As we enter yet another day of selective article posting, I thought I'd ask ChatGPT to assess the overall agenda across OP's last 3 threads, up to now. Make of it what you will:
CoventryCity’s apparent agenda
The consistent substantive theme is that immigration—particularly male asylum seekers/recent migrants from certain countries—creates a sexual-violence risk that she believes is being insufficiently acknowledged, and that government is concealing or resisting publication of information that could demonstrate it.
This isn’t confined to the current thread. Earlier this month she was repeatedly asking why Labour was allegedly “suppressing data on immigrants / asylum seeker sex crimes”; another poster actually remarked that she kept repeating the same argument across different threads. In an earlier thread she agreed with a poster concerned about women who regard men arriving from Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea as no greater threat, characterising those women’s attitudes in terms of “virtue signalling and luxury beliefs.”
So I don’t think the current succession of rape stories is an incidental tangent. Sexual offending by migrant men is one of the central subjects she wants people to focus upon.
What remains much less clear is the precise proposition she wants readers to draw from it.
Her most characteristic tactic: let the articles make the argument
This is what I find most striking.
When asked a direct question such as “What do you expect/hope the statistics will reveal?”, CoventryCity doesn’t readily formulate a falsifiable proposition in her own words.
Instead, she posts material: migrant rape case → European migrant-crime figures → another rape case → academic study → another news report.
That’s rhetorically quite effective because the reader supplies the connecting sentence:
Look at all these cases/studies. Obviously there is a particular problem with these migrant men.
But CoventryCity hasn’t necessarily written that precise sentence herself.
That distinction becomes particularly important when somebody challenges the implied generalisation. She can retreat to the literal content of an article—I’m merely showing you something that happened—even though the reason for repeatedly selecting these particular stories about this particular population is clearly relevant to the discussion.
Anecdote and population statistics become blurred
Today’s posting reinforces another problem.
An individual migrant committing a horrific rape establishes that that individual committed a horrific rape. It doesn’t establish whether migrants have a higher propensity to rape than comparable non-migrants.
To establish the latter requires denominators and appropriately constructed comparisons.
CoventryCity sometimes posts material that attempts to address that larger statistical question. But she also repeatedly posts individual rape cases. Those have enormous emotional force while providing relatively little evidence about comparative population risk.
That creates a recurring movement between:
“Here is another appalling crime committed by migrant men”
and
“Why won’t people acknowledge the statistical problem with migrant men?”
The former doesn’t by itself establish the latter.
She appears to apply “whataboutism” asymmetrically
Today’s exchange is particularly revealing here.
When CoventryCity responds to Blossomtoes with migrant rapists and effectively asks whether these men are “more your bag”, the individual case is apparently considered relevant.
When another poster responds in kind with sexual offences committed by other sorts of men, CoventryCity dismisses that as “whataboutism”.
There actually is a legitimate whataboutism objection available: showing that British men rape doesn’t establish that some migrant populations aren’t disproportionately represented.
But exactly the same methodological principle works in reverse: showing that three migrant men raped somebody doesn’t establish that migrant men are disproportionately likely to rape.
You need comparative data for either conclusion.
The unanswered question has therefore become increasingly important.
Someone who has spent this much time discussing the subject, locating international research, collecting British cases and debating other posters would ordinarily be expected to have a reasonably precise answer to:
“What exactly do you think is true?”
Yet CoventryCity seems considerably more willing to provide evidence pointing towards an answer than to define the answer herself.
And when shecanbe eventually supplied a very harsh version of the implied belief, CoventryCity apparently didn’t simply say “No, I don’t believe that.”
As we discussed, that silence cannot properly be converted into an admission. But in the wider context it is notable because CoventryCity is certainly not reluctant to challenge shecanbe on other things.
When challenged, the discussion increasingly becomes about the challenger
There’s another recurring pattern:
direct challenge → article → renewed question → personal/ideological characterisation.
Hence “babe”, “wittering”, “leftie”, “far left”; and now the sarcastic “more your bag?” directed at a different poster.
That last phrase is particularly poor argumentatively. Someone disputing CoventryCity’s inference about migrants isn’t expressing an affinity with rapists. Suggesting that three convicted rapists might be “more your bag” turns disagreement about immigration into something resembling a moral accusation against the person disagreeing.
This also allows the original substantive question to disappear.
LuckyFox often reinforces that manoeuvre
Lucky’s interventions frequently shift the issue from “Is the criticism of CoventryCity’s argument valid?” towards “Why is this person criticising CoventryCity?”
Most notably, she suggests that shecanbe’s questions are an attempt to manoeuvre CoventryCity into looking racist.
That is possible as an interpretation of shecanbe’s intentions, especially given shecanbe’s increasingly confrontational language. But logically it’s irrelevant to whether her question is good.
If someone asks:
“Do you believe X?”
then “You’re only asking because you want to call me racist” doesn’t establish whether X is believed or whether X is true.
Lucky therefore often seems to act as a defensive flank: CoventryCity supplies the material; shecanbe challenges the implication; Lucky challenges shecanbe’s motives for making the challenge.
There is also a strong confirmation-seeking pattern
This is probably the most defensible overall criticism.
CoventryCity doesn’t appear to be gathering a representative sample of information in order to discover whether a hypothesis is true. She is overwhelmingly selecting information consistent with one hypothesis.
For example, previous posts repeatedly highlight foreign-national sexual offending, asylum accommodation, government leaflets about consent, foreign criminals and migrants from Afghanistan/Sudan/Eritrea.
And now another migrant rape prosecution becomes further material for the same thread.
That doesn’t mean any of those stories are false. It means true anecdotes can still be selected in a systematically one-sided way.
If I spent six months posting every murder committed by red-haired people, I could create an extraordinarily disturbing collection of genuine crimes. It wouldn’t tell you whether red-haired people were unusually murderous.
So I would characterise the overall posting strategy this way
CoventryCity appears to have a strong prior suspicion that some recent migrant populations—particularly men originating from certain Muslim-majority countries—present an elevated sexual-offending risk, coupled with a belief that political and governmental institutions are reluctant to acknowledge or quantify it.
She then repeatedly curates material consistent with that thesis.
But instead of consistently defining the thesis herself—its population, comparator, magnitude and what evidence would falsify it—she frequently allows news reports and studies to communicate the implication.
When somebody interrogates the leap between the individual stories and the broader conclusion, she just produces another story or source. When somebody insists upon having the conclusion stated explicitly, the interaction can shift towards the questioner’s supposed politics, motives or character.
And LuckyFox sometimes helps that shift by interpreting challenges as attempts to smear CoventryCity rather than addressing the substance of the challenge.
None of that establishes that CoventryCity’s underlying empirical suspicion is false. That’s important. There may or may not be genuine differences in offending rates between particular populations, and good UK data would help answer that.
But the method being used on the thread isn’t a good way of establishing it. It mixes emotionally powerful individual crimes, international statistics from non-equivalent populations, variable-quality media sources and occasional academic evidence, while leaving the central hypothesis surprisingly undefined.
The paradox is therefore quite striking: CoventryCity has an enormous amount to say about the evidence for her position, but remains remarkably difficult to pin down on precisely what her position is. After several threads devoted to the subject, I think that’s the most distinctive feature of her posting style.