Wednesday Open Thread: Victims Ask For It, Nobody Meets Harriet, Tim Walzes In

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my *new* least favorite göring

This week we will have a motorcycle review, a “Harambe”, and a “Flashback”, all between now and the Sunday thread. So if you’re looking for uplifting and non-sardonic content… you’ll want to return for that. Today we are going to look at personal failings from the laughable to the terrifying, plus a little bit of politics. The usual caveats apply: it’s open season on me and the public figures, spotted-owl status for your fellow commenters.

Criticize a rapist who served no time, go to jail

Why do people call it Clown World? The Telegraph will tell you:

A woman in Germany has been given a harsher sentence than a convicted rapist after she was found guilty of defaming him.

Maja R, a 20-year-old from Hamburg, called him a “disgraceful rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak”, defamatory under German law… Maja R expressed her disgust in a direct message to one of the gang-rapists via WhatsApp, after his name and number were leaked on Snapchat.

The man was one of nine men and boys convicted of raping a 15-year-old in the bushes of a Hamburg park over a number of hours in Sept 2020.

All were under 20 at the time, allowing them to be subject to juvenile law. Only one of them spent any time in jail, an Iranian national, who was 19 years old at the time, though it’s not clear why. Speaking about the rape in court, he asked: “What man doesn’t want that?”

Hamburg authorities are now investigating around 140 more suspects for insulting or threatening the gang rapists, with 100 of the suspects based outside Hamburg.

Well, let’s hope they, uh, catch ‘em all. Not made clear in the above recap: eight of the nine were recent migrants to Germany. There’s nothing unusual about something like this happening, mind you; there were 677 gang rapes reported in Germany for 2021, and half of them involved migrants, even though migrants only make up 13.7% of the population. (For pointing this fact out, a young female German politician was fined about $6,000 and listed on public records as a convicted criminal, by the way. It’s not even the only recent time that young teenaged girls were gang-raped in Hamburg and the perpetrators were not sentenced to jail; the same thing happened to a 14-year-old in 2016.

The fascinating part is this: afterwards, the judge in the case, Anne Meier-Göring, felt compelled to give an interview where she essentially slandered the victim:

Meier-Göring: There was no brutal gang rape, such as those who commented on platform X probably imagined it. There was no incident in which nine young men "attacked" a young girl. There was no physical violence and no threats. And the co-plaintiff was not dragged into the bushes either.

SPIEGEL: What are the men to blame for?

Meier-Göring: The defendants noticed the co-plaintiff's impaired condition and then exploited this in various group constellations for sexual intercourse without having ensured consent.

True, Judge Anne! The victim was “taken” into the bushes, not “dragged”. Checkmate, fascists! What a whore! Elsewhere in the interview, the judge implies that the victim’s behavior and possibly her outfit were to blame, even though she also notes that the victim was able to make it absolutely plain to her first four rapists that she wasn’t interested in being raped.

Two questions that come to my mind:

0. What would be the consequences of this very same thing happening on an American college campus in 2024? Let’s say that the whole thing was recorded, the perpetrators were all known to the police, and the victim was 15 years old. Remember Brock Turner, the fraternity kid who has been globally vilified for banging an unconscious fellow student in an alleyway? Not only was she not underage, they actually put Turner in grown-up prison for a while before sending him away with multiple felony convictions and a registration-mandatory sex offense record.

1. What kind of funky-ass justice system lets the judge give an interview with a major newspaper where she says, in so many words, “You don’t know all the whorish shit this 15-year-old child said and did, and I’m not gonna tell you, but let’s just *wink wink* say it wasn’t all the fault of those nice migrant boys who, incidentally, regret nothing.” What is she implying? That the victim invited the dudes into the bushes to bust up a chiffarobe?

This, to me, dovetails nicely with UK PM Keir Starmer condemning protest/riots (the reader is free to apply his label of choice) by saying “People in this country have a right to be safe” while turning a blind eye to the fact that the current unrest is due to little kids being stabbed at a dance lesson and also that the UK doesn’t punish, or even deport, the leaders of rape gangs. Or maybe it’s the flip side of Paris forcibly “sweeping” migrants off the streets prior to the Olympics, only to discover that people still don’t want to visit the city. If migrant violence is such a problem that we can’t have it during the Olympics, why is it okay on a daily basis? (You could the same question about San Francisco: why are homeless people acceptable until our Chinese overlords come to visit?)

There is a perception now of two-tier policing. Migrants and other diverse individuals who commit crimes are punished at $LEVEL, while whites and native Europeans who protest against this are punished at ($LEVEL * 10). Elon Musk has seized on this, calling Starmer “two-tier Keir” on Twitter. I would humbly suggest that addressing this perception is the biggest challenge facing Western governments, which either need to be obviously more fair in their actions or — and this seems more likely — increase the punishment for thoughtcrime until it frightens even the most committed critic.

In which the Sundays are not met

If you’re not aware of the site Longreads, then I’ll bring you up to speed: it’s devoted to the idea that we are all better off if we consume more detailed stories. Many of the “long reads” are no bulkier than my average Substack post — maybe that says more about my own delusions than those of the Longreads editors. Nevertheless, I appreciate their mission.

As many of you already know, I also appreciate the work of UK pop band The Sundays. The band’s leaders, a married couple named Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin, have been in a sort of genteel retreat from publicity for a couple of decades now. Kind of like when Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses/Breeders/Belly fame just quit playing music and became a bartender. The difference is that I don’t think The Sundays will ever tour or play again, which is a shame. It's also a fascinating choice for them to have made, because surely they could have made a decent living from touring all the way to the present moment. So when I stumbled upon a piece in Longreads titled “Searching For The Sundays”, I was quite interested.

The beginning of the article, in which the dude talks about his very important friend Katie, whom he never banged, and his other very most best important friend Donna, whom he also never banged, does not promise great things ahead — but the real neon-flash warning sign appears just a thousand or so words in:

As an automotive writer, these are often stories about people and their cars, but once I spend time with my subjects, I learn that the reason people drive or hoard or search for a particular car isn’t just that they’re cool, but that there’s a complicated, beautiful, or tragic story behind the car.

Stories like these require I spend time with people, so if writing the definitive profile meant that I had to spend time with the Sundays to get to know them, well, I considered that a nice perk of an oftentimes difficult job.

Let’s just be clear here: as the finest automotive writer any of you will ever meet or know because all the great ones are dead, I can assure you that autowriting, in fact, about the easiest job possible. Especially for dipshits like David Obuchowski, the writer of the currently-discussed article, who regularly turns out junk like The Magic Of Learning To Drive A Manual Transmission. (You won’t be surprised to hear that this story is about a very super best close friend named Catherine, whom he didn’t bang, by the way.) If Obuchowski had to do a real job, like work in an Alaskan fishing operation or even sweep the floors at Chik-Fil-A, I’m pretty certain he would faint, then die.

Autowriting is literally nothing more than: go on a five-star trip, drive a car, write about what you did, and repeat. My blood boils when I read the complaints of autowriters; it gives me an insight, however fleeting, into why the Khmer Rouge acted the way they did. The only job easier than “autowriter” is, I suspect, “lottery winner”. Scratch that, pun intended; being a lottery winner would require some financial literacy so you don’t lose everything you’ve won.

Alright, back to the Sundays. Obuchowski emails their bassist, who fails to be sufficiently discouraging, so he goes into full Hinckley-Foster mode:

Less than an hour later, Brindley wrote back. His was a friendly, gracious email, but he made it clear he would not consent to an interview. He did, however, offer to pass along a request to the elusive Wheeler and Gavurin…

I made another passionate appeal to please consider the interview, that I would not ask him to be a spokesperson for the band or for any other member, that I was simply interested in his own story, which would then factor into the larger story.

Once again, his friendly, firm reply landed quickly in my inbox, reiterating his position. I felt defeated. I’d struck out. Well, I’d struck out with him.

In his reply, he had once again reiterated his willingness to pass on a request to Wheeler and Gavurin. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever get the chance to make my pitch to the private Wheeler and Gavurin. But if I did, it would be my only shot, so I’d have to nail it.

I began typing, “OK, I perfectly understand, of course. Thanks for hearing me out.”

And then I addressed his offer. “I wonder, since you’ll be passing it along anyway, if you;d mind if I wrote a more specific request for them? If I have a rare shot of them reading something from me, I’d love the chance to try to craft my message as eloquently as possible.”

Brindley’s reply came back three minutes later, explaining that it was too late. He’d already sent them a note…

In my mind, I desperately needed to get an email to them as soon as possible with a personal pitch, explaining that, Yes, I know Paul Brindley already passed my request along, but that was my request to him, not you, so here’s what I would have sent.

Let me tell you something: if Harriet Wheeler ever turns up dead, David Obuchowski's statement above is not gonna play well with the jury.

So, on September 10th, I took nearly a full day to draft a new pitch email to the other band members. When I was done revising it, perfecting it, for possibly the seventh time, I sent it to Brindley, asking him to please pass it along to them. I’d spent the day experiencing a renewed hope that this would all work out. After all, he had been willing to pass along my first request, so why not the second…

Katie emailed me with an update so big, she was shaken. I immediately sensed her unease. Turns out, she’d found Wheeler and Gavurin’s home address, or at least, she was fairly certain she had. She hadn’t found it through any underhanded methods. I am not going to be specific about how she did it, but it involved some very creative thinking…

“I’m going to show up on their doorstep,” I told her, delighted that I no longer had to rely on Brindley as my go-between.

Only months later did I realize that, with their home address, I could have sent them a letter. But even if the idea had occurred to me at the time, I’d have immediately dismissed it, rationalizing that they could have ignored the letter just as easily as they ignored my email.

Only months later did I realize that I probably didn’t need to show up at the house of people who don’t know me, and who don’t want to talk to me. Scratch what I wrote before, because it wasn’t enough. If Harriet Wheeler so much as stubs her toe at Sainsbury’s, I want this dude interrogated.

Obuchowski's wife, who appears in this story as basically a killjoy bitch with none of the charm we’ve seen in Katie and Donna and Catherine and all the other girls from Glee Club, is concerned that her husband is going to harass Wheeler in-person, but she still agrees to go with him to Europe, likely because nobody has taught her to blink twice for help or make that one weird I’m-being-kidnapped hand sign in situations like this.

“What if they hate you?” she asked me bluntly. “What if they’re so mad about you showing up, they literally hate you.”

I looked at the cover of the album up on the shelf: spiraling fossils of shells or something. I’d never thought too much about the cover. It’s a nice cover. But I’d never really wondered how or why they selected that image for it. But sometime in 1989, they did. Then, in 2018, 30 years later, I was staring into it, getting lost.

“I’d look at that record differently,” I whispered.

Sometimes bad writing can teach us how good writing gets done, to misquote Clive James. Were you filming this scene, you might have the protagonist whisper the line — but in real life, people don’t do that, unless they are bisexual drama enthusiasts in the strong grip of what kids call “molly”.

The following Monday, nearly four months after I’d first emailed Brindley, I came down from my office in the middle of the day. I poured myself a cup of coffee as Sarah worked on an illustration. “I emailed Paul Brindley again,” I told her.

“Who’s Paul Brindley?” she asked.

Amazing. The name meant nothing to her. She’s my soulmate, yet I could put the Sundays on, and there was a decent chance she’d just assume it was the Cranberries.

Fookin’ bitch, am I right? And let’s take a moment of silence for Paul Brindley, whose penance for doing some half-decent bass work thirty-five years ago is apparently to be subjected to multiple crazed stalker emails.

The story ends with him not attacking, er, harassing, er, visiting The Sundays at all. Thank God. Which makes this Longread just a matter of 6,336 words in which nothing at all happens.

Well, that’s not fair to Obuchowski. There is a journey in the story, an internal one, from “I will hound The Sundays all the way to my grave, or theirs” to “I’m not going to bang on the door of a 57-year-old woman and demand her full attention just because I bought her Compact Disc recording in 1989.” He’s just not capable of making the reader understand the journey. A better writer would have trimmed-out “The Adventures Of Captain Friendzone” and focused more on the only legitimate struggle in the article, namely: What do creative people owe us, anyway? An even more insightful writer would have drawn some parallels between modern-day Internet “parasocial” relationships and their precedents in the pre-digital age.

Oh, well. Don’t send an autowriter to a music story — not if you want anything to happen. Wonder what David’s up to now?

Cyndi Lauper has really let herself go. No, wait, that’s David. He’s written a children’s book with Sarah Pedry. Who is his wife. It took me a minute to realize that, because she didn’t change her name, but I’m a feminist so I support her efforts to resist the violent force of aggressive patriarchy in the form of the fellow depicted above. Good for her. And good for him, getting a book done. Do you think Katie, Donna, and Catherine regret not wifing him up?

Since this is an Open Thread, and since I’d like to do more with the above tale than just browbeat the poor man who wrote it, let us consider: What do artists and creatives owe us, anyway? If I spend $45 on a trio of Sunday CDs, is Harriet Wheeler obliged to answer the door when I knock? Should she have to return my email? The great LJK Setright once said that “It cannot be too widely known that Setright does not respond to correspondence.” Was he justified in behaving that way? When Ted Williams hit a dinger in his final home game of the season, he refused even to come out of the dugout afterwards and wave to the fans, leading John Updike to muse that “Gods do not answer letters.”

Against that, you have Doug DeMuro patiently playing the “DeMuro” character across the better part of a decade for a thousand lonely nerds at a hundred car shows, Laufey “remixing” the memes that use her music, George Benson crowdfunding a release of Nat King Cole tunes then thanking every single funder (including your humble author, of course) in the liner notes, the YouTubers who allow SuperChats, and many other such cases. What’s a reasonable expectation? What’s right?

For the record, I don’t think of myself as an “artist” or a “creative”. I provide a product which is purchased by you, the Substack reader, and a variety of outlets. You’re free to contact me any time you like, and I’ll respond if at all possible. It’s not uncommon for people to approach me at a race or a trackday. Unless I’m late for grid, those people have my full attention. I’m more like the Sandwich Artist at your local Subway than I am like Harriet Wheeler. And speaking of the lady in question, I wonder if perhaps she didn’t say all she wanted to say about her retirement from public life, well before it happened:

I feel fine

Don't wake me up yet

'cause I feel tired

Don't be like that

We don't need to work any more now

Open that ground up and slip down

Folksy Midwesterner, or “Tampon Tim”?

Well, centrists and lefties of ACF, how do we feel about this fellow? I don’t think it’s promising that he’s already stepped in the “stolen valor” mudpie just days after joining the ticket. My “tankie” pals think he’s a fascist for calling the National Guard in during the Minneapolis riots, while my '“fascist” friends think he’s a tankie for letting the whole city burn for a while before he took any action. His primary enthusiasm seems to be for Chicago-style gun control, which is (like abortion, it must be said) a proven loser with everyday Americans.

His idiot wife hasn’t helped matters with her “burning tires” comments. It also appears that his daughter was on Twitter during those riots, sharing information about when and where the National Guard would appear.

Tactically, it doesn’t appear that the choice of Walz increases Kamala’s appeal with Midwesterners the way that, say, the selection of Josh Shapiro would have in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Walz is neither a policy wonk nor an engaging speaker. Why choose him over Shapiro? The Free Press has a startling suggestion:

Almost as soon as Harris began her search for a running mate in earnest, a campaign from the progressive left made it clear that the anti-Israel wing of the party would not vote for Shapiro… In their criticism of Shapiro, leftists pointed to the fact that he excoriated University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill for refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of the Jews—I know, what a monster!—that he called on Penn to shut down the anti-Israel encampments, which violated university codes and guidelines—the shame!—and that he told The New York Times, “If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes.” How dare he suggest antisemitism should be condemned, no matter what side it comes from! 

I’m old enough to remember when the Democrats were The Jewish Party. My God, look at people like Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman! My first wife was Jewish and her family gatherings were like a Blue Caucus meeting. I remember being taken to task by one of her relatives in 1992. Not because I was against Bill Clinton — I was actively campaigning for the man! — but because I wasn’t doing enough. But now, being Jewish is an active liability with the Democrat base.

Much has been written and said about “The Southern Strategy” in which Nixon supposedly traded upright East Coast tennis-club Ninety-Eight Regency votes for the questionable loyalty of inbred cousin-banger trailer trash. Will future historians talk about the “blue shift to Islam” in the same disgusted tones? Let me offer a hint, according to Pew: “our projections suggest that the U.S. Muslim population will grow much faster than the country’s Jewish population. By 2040, Muslims will replace Jews as the nation’s second-largest religious group after Christians.”

There’s just one little issue with making this otherwise rational swap: many of the Muslims I know are, shall we say, just a little right wing. Some of them are already fighting the culture war against Democrats in the schools — including this situation, where Islamic parents are demanding that their children be shielded from pro-transgender “teaching”. Where is this happening? Why, in Minneapolis! Wonder if Tim Walz learned anything from that.