Links - 24th August 2024 (2 - Star Wars: The Acolyte)

Grummz on X - "Rotten Tomatos burying user reviews on Star Wars today, and CrunchyRoll disabling comments. The trend is to remove your voice, and the choice of the informed consumer. They want you blind, ignorant, and consuming."

Manny Jacinto Wants to Be a Force for Change - "Star Wars, like many multibillion-dollar franchises with vast and vocal followings, struggles with the Dark Side of its online fanbase. Over the last decade, a small but loud segment of the audience has been notoriously resistant to change in the canon, often directing their anger toward the increasingly diverse casts of its films and series. Actors like Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, and Moses Ingram faced a barrage of racist attacks after joining the franchise. More recently, trolls have targeted The Acolyte, accusing it of having a “woke” agenda for prominently featuring people of colour and women in its cast and crew. The Leslye Headland-created series follows an investigation into a crime spree that pits a Jedi Master, played by Lee Jung-jae, against a mysterious warrior from his past, played by Amandla Stenberg... “I think the fans who have become older are trying to hold onto that feeling they experienced when they were younger, and when they see something different, it’s not the same feeling so they don’t appreciate it as much,” he says. “I have to remind myself that kids or younger teens can be inspired by this. What I hope to do with The Acolyte is to inspire those younger Asian boys who want to see themselves on screen. That’s what’s more important to me.”"
This adds credence to the theory that when the media and actors play the racism/sexism/bigotry card, they know it's going to fail, so they are preemptively preparing for it
Weird how rejecting change didn't happen with the Mandalorian, Andor and Rogue One. And that 9 years after The Force Awakens, it is not as beloved as The Phantom Menace was 9 years after it first came out

The Acolyte Falls Off Samba TV Ratings Charts With Episode 6, Big Dip With Lightsaber Episode - "Worth a note is that the episode follows Episode 5, which features that “big” lightsaber scene “everybody” was raving about.  We also see that Episode 5 took a dip in the charts, and with Episode 6, The Acolyte is no longer on Samba TV’s charts.   Samba TV actually claims to be a better data aggregator than Nielsen, and it is also known Disney is an investor in Samba TV...   So following that big lightsaber scene that is supposed to be the best lightsaber scene ever in Star Wars (according to some fans), it apparently didn’t do anything do increase viewership, but just the opposite. Not much happens in the episode.   What’s interesting is that Presumed Innocent has been neck and neck with The Acolyte, but Presumed Innocent is still making the Samba TV charts. So the argument that other movies and TV shows may have pushed The Acolyte out of the charts may not hold. This suggests Presumed Innocent has a stable audience, while the data apparently reveals The Acolyte has lost its audience.    Samba TV also used to release household viewership date for the Disney+ shows, but no longer does. I suspect this is at the request of Disney because the numbers are so low. Obviously, if the numbers were good, Disney would likely give Samba TV the greenlight to publish them in order to promote the show. However, that isn’t happening, and not only for The Acolyte, but Samba TV also didn’t report numbers for Marvel’s X-Men ’97 or any of the Disney+ Doctor Who episodes — both of which are a complete ratings disaster.    The Nielsen ratings also reveal nearly 75% of fans that watched The Mandalorian didn’t bother to watch The Acolyte."

Nobody Watches The Acolyte: Fails Again To Make Nielsen Ratings With Episode 6 - "The Acolyte again fails to make the Nielsen ratings charts for the third week in a row with Episode 6... At a cost reportedly north of $200 million, the show is a massive bust for Disney+. Bob Iger previously confirmed a $4 billion streaming loss for Disney."

The Acolyte Episode 7 Nowhere To Be Found On Nielsen Ratings Charts - "A quick reminder: The Nielsen ratings matter; Disney has them automatically turned on in your Disney+ accounts."

The Acolyte Season 2 Not Happening? - "Regarding The Acolyte Season 2, you know it’s bad when the show’s supporters admit things haven’t been good and turn their back.  I believe Grace Randolph, who was a big supporter of The Acolyte, has now changed her tune with the release of the latest episodes. Likewise, now a writer for Forbes, a “Senior Contributor,” has seen the light (welcome to the party, pal).  Oddly, the writer actually wasn’t a big fan of the first two episode premiere as he wrote an article titled, “The Acolyte’s Twin Concept Sputters In Its Debut.”  However, the writer quickly changed his tune and posted a slew of overwhelmingly supportive articles of The Acolyte, which also attacked the fanbase for not liking the show.  The articles written include, “The Acolyte’s 15% Audience Score Is Embarrassing, For The Audience Scorers” and “The Acolyte’ Star Reacts To Toxic Fan Attacks With A Music Video.” There is mention of a “Best Episode Yet,” “Sexiest Sith,” and even “Super-Sith.” Additional articles include “Professional ‘Acolyte’ Haters Fall For Fake Rotten Tomatoes Controversy,” and “‘The Acolyte’ Reveals Its True Villain At Last In A Stunning Episode.” Now things have changed... Showrunner Leslye Headland also previously doubted The Acolyte Season 2 would happen"

The Acolyte Episode 8 Review: Underdeveloped Garbage Writing, What Could Have Been - "I don’t like how Mae starts off the series as a complete badass but then changes her mind and thinks it’s okay if she tells the Jedi about whatever it is about Qimir (we still don’t know).  I don’t like how Qimir mind-wiped Mae. Why didn’t Mae just go with Qimir and Osha? They didn’t explain well enough why Mae didn’t want to stay with Qimir. If the argument is that Mae fails Qimir, then why wouldn’t Qimir still want Mae, especially since Osha had the Force Vision that showed Mae killing Sol? Qimir even mentions that Mae can kill without a weapon, so it’s unclear why he wouldn’t want her on his side. Additionally, they didn’t explain well enough why Qimir wants to find Mae. He agrees to go with Osha—was it to stop Mae from killing Sol so that Osha could do it instead and become his Padawan (that would’ve been cool)? They don’t even hint at such a thing. Or how about the apparent relationship between Osha and Qimir? They show their fingers touching, implying they have feelings for each other, but there was no onscreen chemistry that hinted at that. So, a full frontal scene makes you fall in love? What?! What was hinted at was that Osha and Jecki had feelings for one another, which Dafne Keen even mentioned in an interview. Maybe Osha is bi? Guess so.  Regarding why Mae acts the way she does, I’ve seen more than one fan suggest that Osha and Mae switch places. But why? There’s zero explanation for this. Is it because one has to be on the Light Side and the other on the Dark Side? So if one moves away from one side, the other moves to the opposite? Again, there are no hints or explanations, and it doesn’t even seem like Headland knows what the fuck is going on. Master Sol is a disappointment. He started off as the best character of the series, but quickly becomes a big bitch. More crying bullshit.  They needed to handle the ‘Sol killed your mother’ revelation better. It would have been more impactful if they had kept that from the audience and revealed it later, making it the show’s equivalent of ‘Luke, I am your father.’ Maybe that’s why they didn’t do it? The fight scene between Sol and Qimir was pretty good. I appreciate that The Acolyte avoided the acrobatic flips from the prequels. However, I didn’t like the slow-motion Crouching Tiger/Matrix-style effects. It looked fake as fuck, like they were on strings. And why didn’t Qimir just headbutt Sol’s lightsaber?  I also didn’t like that Osha was able to take away a lightsaber from a Master Jedi. There’s just no fucking way. Osha hasn’t trained in what? Years? I just can’t see it (we assume Mae trained with Qimir). Or how about Sol’s lightsaber breaking when it hits the ground? WTF? While it was cool to see Osha change Sol’s lightsaber from blue to red, the writing should have been much better. And something cool: So Osha is using the lightsaber that killed her mother!!! I also didn’t like the Rocket Raccoon wannabe stopping Sol from shooting down Mae. Why?  Here’s why: It’s because they couldn’t think of a better way to get Mae to the planet and separate her from Sol. The writing is simply horrible. What’s cool is what’s going on with Darth Plagueis, Vernestra, and David Harewood’s character.  This is what I was alluding to above: imagine if these characters had been more developed throughout the season or at least hinted at. It could have been fucking epic... Having Yoda and Darth Plaguis (again, likely added at the last minute?!) doesn’t make up for an entirely shitty series. It’s like going to your favorite restaurant, getting served a pile of shit, and then they serve you some ice cream—does the ice cream make up for the pile of shit? No fucking way. Bozo Redditors are already falling for it. You got shortchanged, motherfuckers!... The Acolyte Episode 8 is too little too late. It’s full of some cool moments, some fan service, but it’s far from making up for the awful story progression, character development and writing from previous episodes. At a cost of $200 million, I hope Bob Iger gets an audit done ASAP. The episode gets a 4/10 rating. The entire episode and series is also more “Jedi are bad” bullshit. Why can’t Disney give us the Jedi we all want?"

The Acolyte has a writer that had never seen Star Wars – here’s how they made the show even better in episode 3
No wonder it was so bad

Meme - The Bugle Daily @TheBugleDaily1: "Each single episode of the Acolyte cost double or a little over double the entire budget of Godzilla Minus One. #theacolyte"
Clearly, they needed even more money

Meme - Script Trooper @ScriptTrooper: "I’ll indulge the bleed the crystal nonsense despite finding it comically stupid whether it’s canon or not.  Look at the crystal.  See that part that broke out of the super weak saber Sol was using?  Whether she bleeds it or not as soon as she ignites it it’s going to shoot straight into her hand and arm."
Someone else pointed out there's no lens either, and the crystal is supposed to be between the emitter and lens
Left wing logic, as someone put it: "Erm, you see, this is a work of FICTION, it is all FAKE. Therefore it means there should be no thought or consideration regarding the workings of its fictitious elements whatsoever." See also: "Use the Force, Harry", Story Logic and the SJW Agenda, "You can accept dragons, elves and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating. Why are you so bigoted?"

Meme - Disney+ forcing Star Wars Fans' eyes open to watch: "Watch it, or you're a homophobic, misogynistic, bigot."
STAR WARS THE ACOLYTE

Meme - Grim Reaper: "IT IS TIME TO GO."
The Acolyte: "Was I a good show?"
Grim Reaper: "NO. YOU WERE ABSOLUTE DOG SHIT."

Meme - *Quit Having Fun*
Person on side: "IF YOU DONT LIKE ACOLYTE, THEN DON'T WATCH"
People playing games: "OK" *House of the Dragon*
Person on side: "ACOLYTE IS GREAT, YOU PEOPLE ARE TOXIC BIGOTS AND AREN'T STAR WARS"
People playing games: *Watching The Boys*
Person on side: "QUIT HAVING FUN. WHY DIDN'T YOU WATCH? IT'S YOUR FAULT ACOLYTE WASN'T RENEWED"
People playing games: *Watching FX's The Bear*

The Acolyte cancelled : r/GeeksGamersCommunity - "Basically half of the comments in the Acolyte Subreddit blaming it on the toxic fans and reviews bombing. Nah, the show just wasn't good, especially not of you hear it cost 180 mil to make."
The Acolyte cancelled : r/GeeksGamersCommunity - "Oh no, but what about all those bots people posting about how amazing their neilson ratings were! Viewership numbers were so high!  What about all those burning questions they left open!?"
"The real data came out and Disney realized they couldn’t keep pretending people were not watching it. It had less viewership than Ahsoka, which was low."
The Acolyte cancelled : r/GeeksGamersCommunity - "Yeah! This is "so unexpected"! They said it did really really really well! What happened?... Haaaaahahahahaaaaa! 😝"
Now the cope is going to be that all the "toxic" fans and reviewers and "review bombing" meant people never gave it a chance because they were brainwashed. This is how they can pretend that the "Fandom Menace" is a small minority

The Acolyte cancelled : r/GeeksGamersCommunity - "the power of manyyyyyy. first time I saw a clip of it, I thought it was a fake parody on youtube."
"When I first heard someone quoting that chant to poke fun at it, I thought it was just a meme. I was shocked to find out it wasn't just a joke."
"What do you expect from lesbian headlamp?"
"Yes! I thought it was a well dome parody. I went to show a friend and he was like..uh..thats the actual show ..lol"

Mollie Damon on X - "The worst part about hearing The Acolyte is cancelled is this will absolutely impact my ability to enjoy any more new projects for SW. I feel like everything I went through while the show was on was for nothing. I don’t enjoy being depressed and cynical about this fandom 😑"
These are the people who go on about "white fragility"

Rotem Rusak 🔜 NYCC on X - "Very surprised to hear about #TheAcolyte, the only Star Wars show I saw take over spaces I inhabit and cause excitement among folks who might not otherwise be or feel involved. I find it hard to imagine those folks were a minority against the naysayers."
When you spend all your time in your echo chamber and are literally unable to conceive of the real world that exists outside it

Maggie Lovitt on X - "I often joke that I have always felt represented in Star Wars because I’m a white brunette who sees myself everywhere in that franchise (Leia, Padmé, Jyn, Rey), but with #TheAcolyte my friends were finally seeing themselves in a franchise that means the world to them."
So it's settled, then. Representation is a losing strategy. Either that or she has very few friends, and they have no empathy

Meme - "DID YOU EVERY HEAR THE TRAGEDY OF DARTH PLAGUEIS THE WISE?"
"NO."
"I THOUGHT NOT."
"WHAT HAPPENED?"
"THE ACOLYTE GOT CANCELED."

Meme - Star Wars Addicts. Arthur Smith: "I can't stand Star Wars hater fans!! Yall managed to get one of the most brutal dark series The Acolyte season 2 canceled! WTF Some of us actually want to watch Star Wars yall out here trying to end Star Wars. All yall haters should be watching Star Trek"

Is 'The Acolyte' canceled? Answered | The Mary Sue (aka "Disney is happy to let the toxic dudebros win, I guess!")
Like clockwork, all the media outlets came out with articles claiming fans were upset it got cancelled. Amazing how the hivemind works (since they deny there's coordination since there's ethics in gaming journalism)
Clearly the huge dropoff of viewers after the premiere was because these viewers all got brainwashed by "toxic" fans into not watching
Comment: "So riddle me this Batman how is a show being cancelled from lack of viewership the fault of those who didn’t watch it? You should find the nearest tree and apologize for wasting its oxygen."

‘The Acolyte’ Views Grow To 11.1M On Disney+ After 5 Days Of Streaming – Update - "The Acolyte is off to a promising start on Disney+.  The new Star Wars series launched on June 4 with two episodes, generating 4.8M views in its first day on the streamer. That makes it the biggest series premiere on Disney+ this year"
Nielsen Data Shows 'The Acolyte' Had Second-Worst Premiere Ratings Of Any Disney Star Wars Series - "In offering a massive counter to the laughable mainstream narrative that the Leslye Headland-helmed series is an audience success, viewing data provided by The Nielsen Company appears to show that the premiere of The Acolyte was one of the least-watched in the history of Disney Star Wars television."
'The Acolyte' Confirmed Ratings Disaster, Disney Star Wars Series Disappears From Nielsen Charts After Just Three Weeks
The problem is, the shills actually believe their own narrative, that it was successful and well-rated. That's why they're so shocked when it got cancelled

Rebecca Henderson was awful : r/StarWars - "Her acting was just poor. In a show that was subpar with really bad writing, she even brought it down further with her really crappy acting."
"It’s almost as though she wasn’t hired on merit…"
"Amandla Stenberg, as well. The two of them are awful actresses."
"The only one worse than her was Stenberg"
"It's like they told her that Vernestra's only personality was "annoyed." It pains me because she was such a vibrant and fun character in the books. Her in the show is an angry green brick with no personality."

The Acolyte Nielsen Rating Analysis from a TV Industry Guy : r/saltierthancrait - "Let's go one more step here and look at the investment aspect from a financial standpoint. Maybe we don't necessarily care as viewers, but the money movers absolutely consider this. We are going to take the show's budget, divide it properly into the number of episodes, and then see how much a view costs Disney.
   **The Book of Boba Fett:** $4.21/view
   **Obi-Wan Kenobi:** $3.06/view
**Andor:** $8.71/view
   **Ahsoka:** $3.81/view
   **The Mandalorian S3:** $2.02/view
**The Acolyte:** $9.28/view"

They should of saved the Oshamir romance for season 2 : r/TheAcolyte - "I’m not opposed for the romance, but it felt extremely forced at the end. It made Osha seem extremely thirsty . We get it, manny has big sith energy, but he just killed your friends/colleagues and you witnessed all of it. You spend like one day with him, find out sol lied, kill the man that raised you, come back, and made us question if the rocks are wet because of the ocean or you.  Like you were with this man for a day. Not even enough time for Stockholm Syndrome to kick in. I wish we saw osha mourn or process what we all went through. It would have been a perfect character moment/devolpment for her during her stay with quimir. Was it her first experience with death? How is she processing watching everyone die? Was this her first combat experience? Is she developing PTSD? Emotionally I feel like she is the same before and after that insane climactic moment in episode 5. I feel like nothing changed and we were robbed of a crucial character moment.  In the second season, we could have explored the relationship more. OSHA having accepted the dark side but still reluctant from everything that just happened. Manny slowly starts cutting trough the void and slowly, through his teachings we can together come to understand him and oshas personas and overtime see the attraction and seduction develop between the two.  Quimir just grabbing osha hand at the last moment felt very YA/harry styles fan fiction vibes."
Naturally, this got downvoted, because if you don't shut up and consume, you're a bad person

The haters got their way. : r/StarWarsCirclejerk - "the power of one season, the power of two viewers, the power of maaaany plotholes."

Robert Meyer Burnett, Viceroy of Verisimilitude on X - "Remember, critics had NOTHING to do with the cancellation of THE ACOLYTE. Only analytics, metrics, corporate interests and most of all, viewership did. The show failed because it betrayed the brand, and put an agenda before legacy, characters, and sincere storytelling."

Meme - rasha *Palestinian flag* qimir's wife @anakinsdream: "i need star wars fans who hate the current star wars to just die to be honest"
It's only toxic, harassment and death threats if it pushes the left wing agenda

Every Acolyte Tie-In Star Wars Just Announced - "Lucasfilm has officially announced a delightful number of official transmedia tie-ins and spinoffs to The Acolyte. The future of Star Wars lies in the past; specifically, the tail-end of the High Republic Era, the golden age of the Jedi and the Republic."
From July. So much for that

Blame Modern TV For Star Wars: The Acolyte's Cancellation
Apparently there's Modern TV, but no Modern Audience
Kotaku is still playing the sexism and racism card of course

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "I was just thinking about this the other day. The main draw of the show isn't Mae and Osha, it's Qimir/The Stranger.  They make this big thing about how Mae and Osha were born like it's a big reveal when it's really not that much of a mystery in the end, but they have this hugely charismatic bad guy with a mysterious past that they just barely dip their toe into. Like, what the fuck? Writers, hello?  Also, maybe don't advertise your show with Carrie Anne Moss and then immediately kill her in the very first scene. Absolutely baffling."
'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "Finally someone points this out; what were they thinking? Osha was boring, Mae was all over the map; they were constantly out done by the supporting cast and had more well known and better actors who could have been main charecters (like the lady who played Trinity from Matrix)  But then they just kill off ALL of them (except the stranger). Like, as cool as it was that a villain actually kill off people from core cast and we have some consequences, what were they hoping to do with this? Jecki gone, Jord gone, Sol is gone, Trintiy is gone, etc. ALl that was left is the unlikable green lady, twins played by a boring actor, and I guess the interesting Plagius and The Stranger."

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "Im not a writer, but in this show even I could feel that there was just no point to it. It even went so far that I thought it’s already over after ep 6 I think.  Failing to establish clear goals and motivations for your characters is pretty much the worst mistake you can make."

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "It pains me to agree. Amandla Stenberg was a big issue. She wasn’t bad but equally she just didn’t have the heft required to carry the main role(s).  For example: She sees her presumed dead sister for the first time in like 20 years and her reaction was more akin to running into an ex-colleague that she hasn’t seen for a while. She just didn’t sell the big moments."
'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "Hiring an actress that can't act to save her life will do that. She has one scene with Yord in the first episode where she displays some range and after that it's just one bland expression for the rest of the show."
'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "  Casting agents should have harnessed the power of mannyyyyyyy"

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "Amandla played each twin pretty much the same, with each ones character constantly changing with no clear motivation. Leslye tried way too hard to make the Jedi evil or mean, and it just didn't fit. Characters made stupid decisions. The dialogue was boring, the pacing was terrible. The double 'twist' of Plagueis and Yoda were so 'on the nose', it felt so tacked on and was them begging for another season. There were so many things wrong it bad in this show, this should be used as a 'what not to do' when making a show. It's like it was written by someone that didn't understand Star Wars."

Libyan Muslim Women in 1953

So much for the myth that before Wahhabism, Muslim women were very free.

From 1953:

The Queen of Libya
by Nel Slis, Associated Press correspondent, who became the first western journalist to be received by the queen in her palace

-Benghazi, Libya (Ass.Press) ---- Fatima-al-Sjifa, queen of Libya, is one of the most elegant queens, but perhaps the least known. She is married to Idris, the first king of Libya, who is 20 years older and a first cousin of hers. Both belong to the tribe of the Senoessi, a religious sect which has followers in every country in North Africa.

The 43-year-old Queen Fatima was brought up in Arabic-speaking countries, mostly in Egypt. She does not speak any foreign languages, but understands a little English.

Before her marriage, she had a role dealing informally with men, and scores of British officers remember how she played tennis in shorts. Since she became queen of Libya, however, she has led the life of the typical Libyan woman, strictly separated from all men.

"It will be a slow and gradual process before the Libyan women attain emancipation", she told me, "But the Libyan girls are very much longing to learn and to win their freedom."

Queen Fatima, small and elegant in her black clothes, which were made for her by Christian Dior, spoke Arabic, which was translated by her lady-in-waiting, the beautiful 24-year-old Mrs Selma Dajani, a Palestinian, whose husband was one of King Idris' advisors.

Queen Fatima spends the greatest part of her time in the small palace just outside the war-battered city of Benghazi, and one of the two capitals of Libya. King Idris, who himself comes from the province of Cyrenica, prefers to live here than in the more cosmopolitan co- capital, Tripoli.

Queen Fatima, who was receiving a journalist from the west for the first time, said she was pleased that there was interest abroad for her poor country, which had suffered so much from the war.

It is hard for one to imagine that the elegant queen, who would attract attention in any society and would command respect, is a descendant of raw (sic) Arabs who, like the forefathers of her consort, whose fourth spouse she is, were in the habit of roaming through the desert.

Tranquil and smiling, Queen Fatima told via her lady-in-waiting of the journey she had recently made through Europe and during which she visited Germany, France and Spain. Her eyes began to shine when she spoke of her visit to southern Spain, Andalusia, where she found the Arab influence very striking.

She spoke of the future possibilities for the emancipation of Libyan women. Instead of playing tennis in shorts, she is currently obliged by her royal rank to go back many centuries and live the life of seclusion ... of 99 percent of Libyan women.

The women of Libya live a more concealed life than their sisters in other Arab countries. They are dressed in the barracan, a hand-woven wool or silk cloth - the material depends on their circumstances - in which they wrap themselves up in such a way that only one eye is visible.

Only if she goes abroad does the queen live like a western woman, dressed in European clothes, and then a visit to a fashion show or to the Folies Bergère in Paris - where she has indeed been - fascinates her just as much as any other woman in the world.

Having to dress in the barracan is perhaps harder for her than for all her Libyan sisters, in view of the fact that she knows the freedom of the west.

The wife of the leading statesman in Libya, premier Mahmoed Moentasser, for example, never comes in contact with the world.

But this is simply the Mohammeden law, which in its most orthodox form forbids the woman to be seen by a man other than her husband, and concerning the husband - the woman sees him for the first time after the elaborate marriage ceremony, which lasts a week.

Queen Fatima however believes that Libyan women will make important progress in a subsequent generation on the road to freedom. They will be able to study and go abroad.

While a Sudanese, dressed like a European butler, served exquisite, sweet and creamy cakes, she said "we have many good American friends and one of my greatest wishes is to visit the U.S. one day".

"If I were to go to the United States", Queen Fatima went on, "I would dearly like to fly, but" - as she added here - "the king won't fly".

King Idris does not like either flying or sailing, but he has still accepted an official invitation to himself and the queen to make a visit to Turkey this spring, a country with which Libya is linked by many historic, religious and emotional bonds."

As quoted in:

Hellcat of The Hague: The Nel Slis Story / Caroline Studdert

Links - 24th August 2024 (1 - UK Migrant Riots: Two Tier Policing)

Two-Tier Keir showed his true colours years ago - "Sir Keir Starmer is quite right to condemn the violence against police officers during the appalling riots that have played out on our streets over the past week. “Our police deserve our support,” the Prime Minister has said. “Whatever the apparent cause or motivation, we make no distinction. Crime is crime.”  I totally agree. There is, however, one thing that puzzles me.   On June 6, 2020, 14 police officers were injured in London after a Black Lives Matter protest turned violent. One female officer suffered a broken collar bone, broken ribs and a collapsed lung after a protester threw a bicycle at her horse, causing it to bolt. The next day, at another Black Lives Matter protest in London, a further eight officers were injured. One was pictured with blood pouring down his face.  Then, two days after that, Sir Keir Starmer chose to publish a photo of himself, solemnly taking the knee.  Given all the injuries to police in the preceding days, did it not occur to Sir Keir that this gesture might look just a touch crass? If he believes there’s no excuse for violence, “whatever the apparent cause or motivation”, shouldn’t he have avoided this photo op? Or are violent protests after the killing of a man in the US somehow more excusable than after the killing of three girls in Britain? Personally, I think not. But, if anyone is wondering why Elon Musk has started referring to the PM as “Two-Tier Keir”, I suspect that this may have something to do with it. The PM’s new nickname – which has also been used by Reform UK, among others – reflects growing fears of double standards. And not just from the PM, but from police chiefs.  Sir Keir has dismissed claims that we now have a system of “two-tier policing”. So has the head of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley – who, when asked by a reporter whether we’re “going to end two-tier policing”, simply shoved the microphone aside and strode off. becoming harder to deny Michael Deacon Columnist & Assistant Editor 8 August 2024 • 8:11am Michael Deacon Related Topics      Riots, Police, Black Lives Matter , Israel-Hamas War, Racism   3808 Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner 'took the knee' in 2020 following the Black Lives Matter protests Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner 'took the knee' in 2020 following the Black Lives Matter protests  Sir Keir Starmer is quite right to condemn the violence against police officers during the appalling riots that have played out on our streets over the past week. “Our police deserve our support,” the Prime Minister has said. “Whatever the apparent cause or motivation, we make no distinction. Crime is crime.”  I totally agree. There is, however, one thing that puzzles me.   On June 6, 2020, 14 police officers were injured in London after a Black Lives Matter protest turned violent. One female officer suffered a broken collar bone, broken ribs and a collapsed lung after a protester threw a bicycle at her horse, causing it to bolt. The next day, at another Black Lives Matter protest in London, a further eight officers were injured. One was pictured with blood pouring down his face.  Then, two days after that, Sir Keir Starmer chose to publish a photo of himself, solemnly taking the knee.  Given all the injuries to police in the preceding days, did it not occur to Sir Keir that this gesture might look just a touch crass? If he believes there’s no excuse for violence, “whatever the apparent cause or motivation”, shouldn’t he have avoided this photo op? Or are violent protests after the killing of a man in the US somehow more excusable than after the killing of three girls in Britain?  Personally, I think not. But, if anyone is wondering why Elon Musk has started referring to the PM as “Two-Tier Keir”, I suspect that this may have something to do with it. The PM’s new nickname – which has also been used by Reform UK, among others – reflects growing fears of double standards. And not just from the PM, but from police chiefs.  Sir Keir has dismissed claims that we now have a system of “two-tier policing”. So has the head of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley – who, when asked by a reporter whether we’re “going to end two-tier policing”, simply shoved the microphone aside and strode off.   If people do believe the system is “two-tier”, they can hardly be blamed. Look at the Met’s soft-touch handling of the pro-Palestine marches. When marchers chanted for “jihad”, the Met actually excused them, by insisting that the word has “a number of meanings”. Yet, when a lone counter-protester waved a sign that read “Hamas is terrorist” (a statement that reflects UK law), he was arrested (police de-arrested and released him shortly after, claiming he had been held for his own safety).   If that wasn’t “two-tier”, what was it?  Equally troubling were comments this week by an officer from West Midlands Police. Sky News covered a counter-protest in Birmingham by masked men who had initially gathered outside a mosque and local Islamic Centre in the Bordesley Green area. Their reporter asked the officer why there had been such a “low-key police presence” when “an awful lot of people [were] armed with various weapons” (including a man wearing a balaclava and clutching a knife, who followed the Sky News crew after they’d finished broadcasting). The officer’s reply? Apparently, the police had had “conversations” beforehand with “community leaders” in order to “understand the style of policing we needed to deliver”, and “our policing response” had been “commensurate” with that. The officer added that the “communities” were “trying to make sure that [the counter-protest] was policed within themselves as well”.  Sorry, what? Do all “communities” have “community leaders”, who are invited to set out the “style of policing” they wish to receive? Who is my “community leader”? And are all “communities” entitled to “police within themselves”?"

“Two-Tier Keir” - Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali - "11 young girls aged between 6 and 9-years-old were stabbed multiple times at a Taylor Swift-themed birthday party... There is now rioting across England. The response to this rioting may tell us everything we need to know about the skewed preferences of Europe’s political elite and those of Britain’s in particular, the unabated demonization of the white working class, and the failure of the mass-immigration project to produce a society in which minority groups view themselves and the nation as part of a cohesive whole... violence has now surfaced in pockets across the country in protest against mass immigration. It’s akin, though on a smaller scale, to what we have seen in Ireland and France this year.  It should go without saying that all violent disorder which endangers lives and destroys property is unacceptable... Unfortunately, the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer did not say this in his statement on the developments.  The Prime Minister decided instead to single out what he calls “far-right” and made a point of stressing the need to keep Muslims and minority communities safe. In this speech, which focusses not on the spark which ignited this unrest, but rather on “Islamophobia,” and “far-right” thuggery, you can see how the Prime Minister might be gearing up to implement his de facto blasphemy laws... Sir Keir’s rhetoric serves to embolden disaffected Muslim youths by furthering the narrative that Muslims are persecuted in western countries. It is this narrative which Islamists seize upon to radicalize the population and stir young men to violence. The response also serves to demoralize the British population, who have found that their extreme concern over the effects of mass-immigration falls on deaf ears. The play-book is always as follows: an immigrant or child of an immigrant goes on a killing rampage and the government goes after a “far-right” threat...  the self-styled “Muslim Defence League,” a group of loosely organized young Muslim men have been parading around their towns armed with weapons in response to what they perceive as a threat to Muslim communities. They have largely been goaded on by the rhetoric of senior politicians such as Sir Keir.  There has been little interrogation of this in the media, but a proliferation of videos online gives us a glimpse into the scale of the crowds in some of these areas. There has been no press conference held on the threat of “far-right” Muslim gangs – young men walking around their towns with machetes and pipes. In fact, videos have emerged of police in Stoke encouraging Muslim men to discard their knifes at the mosque. In organizing an amnesty for this group, in these terms, the police essentially treat Muslims as a separate community over whom legitimate authority lies in the Mosque, not the state. They might be accused of policing along sectarian lines... This has culminated in a sense, amongst Britons, that there is a two-tiered application of policing. That minority “communities” are treated with kid gloves in comparison to native Britons. The moniker “Two-Tier Keir” has latched itself onto the man who has only been Prime Minister for a month... “shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?” It is a fair question, one which a large subsection of British society does not think has been answered convincingly. And it is why these sporadic outbursts of violence have continued to erupt. This all comes in the wider context of increasing disorder and criminality on the streets in Britain. Just a few weeks ago, riots erupted in Harehills, an area in Leeds, after four children of a Romani family were taken into care by social services. A double decker bus was set on fire in the middle of the street and property was damaged and burnt throughout the night. Videos emerged of “community leaders” arguing that the Romani community could deal with its affairs internally, threatening further riots if they were not allowed to do so. It was stressed that the local police and social services were unwelcome... a solider in full uniform, was stabbed multiple times in the neck leaving his barracks. 24-year-old Nigerian migrant, Anthony Esan, has been charged with the attempted murder. It was only 11 years ago that Fusilier Lee Rigby was decapitated in the street by two Nigerian migrants. This time, there was barely a mention on the news though there were, of course, the inevitable well wishes to the family from the Prime Minister. But the most tangible reflection on the event seems to be a change in the rules on what soldiers can wear outside of barracks in order to keep them safe from certain members of the public; a twisted irony. There is a sense that in Britain, much like the rest of Europe, events like this have become normalized. It has required the brutal murder of three young girls to bring people onto the streets.  Britain has fewer police per capita than most European countries... they have always relied on the support of the public to maintain order. It is an important principle on which the country was ordered for over a century. And it worked. There are now groups of people with a sense of identity entirely separate from that of the British and who resent the imposition of authority coming from outside their “communities.”  The scale of mass immigration into the country, from places with very different cultures to that of Britain, has radically transformed the country in just twenty years and upended the social contract. It has made this situation inevitable. It will only get worse if the political elites in Britain, including journalists, continue to refuse to have uncomfortable conversations in the public square about the nature and effects of immigration and the violence perpetrated and encouraged by certain groups. The British people have voted in at least the last six elections to put an end to mass immigration, which they view as a drain on public finances and a danger to their way of life. And, as we have seen, over recent years it is. The offences against the British people are perhaps too numerous to list... On top of all this, in deprived towns across the country, from Telford, to Rotherham to Rochdale, thousands of young girls were systematically raped and groomed by Muslim grooming gangs over decades. The police turned a blind eye as this tragedy was unfolding out of fear of being accused of racism and islamophobia.  It does not seem unreasonable that a working-class British person might take one look at the changes which have occurred in his area over the last twenty years and feel betrayed. Nearly all of this change occurred since 2001. Not only did the public not ask for this, they actively voted against this at every election over the last two decades.  Rioting is an abominable thing. Stealing, looting, and the damaging of property have been excused by swathes of liberal commentators over recent years as an essential form of speech; a way to “speak truth to power.” This is never right and punishment for violence ought to be handed down firmly. However, it cannot be the case that the expression of grief and anxiety from one “community” – the British – is condemned more harshly than the violence expressed on the streets of Britain by minority gangs on a regular basis. This is anarcho-tyranny manifest."

Jess Phillips under fire for 'excusing masked thugs' - "A Home Office minister has been accused of excusing the behaviour of masked activists who forced a live Sky News broadcast off air.  Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, was criticised for “justifying” the actions of the men, one of whom who appeared to be carrying a large bat... an independent MP who was elected in the nearby constituency of Birmingham Perry Barr last month defended damage to a pub as “natural reaction” to anti-Muslim hatred.  Social media footage showed a lone man outside the Clumsy Swan pub being punched and kicked by a mob of masked men, some of whom were carrying Palestinian flags.  Asked about the incident, Ayoub Khan – who was elected on a pro-Palestinian ticket – said it was “disappointing” but followed claims that far-Right marchers were set to target Birmingham.  “There were a series of messages – I received hundreds – from residents, concerned residents, claiming that EDL [English Defence League] and far-Right extremists were going to be marching within inner-city areas,” he told Times Radio.  “People will come out in large numbers, and you’re not going to be able to control young men, especially who are upset, angry, when you see some of the scenes play out … All we can do as political leaders, as community leaders, is to urge restraint.  “But unfortunately, this is a natural reaction … And when I say a natural reaction by these young men, it’s a natural reaction for them. But it’s obviously something that we don’t condone in any shape, way or form.  “But you can see why it’s being played out in the way it has. When you see the stoking up of tension, the bigotry, the racism, the Islamophobic attitude, it’s created a lot of tension.” Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, claimed the footage was an example of “two-tier policing”, writing on X, formerly Twitter: “All violence, rioting and assault is totally unacceptable.”  But Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, replied: “These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them. This misinformation was spread entirely to create this content. Don’t spread it, Mr Tice!”... James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, said: “Home Office ministers should not be making excuses for masked men shouting, abusing and intimidating members of the media.  “Ministers are not commentators or casual observers – they are decision-makers and need to think about the consequences of their words and actions.”  Liz Truss, a former prime minister, said it was “astonishing a Home Office minister is excusing masked thugs”, adding: “She must retract this statement and the Prime Minister must urgently commit to protect the safety and freedom of everyone in our country.”  Mr Tice said: “Jess Phillips trying to justify thuggery, intimidation and threats by violent gangs. Not a great look for a Labour minister.”"

Brendan Robinson on X - "I’m ex Police & I’ve no sympathy for rioters or villainous thugs of any variety, but listening to my old force WMP Chief Constable deny two tier policing exists and then in his message he thanks the local ‘community elders and mosque leaders’ for their ‘guidance’… it’s biased."

Queen Bob on X - "What the hell is the point of MP's, Lords and a King when NOBODY will speak for us???!!!!   I feel like I'm drowning. I feel so overwhelmed and angry and frustrated and confused and  I know many of my followers are too.   My inbox is full of people literally petrified that there's going to be a knock on the door and they're going to go to prison for speaking.   It's absolutely insane that we're being treated like this, and then being told we're not.   Just like the trans row - women, with legitimate concerns about safety and children we're labelled "TERFS" and then people threatened them, vindicated by their new label.   Now, people, NORMAL, GOOD, PEOPLE = Nannas and Grandads, Mums and Dads,  are being labelled as "Fascist/Far Right/ Racist/ Nazi" and thousands of people cheer when those, entirely innocent people, with perfectly reasonable concerns about immigration, are threatened with extreme physical violence and murder.   Where are the people speaking for us? Where are the Torys? Where are the Lords? Where is our King?   We have NOBODY. I simply cannot believe what has happened, and how quickly it has happened."

Khaled Hassan on X - "Over the past 10 months, since October 7th, the British Jewish community warned that we are under attack. We showed the police and government that we were under attack in university campuses, workplaces, streets, and even in our own synagogues.   My synagogue and members of my immediate community received many threats. I am regularly called a "coconut", "house slave", "Uncle Tom", "Israeli agent", "Mossad spy", and often receive death threats.   In a meeting with our local police a few weeks ago, I showed them the below comment from extremist Muslim Majid Freeman where he was calling me a "house negro". I also showed them another comment where another Muslim extremist was calling me a "house slave". THEY TOLD ME NONE OF THIS CONSTITUTES A CRIME.   Today, I saw a video of the director of public prosecutions of England and Wales warning that retweeting something online could be an offence (link in first comment).  Oh, by the way, no one ever wished me a Shabbat Shalom or used a language other than English to communicate with me (unlike the Alsalam alikum the police are using to address Muslims across the country)"

'Anti-fascist' demonstrators have a troubling blind spot | The Spectator - "A flyer calling for the expulsion of an ethnic group from parts of London was widely shared online yesterday. There were also reports of menacing chants being made outside a place of worship. Were the far-right thugs of riotous Britain up to no good again? Actually, this time the bigotry was coming from the other side, from the self-styled anti-fascists of the radical left. Yes, it seems yesterday’s anti-racist gatherings may not have been entirely anti-racist. A group called Finchley Against Fascism shared a virtual leaflet inviting people to gather in Finchley in north London to show their opposition to the bigotry and chaos of recent days. We need to mobilise, it said, in order to ‘Get fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley!’  Wait – Zionists? Jews who believe their people have a right to a national homeland? To lump Zionists in with fascists and Nazis is bad enough. To then say Zionists must be driven ‘out of Finchley’ is horrendous. Finchley is one of the most heavily populated Jewish areas of the UK. Many of its Jewish residents are likely to identify as Zionists. Let’s be clear about this: expelling Zionists from Finchley means expelling Jews from Finchley. Not surprisingly, the online flyer caused distress to Jews. Local MP, Sarah Sackman of Labour, herself a Jew, was contacted by ‘concerned residents’. The flyer is ‘clearly anti-Semitic’, many of them said. It is. Saying ‘Zionists out’ in Finchley is as bad as those awful cries of ‘P*kis out’ that we heard during the recent riots. In both cases, bigots were essentially calling for the ethnic cleansing of parts of the country. Some people also reported hearing chants of ‘Free Palestine’ outside the synagogue by Woodside tube station in Finchley. I thought we’d all agreed that political agitation near places of worship is a bad thing? There were Palestine flags on many of the anti-racist gatherings yesterday, too, and spontaneous eruptions of the chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’.  Was this really necessary? I thought these protests were about riotous bigotry here at home, not conflicts in the Middle East?... Could that chant not have been parked for one measly evening in the name of that ‘unity’ everyone was talking about?  It should concern the organisers of yesterday’s gatherings that some Jews reported feeling uncomfortable at them... Sure, it was a small minority at yesterday’s protests who said – or at least thought – ‘Zionists out’. Yet the fact that anyone said it, the fact there was an ‘edge’ to these demos that niggled at some Jews, speaks to a blind spot on the self-styled anti-racist left. They are fast to spot prejudice and intolerance when its targets are Muslims or black people, but the blinkers seem to come down when it’s Jews being menaced.  Indeed, Britain’s Jews are well within their rights to ask why there weren’t anti-racist gatherings in protest at their persecution following 7 October. Over the past ten months, synagogues in the UK have been daubed in graffiti. They’ve had their windows smashed. One in St John’s Wood in northwest London was targeted by a ‘pro-Palestine’ mob. Just two months ago, a teenage Nazi was jailed for eight years for plotting to blow up a synagogue. This week, yet another ‘surge’ in anti-Semitic hate crime has been reported. Where’s the demo?"
The left wing agenda is all connected

Joel Braunold on X - "All kidding aside this is not an anti racism march when you come to a Jewish area and demand that zionists (whom are the vast majority of the community there) are to leave. It’s racism. It’s disgusting. It’s in plain sight."
Peter Beinart on X - "Agree. Critiquing Zionism is one thing. Demanding that all "Zionists" leave a neighborhood is different. Imagine going into a Hindu neighborhood and demanding that all Modi supporters leave. You've crossed the line from ideological argument into something far more menacing"

Liza Rosen on X - "This is not Gaza‼️This is London‼️ Muslims warn the entire Jewish community in Britain that their turn to be beheaded as a human sacrifice for Allah’ sake is coming soon. As you can see in the video the Muslims chanted in Arabic: "Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud (Translation: Jews, remember Khaybar the army of Muhammad is coming to kill you too)." They literally telling Jews that the “army of Islam (ie, Muslims)” is returning in order to kill them for being Non-Muslims, just like they beheaded all the Jews in "Battle of Khaybar". Please check out this entire thread 🧵!"
Damn far right! Extradite Tommy Robinson so he can face the death penalty!

Meme - "Tier 1. Asylum seeker ordered to pay only £2 a month for assaulting an emergency worker. Let off community service as he doesn't speak English. FREE. Mustafa
Tier 2. Steve Mallon JAILED for 26 months for shouting and gesticulating at police. Al Mbaidib. JAILED. Steven Mailen"

Meme - Callum @AkkadSecretary: "He went from being the ruler of Scotland and as Scotish as William Wallace to planning to go home to Pakistan in 3 months.  They have a motherland to flee to, we only have this island."
"Humza Yousaf says he could leave Scotland with his family due to 'Islamophobic'"

Meme - *Scowling black man holding Black Lives Matter flag and Antifa T-shirt with Molotov Cocktail*
Media: "MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS"
*Scowling muslim man holding baseball bat and Palestinian flag*
Media: "DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH"
*Puzzled white blonde man with British flag and "Save Our Children" T-shirt*
Media: "FAR-RIGHT TERRORIST!"
*police moving in with assault files and body armour*

You will be refused bail even if you only watched riots from the sidelines, Belfast judge warns - "A judge has warned that anybody present at a riot will be remanded in custody, even if they were only a “curious observer”.  District Judge Francis Rafferty said that someone’s presence at a riot made them involved in the riot as he refused two bail applications."
Isn't it fascism to interfere with the media?
Since you can't even observe a protest the establishment doesn't sanction, can we arrest "peaceful protesters" at protests the left wing approves of if there's any violence?

Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 on X - "They're planning to drag you off the streets of the UK and imprison you instantly for ecen "looking at riots". As @Keir_Starmer installs these dystopian measures, the legacy media and far left cheer on."

Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 on X - "Belfast, Ireland, Aug. 9 — Two-tier policing? A @GBNEWS correspondent compared and contrasted how Belfast police @PSNIBelfast were dressed on the anti-mass migration protest side compared to the antifa side."

Douglas Murray on X - ""Allahu Akbar" is a prayer - and also a war cry. There is no comparison between it and (say) Christians shouting "Hallelujah". Besides, if a term has been recently and repeatedly used by your co-religionists as they massacre people of other faiths a decent person might lay off it"
Sohail Ahmed on X - "As much as I may disagree with Douglas at times, he is correct here.  Remember that guy who was waving the jihadist black standard flag, frothing at the mouth, shouting 'Allahu Akbar, Jihad fi sabilillah' (Allah is great, Jihad for the sake of Allah) during the pro-Palestine protests? This *specific* phrase is only ever used in the context of violent jihad, by the way.  He was also shouting something about the 'kuffaar' (infidels), and whilst I don't quite remember what exactly it was that he said, I remember it not being very positive.  Now, the police comms team, evidently advised by someone with ulterior motives, came out with a public statement saying that he was benign and that he wasn't advocating for Jihad.  The police defended him.  They were utterly naive to do so, which is terrifying. Because if those who are tasked with keeping us safe are lost and confused, then what hope do we have against these people?  The only reason there aren't more Islamist terror attacks is because Islamists tend to be utterly incompetent."
Left wingers are obsessed with "dog whistles" and connotations meaning that even innocent things like the OK sign are no longer acceptable. But of course, these rules only apply to "white" people

David Collier on X - "So 'Allahu Akbar' is just the Muslim equivalent of 'hallelujah'? Well if any of you have any recent reports of Christians shouting Hallelujah as they chop off heads, or blow up buses, or blow themselves up next to kids in fancy dress or at a music concert. Can you let me know?"

Amnesty UK break silence after activist applauded Labour councillor's 'cut throats' threat - "Amnesty International has spoken to one of its activists after she was pictured applauding a Labour councillor’s call for right-wing protesters to “have their throats cut”.  Ricky Jones, an elected councillor in Dartford, was caught on camera at an anti-racism protest in Walthamstow delivering an incendiary speech.  Armed with a microphone, he declares: "They are disgusting Nazi fascists.  "And we need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all!”  The woman, wearing an Amnesty tabard, applauds as he stops speaking, along with other members of a large crowd surrounding him. Since the clip emerged, Mr Jones has been suspended by the Labour Party.  An Amnesty International UK spokesperson told Express.co.uk: “Members and supporters of Amnesty UK attended yesterday’s mass anti-racism rally in Walthamstow.  “The activist in the video has made clear to us that they were distracted and hadn’t heard the speaker’s comments when they applauded generally with the crowd.  “The speaker at the event is not affiliated with Amnesty and we strongly oppose violence and any kind of hateful speech.”"
The double standards are so amusing. Of course, if you don't push the left wing agenda and happen to take a picture with someone associated with a cause the left disapproves of, like someone wearing a "Straight Pride" T-shirt, or even exit a RV with the Diagolon flag, that shows you are the Nazi fascist, even if you explicitly reject whatever the left is trying to associate you with

Ian Miles Cheong on X - "How is it legal and permitted for far-left activists like Hope Not Hate CEO Nick Lowles to create hoaxes about how Muslim women are having acid splashed on them by anti-mass immigration protesters?   This vile lie was clearly intended to drive anger and anti-white sentiment in migrant communities towards the protesters. As we clearly saw, this Lowles’ lie inflamed tensions among migrants in Middlesbrough.   Will Keir Starmer and the UK police act? Or do they only intend to arrest white British people who share content that makes the natives upset?"

Shabana Mahmood MP on X - "I joined @Keir_Starmer  today to speak to faith leaders and those impacted by recent disorder.  Amidst the shocking scenes over the past week we’ve also seen the very best of Britain.  To call upon the motto of my great city of Birmingham we only go one way from here: forward."
Theorised on X - ""Faith leaders" We live in a de facto secular country, where freedom of and from religion established under the pillars of Westphalia take primacy. Why, then, do we defer to unaccountable & unelected religious leaders on matters of 'community'. Isn't this a demonstrable failing?"

Meme - Ben Leo @benleo444: "Hope not Hate's Nick Lowles here, who spread misinformation that Muslims had been acid attacked, admitting the '100 riots' from last night was a hoax but it doesn't matter as it pushes their 'migrants welcome' agenda.  Why hasn't Lowles had a knock on the door by cops for his acid lie?"
Nick Lowles: "Yes, the list was a hoax, but just look at the front pages of today's papers. An anti-racist message is being transmitted to millions of homes this morning"
"Hate" is anything that threatens the left wing agenda

Meme - Elon Musk: "Found this pic of the UK justice system"
*Piper Perri surrounded*
*UK policeman (?) surrounded by 4 Muslim men*

Meme - The Guardian @guardian: "England riots: how has 'two-tier policing' myth become widespread?"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The Guardian have been telling people about two-lier policing based on race and sexuality for decades."
Archived version
The Guardian's dismissal of the current claims amount to claiming that the police actually somehow clamped down too hard on the BLM protests (where the "evidence" was to cite an anti-police NGO and somehow slime the "far right"), dismissing the light touch for Pakistani grooming gangs as historical and pretending that the "vast majority" of protests the left approve of (which get the kid gloves) were peaceful, ignoring the fact that the same applies to the current protests and that you're not even allowed to observe them, much less take part in them. It also ignores the policing of social media (which of course don't happen for protests the left approves of)

Meme - aaaaaaaaaa @Boomer_Pride *Balding Soyjak with stubble and ugly black horn rimmed glasses in Trans t-shirt* "Riots are the voice of the unheard unless the riot is over three girls getting stabbed then its the voice of the oppressor."

Links - 23rd August 2024 (2)

Ben Reinhardt on X - "Our ability to do things is dying a death of 1000 cuts. It's nice to talk about bottlenecks and silver bullets, but my hypothesis is that stagnation is the accumulation of many small frictions. My plan is to continuously update this thread with examples as they pop up."
Ben Reinhardt on X - "Grants and contracts often need a full-time administrator to handle compliance."

Science of Science on X - "We also find that proposal success is correlated with a high level of topical overlap between the proposal references and the applicant’s prior publications."
Toward predicting research proposal success
Gerald Barnett on X - "The average amount of time required to prepare a single proposal ranges from 170 h to 270 h .... This equates to roughly $8500 to $13,400 USD in salary costs alone. Actual costs per proposal can be $20,000 on average when administrative overhead rates are included."

Pirate Wires on X - "18 King Cove residents have died trying to travel to the Cold Bay airport for medevac transport to Anchorage. Despite the seriousness of the issue, the Biden admin and environmental groups refuse to let them build a road to it "
Opinion: The Biden administration’s betrayal of King Cove - "The lack of respect and hypocrisy in the Biden Administration’s application of its policy of Environmental Justice toward Alaska Natives was on full display when on March 14 the White House forced Secretary Deb Haaland to withdraw from the July 3, 2019, Land Exchange in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge that the Department of Interior had agreed with the King Cove Corporation and the Agdaagux and Belkofski tribes. This land exchange was intended to provide the people of King Cove with the opportunity to seek the permits to construct an 11-mile gravel road to medevac people from the all-weather Cold Bay Airport when the weather prevented aircraft from landing in King Cove... Why did the White House suddenly withdraw from the land exchange on March 14? Well, the day before the Biden administration had ever so reluctantly agreed that the Willow Project in the National Petroleum Reserve could proceed. This was the right call from a national energy security perspective. But hyper-outrage about the Willow decision from environmental groups went into overdrive.  So, a sacrifice was needed... every Alaska governor and delegation member has supported an 11-mile gravel road between King Cove and the all-weather runway at Cold Bay.  Why? For humanitarian reasons. There is no certain way out of King Cove in a medical emergency during one of its notorious and frequent bad weather events. It is my understanding that 18 people have died in airplane crashes that have occurred while trying to get in or out of King Cove during a medical emergency in bad weather...  It is disgusting that the environmental groups are not concerned for the health and safety of people who live there... Alaska’s problem is that our transportation lanes go through federal land and transportation access is always opposed by environmental groups (Willow, Ambler Road, Tongass Roadless Rule)."
Environmentalists claim the planet is overpopulated, so

Ben Reinhardt on X - "You need OSHA training to go down a ladder"

Meme - Tucker Jones (tuckerjones.bsky.social) @tuckcomatus: "It took about 2,500 days from President Kennedy's "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech to the Apollo 11 moon landing.  It will take about 3,300 days from first Connecticut Avenue NW safety study to expected completion of construction in Winter 2028.  DC deserves better."

ᚇ Darragh Rogan on X - "The one winding me up lately (as I have similarly been affected) is people cannot get permitting to put bicycle sheds in their front gardens for various aesthetic reasons, despite national policy to shift away from car centric travel"

Federal law prompts Chick-Fil-A, other chains to add allergen to menu - "A federal law requiring that sesame be listed as an allergen on food labels is having unintended consequences — increasing the number of products with the ingredient.  Food industry experts say the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame. As a result, several companies — including national restaurant chains like Olive Garden, Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A and bread makers that stock grocery shelves and serve schools — are adding sesame to products that didn’t have it before. While the practice is legal, consumers and advocates say it violates the spirit of the law aimed at making foods safer for people with allergies... The new law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, requires that all foods made and sold in the U.S. must be labeled if they contain sesame, which is now the nation’s ninth major allergen. Sesame can be found in obvious places, like sesame seeds on hamburger buns. But it is also an ingredient in many foods from protein bars to ice cream, added to sauces, dips and salad dressings and hidden in spices and flavorings.  Advocates for families coping with allergies lobbied for years to have sesame added to the list of major allergens. Congress in 2004 created labeling requirements for eight: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans... If the ingredients don’t include sesame, companies must take steps to prevent the foods from coming in contact with any sesame, known as cross-contamination.  Food industry experts said the new requirements aren’t simple or practical.  “It’s as if we’ve suddenly asked bakers to go to the beach and remove all the sand,” said Nathan Mirdamadi, a consultant with Commercial Food Sanitation, which advises the industry about food safety. Some companies include statements on labels that say a food “may contain” a certain product or that the food is “produced in a facility” that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination... United States Bakery, which operates Franz Family Bakeries in California and the Northwest, notified customers in March that they would add a small amount of sesame flour to all hamburger and hot dog buns and rolls “to mitigate the risk of any adverse reactions to sesame products.”... Bob Huebner, food safety/quality assurance manager for Pan-O-Gold, told Fitzgerald in a string of emails that the company was forced to add sesame to the product and the label.  “The unfortunate reality is that our equipment and bakeries are not setup for allergen cleanings that would be required to prevent sesame cross-contamination and was not an option for us”"
Time for more regulation so greedy companies don't kill consumers!

Giant phallus-shaped iceberg floating in Conception Bay surprises residents of Dildo, Canada - "Mother Nature has provided more than a handful of phallic shapes to giggle about. In 2021, a man went viral for his photographs of a penis-shaped rock tower in Arches National Park. Cambodian authorities have had to beg people to stop picking the carnivorous plant Nepenthes bokorensis, which just so happens to look like a penis. And don't even ask about California's plague of penis fish, which washed ashore on Drakes Beach in 2019. (They were actually marine worms, which have a long and storied history of looking phallic.)"

Jacky Martin on X - "Did you know that some companies put weights in their products to make them feel higher quality? It's because we associate heavier with better quality material. I am curious, is there something similar for games?"
Grummz on X - "Yes. When games shipped in physical boxes, we always included a blank notepad of Blizzard stationary. This was to make the box feel heavier and increase it's perceived value.  We knew gamers would pick up the boxes and turn them over to see the back. When they did, we wanted Blizzard games to feel heavier than the competition."

Meme - Kangmin Lee | 이강민 @kangminjlee: "A symmetrical, orderly, and warm-lit meeting room is fascism"
*Bukele in El Salvador* Paul Graham @paulg: "This looks like a shot from a dystopian movie. The symmetry, the shininess, the flags that look like cones, the guards with capes. Everything says dictator."
Left wingers think everything is 'fascism'. So when they warn about 'fascism', no one should take them seriously

Soldiers Strip and Rebuild Jeep in Minutes - "Canadian army soldiers from the 3 Area Support Group (3ASG) Technical Services Division stationed at CFB Gagetown strip and rebuild a Willys MB US Army Jeep in under four minutes during a local army services parade in Halifax"

Katie Price's 'desperate last attempt to save Mucky Mansion' as she's evicted over £3million debt - "Katie Price is reported to be desperately seeking an emergency court intervention to avoid being booted out of her infamous Mucky Mansion.  The former glamour model, whose fortune once peaked at £50 million, is grappling with two overdue mortgages on her West Sussex property valued at £1.3 million, alongside a hefty unpaid tax bill of £750,000 contributing to her overall debt of £3 million... Katie is not giving up without a fight, subsequently requesting a court hearing to argue for her right to remain in the property, which serves as both her family home and the hub for her OnlyFans content creation business... The model recently caught media attention again as she dodged her second bankruptcy hearing, electing to jet off to Cyprus with her current partner, JJ Slater. Faced with bankruptcy for the second time earlier this year after failing to settle a tax bill exceeding £750,000 with HM Revenue and Customs, Katie purchased her home back in 2014 for a neat £1.3million.  Since then, the property has become famous in her Channel 4 renovation show as she transformed it from a state of disrepair.  In March, Katie confidently reassured her followers that her 'Mucky Mansion' was safe despite her financial issues, proclaiming: "You've followed my life, my journey, I say it as it is. Yes, I'm in a bankruptcy. But guess what? I own my house. No one could take it off me as well."... Regarding her financial insolvency, she has even said that she's been in a courtroom "more times than I've had hot dinners", and that going to jail wouldn't faze her."
Katie Price's £2M mucky mansion left abandoned with piles of rubbish after she moved out to rent 'eye-wateringly' expensive home despite double bankruptcy woes

Scientists put Jared Diamond’s continental axis hypothesis to the test — here’s what they found - "Their research, drawing upon a vast array of cultural, environmental, and linguistic databases, challenges the notion that Eurasia’s geographic layout inherently facilitated a quicker spread of critical innovations compared to other regions of the world, such as the Americas and Africa... In line with Diamond’s hypothesis, the researchers found that environmental barriers do indeed impact the likelihood of cultural traits being shared between societies. For example, traits related to subsistence strategies, housing types, and social organization showed significant correlations with environmental and travel barriers, indicating that the ease of cultural transmission for these aspects is closely tied to ecological factors. However, the researchers discovered that these environmental barriers do not consistently favor Eurasia over other continents. This finding directly challenges Diamond’s assertion that Eurasia’s geographic orientation provided a unique advantage in the spread of agricultural and other critical innovations... The study underscores the complexity of cultural transmission, revealing that the spread of innovations is influenced by a myriad of factors beyond environmental and geographic barriers. The findings suggest that factors such as the movement of peoples, direct and indirect cultural exchanges, and perhaps even historical contingencies, play significant roles in shaping the distribution of cultural traits. Co-author Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology summarized the results by saying, “Our findings point out that geography, like genetics and ecology, matters, but it is not destiny.”... The study, “Geography is not destiny: A quantitative test of Diamond’s axis of orientation hypothesis,” was authored by Angela M. Chira, Russell D. Gray, and Carlos A. Botero."

World’s Oldest Cave Painting Unearthed: At Least 51,200 Years Old, Scientists Reveal - "In an astounding revelation, researchers have determined that a cave painting in Indonesia is the world's oldest known artwork, dating back at least 51,200 years. Knewz.com has learned that the painting, discovered on the island of Sulawesi, is also considered the earliest example of storytelling through art, as reported in the journal Nature."

Colby Cosh: Planets could be the reason early humans revolutionized farming - "In a world that was more or less the same year-round, hunter-gatherers didn’t have to worry about food storage: they could migrate cyclically within a small range, following wild game, to keep up with modest seasonal effects. But if the seasons then got more intense, food storage would become more important to the long-term survival of the group: one winter could now finish everyone off. Those hunter-gatherer skeletons from Neolithic times really are bigger and stronger than those of the farmers, but they are also marked noticeably, Matranga says, with “ Harris lines ” like the rings of a tree — a biological signal of periodic starvation. Those sedentary idiots eating grass — ancestors to most of us — might have been hungry year-round, but they prevailed, and eventually stumbled their way into civilization. For better or worse, as some would say ."

Tehran police close Turkish Airlines office after its employees defy Iran's headscarf law - "Iranian authorities have over the past years shuttered hundreds of businesses across the country — from shops, restaurants to pharmacies and offices — for quietly allowing their female employees to forgo wearing the hijab."
Weird. Muslims keep insisting that no one is forced to wear the hijab. Either that or they dig up ancient history to claim that nuns abusing children in the 20th century means Muslim women being forced to wear the hijab in the 21st century is exactly the same and you can't be concerned about the latter without being a hyporite

An engineer opens the door to reading ancient, once-unreadable history - "The incinerated scrolls are so sensitive that they tend to explode into a cloud of ash at the slightest touch. Occasional attempts to unravel the scrolls — which were rolled very tightly for storage in the first place — have been made over the past 300 years; the chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), for example, gave it a shot using newfangled stuff called chlorine. But none of these projects ever came especially close to success, and they typically involved destruction of some of the “books” in the library. In recent years 3D imaging techniques for “reading” documents like this in a non-invasive way have been making great headway. The leader in the field is a University of Kentucky computer scientist named Brent Seales, who in 2015 led efforts to read a fragile, desiccated Hebrew Bible parchment scroll dating to the third or fourth century AD. The text was from the book of Leviticus, and proved to be a letter-for-letter match with the Torah of today — which is a disappointment to scholars from one point of view, and a finding of awesome significance from another. (It goes without saying that this scroll came from the territory of Israel, near a kibbutz: this is a fact that would, in any other political context, be regarded as a supreme affirmation of indigeneity.)"

Ancient mysteries soon to be solved by decoding ancient Roman scrolls - "A computer programmer, Luke Farritor, had won a US$40,000 (C$54,000) prize by extracting a single legible word from one of the Herculaneum papyri that got flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. This papyrus scroll was one of those extracted from an entire library unearthed near the volcano in the 18th century: over the centuries, hundreds of these tightly-wrapped and then incinerated scrolls had been retrieved from the Villa of the Papyri, but had defied attempts to physically unroll them. Even modern, non-destructive imaging techniques employing algorithmic assistance were at a disadvantage, for the original ink on the scrolls was made of carbon. Farritor, provided with open-source 3D scans of a few scrolls, had thrilled classical scholars with his revelation of a single word, Greek “porphyras” (purple). But the really big prize was yet to be claimed. The funders of the Vesuvius Challenge, a prize pot designed to summon the attention of amateur coders like Farritor, promised US$700,000 to anyone who could decipher four passages of at least 140 characters from one of the scrolls. On Monday morning, Farritor and two other young Vesuvius Challenge notables, Youssef Nader and Julian Schillinger, were announced as winners of the grand prize... At this moment antiquarians know the titles of dozens of lost plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; we are missing major works of Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and Eratosthenes. We know that Sulla wrote his memoirs and that Cato the Elder wrote a seven-book history of Rome. Any of these old writings, or others of equal significance, may materialize suddenly out of oblivion now, thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge."

Meme - "Hey, I know all these songs! I love these bands! You guys play great music here"
"Thanks! love listening to the Oldies station, it's so retro"
"OLDIES. RETRO"

Meme - "Why I didn't text you back:
I was asleep
I was driving
I was ignoring you
I forgot
I saw your text and told myself that I was going to respond, but I wanted to finish what I was doing first. After that, I got side-tracked and went to do something else and completely forgot your text even existed because I was stuck in my own tiny world until I went to text you days or even weeks later about something completely unrelated"

Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "How long is your tax code on a scale from Switzerland to America?"
"Whose Tax Code Contains the Most Words? Swiss German Moroccan Canadian French American"

Meme - "diagnosed with awwtism because im such a cutie"

Meme - "I think the panda knows *people dressed as Pandas interacting with Panda, and Panda looking traumatised*"

ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 on X - "Paul Kagame may have once had a Twitter Burner Account called ‘Richard Goldston’ which on different occasions he possibly used variously to deny Rwandan involvement in the Congo, call the African Union ‘useless’ and call South Africa’s President a ‘Black Retard’"

Meme - Kiwi Edward Lim is feeling thoughtful in Singapore.: "Tips on how to recognise Love Scams: Guys who fulfill all 3 criterias below are usually love scammers 🤭
* Good looking / handsome
* Wealthy / earning a good income
* Appears to love you faithfully
Chinese govt educating ladies on recognising love scams 😒 Have you encountered a love scam before? #ScamAlert  #lovescammer  #lovescams  #lovescamsingapore"

Meme - “Bad” Billy Pratt @KILLTOPARTY: "Every man simple wants a beautiful mid to call his own" *Michele Alves*

Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Smile Mask Syndrome is a psychological disorder in which subjects develop depression and physical illness as a result of prolonged, unnatural smiling. First described in Japan in 1983, this is attributed to the great importance placed on smiling in the Japanese service industry."

How eating records have changed and why you can't attempt to eat biggest meal ever | Guinness World Records - "Eating records have changed a lot over the years.  As more has been learned about the effects of gluttony, the world of record breaking has had to adapt.  These days, we don’t monitor record attempts for how much a person can eat in an unlimited amount of time.  Instead, we set a short time limit (three minutes at the longest) for a person to eat the most of one particular item, or we time how quickly they can eat a certain thing... But there was a time when we monitored a record called largest meal eaten. It is still active today, but it’s not one that you can apply for.  It was featured in an episode of Guinness World Records podcast Behind the Book, when Editor-in-Chief Craig Glenday shared the shocking and tragic tale.  It was 8 a.m. on a Sunday in 1983 when a 23-year-old woman arrived at the accident and emergency department of Royal Liverpool Hospital complaining of abdominal pain.  Her belly button had popped out like you’d expect to see during pregnancy, and she was finding it difficult to breathe. Nurses questioned her and she confessed that between midnight and 4 a.m. she had sat down to a late dinner.  What she ate was what doctors believed at the time to be the biggest meal ever eaten by an individual.  According to correspondence published in the medical journal The Lancet (Volume 325, Issue 8432, 6 April 1985), her meal weighed 19 lb (8.6 kg).  Craig said: “That’s heavier than the heaviest bowling ball you’ll ever find at your local bowling alley.  “Little wonder then that this young woman is now, four hours later, in agony.” The gigantic meal comprised 1 lb (453 g) of liver, 2 lb (907 g) of kidneys, 0.5 lb (226 g) of steak, two eggs, 1 lb (453 g) of cheese, two large slices of bread, 1 lb (453 g) of mushrooms, 2 lb (907 g) of carrots, one cauliflower, 10 peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, 2 lb (907 g) of plums, 2 lb (907 g) of grapes and two glasses of milk.   An abdominal X-ray confirmed the diagnosis of acute postprandial gastric dilatation. Various efforts were made to save the patient but tragically she died as a direct result of her final meal... These days, we wouldn’t accept applications for records such as the largest meal eaten, at least not from members of the public.  This is the kind of record that’s researched and submitted by medical experts and one that’s not considered safe for people to attempt themselves.  As well as stories like this from medical history, we’ve reported on the competitive side of eating ever since our first edition.  The book included records from people who had consumed huge amounts of food in one sitting, and even chronicled records for downing astonishing amounts of alcohol. By the 1970s, records like this covered half a page of our book.  There was even a record for eating live goldfish (210), but this is certainly not something we would condone or monitor today.  In the 1990s, the editors of Guinness World Records decided to draw a line under uncontrolled gluttony.  However, there had been warnings in the book since 1966, with the first ever one reading: “From a medical point of view, record attempts must be regarded as extremely inadvisable”. But at the start of the 1990s, all consumption records were taken out of circulation and placed under review.  Craig said: “When gastronomic records were later reintroduced in 1997, the focus shifted from unfettered gluttony to the rate of consumption... One thing that hasn’t changed is how popular these food records are"

Sending birthday cards to colleagues could count as harassment - "Sending a card to a colleague who has said they do not want their birthday celebrated could count as harassment, an employment tribunal has ruled.  The conclusion came in the case of a tax worker who has successfully sued HMRC after bosses sent her a birthday card when she expressly said she did not celebrate it. Kani Toure was off sick with work-related stress when she asked for correspondence to be kept to a minimum and via email, the tribunal heard.  However, in the month that followed she was contacted “more than once every other day”, before being sent a birthday card despite informing her boss the previous year she did not want one."
Good luck keeping track of who wants a card and who doesn't want one

Codpiece (Character) - Comic Vine - "Codpiece is a Doom Patrol villain with a giant transforming weapon attached to his groin."

Pcwelds on X - "My dad went to a doctors apt with my grandma & found out she was diagnosed with dementia over a year ago but she never told anyone because she forgot lmaoooo"

Wife suffocates after being buried in cow dung to treat a snake bite - "A wife suffocated to death after being buried in cow dung to treat a snake bite in India.  The 35-year-old woman, named as Devendri, was out collecting wood for her fire when a snake bit her on the hand in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, northern India.  She ran home to tell her husband, Mukesh, and the pair decided to call a local snake charmer called Murarey, who suggested his bizarre treatment may succeed in sucking out the poison. Villagers gathered outside the house and watched as Mukesh covered Devendri in cow dung.   The snake charmer sat beside her and chanted mantras but after 75 minutes Devendri died."

Where is the moral outrage about Britain’s grooming gangs?

From 2023:

Where is the moral outrage about Britain’s grooming gangs? | The Spectator

"Stead was most of all famous for the first great newspaper investigation, in 1885, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, on the scandal of child prostitution. Stead had bought a girl called Eliza for £5, on the premise that she was to be taken to a brothel on the continent, using quite dubious methods that got him sent to jail for three months.

Despite this, the story succeeded – a national scandal which led to a change in the law, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. The idea of English girls being trafficked into sex outraged and horrified the public, Stead’s story imprinted itself deeply into the public psyche, to the extent of influencing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — thus, Eliza Doolittle...

A century or so later, in 2003, a journalist for the Times called Andrew Norfolk became aware of strange and disturbing rumours from Yorkshire. Originally reported by Labour MP Anne Cryer, they involved groups of mostly Pakistani men loitering around schools in Rotherham and sexually abusing girls, some as young as 13. There were supposedly whole gangs of men involved and the number of victims stood in the hundreds. Norfolk found it implausible; it sounded like a far-Right conspiracy.

Yet, as the Times journalist soon began to realise, this story was true. In fact, it was much bigger than anyone could really conceive, and it wasn’t just Rotherham, either; similar things were happening across the north of England and beyond. There were thousands of girls involved.

This was far more horrifying than the scandal Stead uncovered, yet no Parliamentary law resulted from the revelation. The story was extensively covered by Norfolk, and it inspired a drama and a couple of books by those involved. Yet no great national soul searching had followed — and that is why it is most likely still going on.

All of which makes tonight’s long-awaited GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame, so necessary. Presented by journalist Charlie Peters, who travelled across the country speaking to victims, whistle-blowers and campaigners in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford (where I met him last October), the documentary is both harrowing and frustrating in the sheer sense of powerlessness it projects. Repeatedly the authorities knew what was happening, were passed the details of the abusers and evidence, gave reassurances that something would be done and then… nothing. 

Although grooming gangs have been uncovered in multiple towns and cities, the case of Rotherham remains the most shocking, not just for the scale of the abuse but the institutional response. 

Here Norfolk was able to access a number of reports on the council’s handling of abuse, one written by solicitor Adele Weir. Sent by the Home Office to study child prostitution, Weir found an abuse ring centred around a man called Arshid Hussain, discovering 270 victims with no fewer than 18 naming Arshid as their supposed ‘boyfriend’.

The police failed to act — even though the rapists involved were also dealing drugs.

In 2001 Weir took a young girl who’d been raped to report the crime to the police. While in the police station her abuser contacted her to say he had her younger sister. The gang had already broken her brother’s legs and so the terrified girl dropped the complaint. ‘You can’t protect me,’ she said. How the abuser found out she was in the police station has never been explained. When Weir complained to the police, she was told to never do it again, she and a colleague told off ‘like naughty schoolgirls’.

During her time Weir worked in the offices of a charity called Risky Business, which helped victims of sexual abuse. Now strange things happened at the office: a computer was interfered with, the minutes of a meeting changed; files and paperwork went missing after a break-in. The intruder, Peters suspects, could have been someone working for Rotherham council. 

Jayne Senior, who ran Risky Business, is among those who features in the documentary and it’s hard not to feel that one might go insane in her position, or at least develop a soul-crushing cynicism about how things worked.

Senior was heavily involved in trying to do something about the Rotherham scandal; in fact it was she who had helped Norfolk get a Serious Case Review for the murder of a girl called Laura Wilson. Wilson, aged 17, had been stabbed 40 times by her ex-boyfriend after telling his family about their relationship. But the review found that she’d been groomed by a group of men from an early age, and with an IQ of 58 was completely helpless to defend herself; and 15 different agencies were found to have failed. 

Rotherham Council wished to present this as a simple ‘honour killing’. The council also censored the report, then threatened to use a High Court Injunction to stop the publication of uncensored extracts.

Senior heard of a young girl who had been abused, and tried to alert the authorities. ‘I had a database where we had intelligence that we were putting there on a daily basis,’ she tells Peter. ‘And I’d get lots of things that were said to me in meetings, such as “these children were consenting”, “they were making informed choices”, “they were returning to their abusers”, “they wouldn’t make a good witness if it went to court”, and also we were breaching their human rights; but it was never the human rights of the children, it was the human rights of the perpetrators.’

In many cases the authorities were enabling these ‘relationships’; exactly a century after Stead’s great campaign the Lords had ruled that children under 16 could be given contraception without their parents’ consent; relationships between grown men and girls under 16 were treated as ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’. One 12-year-old victim was even offered Punjabi and Urdu lessons, the language of her abusers!

Senior’s campaign was relentless but seemingly futile. Repeatedly she would give the authorities details: ‘car registration numbers, names, nicknames, addresses, properties of concern…. we kind of collated a raft of that information that we kept, and we kept it in a database…. And people still say to me today, “why did they actually do nothing”. And I can’t give you the absolute answer to that, all I can tell you is what they said at the time: “the children were consenting”, “the children wouldn’t make good witnesses if they went to court”.’

In Rochdale, under the control of the Greater Manchester police, one policeman — the only whistle blower to resign over what was going on, reflected: ‘I couldn’t get any answers. All I was told was that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.’

It gets more and more bleak. A girl in Telford tells how she was raped a thousand times. In this Midlands new town built in the optimistic post-war era, children were sold for sex in a house, where local men would visit and note their names on a piece of paper; what the documentary makers describe as a ‘paedophile honesty box’. The girls were frightened because of what happened to Lucy Lowe, a 15-year-old girl who had been burned to death with her mother, sister, and unborn child — murdered by an abuser.

In Telford a group of teachers complained that ‘there was a problem in this authority with Pakistani youths’ abusing girls; a council worker accused them of being racist. One council worker failed to share reports because it was fearful it would ‘start a race riot’. 

Watching this, the inability of people to weigh up the seriousness of different social evils, I wonder to what extent this scandal was made worse by the Macpherson Report of 1999, and the terror public servants had of being accused of racism, or their department being accused of ‘institutional racism’. That is a career ending allegation in Britain, while in contrast allowing your town to become the scene of the worst mass rape in British history seems to make little dent.

The bitter aftertaste to this story comes from the fact that, after lengthy reports criticising councils and police forces, very few people have been disciplined; a handful of police were told off, but most of the people involved in the councils have happily progressed in their careers — including one who, incredibly, now thrives in the equality and diversity industry. The Labour party, the soul of which feels tarnished by the terrible moral compromises it has made with multiculturalism, even tried to make one of the Rotherham councillors an MP until GB News forced him to stand down. Fresh revelations about the council have emerged just in the past few days.

The running theme of this story is that institutions — whether the Labour party, social services, local authorities or police — repeatedly reward those responsible, until they feel the pressure of the media and of public outrage. And, apart from Norfolk’s investigation, this has been quite muted; even the Tory party has been reluctant to make capital over this scandal.

It’s a taboo issue, for obvious reasons, but that is why it is almost certainly still going on; because, as Peters says, political correctness is not just about being nice, it has serious, often horrific consequences...

We also need to ask about the role of the media, and the arts world, and the cultural powers who decide whether something is worth caring about. It’s significant that this has been left to GB News, a small and still fringe television channel, to tell the story. It should be on BBC1; this should be regularly discussed on the Today programme. My local arts cinema should be telling me about a new film portraying the scandal."