agree this is silly if you like, but the model of TKAM censorship as usually told is just false in every direction - almost never “banned” and almost never complained about for the reasons people assume.
The books don't get put in storage in most places, they get thrown away.
> but a classmate of mine in high school used it as effectively free pass to university libraries that you can't borrow books from when you're not suffering or faculty.
The mass de-accessioning of older books is such a huge problem you often cannot find (even famous!) works through ILL anymore.
That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.
In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
> Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.
When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."
For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."
So besides the "no old books" that was purportedly a misunderstanding is the official policy, there was also explicit ideological filtering.
Yup, they employed intense scrutiny on books before 2008, followed by ideological filtering as you noted, resulting in empty library shelves.
On that note, it's sad to see the GP downvoted for raising this uncomfortable truth. I guess "deaccessioning" or "weeding" reveals a certain hypocrisy among those who supposedly hate banning books.
Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking stacks of reference volumes.
I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”...
but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right
There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd much rather get a reference text at the library than search for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or AI-generated trash.
It's not like the librarians have unilateral choice here. Old books on the shelves get vandalized and stolen; new books are not easy to come by, due to reduced print runs and supply-chain issues. How many times have we heard complaints about Amazon orders being "print-on-demand", and the quality is horrible? And if a published book is typeset in original PDF format anyway, why not distribute it that way to begin with?
Librarians have the demand side to cope with too. Personally, I don't enjoy checking-out books from the library. They're heavy; they require a backpack to carry them; they're not ubiquitously available to me wherever I am; they need to be physically lugged back to the same place where I found them. So yeah, I'd rather have an eBook.
But I contend (not in front of librarians) that a book such as a "Lakota Language Dictionary" is irreproducible in electronic form, because scholars have striven to compile those in print form; they developed new orthographies and documented the existing ones; and any new electronic-format dictionary must be recompiled, retypeset, and re-edited to satisfaction for a new publisher. So we won't have the same materials.
I used to derive great joy from finding really old copies of the Vedas, or a Navajo dictionary, but mostly Hindu texts in the original scripts. And yeah, they were painstakingly compiled by British colonisers and oppressors. But that history is preserved because of those colonists having a scholarly interest in "Hindooism". And those Vedic texts, and Panini's grammar, will not be directly transcribed to eBooks. They may take photographic images of them and shove them into a PDF, but those volumes will be given short shrift, because they're all Public Domain anyway.
The money's in stuff that you can copyright and IP that you can defend. And that's where libraries and librarians are going to follow.
Well, you don't need to think too hard about this when sites like archive.org are in legal danger, and the dream of Google Books is dead. I had not considered the "everything on the Internet is AI/SEO slop now" - that's a good point too: even if the stuff exists online, it's often almost impossible to find.
A few months ago I half-remembered a quote from a famous philosopher. Google and Bing returned only the vaguest, most useless search results - basically assuming I didn't actually want the quote, but general information about the philosopher. So then I turned to ChatGPT, which asserted that no such quote existed, but here were ones "like it" (they weren't.) Finally I skimmed through all the books I had until I located it.
> Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
Yet these same local libraries used to be filled with the sorts of books I'm talking about. They threw them away to replace them with DVDs of Marvel movies, the worst dreck imaginable in the children's section, and shelves and shelves of the latest romance and mystery novels, along with whatever "hot" ghostwritten politics book is out.
Frankly, I look at that is abandoning their original mission and no longer feel inclined to support them in any way. Libraries should have led their communities as centers and sources of learning. What we have now is something else wearing libraries as a skinsuit, and I don't see why libraries like this deserve public support as a library.
But at any rate, as I said, the problem is not limited to municipal libraries, it's ongoing even at institutional libraries.
I think it's important to note the primary argument for even that "later" dating of the end of the first/beginning of the second century is that the gospels predict the destruction of Jerusalem. There is no "hard" argument on the lower bound, only the upper bound (earliest known physical evidence.) I don't think it's particularly wild to suggest, even for a secular historiographer, that the vague, flowery language taken to prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem could have been written without any supernatural influence. It had happened before, and tensions were high.
Luke-Acts claims to be written by an eyewitness (the latter part of the narrative of Acts shifts to first person as he describes events he allegedly participated in versus just heard and read about) and John also claims to have been written by an eyewitness. I don't think there's any particularly strong argument against that, but the scholarly consensus goes back and forth over time.
> However, upon closer examination, this theory encounters several historical and contextual challenges. One of the key issues is the lack of any contemporary evidence from the early Christian period directly linking the choice of December 25th for Christmas to pagan festivals.
> But several decades earlier (c. 203 C.E.), a bishop from Rome, Hippolytus, wrote: “For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years.” (Comm. on Dan. 23.3.) [...]
> Tertullian, for example, calculated that Jesus was killed on March 25th. If Jesus had also been conceived on March 25th and you count exactly nine months later from that date, you then have Jesus’ birth on December 25th. I think this is the way early Christians came to believe that Jesus’ birth happened on December 25th.
> Moreover, unlike the previous and still most popular theory, this one is mentioned in the early sources!
> A treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which comes from the 4th century states: “Therefore, our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in March, which is the day of the passion of the Lord and his conception. For on that day, he was conceived on the same he suffered.”
Note that regardless, December 25th was regarded as the date by at least some Christians long before the fourth century. As for the mention of shepherds in the article, we have independent attestations of shepherding in winter in the area, so the question of "why would they be there in winter" is "because that's normal".
I don’t think anyone is claiming there’s secret industry on the islands. But a “data error” is probably understating it, that is what did actually appear on the bills of lading. Whether it was a bizarre innocent mistake or sort of some kind of financial scheme is unclear.
Maybe. That’s clearly the likely case for Norfolk.
Do you know if tariffs are assessed based on the country of origin in the bill of lading? The Guardian article doesn’t answer that question. I’d suspect so since that’s how everyone is counting imports and exports, but the Guardian article isn’t clear.
Lots of people remember the 80s and 90s being better times with quality manufacturing employment without romanticizing the past. To this day multiples of the “information” sector are employed in US manufacturing.
We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.
I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.
> We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries.
I mean, they can, if you put up trade barriers or introduce capital controls. It's not a coincidence that after capital controls were removed, basically any manufacturing that could, fled America. And I (and my family) in Ireland were massive, massive beneficiaries of this!
Like, you can definitely make the argument that globalisation has benefited the world overall, while being bad for a bunch of people in the developed countries. And it's not a bad argument.
But unfortunately for all of the people who think globalisation is great, the votes of all the people who disagree count just as much as yours, and it looks like they're willing to vote for anyone who even hints at promising to fix this.
> Clinton was running the show in the 90s,
He introduced NAFTA, which made it profitable for much US manufacturing to move to Canada/Mexico. Bush let China into the WTO (or was that Clinton too?).
The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns. It wasn't just Rotherham. This is trivially provable by simply going to the Wikipedia page. It's also still ongoing.
> the unfounded lie that the police did not chase them due to fear of being called racist
This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists, but what was actually found in the council report.
> The report found: "Several 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."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-289516...
You can also find stories featuring the very words of police chiefs: https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/18/rotherham-police-chief-admits...
I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this and still post about it. I do think this is one of those stories that is so horrifying it's better not to think about it. But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.
reply