Regarding the Scotland situation, the fact that the police claim there's misinformation going around without actually giving the slightest explanation of what happened makes me think the so-called misinformation is probably pretty spot on.
1. It might just be the proper reluctance to discuss on ongoing investigation.
2. Anonymous internet commandos, you and me included, don't have a better track record than police. And I say that as someone who detests government and doesn't trust government police.
They have been reporting on this ongoing problem for decades. So has Tommy Robinson, who has been sent to prison multiple times for it (but also received an award from the Danish parliament).
The simple fact is that all of Britain's police agencies have decided they'd rather allow the Muslim migrant community run industrial-scale gang rape operations on local school girls than commit "racism" by holding them responsible. Only a fool would buy that the middle aged rapists are married to the victims.
The same thing is going on in Sweden, Germany, and several other places in the EU, because the European Court of Human Rights demands that their police have that same horrible set of priorities.
“A story published by a reputable organization or publication may be biased or mistaken but is unlikely to be entirely invented.”
As recently as 10 years ago, I would have entirely agreed with this.
But since Jim Rutenberg’s piece in the August 2016 NYT, I no longer do.
Of course, partly this depends on how much weight and how much you put on the word “entirely”.
But consider these major stories in inarguably “reputable publications” in recent years:
- the Duke lacrosse rape
- the Russia collusion story (*not* the related but separate “Russian interference in our election” story)
- the “Hunter Biden laptop is a fake / Russian disinformation” story
- the 2019 Jussie Smollet hate crime hoax
- the 2019 Covington Catholic Students incident
- the 2021 “Border Patrol Whipping Migrants” story
- the Ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative
- a multitude of false claims of Israeli violence against Palestinians/Gazans, most notably the hospital bombing one, and the very recent starving child one
There is a very good reason the MSM is no longer trusted by more than half of the country; the biggest of which I’d argue is precisely that your claim of “unlikely to be entirely invented” is sadly no longer true.
I don't believe those were "_entirely_ invented," at least of the ones I followed. The conclusion of the story was false, but it was based on something.
I'm in Aerospace. Whenever there's a MSM story concerning Aerospace, a reliable first approximation is that every word about the technical aspects of aerospace is false, including "and" and "the," and that their conclusions are therefore nonsense.
I'm unaware of any counterexamples outside of industry publications, leading to the curious conclusion that people who routinely fly eight miles above the earth in pressurized aluminum tubes don't really believe such crazy things can work at all, let alone be quite safe.
I saw a story about a carjacking or an accident or something routine on a local TV station website with a map of the SF Bay Area which had Concord, a northeast city, far south, 50 miles or so.
A map! I cannot visualize any circumstances which justify fiddling with a map which ends up moving a city from the top of the map to the bottom, for such a piddling story.
It was certainly an extreme case, but I have seen enough other piddling local news stories with basic facts wrong to simply not trust anything they say. It's not that I think every story is full of lies, but that the odds of getting something wrong are too high for me to trust anything.
I just had a funny thought. Sherlock Holmes fanatics go to great lengths to connect all the facts in all 56 short stories and four novels so they can tease out "errors", put the stories in chronological order, and otherwise treat them as factual accounts of a real live Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. To this end, they have unearthed quite a few nonsense dates, such as Tuesday Sept 03 2025. These are the kinds of errors I see in local news stories which I have some familiarity with. Intersections of two streets which never cross, addresses like 227B Baker Street which don't exist.
Perhaps because it was a young woman, perhaps because a hatchet was involved, the second incident seems to have quickly become memes and rallying cry, with very little reference to the truth of the matter. That seems evidence that there was demand for such a symbol to rally around.
I've had a certain distrust of media and government for quite a while. Lately however anything said by media or government, any media and any government, I assume to be a lie until or unless proven otherwise.
Having noted such, I lean strongly in favor of the Scottish girl's side of the story. Call me gullible if you want, that's still my take on it.
In this world today it's simply sensible in far too many locations, to look both ways, thrice, before you cross the street and to carry at a minimum, a knife and hatchet.
A knife and a hatchet strikes me as less protection than a knife, especially for a 12 year old girl.
We don't actually have the Scottish girl's side of the story.
We have a story invented by people online with no more information than we have, one that fits their pre-existing views. We have an observer's story which doesn't tell us how the conflict started. We have the video. We have a story supposedly from the mother of a third girl who is not in the video, a story which I offer reasons to believe is bogus. We have a newspaper account of an interview with the man.
Actually I think the hatchet is better, especially for a young untrained girl. Using a knife effectively requires much skill. The hatchet on the other hand is a sharp edge, a bludgeon, it cuts and/or clubs, no matter how or where it contacts the opponent it reduces the threat.
Hum, I think the Scottish girl very clearly told her side of the story by trying to walk away. He following, hectoring, provoking, very obviously attempting to cause her grievous harm (Why yes I see arrest as grievous harm.).
Yep I take Scottish girl's side of the story, OK call me gullible.
I appreciate seeing a different view of the Scotland incident as I had completely bought into the narrative of girl protecting her sister from sexual harassment. It wasn't the purpose of this essay to provide the most plausible account of what occurred consistent with the evidence but I would certainly like to see that. I don’t believe police always advance the interests of the communities they're assigned to protect by refusing reveal what they believe they know in the "interests of an ongoing investigation." If there are 2 versions of an event that have yet to be resolved those 2 versions should be accessible to the public and subject on-going updates and refinements.
My guess is that there was a hostile verbal interaction set off by one side or the other, the man observed the weapons and wanted to get them on video, possibly to get the girl in trouble.
I doubt the girl was carrying the weapons in response to a realistic fear of rape. The Rotherham cases were mostly seduction of minors, some forcible rape of minors who had been seduced, I don't think any examples of simply raping a victim in public with no previous interaction.
But it might have been in response to an unrealistic fear of rape. And I could be wrong.
My understanding is that we have credible neutral witness testimony that you are basically correct, that there had been a quite heated verbal interaction that left the neutral observer quite concerned, started by the man, before the video.
Evidence about whether there was fear of rape is, of course, much harder to come by. And plenty of young women of her social class carry weapons, legal or not, for a variety of reasons, most of them at least somewhat understandable.
But between the prior verbal hostility, being followed by a man, and the fear in her eyes visible in the video, I think her reasons for brandishing those weapons are fairly knowable.
I agree that the neutral witness is credible but she isn't that certain who started the interaction, which was before she started observing:
"At the time, I assumed the older male and female were the instigators"
and on the other hand:
"I guess now they were recording because one of the teenagers threatened them with weapons,"
Initially the teens are behind the couple, not the couple following the teens. Later he is yelling at her to show the knife. The only aggression seems to be shouting, aside from her waving weapons.
Carrying a large kitchen knife and a hatchet seems odd to me, carrying a knife not so odd.
Right, who started the interaction is not terribly well known, and might not be a particularly binary thing anyway.
The knife and hatchet doesn't make sense from a pure concealable lethality perspective. But from the perspective of a culture in which physical intimidation is normal, the hatchet as well as the knife makes more sense. That is the sort of thing I was trying to get at, mentioning young women in her social class carrying weapons being normal.
Yes. Government judicial decisions are ultimately backed up or discounted by the public. The public is the ultimate jury making sure the government doesn't overstep itself. To do that requires the public know what the government is up to, and come to their own conclusion regarding reality without taking the government's word.
That sounds reasonable, but the problem for me is that if the public is to be made aware of details about events in the lives of private citizens any time the government gets involved (keep in mind we are not just talking about court rulings, but minor police interactions)…well, the government is involved in a lot of matters in the lives of private citizens. Providing details of all versions, or any versions, to the public would result in a significant portion of our private lives being broadcast, or at least readily able to be, with not just the government but lots of fellow private citizens *assuming* a right to access it.
To say this “should” be the way things are therefore strikes me as a profoundly strong claim.
The more government bureaucrats can hide, the more they will hide. That is the way of government employees. It is a mistake to think government bureaucrats will choose the honorable thing to do just because they get a government paycheck.
It always astonishes me how many people will excuse despicable behavior from government that they scream bloody murder about when private industry does the same thing and demand government do something about it.
People may choose to share details from their own lives, and in some cases this may be a good idea, but it doesn't strike me as a good idea for this access to be presumed by everyone. A surveillance state where all watch all doesn't sound much better than a state where Big Brother--corporate or government--does the same thing.
Who said “all watch all”? I said all watch government, and if you extend that to “all watch all”, you have just admitted you believe government is already watching all.
"A story published by a reputable organization or publication may be biased or mistaken but is unlikely to be entirely invented." - Quite possibly entirely invented if published by The White House. Such as Trump being Superman, for instance.
The second story is almost certainly true. UK police have made it policy to deny and punish anyone who tells on child rape by the horde of Muslim migrants with whom their country is overrun -- and to let the rapists walk.
Although reality is much more muddy than a simple narrative, I believe this is referring to the Rotherham scandal. That is a case where young girls were being sexually abused by many immigrants of Muslim extraction over a period of years, and official sources attempted to cover up the abuse instead of investigating it. If I recall, we're talking five or six-figure numbers over more than a decade, so not exactly a small thing to cover up.
These were low class girls who were often complicit in the relationships, but by any metric in a modern society they were abuse victims. And then there were a number of cases of outright kidnap and rape that also got covered up.
What I'm seeing in the more recent case is a strong rejection of the official narrative because the UK authorities have shown themselves to be unreliable in certain circumstances. Specifically cases where immigrants are being accused of crimes against long term residents. I believe the guy filming the Scottish girls was identified as a Bulgarian immigrant, whose social media is less than savory. By disbelieving the official story (for general cause, if not specific to this case) and noting the facts of 1) immigrant, 2) unsavory social media posts, it leaves some readers to pattern match to the opposite result - this must be a case of bad behavior by an immigrant and the girls were defending themselves.
On its own that's sloppy reasoning, but it's also why I'm a huge proponent of telling the truth, especially from official sources. That the UK government lied at more than one level is now known to be true. That it lied in the service of covering up abuse of thousands of UK citizens is both known to be true and in many people's eyes fully disqualifying in terms of governmental legitimacy.
Where can the newspaper story be found? A quoted statement from the police doesn't inspire much trust: There isn't enough information, and I have my doubts about the integrity of the British police. I've been seeing what was said on Samizdata, but the facts there seem kind of scanty, too.
For anyone with a tribal identity, that is the lens through which their whole reality is filtered, from big concepts and values down to the minutia of perception.
My girlfriend sometimes sends me stories that seem so clearly fabricated to me. I usually say something like 'it sounds like an essay written by a teenager', it probably would have been better to give a detailed explanation like you have here.
I'll send her this article, it's nice to have some rules to go by instead of solely relying on intuition.
Regarding the Scotland situation, the fact that the police claim there's misinformation going around without actually giving the slightest explanation of what happened makes me think the so-called misinformation is probably pretty spot on.
1. It might just be the proper reluctance to discuss on ongoing investigation.
2. Anonymous internet commandos, you and me included, don't have a better track record than police. And I say that as someone who detests government and doesn't trust government police.
They have been reporting on this ongoing problem for decades. So has Tommy Robinson, who has been sent to prison multiple times for it (but also received an award from the Danish parliament).
The simple fact is that all of Britain's police agencies have decided they'd rather allow the Muslim migrant community run industrial-scale gang rape operations on local school girls than commit "racism" by holding them responsible. Only a fool would buy that the middle aged rapists are married to the victims.
The same thing is going on in Sweden, Germany, and several other places in the EU, because the European Court of Human Rights demands that their police have that same horrible set of priorities.
“A story published by a reputable organization or publication may be biased or mistaken but is unlikely to be entirely invented.”
As recently as 10 years ago, I would have entirely agreed with this.
But since Jim Rutenberg’s piece in the August 2016 NYT, I no longer do.
Of course, partly this depends on how much weight and how much you put on the word “entirely”.
But consider these major stories in inarguably “reputable publications” in recent years:
- the Duke lacrosse rape
- the Russia collusion story (*not* the related but separate “Russian interference in our election” story)
- the “Hunter Biden laptop is a fake / Russian disinformation” story
- the 2019 Jussie Smollet hate crime hoax
- the 2019 Covington Catholic Students incident
- the 2021 “Border Patrol Whipping Migrants” story
- the Ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative
- a multitude of false claims of Israeli violence against Palestinians/Gazans, most notably the hospital bombing one, and the very recent starving child one
There is a very good reason the MSM is no longer trusted by more than half of the country; the biggest of which I’d argue is precisely that your claim of “unlikely to be entirely invented” is sadly no longer true.
I don't believe those were "_entirely_ invented," at least of the ones I followed. The conclusion of the story was false, but it was based on something.
As I noted above, it of course depends on how much weight you put on the word “entirely”.
For smaller stories, such as the ones in your post, I do agree with you.
But for bigger stories IMO this is a distinction without a difference.
I'm in Aerospace. Whenever there's a MSM story concerning Aerospace, a reliable first approximation is that every word about the technical aspects of aerospace is false, including "and" and "the," and that their conclusions are therefore nonsense.
I'm unaware of any counterexamples outside of industry publications, leading to the curious conclusion that people who routinely fly eight miles above the earth in pressurized aluminum tubes don't really believe such crazy things can work at all, let alone be quite safe.
I worked in tech, and saw something similar, if not as extreme.
But for technical stuff that media gets wrong, I attribute it almost entirely to incompetence rather than malice.
I saw a story about a carjacking or an accident or something routine on a local TV station website with a map of the SF Bay Area which had Concord, a northeast city, far south, 50 miles or so.
A map! I cannot visualize any circumstances which justify fiddling with a map which ends up moving a city from the top of the map to the bottom, for such a piddling story.
It was certainly an extreme case, but I have seen enough other piddling local news stories with basic facts wrong to simply not trust anything they say. It's not that I think every story is full of lies, but that the odds of getting something wrong are too high for me to trust anything.
I just had a funny thought. Sherlock Holmes fanatics go to great lengths to connect all the facts in all 56 short stories and four novels so they can tease out "errors", put the stories in chronological order, and otherwise treat them as factual accounts of a real live Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. To this end, they have unearthed quite a few nonsense dates, such as Tuesday Sept 03 2025. These are the kinds of errors I see in local news stories which I have some familiarity with. Intersections of two streets which never cross, addresses like 227B Baker Street which don't exist.
I simply do not trust the media.
Perhaps because it was a young woman, perhaps because a hatchet was involved, the second incident seems to have quickly become memes and rallying cry, with very little reference to the truth of the matter. That seems evidence that there was demand for such a symbol to rally around.
I've had a certain distrust of media and government for quite a while. Lately however anything said by media or government, any media and any government, I assume to be a lie until or unless proven otherwise.
Having noted such, I lean strongly in favor of the Scottish girl's side of the story. Call me gullible if you want, that's still my take on it.
In this world today it's simply sensible in far too many locations, to look both ways, thrice, before you cross the street and to carry at a minimum, a knife and hatchet.
A knife and a hatchet strikes me as less protection than a knife, especially for a 12 year old girl.
We don't actually have the Scottish girl's side of the story.
We have a story invented by people online with no more information than we have, one that fits their pre-existing views. We have an observer's story which doesn't tell us how the conflict started. We have the video. We have a story supposedly from the mother of a third girl who is not in the video, a story which I offer reasons to believe is bogus. We have a newspaper account of an interview with the man.
I think that's it.
Actually I think the hatchet is better, especially for a young untrained girl. Using a knife effectively requires much skill. The hatchet on the other hand is a sharp edge, a bludgeon, it cuts and/or clubs, no matter how or where it contacts the opponent it reduces the threat.
Hum, I think the Scottish girl very clearly told her side of the story by trying to walk away. He following, hectoring, provoking, very obviously attempting to cause her grievous harm (Why yes I see arrest as grievous harm.).
Yep I take Scottish girl's side of the story, OK call me gullible.
As Francis Bacon said, "Men more readily believe that which they wish were true."
I appreciate seeing a different view of the Scotland incident as I had completely bought into the narrative of girl protecting her sister from sexual harassment. It wasn't the purpose of this essay to provide the most plausible account of what occurred consistent with the evidence but I would certainly like to see that. I don’t believe police always advance the interests of the communities they're assigned to protect by refusing reveal what they believe they know in the "interests of an ongoing investigation." If there are 2 versions of an event that have yet to be resolved those 2 versions should be accessible to the public and subject on-going updates and refinements.
My guess is that there was a hostile verbal interaction set off by one side or the other, the man observed the weapons and wanted to get them on video, possibly to get the girl in trouble.
I doubt the girl was carrying the weapons in response to a realistic fear of rape. The Rotherham cases were mostly seduction of minors, some forcible rape of minors who had been seduced, I don't think any examples of simply raping a victim in public with no previous interaction.
But it might have been in response to an unrealistic fear of rape. And I could be wrong.
My understanding is that we have credible neutral witness testimony that you are basically correct, that there had been a quite heated verbal interaction that left the neutral observer quite concerned, started by the man, before the video.
Evidence about whether there was fear of rape is, of course, much harder to come by. And plenty of young women of her social class carry weapons, legal or not, for a variety of reasons, most of them at least somewhat understandable.
But between the prior verbal hostility, being followed by a man, and the fear in her eyes visible in the video, I think her reasons for brandishing those weapons are fairly knowable.
I agree that the neutral witness is credible but she isn't that certain who started the interaction, which was before she started observing:
"At the time, I assumed the older male and female were the instigators"
and on the other hand:
"I guess now they were recording because one of the teenagers threatened them with weapons,"
Initially the teens are behind the couple, not the couple following the teens. Later he is yelling at her to show the knife. The only aggression seems to be shouting, aside from her waving weapons.
Carrying a large kitchen knife and a hatchet seems odd to me, carrying a knife not so odd.
Right, who started the interaction is not terribly well known, and might not be a particularly binary thing anyway.
The knife and hatchet doesn't make sense from a pure concealable lethality perspective. But from the perspective of a culture in which physical intimidation is normal, the hatchet as well as the knife makes more sense. That is the sort of thing I was trying to get at, mentioning young women in her social class carrying weapons being normal.
Sounds plausible.
“ there are 2 versions of an event that have yet to be resolved those 2 versions should be accessible to the public”
Can you explain why this interaction between private citizens is anyone’s business except that of law enforcement and the people involved?
Yes. Government judicial decisions are ultimately backed up or discounted by the public. The public is the ultimate jury making sure the government doesn't overstep itself. To do that requires the public know what the government is up to, and come to their own conclusion regarding reality without taking the government's word.
That sounds reasonable, but the problem for me is that if the public is to be made aware of details about events in the lives of private citizens any time the government gets involved (keep in mind we are not just talking about court rulings, but minor police interactions)…well, the government is involved in a lot of matters in the lives of private citizens. Providing details of all versions, or any versions, to the public would result in a significant portion of our private lives being broadcast, or at least readily able to be, with not just the government but lots of fellow private citizens *assuming* a right to access it.
To say this “should” be the way things are therefore strikes me as a profoundly strong claim.
The more government bureaucrats can hide, the more they will hide. That is the way of government employees. It is a mistake to think government bureaucrats will choose the honorable thing to do just because they get a government paycheck.
It always astonishes me how many people will excuse despicable behavior from government that they scream bloody murder about when private industry does the same thing and demand government do something about it.
People may choose to share details from their own lives, and in some cases this may be a good idea, but it doesn't strike me as a good idea for this access to be presumed by everyone. A surveillance state where all watch all doesn't sound much better than a state where Big Brother--corporate or government--does the same thing.
Who said “all watch all”? I said all watch government, and if you extend that to “all watch all”, you have just admitted you believe government is already watching all.
Still a good reminder: credence is precious. Grant it sparingly and justifiably.
"A story published by a reputable organization or publication may be biased or mistaken but is unlikely to be entirely invented." - Quite possibly entirely invented if published by The White House. Such as Trump being Superman, for instance.
I specified a reputable organization.
Good point! :-)
The second story is almost certainly true. UK police have made it policy to deny and punish anyone who tells on child rape by the horde of Muslim migrants with whom their country is overrun -- and to let the rapists walk.
There are many good podcasts about it. Here's one that does tell the girl's side: https://rumble.com/v6y3oay-dundees-diversity-dilemma.html
You probably won't hear any direct from her mouth, since she is threatened with prison if you do.
That is an hour and a half podcast by people who agree with you. What evidence do they cite?
Although reality is much more muddy than a simple narrative, I believe this is referring to the Rotherham scandal. That is a case where young girls were being sexually abused by many immigrants of Muslim extraction over a period of years, and official sources attempted to cover up the abuse instead of investigating it. If I recall, we're talking five or six-figure numbers over more than a decade, so not exactly a small thing to cover up.
These were low class girls who were often complicit in the relationships, but by any metric in a modern society they were abuse victims. And then there were a number of cases of outright kidnap and rape that also got covered up.
What I'm seeing in the more recent case is a strong rejection of the official narrative because the UK authorities have shown themselves to be unreliable in certain circumstances. Specifically cases where immigrants are being accused of crimes against long term residents. I believe the guy filming the Scottish girls was identified as a Bulgarian immigrant, whose social media is less than savory. By disbelieving the official story (for general cause, if not specific to this case) and noting the facts of 1) immigrant, 2) unsavory social media posts, it leaves some readers to pattern match to the opposite result - this must be a case of bad behavior by an immigrant and the girls were defending themselves.
On its own that's sloppy reasoning, but it's also why I'm a huge proponent of telling the truth, especially from official sources. That the UK government lied at more than one level is now known to be true. That it lied in the service of covering up abuse of thousands of UK citizens is both known to be true and in many people's eyes fully disqualifying in terms of governmental legitimacy.
For a much smaller example in a different country, https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/01/fauci-lying-greyhound-racing-and-trump.html.
Where can the newspaper story be found? A quoted statement from the police doesn't inspire much trust: There isn't enough information, and I have my doubts about the integrity of the British police. I've been seeing what was said on Samizdata, but the facts there seem kind of scanty, too.
I just had a look at Spiked, and they have an article about it, which also has a link to the Daily Mail story: https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/30/sophie-of-dundee-and-the-online-rights-bs-machine/ . I'm glad to see more details.
I just rewatched the video carefully. At 43 seconds in there is a hand with six fingers. AI.
Even faker...
I see 5 fingers and some shadows.
OK, maybe so. Still looks like a weird gap between the fourth and fifth finger.
For anyone with a tribal identity, that is the lens through which their whole reality is filtered, from big concepts and values down to the minutia of perception.
My girlfriend sometimes sends me stories that seem so clearly fabricated to me. I usually say something like 'it sounds like an essay written by a teenager', it probably would have been better to give a detailed explanation like you have here.
I'll send her this article, it's nice to have some rules to go by instead of solely relying on intuition.