Limits, Boundaries, and Risks

Over the last few weeks I’ve been pondering stuff. There’s all sorts of questions fizzing away, most of which I have no good answers for. Part of me is a bit concerned because as I’ve gotten older my heart has calcified a bit - and not just because I love a good cheeseburger.

In my younger days, “bleeding heart liberal” would have been a fairly accurate description of me. I was the archetypal “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice” idiot. Today I find myself actively considering more extreme ‘solutions’ to problems without a sufficiently great degree of accompanying moral squeamishness.

You’re all doubtless aware of the statistic that has been all over social media recently which states something like : serial offenders who make up about 3% of all offenders commit 80% of violent felonies. I could probably look up the details exactly, but it’s something like this. The exact details, however, are immaterial.

The older me is looking at this and thinking that simply executing (and quickly to minimize economic costs to society) those repeat offenders, as grim as that thought is, would make everything so much safer for everyone else. The younger me would be totally disgusted at this kind of thinking. I’m not advocating for this as a solution here - just noting that the older me is prepared to contemplate such a solution. On a rational level such a measure would reduce serious crime by a significant amount. But rationality isn’t everything and perhaps we might consider the cost to our ‘collective humanity’ to be too great should we adopt such a brutal measure.

The older me is, therefore, prepared to contemplate an entirely different cost/benefit structure to the younger me. Part of me is quite worried about this. Did I lose my moral compass behind the back of the sofa, or have I been radicalized by those naughty right-wingers?

I’m only a partial fan of the whole ‘human rights’ structure of thought. Some people seem to view them as ‘God-given’ as if they’re some fundamental objective property of the universe instead of the human construct they are in reality. By treating them as some kind of sacred thing, however, they have provided a useful framework in which to limit human excess and to reign in through international pressure more oppressive regimes.

But I’m of the view that if one voluntarily commits a serious crime you have chosen to cede some of those rights. Why should the criminal engaged in some illegal activity - by choice - have the same rights as their victims? I see no good reason why they should.

It’s all well and good stating some wishy-washy principle like this; the devil, as it always is, is in the details. But the overall approach where the preponderance of sympathy and benefit of the doubt should lie with the victim rather than the offender is an overarching ‘structure’ we need to adhere to better than we currently do.

Tough upbringing? All sorts of ‘systemic’ wotnots holding you back? You’re feeling sooooo Oppressed™?

Don’t give a shit. If you’ve stabbed someone they should throw the proverbial book at you. But we don’t do this any more so much. The current instantiation of our ‘judicial’ systems seems to try to layer excuse after excuse so that you end up thinking the victim should be grateful for providing the bodily opportunity for the poor, misunderstood, miscreant to vent their anger against the unjust system.

“Oh you poor thing - you’ve suffered so much Oppression™ - we totally understand why you had to do what you did even though it’s wrong. Here’s 150 hours of community service in recognition that you did wrong, but in recognition that you just couldn’t help yourself, we’re not sending you to jail because we think you’ve already been Oppressed™ enough”

This might be a bit of an hyperbolic exaggeration, but not by too much if you read about some cases.

So the thing that has been on my mind is the question of limits, boundaries, and risks.

At what point does a behaviour become bad enough, even if it represents only a minority of a particular ‘group’, do we need to step in and re-impose some sort of order or restriction? At what point does quite a severe solution become necessary?

Until fairly recently it was accepted that although most men do not pose a physical threat to women, some do, and therefore it was considered necessary to keep all men out of women’s bathrooms. Obviously physical safety is only one component of that consideration - things like privacy and dignity and having a space that entirely excludes men are important too.

With the advent of woke and the Grievance Goons™ things have all gone a bit pear-shaped on that score with even some women arguing that men who possess the requisite “lady feelz” should be allowed access.

There are a lot of issues where the question of limits, boundaries, and risks arises. Take illegal and mass immigration, for instance. This is clearly tolerated and even welcomed by a substantial portion of our populations in the UK and US. Yet as we’ve seen in the UK, and across Europe, mass immigration of people from countries who do not universally share our cultural norms¹ has resulted in substantially higher crime.

I watched a short video the other day (as usual, I didn’t save a link) about the 2024 UK crime stats in which there were nearly 70,000 reported rapes in England & Wales which was compared to the figure of around 8,000 in the year 2000. These kinds of increases are usually excused away by stating, without evidence, that it simply reflects more reporting by victims rather than an increase in actual criminality.

Over the same time period, net migration to the UK has increased by nearly 10,000%

I’m sure this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it because correlation is not the same as causation².

So donning the frothy right-wingy racisty bigoty hat, if we did ascribe some of that increase in reported rape to the rise in immigration we’re then at the question, as before, of at what point does this become too serious an issue to ignore so that we have to do something about it? Possible solutions, heaven help us, may be to halt immigration entirely and/or to simply deport a whole bunch of people who are not a good match for us here in the UK.

For some reason there are a significant number of people in the UK who have a knee-jerk ideologically-driven blanket dismissal of the entire concept of some other cultures not universally sharing quite the same values as ours.

What if we imported a whole bunch of people from Somalia, say, where female genital mutilation is one of those lovely ‘cultural values’? Would we be allowing it here in the UK? If not, why not? As far as I know, it’s illegal in the UK, but is this not, in itself, a tacit admission that some cultures are most definitely not like ours? According to The Search Engine from Bias Hell™ something like 98% of women in Somalia have suffered FGM.

At what point do we look at the threats and risks, albeit from a minority, and say “enough is enough”? I don’t have a good answer to that question. We could eliminate a major source of risk entirely by the deportation of all Muslims, for example³, but this extreme step would tangle up many innocent (and good) folk in the process. Yet, is it right that we have a minority of Muslims running around behaving like arseholes and threatening to kill people, and in some instances carrying out those threats, and do nothing serious about it?

What’s the ‘right’ size of loony minority we can ‘tolerate’ before we impose restrictions on all? And I single out Muslims because, let’s face it, Islam is the only religion associated with things like beheadings for insult, major hissy fits, death threats, penalties up to and including death for leaving the religion, suicide vests, and something like close to 70,000 terror attacks worldwide since 9/11

There is no other religion with such a record - at least not in modern times⁴. There’s a reason why they have to continually proclaim Islam as being the ‘religion of peace’. No other religion has to do this, to try to convince us that despite a significant number of its believers blowing shit up they’re actually all about peace.

And yet, despite many who might disagree with me, I would maintain that the nuttier side of Islam is indeed a minority and the majority of Muslims are indeed peaceful and decent. At what point does this crappy minority of shitty human beings become too much of a problem, though? And if we do recognise the problem, what’s the solution?

Is allowing Islam any sort of foothold simply too risky? We’ve seen more moderate Islamic nations fall to the Islamic crazies. Is it a risk we are prepared to take? Do we understand enough about the motivations and methodologies of the crazies to be certain we can defend ourselves adequately against them? Note that sometimes even Muslim countries who probably understand where the crazies are coming from much better than we do end up being overrun by them.

As ever, I have more questions than answers. But there are answers to some of these issues. For example, one easy way to stop mass immigration into the UK would be to completely disincentivize it. If you, say, removed any benefits for immigrants and their families until, maybe, someone had been a net contributor to the tax pot for 3 years this single measure would probably work to curb a lot of the desire to come here.

Stopping the flow of illegal immigrants coming across the channel would be trivially easy. You could just patrol the channel and turn the boats back. Any that refused to do so could be sunk.

I’m sure there are lots of other ways to disincentivize immigration, but none of these are going to be implemented because there is currently no political will to do so. It’s not that we can’t find solutions to mass immigration it’s that we don’t want to - or at least the governments over the last 25 years haven’t wanted to.

I’ve mentioned this before, but when I worked abroad in a non-UK (and non ‘west’) country they had a different approach to immigrants (of which there were many). You needed a job and sponsorship. There was no automatic ‘right’ to bring your family over. You could bring your immediate family⁵ over provided you had the financial resources to support them. If you caused trouble you could find yourself deported the very next day without anything like months of “due process”. This was all fine and accepted.

Causing trouble immediately made you no longer welcome.

There is no reason why such a system could not be implemented anywhere else. It worked pretty well for the country I was working in.

But we choose not to do things like this.

It is not clear to me, not without going all ‘conspiratorial’ anyway, exactly why our governments over the last 25 years have had such a hard-on for mass immigration. It is abundantly clear there is no economic benefit since it is a net drain on our economy⁶. Which makes the rest of us scratch our heads and wonder what they’re playing at? It’s fairly clear from the crime stats that mass immigration also brings a concomitant increase in serious crime. So they’ve made the UK poorer and less safe and less cohesive as a society.

But diversity is our strength. We’re strong, so strong, stronger than really strong stuff, because of all the diversity and also more stabbed, raped, divided, and poor. The mantra of morons (diversity is our strength) is all there is - that’s all we have, a fucking slogan - there’s no evidence that I can see of this amazing ‘strength’ we have managed to accrue.

Don’t get me wrong here - I love diversity. I love that people from all over the world have wanted to come to the UK to share in our future. But ‘diversity’ is not the only thing that’s important, and it’s far from being the primary thing of import either. I’d rather have a software engineer from India than a clit-chopper from Somalia. Who wouldn’t? Or a mathematician from Nigeria than a groomy ghoul from Pakistan. Wouldn’t you?

Is it really all that difficult to work out? Import too many shitty people and you end up with a shitty country. Import people of quality and moral character and you’ll improve your country. It isn’t rocket surgery.

These are important considerations - oh, but I guess ‘content of character’ is one of those racist macro-aggressions these days - that need to be in place before we even consider practical issues like the scale of immigration.

There’s a concept in physics of something called stable equilibrium. You can think of a ball in a bowl. Tip the bowl a bit and the ball will move. Set the bowl back down and the ball will oscillate back and forth until it comes to rest back in the centre again. There is stability, or resistance, to small perturbations of the system. This is kind of how our societies have operated for the last few decades - until things like woke and social media took hold. I think the perturbations these have introduced have been enough to tip the ball out of the bowl.

Getting the ball back into the bowl is going to take a lot of effort - and we’re in a different ‘potential well’ now than we were 25 years ago. The systems and mechanisms we had, pretty stable against small perturbations, are not working so well anymore. That would be my hypothesis at any rate. If we want to ‘put things right’ and return to a less stabby, rapey, and divided society we’re going to have to do a bit more than wiggle the bowl a bit.

We need to be very clear on limits and boundaries and risks - and I don’t think there are any ‘easy’ answers as to what those should be. But we’re not even having those ‘conversations’. No one is setting out arguments as to what an acceptable level of immigration should be. Other issues, such as the so-called grooming gangs scandal, where rape of underage girls on an industrial scale committed almost exclusively by immigrants of a certain ethnicity and religion was ignored by our leaders and institutions, reveal that there isn’t even the political will to ask those bloody questions, let alone do something about it.

One thing’s for sure, we can’t go on like this. Something is, eventually, going to break. You can stretch an elastic band only so much before it snaps. And maybe that’s exactly what they want to happen?

1. Easy ones - like don’t be all stabby and rapey

2. What most people leave out of this handy little phrase of dismissal is that correlation could well be indicative of causation. It’s like one of them clue things. It’s similar to Sweden I guess where the insane increase in hand grenade attacks (yes, hand grenade attacks) is correlated with a rise in immigration. But, you know, correlation is not causation

3. No - I’m really NOT advocating for this

4. The argument is often made that in the past Christianity was just as brutal. Excellent - so we just have to wait another few centuries for Islam to grow up then do we?

5. In other words, spouse and children and most definitely NOT your 2nd cousin’s brother’s uncle’s next door neighbour. Or your parents, brothers, uncles, or cousins either

6. One caveat to this is that without the work of immigrants our NHS would disintegrate. This is an issue. The NHS and the whole incentive/training structure does need some kind of radical overhaul. If you need to prop things up with that number of immigrants (and most of them I have personally witnessed do a stellar job) then something’s gone badly awry in your homegrown processes