Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notahacker 322 days ago
Many of the areas most upset by immigration barely see any immigrants, whilst many of the most persistent spreaders of rumours about terrible things caused by immigration to the UK don't actually live there. Of course, it isn't just social media that obsesses over immigrants in the UK (and many other places), mainstream print media and politicians are pretty obsessed with them too.
1 comments

Personally, I would rate the grooming gangs scandal as one of the worse things that happened to a western nation in decades. It literally made me sick to stomach when I read the details. I think the obsession is somewhat justified.
Sure, these guys were disgusting scumbags, but they weren't immigrants https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o

News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly

THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.
> There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.

With no intention of downplaying the particular scandal that you're referencing, I don't think this is correct. Victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church are also usually estimated to range in the thousands, particularly e.g. in Germany

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse...

No credible account suggests the Rochdale grooming gangs' victims numbered in the thousands.

Implying that the recently -convicted gang who spent several years hosting "rape nights" targeting minors in Glasgow I've linked to was somehow less depraved than people of Pakistani descent doing the same thing in Rochdale years earlier because they weren't members of an ethnic minority does kind of underline my point.

Not just Rochdale. You forgot Rotherham, Telford, Oldham, Oxford, Derby, Bradford, Huddersfield, Keighley, Halifax, Bristol, and Newcastle.

Your second point is a hallucination on your part. Nobody is saying it's bad because they're minorities. We're saying it's especially bad because the government was implicated - they very people charged with keeping children safe sacrificed them for political reasons, by the thousands, for years, and still are. That, combined with the scale of crimes by the Pakistani and other rapists and the acceptance these crimes received in their community, form a different type of crime - a massive crime committed by authorities and a whole community over years. That's what's so especially horrifying.

And... not Glasgow?

You're literally doing what you're accusing me of "hallucinating" yourself, bracketing a group of crimes by the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and ignoring white British people doing exactly the same thing and also getting away with it for years, and pinning the blame on the crimes committed by ethnic minorities specifically on the "entire community"; Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush, and according to the person I was replying to even the perpetrators aren't as depraved. Police and social services (not generally considered part of "the government") failed to put a stop to grooming gangs for a wide variety of reasons; yes, in the case of Rochdale specifically where there were a number of warnings that shouldn't have been ignored that made it warrant a public enquiry and elevated news coverage. Needless to say social media coverage driven by agendas tended to skip the more robustly established findings that police repeatedly didn't take victim reports seriously out of assumptions about the behaviour of working class girls staying out late at night and often failed in fulfilling basic child protection protocols in favour of the "politicians covered it up and still are" angle. Back in reality, we've had a lot of convictions, multiple public inquires and people from all political parties talk more about them than most other sex crimes put together (even including Jimmy Savile)

In any case, the wider discussion was whether the UK's current ailments and political schisms are "mainly caused by immigration", and its quite hard to logically connect even the immigration-driven controversies like Brexit, "caps on migrant numbers" and fixation on small boat crossings to crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis, mostly in the early 2000s.

>Sure, these guys were disgusting scumbags, but they weren't immigrants

Yeah they were: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/operation-stovewood-seven-me...

You're pointing to another rape case(ironic there's so many of them) but the other one was the OG that exposed the British government being involved in the cover up of migrant crimes to not seem racist, where the British citizens talking about the Muslim rape gangs were the ones being persecuted instead of the gangs themselves.

You can't make this shit up. It was a betrayal of the British people of epic proportions, whose trust in their leader was lost forever, because if they're willing to sweep that under the rug to protect their image, what else have they been covering up. Then the post office workers comes up.