We are told that an evil, despicable action is to talk about these crimes and not the crimes themselves:

This is one of the least graphic descriptions. People can consult trial transcripts for details of absolute horrors that were done to these children.

Victims report that after the very short sentences received for these horrific crimes, rapists were back in these communities, raping the next generation of girls. This never ended and it won’t until we all speak about this and make the scandal impossible to ignore.

Female friendship can be poisonous. Joyce Maynard’s novel Under the Influence narrates how a woman throws away a possibility of a happy, quiet family life over a friendship that promises excitement, fun, and a reflected light of somebody else’s glamor.

Years after writing this novel Joyce Maynard became infected with TDS, and everything she has written since 2020 is embarrassing. This novel, however, is good, and its sensibility is profoundly conservative. Maynard writes in defense of normalcy, family, and contentment. Chasing excitement, especially when you are no longer very young, is a terrible idea. Helen, the main character, finds out when it’s too late that nobody’s life is free of burdens and that the era of youthful friendships should give way to the time when one makes a family.

It’s a very good novel, the characters are believable, the plot is never boring, and while the protagonist is very annoying in her immaturity and flightiness, she’s also endearing in her love for her small child. I read the book in one very enjoyable snow day, and I haven’t had this much fun since Moa Herngren’s novel The Divorce. As we all understand, I will now proceed to read Maynard obsessively because it’s not easy to find an author one can enjoy this much.

Proud to be American;

Fellow is not wrong. I still can’t get over the amount of effort it is taking to prod the Brits from across the ocean into noticing the rape gangs on their soil. They are pouting all over social media that somebody is trying to kick them out of their torpor.

Not my experience at all. A small child is so fascinated by the parents that one feels like a movie star. I’ve never had anybody who’d be so minutely, unflaggingly, intensely interested in me as my child. I’ve never had such a thankful audience for my every joke, anecdote, or story. It’s a very intense feeling to be so extremely important to another human being, to be so admired, so studied, so passionately defended from mostly imagined slights.

Your children think you hang the moon every evening because for them you actually do. And another thing is that they will need you even when you are eighty, so it becomes very, very important to stay alive as long as possible. So please don’t worry, it will become about you like never before when you have a child.

Even just knowing that the father existed, had a name, was present in the child’s life, wanted the child to exist and did not abandon the child of his own volition makes an enormous difference.

To be known to the father and to be accepted by him is crucial for a human psyche.

Everybody has now heard of the horrific things done to thousands of British girls by Pakistani rape gangs. At this point, nobody can credibly claim they don’t know. The tragic descriptions of the rapes and the violence are all over social media. Curiously, the people who were enraptured by Gisèle Pelicot have nothing kind to say about the underage girls who fought so valiantly to denounce the rapists, to give evidence, to defend their sisters.

What I don’t get, though, is this. Why? Why was this allowed to happen? Why was this silenced for over a decade? Why were the British compliant with their own destruction?Why are so many of them still trying to make this a conversation about Elon Musk and not the victims? What is compelling them to do it? All of the social workers who returned the raped girls to their rapists. The police who charged the girls and not their torturers. The judges who imposed sentences on the journalists investigating the abuse. The MPs and the journalists who lied outrageously. Why did all of these people – and there are many, many of them – side with nasty, despicable men and not the violated girls?

No explanation anybody has given makes sense. “They wanted to avoid tarnishing the idea of multiculturalism.” OK but why? Why are they so attached to this idea and not some other?

I deeply wish I had the psychological health for this to be true for me in my twenties.

A long-time commenter on this blog, Alex the Physicist, died of an aggressive brain cancer. He was only 47 years old.

Alex was so funny, sweet, and brilliant. He despised wokeness and often commented as “Anonymous for This One” when fearing detection by his left-wing colleagues.

I hate cancer. And I also hate having a little cemetery of people I cared about who died.

For at least 20 years, every poll of public opinion demonstrated that Americans want less immigration. Americans are the most welcoming and kind people towards immigrants but at this point they overwhelmingly agree that there’s been too much immigration. Large majorities of people of all political persuasions agree. And yet this very strong wish of the electorate has been completely disregarded by politicians of every single administration.

What kind of democracy is it where people get the exact opposite of what they want, again and again and again?

I think that the wishes of the American people should finally be respected. I believe there should be a pause on immigration of all kinds. There needs to be a period of time, say, a couple of decades, where the existing new citizens get absorbed and assimilated to the culture. Not only is this reasonable, it is, I repeat, what the overwhelming majority wants. Which means that is what should happen.

Elon Musk is smart. He reoriented everybody’s attention away from his exceptionally unpopular stance on H1-B visas towards the pedo rape scandal in the UK. It’s a very real scandal, and he’s done the world a great favor by attracting attention to it. But what a smart way to emerge from his own recent troubles.