Jesus. The facts of this case are horrendous. That a gaggle of racist trolls on Twitter, including the racist troll who owns Twitter, would run hogwild with them is despiriting and entirely unsurprising. It's just that in this case, the facts are *so* horrendous that they handily overshadow my distaste for the hogwild-running.
I get the impression this is the first instance of bias incidents involving the British Police you have examined. Perhaps you then made a cursory search to see if there were other incidents to establish a pattern and, for whatever reason, you dismissed what you found. You need to look more deeply into it, as this has been a growing problem. It extends to so-called "anti-trans" incidents as well, which have been the justification for numerous abuses of police procedure, as well as the Orwellian "non-crime hate incidents" which have seen thousands of people getting visits from British police over tweets and online posts.
These incidents are so extreme and widespread that they made an old American 90s liberal like me start to believe there was a shocking level of far left progressive bias in especially the London MET police force, but actually countrywide. This is not just coming from ideologues like Nigel Farage, and by portraying it that way you are part of a much larger failure to investigate the truth. Millions of us moderate liberals have now had the experience of being labeled "far right" or "conservative" and thus dismissed when we don't 100% toe the farthest left ideological line on every issue.
So no, woke anti-racism is not solely the reason for Nowak's death. It's a combination of that and a general incompetence.
It's hard to argue with Farage on this point (and only on this point). The equity policies and training embraced by police and the UK at large are absurd. Treating people differently because of their heritage or other immutable characteristics is immoral. Excusing or minimizing it is equally immoral.
It's actually very easy to disagree with him. Farage wants to incite violence and emphasize identity politics here (though on this occasion from a far right perspective). His purpose is not noble, but political. Since his party has risen in the polls in the UK, he has tried to rein back some of his more unpleasant utterings and the more outrageous of his economic policy. However, now he is being outflanked from a party even further to the right (yes, it's possible) in the upcoming Makerfield by-election, so he's also been obliged to allow his true feelings to come out.
This whole horrific incident needs to be investigated and appropriate action taken. However, it needs to be done calmly and without the racist rabble rousing coming from Farage. As Henry's father said, this isn't about racism, it's about murder.
It is (also) about racism - the reverse racism that has been embedded into UK institutions - and denying / ignoring it is what everyone rightly is angry about. And whilst the murder was horrible, it should be with horror that Brits look at what they have become. A police officer automatically sees a racist yob and a minority victim because he's been directed and conditioned to be especially on the lookout for this circumstance, and to handle it in a socially sensitive manner, because to do otherwise would risk making certain communities uncomfortable. You have overcorrected as a means of reparations and it is equally immoral. Two wrongs don't make a right. You cannot make up for a racist past by being anti/reverse racist now.
I don't really quarrel with the gist of your argument, but I'm appalled by your decision to term Nowak's murder a "tragedy." If he had died of leukemia, that would be a tragedy. But this was not an accident, nor a very sad error of judgement; it was a brutal violent murder. I think that if progressives were more willing to acknowledge the wicked nature of evil deeds, reactionaries would be more ready to acknowledge that the fault was that of the murderer, not the "system."
I think your argument would be stronger if it took more seriously the police officers' negligence. You explain that there was no visible pool of blood because the victim was bleeding internally. Fair enough. But you need to give more weight to his repeated pleas to the officers, "I can't breathe." (This heartbreaking detail is of course the reason for the uncanny evocation of George Floyd's murder.) There really is no excuse for officers to ignore BOTH his struggle to breathe AND his statement that he had been stabbed (along with his having collapsed on the ground.) To disregard all three pieces of information is egregious, which is why so many people have concluded that racial biases prevented the victim from receiving the emergency life support he needed.
Similarly, you condemn Farage's inflammatory words about "rage," without mentioning the discrepancy between Keir Starmer and Sadiq Kahn's intensely emotional reaction to George Floyd's death versus their comparatively unruffled response to the murder of their countryman. Photos of Keir Starmer taking the knee for George Floyd have left commentators to wonder why he doesn't do the same in this case. If Farage's heated rhetoric is making everything worse, so is Starmer's icy indifference.
This is a fair analysis of the Nowak case carefully considered in a vacuum, and I agree that some of the inflammatory misinformation has not been helpful. However, I think it's become undeniable that there are dramatically different tiers of justice in uber-woke Britain that have rendered working- and middle-class white folks second or even third-class citizens that their government actively discriminates against. The unrest is more than justified, but yes let's all do our best to stick with the facts.
Fair enough that antiracism wasn't the *only* reason for Nowak's death. But it's still true that antiracism (in the woke sense of that word) is by far the most toxic and destructive ideology in the West, and has led to many preventable disasters and losses of life:
Wow. Amazing mental gymnastics spinning of the story to defend from the actual sickness of feminized reverse racism that has corrupted the entire Western world with respect to law enforcement and justice.
Absolutely f*ck no.
You liberal chicks and your low-T feminized male lapdogs that collect as EUTards in the UK and elite Democrats in the US, have made a big f*cking mess out of Western society.
We saw the truth during your authoritarian destruction during COVID.
F*ck multiculturalism and mass immigration.
F*ck anti-white racism.
F*ck the lie that white supremacy is a threat.
The need is to take back the country and return it to its base culture. Allowing an immigrant to carry a knife based on some stupid religious justification while denying the ability for the local native population to do the same... that is EXACTLY the type of evidence that you people are insane and need to be eliminated from any power, influence or control.
The police are hired by these woke, feminized, radical, EUTard political operatives and trained to do their jobs in support of the ideological principles of those political operatives. The police have become political actors and not true law enforcement. Not only does the big purge in government need to take place, but the police and military need to be cleared of all this trash too.
A tip for writing. When you write such a long reply to a piece on Persuasion, it's generally advisable to at least try to address some of the points raised, preferably with some evidence. The alternative is for it to read like the rantings of a madman.
Between the grooming scandals involving Pakistanis that were studiously ignored, the supposed need to apply a “is this …-ism?” lens to any situation and the appallingly repressive and borderline totalitarian policing of pro-Palestinian protests, it’s clear that British police has lost the plot. Prejudice and discrimination against all sides of the political spectrum is not a balanced solution. They need to get rid of all that crap and implement liberal policies that explicitly exclude group affiliation as a valid criterion for analysis and action.
Matt Johnson’s June 1st essay in Persuasion argues that Samuel Huntington is still wrong. But the events of this week — and Cathy Young’s analysis today — suggest the opposite. Huntington was more right than wrong, and that many misunderstood the implications of his argument.
Huntington assumed that cultural clashes would occur between civilizations, and that internal conflicts would erupt only along the fault lines of culturally divided states. He assumed that Western nations would remain culturally coherent, or that Fukuyama’s liberal democracy would be strong enough to reconcile cultural differences.
That assumption has failed. Liberal democracy, confident in its promise, has exposed itself to unrelenting cultural challenges it does not understand. The Nowak case is only the latest example of how liberal democracy cannot or has not coped with the internal scale of cultural divergence. The news is almost a constant stream from the Somalian fraud scandals in Minneapolis, the riots near the Arc de Triomphe, and the Karmelo Anthony murder trial. These events are unrelated, but share a common feature: each is interpreted as evidence of cultural disorder.
This is precisely what Huntington got right. He understood that:
• Identity is the primary driver of modern conflict
• Culture outweighs ideology or economics
• Once culture becomes political, politics becomes existential
Jesus. The facts of this case are horrendous. That a gaggle of racist trolls on Twitter, including the racist troll who owns Twitter, would run hogwild with them is despiriting and entirely unsurprising. It's just that in this case, the facts are *so* horrendous that they handily overshadow my distaste for the hogwild-running.
I get the impression this is the first instance of bias incidents involving the British Police you have examined. Perhaps you then made a cursory search to see if there were other incidents to establish a pattern and, for whatever reason, you dismissed what you found. You need to look more deeply into it, as this has been a growing problem. It extends to so-called "anti-trans" incidents as well, which have been the justification for numerous abuses of police procedure, as well as the Orwellian "non-crime hate incidents" which have seen thousands of people getting visits from British police over tweets and online posts.
These incidents are so extreme and widespread that they made an old American 90s liberal like me start to believe there was a shocking level of far left progressive bias in especially the London MET police force, but actually countrywide. This is not just coming from ideologues like Nigel Farage, and by portraying it that way you are part of a much larger failure to investigate the truth. Millions of us moderate liberals have now had the experience of being labeled "far right" or "conservative" and thus dismissed when we don't 100% toe the farthest left ideological line on every issue.
So no, woke anti-racism is not solely the reason for Nowak's death. It's a combination of that and a general incompetence.
It's hard to argue with Farage on this point (and only on this point). The equity policies and training embraced by police and the UK at large are absurd. Treating people differently because of their heritage or other immutable characteristics is immoral. Excusing or minimizing it is equally immoral.
It's actually very easy to disagree with him. Farage wants to incite violence and emphasize identity politics here (though on this occasion from a far right perspective). His purpose is not noble, but political. Since his party has risen in the polls in the UK, he has tried to rein back some of his more unpleasant utterings and the more outrageous of his economic policy. However, now he is being outflanked from a party even further to the right (yes, it's possible) in the upcoming Makerfield by-election, so he's also been obliged to allow his true feelings to come out.
This whole horrific incident needs to be investigated and appropriate action taken. However, it needs to be done calmly and without the racist rabble rousing coming from Farage. As Henry's father said, this isn't about racism, it's about murder.
It is (also) about racism - the reverse racism that has been embedded into UK institutions - and denying / ignoring it is what everyone rightly is angry about. And whilst the murder was horrible, it should be with horror that Brits look at what they have become. A police officer automatically sees a racist yob and a minority victim because he's been directed and conditioned to be especially on the lookout for this circumstance, and to handle it in a socially sensitive manner, because to do otherwise would risk making certain communities uncomfortable. You have overcorrected as a means of reparations and it is equally immoral. Two wrongs don't make a right. You cannot make up for a racist past by being anti/reverse racist now.
Clearly you have some inside information on what was actually happening in that alleyway. I can only rely on the published facts to help form my view.
I don't really quarrel with the gist of your argument, but I'm appalled by your decision to term Nowak's murder a "tragedy." If he had died of leukemia, that would be a tragedy. But this was not an accident, nor a very sad error of judgement; it was a brutal violent murder. I think that if progressives were more willing to acknowledge the wicked nature of evil deeds, reactionaries would be more ready to acknowledge that the fault was that of the murderer, not the "system."
I think your argument would be stronger if it took more seriously the police officers' negligence. You explain that there was no visible pool of blood because the victim was bleeding internally. Fair enough. But you need to give more weight to his repeated pleas to the officers, "I can't breathe." (This heartbreaking detail is of course the reason for the uncanny evocation of George Floyd's murder.) There really is no excuse for officers to ignore BOTH his struggle to breathe AND his statement that he had been stabbed (along with his having collapsed on the ground.) To disregard all three pieces of information is egregious, which is why so many people have concluded that racial biases prevented the victim from receiving the emergency life support he needed.
Similarly, you condemn Farage's inflammatory words about "rage," without mentioning the discrepancy between Keir Starmer and Sadiq Kahn's intensely emotional reaction to George Floyd's death versus their comparatively unruffled response to the murder of their countryman. Photos of Keir Starmer taking the knee for George Floyd have left commentators to wonder why he doesn't do the same in this case. If Farage's heated rhetoric is making everything worse, so is Starmer's icy indifference.
This is a fair analysis of the Nowak case carefully considered in a vacuum, and I agree that some of the inflammatory misinformation has not been helpful. However, I think it's become undeniable that there are dramatically different tiers of justice in uber-woke Britain that have rendered working- and middle-class white folks second or even third-class citizens that their government actively discriminates against. The unrest is more than justified, but yes let's all do our best to stick with the facts.
Fair enough that antiracism wasn't the *only* reason for Nowak's death. But it's still true that antiracism (in the woke sense of that word) is by far the most toxic and destructive ideology in the West, and has led to many preventable disasters and losses of life:
https://www.willsolfiac.com/p/how-to-stop-anti-racism-harming-our
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/i-cant-breathe
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/inhumane-and-degrading
Wow. Amazing mental gymnastics spinning of the story to defend from the actual sickness of feminized reverse racism that has corrupted the entire Western world with respect to law enforcement and justice.
Absolutely f*ck no.
You liberal chicks and your low-T feminized male lapdogs that collect as EUTards in the UK and elite Democrats in the US, have made a big f*cking mess out of Western society.
We saw the truth during your authoritarian destruction during COVID.
F*ck multiculturalism and mass immigration.
F*ck anti-white racism.
F*ck the lie that white supremacy is a threat.
The need is to take back the country and return it to its base culture. Allowing an immigrant to carry a knife based on some stupid religious justification while denying the ability for the local native population to do the same... that is EXACTLY the type of evidence that you people are insane and need to be eliminated from any power, influence or control.
The police are hired by these woke, feminized, radical, EUTard political operatives and trained to do their jobs in support of the ideological principles of those political operatives. The police have become political actors and not true law enforcement. Not only does the big purge in government need to take place, but the police and military need to be cleared of all this trash too.
I think you need to update whatever version of Claude it is that you're using to write these nonsensical word salads.
Nope, all my organic critical thinking sweetheart. You should try it sometime.
A tip for writing. When you write such a long reply to a piece on Persuasion, it's generally advisable to at least try to address some of the points raised, preferably with some evidence. The alternative is for it to read like the rantings of a madman.
You lack credibility to deliver any tips for writing. It requires actual critical thinking which is poorly demonstrated by you.
Examples?
Persuasion should be proud to have a piece that explains a complicated situation so well. Thanks for writing :)
Between the grooming scandals involving Pakistanis that were studiously ignored, the supposed need to apply a “is this …-ism?” lens to any situation and the appallingly repressive and borderline totalitarian policing of pro-Palestinian protests, it’s clear that British police has lost the plot. Prejudice and discrimination against all sides of the political spectrum is not a balanced solution. They need to get rid of all that crap and implement liberal policies that explicitly exclude group affiliation as a valid criterion for analysis and action.
Thank you for this. Journalism, public debate, and private conversation ought to be conducted in the same conscientious spirit.
Hear, hear! Persuasion at its best
Matt Johnson’s June 1st essay in Persuasion argues that Samuel Huntington is still wrong. But the events of this week — and Cathy Young’s analysis today — suggest the opposite. Huntington was more right than wrong, and that many misunderstood the implications of his argument.
Huntington assumed that cultural clashes would occur between civilizations, and that internal conflicts would erupt only along the fault lines of culturally divided states. He assumed that Western nations would remain culturally coherent, or that Fukuyama’s liberal democracy would be strong enough to reconcile cultural differences.
That assumption has failed. Liberal democracy, confident in its promise, has exposed itself to unrelenting cultural challenges it does not understand. The Nowak case is only the latest example of how liberal democracy cannot or has not coped with the internal scale of cultural divergence. The news is almost a constant stream from the Somalian fraud scandals in Minneapolis, the riots near the Arc de Triomphe, and the Karmelo Anthony murder trial. These events are unrelated, but share a common feature: each is interpreted as evidence of cultural disorder.
This is precisely what Huntington got right. He understood that:
• Identity is the primary driver of modern conflict
• Culture outweighs ideology or economics
• Once culture becomes political, politics becomes existential
Samuel Huntington is (Still) Right.
Not according to Henry's father (whose voice we should probably listen to). He said that this was not about racism, but about murder.