Two pretty awful things where reported in the news today in the UK.
The first was the sentencing of two men, one for life with no chance of release and the other 25 years.
The two men were partners and were sentenced for the murder of 13 month year old boy they had adopted. They also physical and sexual abused the child. Absolutely horrific stuff.
Needless to say all the major news channels and papers in the UK are covering the story.
In another story from today a 30 year old man from Norfolk has been arrested at a Zoo in the UK for attempted murder following an incident in which a 3 year old child ended up in alligator enclosure and sustained serious injuries (though now he is no in a stable condition). The man is not believed to have known the boy.
Now while I'm sure we can all agree the people responsible in both cases are evil bastards that deserve long sentences.
In the case of the two men arrested for the murder of the 13 month old child they were both white men. The ethnicity of the person in the 2nd case is not yet known.
The question I have is where is the outrage. Where the are the meme posts, trolling anti racism initiatives or blaming it on wokeness... where are the right wing politicians with their outrage and calls for cold blooded rage... where are the far right rioters trashing up the streets...where are the calls online that something must be done before it's too late.
Of course there is none. Yes on the comments section of newspapers that allow commenting there is outrage at what these men did. But there is no calling for riots or demanding the government must do something. The right wing newspapers for example are covering the story... but will they keep coming back to the story over the coming days and weeks like they have done so often over the crimes committed by immigrants or refugees? No they won't this story will fade out of the public conscious in a few days.
Depending on ethnicity of the man arrested today for the incident at the Zoo, we will likely have one of two very different responses. If he turns out to be white, the story will be covered for a day or two in the media and then again when the person's trial starts but that's it. You won't hear more about it. If it turns out he's from a minority ethnicity or a refugee... watch as the story blows up...Elon Musk starts tweeting about it...and the far right wing gobshites will come out of the woodwork to exploit the situation.
Another interesting thing I saw online was that a caller into LBC brought up a point about the recent riots following the attempted beheading of man. They pointed out that in the last 6 years in Northern Ireland 30 women have been murdered. Not once did these result in the same sense of outrage that the recent cases involving the death of Henry Nowak and the beheading attempt in NI... why because the perpetrators were all white men.
And one final last point to note. Today I also seen an interesting article about the perception of crime in Western Europe. Polling done in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and the UK shows a majority of citizens in those countries think crime has gone up. France and Italy think its gone up a lot. In all those country crime has been trending downwards since 2000. There is quite a few different reasons for why people perceive crime to be going up when actually it's coming down and yes certain categories of crimes like fraud are up, but violent crime is lower. It's interesting that western Europe's violent crime rate was higher at a time when we had very few migrants relative to now.