As regular readers know, every so often I find an article that’s so totally ridiculous, infuriating, idiotic and/or just plain wrong that I feel compelled to vivisect it rather than just performing my usual drive-by mocking in a news column. Well, it’s that time again; this one’s especially worthy of scorn because the author, Brian Lambert, is a pompous ignoramus who (like so many yellow journalists) mistakes his own cluelessness for some sort of…I don’t know, hipness maybe? In any case, he or his editor put the crowning touch on this steaming pile of stupid by giving it the most ironic headline I’ve seen so far this year, “Tracking online predators…and revealing the utter cluelessness of most parents“. To reward that great moment in arse-backwardness, I’ve borrowed the operative phrase for the title of this column. And to properly set the tone, I’m reprinting this photo of three self-important yahoos which opens the original.
A person has distinctly mixed feelings after a conversation with the unit in Washington County tasked with tracking online sexual predators. On the one hand, the sheer numbers — and the appalling details — of what is routinely going on in Minnesota (and most other states) makes you want to lock the doors and take a long hot detergent shower. It’s that bad and that creepy. On the other hand…the unit…is now playing a more sophisticated game of tracking and identifying predators who troll social media for underage victims, as well as “recovering” kids swept up by such criminals.
Well, Lambert’s right about one thing; the appalling details of what’s routinely going on in police departments and DA’s offices across the US really does make you want to lock the doors and take a long hot detergent shower. The reality of “authorities” using public funds to sit around making up increasingly-lurid masturbatory fantasies, repeating them to slackjawed soi-disant journalists for dissemination to a credulous public, and then using them to justify a campaign of entrapment against peaceful adults engaged in consensual activity, is enough to make anyone with a more highly-developed moral sense than the average cop feel dirty and threatened. Unfortunately, Brian the Bewildered attaches the badness and creepiness to the victims of this pogrom rather than its perpetrators, and joins in the wanking fantasy of nubile young girls in sexual peril. He also buys the self-aggrandizing cop lie that deceiving people in order to destroy their lives for wanting to have consensual sex is some sort of “sophisticated” technique. There are indeed predators trolling social media for victims, but they are paid to do it by the state.
Tipped by a Kevin Giles story in the Strib, I made the run to Stillwater to talk with [County attorney Pete] Orput and his team of three…The key character in Giles’ story was Backpage.com, the long-notorious “personals” website…[which] remains far and away the primary site for predatory trolling…But…at least Backpage.com — its sleazy profit-delivering ads withstanding — cooperates with law enforcement when some agency…identifies contact between an adult and a child. Something you can’t say about dozens of other social media venues.
Oooh, I’m so impressed with your reportorial adroitness, Clark Kent! You were “tipped” by a story in the mass media, and sought out a “scoop” by running to officials and obediently parroting everything they told you! And you know what? You’re right again, Clarkie Boy; Backpage is indeed the primary site cops use to predatorily troll for victims! But your adoration of authority figures apparently excludes Strunk & White, else you’d know what “sentence fragment” means.
Before this Washington County unit existed, there was a conspicuous absence of anyone in local law enforcement focusing on culling through the thousands of Backpage.com ads or the literally dozens of apps serving essentially the same deviant clientele. For all the shock and horror respectable citizens express at stories of creeps luring (primarily) young girls into sex, it turns out that the will to apply regular, sustained taxpayer resources to monitoring, collating and reporting online activity simply wasn’t there…
NO! Say it isn’t so, Brian! You mean until this moral panic started, politicians weren’t willing to waste money paying pervert cops to troll the internet all day, pretending to be teenage girls so they can engage in sexy talk with strangers? There was really nobody willing to spend public funds on the vital work of defining adult women as “children” and adult men with very ordinary sex drives as “deviants” and “predators”? And “respectable” citizens weren’t begging to have their communications spied on and recorded by “authorities” for the specific purpose of trying to pin imaginary “crimes” on them? WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO? WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!!??!?!
…[Imran] Ali…[is] “pleased with the cooperation we’ve received…People clearly understand the scope of the problem”…what begins to gnaw at you most is how poorly informed parents are…
No, what “gnaws at me” (even more than Lambert’s inane, cliche-ridden writing) is the way collaboration with the pigs is euphemized as “cooperation”, buying into propaganda is cast as “understanding”, and refusal to participate in a moral panic is defined as being “poorly informed”. Remember, part of the reason the First Amendment is the first one is that the press’s job is supposed to be encouraging skepticism of the pronouncements of government blowhards.
…predators have used sites as innocuous as Words with Friends to meet and connect with victims…kids from…normal home environments are…at risk…the predator seeking to befriend them is there in their hands, on their phones, most of their waking hours. “Parents are absolutely clueless about…how easily predators can interact with their children,” [Siv] Yurichuk says…
Make note, dear readers; you have just seen the “Facebook pimps” myth surpassed in its sheer absurdity and blatant fearmongering. I’m using comedy to lampoon this police-state cheerleading, but these people’s motives are no joke: they want nothing less than universal surveillance and the power to censor the internet, and they’re willing to use parental paranoia to get it.
…The Washington County trio’s prime directive is to identify contact between predators and children and assist work to recover the child from the situation. Apprehension of the perps is police work, and one of the unit’s prominent law enforcement liaisons, thanks to his 20 years’ experience in the realm, is Sgt. Grant Snyder…
Actually, their directive is to trick adults into interacting with cops pretending to be teenagers (not “children”), as one of them admits below; on the rare occasion when they manage to get their filthy hands on an actual teen, “recover” means “arrest”. Note the usual bootlicking use of the pig dysphemism “perp” to mean “person we’re accusing of something”. And when discussing cops, “experience” actually means “immersion in cop culture”.
…Snyder…frequently plays the role of online bait, posing as say a 15-year-old girl…
And wanking furiously while doing it.
…The minority of parents who are aware of the peril is far outnumbered by those with only a vague comprehension. And even savvier parents are ill-equipped to keep up with the constantly expanding…social media network. Some…prefer to “trust” their children to know better and use good judgment…
Once again, note the emotionally-manipulative language which is the hallmark of the yellow journalist. People who buy into hysteria are described as a “savvy” elite; those who live in reality are described as having a “vague comprehension” of the imaginary hordes of bogeymen. But Lambert is rather sloppy, even by hack standards; putting “trust” in scare quotes is insultingly amateurish. As a propagandist, he’s strictly fourth-rate; unfortunately, many other promoters of anti-sex, anti-internet hysteria are a lot better at it, and the rest of this article discusses efforts to expand the panic still more. The media, however, are already saturated with propaganda about imaginary sexual threats to “children”; the level of skepticism about “sex trafficking” has already begun to rise, and with any luck maybe the 30-year-old “sex predator” panic may start to go with it. To borrow Lambert’s last line, “It can’t happen too soon.”
