the flower of scotland

and the horror of invasion and capture

in keeping with this week’s theme of immigration, power, and trust, let’s peruse the latest outrage reel from the UK.

here we have a grown man with an immigrant accent (sounds pakistani or thereabouts to me but i could be wrong) following two young girls and badgering and filming them.

one of the girls is armed. she’s not (at the start) threatening or seeking to threaten anyone, she’s trying to get away, trying to leave. but this guy is having none of it. he keeps coming and will not leave her alone. and he wants this documented and will not back off.

and then the girl wound up arrested.

he did the math correctly.

and that means the calculus must change.

the obvious questions here would seem to be:

1. why was this man interacting aggressively with girls this age to begin with, especially to the point where they are screaming “don’t touch us”?

2. what had happened just prior or in past interactions that this man knew the girl to be armed or that the girl felt a need to make it known that she was armed (again, while demanding not to be touched).

i’m sort of amazed by the number of epistemological edge lord lawyers online saying “well, we really need to wait and see what happened” as though this situation seems ambiguous and perhaps scotland is being terrorized by a plague of wee lassies bullying the innocent menfolk, but info is starting to leak out.

some reports are stating that:

“The apparent mother of one of the teens present at the scene claims that the man and another woman were sexually propositioning a young girl when she intervened. The migrants then allegedly attacked her and that is when the weapons came out.”

this has always seemed the likely base case to me. girls that age don’t go attack strange men and strange men like that don’t follow and film girls that age aggressively for any good reasons. the odds on bet was always “he tried something shady/assaultive, the girl told him to get away, he kept coming, and she said she was armed to get him to back off.”

that’s the simple, obvious story that makes sense and fits all the facts.

i get the whole “well, it could be this wild corner case!” thinking and the logic space it constitutes, but at a certain point when one is standing on railroad tracks in a tunnel and sees an onrushing light approaching amidst much noise, “maybe it’s not a train but rather a magical sleigh full of elves coming to bring me a cookie!” is just not a good bet. no one can really live like that (for long).

the question is always “when do we have enough information to develop a high quality view likely to lead to useful actions?”

this is always a collage of context and data. that’s how decision theory works. you never wait for ALL the data to decide if someone constitutes a threat. the people who did that all got eaten by saber-toothed tigers and lions and bears back in the day or got conked on the head by the tribe from over the hill.

their genes are no longer with us.

sound, rapid decision closure is highly adaptive as is strong knowledge of local context.

in light of recent events in the UK, fear by girls like this of men like our amateur film maker hardly seems out of place and faith that “police” will do anything apart from come and join in the grooming gang rape seems dangerously misplaced.

this is not how civilization is supposed to work.

let’s be serious about the salients here:

“don’t touch my little sister, she’s f*cking 12!” is not exactly an extreme ask from a child to an adult male stranger.

and somehow she’s the criminal in this episode?

how is the first question not automatically “why would she feel a need to go about armed and scream such things?”

“oh, maybe she’s crazy or BPD!”

ok, maybe, but big assumption there and one that ignores some important context:

UK grooming and rape is not some small, isolated incident. it’s been hundreds of thousands of girls. the sheer scale of it is all but incomprehensible. i’m embrassed at how long it took me to realize that this was real. it was just too big to believe.

this has been going on for decades. rapists walk free. the police side with them and arrest fathers who stand up. speak out about it and you get sent to diversity training or get the tommy robinson treatment of political prisonerhood.

and little girls are left to stand alone.

then they get blamed for doing it.

well, what the hell did you want them to do?

how is “she was being harassed” not the odds on base case presumption?

and how is the fact that it is anything but an extreme indictment of current affairs?

it probably will not surpise anyone to learn this, but i stand with the little girls.

because this whole grooming gang saga is an atrocity.

under geneva, it would be a war crime.

and under any sane or reasonable ethical system not only preventing but destroying such predation stands as moral imperative.

and the UK has been doing shockingly, conspicuously, “seriously what is the culpability of the officials” little to get to the bottom of it or stop if from continuing.

i do not want to hear about cultural sensitivity or difference, of tolerance for this or fear of being called a racist by the crybully industrial complex.

anyone who fails to grasp this moral imperative or stands against it is anathema. i simply do not care about your “reasons.” you’re not someone with whom a civilization can be shared.

and somehow the local press report on this is a total whitewash.

to describe this as “political capture” seems altogether inadequate to express how dire this situation has become.

again, just what are the incentives here and what are these editors working in service of?

because you can basically tell who the perp is and where the shady bits lie by what they leave out.

in fine soviet and maoist tradition, the white space informs more than the letters set to page.

no mention of adult male harassers, no other side to the story, no reason, no rationale. the story is the charge she’s up on.

on what planet is this possibly the story here?

no planet you want to live on. that much is certain.

let’s make this as simple as humanly possible:

if the girls of your society feel a need to carry weapons to protect themselves and their 12 year old sisters from the predations of grown men who can follow, groom, and even rape them with impunity, there is only one question:

how do you stop this?

anyone claiming otherwise is not someone who gets a voice.

not anymore. never again. never should have had one in the first place.

sorry, not sorry.

the endless appeasement of this sort of behavior is ravaging the west.

the data is stark.

this is a canary so badly poisoned that it fell dead in a strip mine.

note the one nation bucking this trend. now ask me what their immigration policy or tolerance for this sort of behavior is.

yeah.

this is not happenstance.

this is a choice.

the poles are still the hard men made by the hard times of soviet domination. they know better than to fall for this crap and have no compunction about telling you in very direct, in your face terms to “go to hell” if you try to sell it to them.

this is the response of a healthy society, sure of itself and its values.

the rest of the west have become “the other guys,” the soft men making hard times.

and mostly, it’s an own goal.

no child should face this choice

if the response of your society is to arrest this girl, who harmed no one, and to act as though the man following and harassing her is the victim here, then your society has ended.

you are not a real people anymore.

you are food.

worse, you are collaborators in serving yourself and your neighbors up as a predator buffet.

saying "well brandishing a weapon is a crime!" is the empty legalism of a slave, a showing of one's belly to the alpha.

“brandish” of its own accord has no ethical meaning. we must ask “in service of what? to what end?”

to brandish a weapon in a robbery or as a threat to force people into actions against their will is one thing. you are an aggressor, a rights violator, a taker and forcer.

this is not compatible with sound social contract.

to brandish a weapon in defense of your desire to be left alone is something very different.

that is a request to honor the social contract.

it is no threat to peaceful people.

the message is selective: it is a reminder to those whose minds are mired in might makes right that you are not defenseless and that if they will not respect your ethics, they must respect your fist.

but the fist will only come into play in self-protection.

that is no breach of rights, merely a reminder that their breach will carry consequence.

“stop touching my sister” is not coercion, it’s a demand for coercion’s cessation.

and if that is not your conception of ethics, then i’d love to hear what is.

the right to self-defense is foundational and absolute.

without this, no other right nor freedom may stand.

so is the right to say "no" and "leave me alone."

all this "poor victim" of a man had to do was walk away. she had no desire to interact with him or threaten him, very much the opposite. it’s clear they were trying to get away and that he was pursuing them. he created this situation by harassing this girl. even in the video, he will not leave her alone, will not stop creating this situation.

imagine the sort of person who, when faced with a girl this obviously frightened and desirous of being left unmolested, responds not with reasonable accommodation but rather with more and greater physical and emotional encroachment.

“show the knife.”

he knows who will get in trouble here.

imagine the sort of person who does not care if this girl feels safe but rather wants her disarmed.

what might we infer about such a person, their aims, their values?

seems like nothing good.

now ask the same questions about a system that supports it.

this is not a thing that stops of itself, but rather one that grows ever worse until it is stopped.

it’s interesting seeing all the calls of “where are the men!?!” all over the internet yesterday.

it reminds me a great deal of this:

i lived in SF for 16 years and can speak to this with some experience:

none of the local men will help get crazy homeless people to stop molesting people because the police will arrest any man who touches the sacred lunatic but never the lunatic himself.

the vast homeless industrial complex of NGO's and agitated neighbors will be sure of it and unlike the homeless guy, the DA will charge you. hard. you'll face serious prison time.

even if you are cleared, it's months, maybe years of your life and piles of lawyer cash.

and it will accomplish nothing. the crazy guy will be back on chestnut the next day.

why would anyone put career, family, and freedom on the line for that?

it's a senseless bet.

the police face the same conundrum. legions of pro bono and NGO lawyers stand ready to take the homeless guy's case for free and charge officers for some imagined wrongdoing. even if the cops arrest the nutter, the DA won't charge him or will let him out the same day with no cash bail. so that too will accomplish nothing.

it's another senseless bet.

and police aren't stupid.

so perhaps ask a different question: why do people keep electing leaders, DA's, and judges that create this impossible incentive structure?

why do juries never convict the homeless in the unlikely event they ever get charged and why do they get caught and released like endangered animals?

because that's the question you need to find the answer to before anything can or will change.

and what’s going on all over the west with all this low trust behavior is all exactly the same. same NGO’s, same politicians, same stacked deck of “they can attack you and skate but if you attack them it’s a hate crime.”

have you seen what’s going on in the UK police state?

christians are getting arrested for praying silently while muslims can block streets to pray loudly.

a guy got arrested for saying “we love bacon” near a mosque. yes, really. meanwhile, the immigrants are making throat slitting gestures at kids and no one does anything.

and people respond to incentives.

police states and court systems have been weaponized against self defense but look the other way for actual conquest.

criminalizing the defense of civilization while legalizing its destruction has predictable consequences.

none of this is rocket science guys.

either wake up and allow high trust high function people to defend their values or kiss the west goodbye.