I saw this report on French TV, and it contained a lot of Straussian signalling. Look at all these vigilantes! Look at all these people who enact violence in revenge because the French criminal justice system doesn't punish criminals because it can't get around to it with all the other criminals in the system! Look at all these men taking justice into their own hands because they correctly anticipate that they won't ever get their day in court! Look at these men who get punished by the criminal justice system but who are unrepentant!
Specifically, these unrepentant men took the law into their own hands, and they knew they would get got for that. They knew the police would never help them, and the criminal justice system would never punish those who had wronged them, but as soon as they enacted revenge, they knew the police would make them a priority. A harrowed prosecutor explained that there are not enough prosecutors, but if you question the state's monopoly on violence like that, they are going to prosecute you, and then they are going to prosecute the guy who beat up your grandma to steal her purse, in that order.
It was all rather bizarre. The problem isn't the violence, the problem is state capacity to enact violence, but the prosecutor didn't think that rape and murder are the kind of violence that threaten the state monopoly on violence. The kind of violence that threatens the state's monopoly on violence is violence against the state's organs, and violence where citizens take justice into their own hands.
While hand-wringing "oh isn't it terrible that all these people are enacting violence in revenege, taking the law into their own hands", the actual message was: "the French state is breaking down and in denial about it". The straussing wasn't subtle, they just couldn't say it outright. They could walk right up to the line and say "Rule of law is breaking down, and even though this is the only way to get a semblance of justice, punishment, or deterrence, this is wrong. *wink*"
The most bizarre part was this prosecutor who more or less said "the system works" after he jailed a man for getting his revenge, because the French criminal justice system had, after all, also put the man who committed the original crime in jail. It was clear from his demeanour and the rest of the reporting that the system does not actually work, and the only reason there was a speeds trial was the optics of putting only the man who sought revenge in jail.
Not only does the system not work, vigilante justice was the reason why the system finally did something.
It makes sense from the point of view of the state. If you can't punish everybody, and if people can break the law with impunity, at least you have to prioritise the people who loudly proclaim that you can break the law with impunity, and the people who only committed a crime because they assumed they can do so with impunity. Otherwise, the rule of law would break down even quicker.
I saw some post about Rotherham on my dash. Somebody in the notes was gesturing at something about race or culture, and at this moment I regretted deleting my big, long "everybody is wrong about Rotherham" draft. Especially Elon Musk. You see, even if you think South Asians are genetically predisposed to raping, or if you think Pakistani Muslim men are culturally taught to think raping a white teenage girl is not a big deal, even then there's something to explain.
You see, this is the first major point of where I disagree with Elon Musk, and it puts me in an awkward position. There are still people out there who think the correct response to Rotherham is to keep it under wraps, even after it has become common knowledge in 2014. Rotherham was a matter of public record, something you knew about if you lived there or knew locals, then an open secret, until finally, through the reporting of Andrew Norfolk, it became common knowledge. Still, after 2014, there were people in journalism and media who continued to insist that the correct way to handle Rotherham is to hush it up. It was a lot of virtue signalling, if you ask me, but not exclusively. Many people seemed to honestly believe that "if you ignore it, it might go away" was still a viable strategy, after everything. So if you talk about Rotherham at all, some people will lump you with Elon Musk and Farage and Tommy Robinson and Julie Bindel, and these people are the same people who hushed up Rotherham in the first place.
If, on the other hand, you try to really work out how and where Elon Musk is wrong, you run the risk of being rounded down to "you got to hand it to them" in the eyes of some people, and you run the risk of explaining your opinions and the basics facts with great nuance to somebody whose opinion boils down to "The only way to not be racist would have been to keep the rapes out of the public eye and deal with the problem quietly".
Fundamentally, you cannot explain Rotherham only or mostly or primarily with genetics or "woke" or "South-Asian culture". Sure, you can talk to actual South Asian women, and they will tell you something along the lines of "Are you insane? That's how you get raped on the street in Delhi" or "If you do that, they will whip you and drive you out of the city."
Sure, you can make up a HBD just-so story. Sure, you can talk about pre-woke political correctness and racial politics, the same kind of political correctness that caused the Duke lacrosse scandal, and the same kind of racial electoral politics that had been going on in the USA for the last 150 years, where local politicians intentionally pandered to, or felt forced to pander to, specific ethnic interest groups.
I'm granting this all for the sake of argument. Maybe there is a political-correctness incentive not to notice that South Asian men are rapists. Maybe there are political considerations so that local politicians feel pressure to placate ethnic minorities. But even if there was this massive genetic or cultural factor, it wouldn't explain the institutional failure that let problem grow and grow.
It must have started somewhere, and it went unpunished for long enough that an institutional culture had emerged and solidified around understanding the pattern and intentionally looking the other way.
You may argue that this isn't how it works, and political correctness explains it all, just like political correctness explains the Duke Lacrosse case. But the alleged events of the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax case happened in 2006, and about a year later, it had all fallen apart. It was a scandal. The prosecutor was disbarred.
A case that was in some ways the opposite and in some ways the same happened earlier thus year in Berlin (Germany), and it immediately became a scandal: A 16 year old girl was raped by a 17 year old Muslim boy at some type of after-school youth centre, and the people running the tried to keep it under wraps because it would confirm stereotypes. The thing is it was a scandal. There wasn't a culture of turning a blind eye to rape. A couple of people who ran this space tried to hush it up, and somebody else reported the rape and exposed them as the self-serving arseholes they are, self-serving arseholes who make flimsy excuses for letting rape happen on their watch, in their spaces, self-serving arseholes who cover up rape to cover up their own failure to do their jobs and then paint it as political correctness.
Both of these aren't examples of a thing that is like Rotherham. Both of these are examples of the system working, slowly, and in the end, the politically correct idiots have egg on their face.
If anything, the Duke Lacrosse case was an example of racial electoral politics, because the white prosecutor tried to fabricate a rape case for political reasons.
Even if you have a problem with institutionally entrenched political correctness, it usually doesn't take decades until somebody points out that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to cases of actual sexual abuse.
If there is a pattern of sexual abuse/rape/sexual exploitation, and if there is a pattern of ignoring sexual abuse/rape/sexual exploitation, then you are dealing with institutional failure, powerful people putting their thumb on the scale, or both.
For things to get this way, you need to have systemic or systematic problems in more than one place: Police, mayor's office, city council, journalists, social services. For things to get this bad, the problem has to grow into a recognisable phenomenon, something that is delineated clearly enough so multiple parties can look at it and coordinate around it without writing a memo that puts into words "Here's the thing we are all pretending not to notice". For things to get as bad as Rotherham, you need people on the other side to recognise the dysfunction and to organise inside the gaps in the system. It's not enough for a rape to go unpunished, not enough for it to be swept under the rug. It has to be swept under the rug so often and so reliably that the people on the other side, the people doing the raping, know that they will go unpunished, and start acting accordingly.
Political correctness alone does not create this stable vortex of reliable institutional failure. Rotherham has more in common with Jimmy Saville, Jeffrey Epstein, and Lavrentiy Beria, than with individual men who got away with it on their own, or any case of women covering up an individual rape because it would confirm the stereotype.
What absolutely would create this pattern is a country where 70000 individual cases of child sexual abuse across all of France had been on the back burner because the criminal justice system is swamped with terrorism and organised crime and Russian or Iranian saboteurs and murder already. It's bad enough when the local police can't follow up when you report scams or targeted vandalism (here in REDACTED) or most property crimes (I hear that's how things are in San Francisco). But if the criminal justice system is already so far behind, well, people on all sides will start to notice and act accordingly.
