Straight Man: Why do you keep snapping your fingers?
Comedian: To keep the elephants away.
Straight Man: But there aren’t any elephants within a thousand miles!
Comedian: See how well it works?
I really wish this silly bit of business, which was probably already old when vaudeville was young, was merely a joke; unfortunately, this sort of idiocy is foisted on the citizenry regularly by “authorities” desperate to justify their existence and prove their omniscience. Whenever some sort of disaster (like the “Y2K bug” or the “swine flu pandemic”) predicted by government officials fails to materialize, you can bet that their response will not be sheepishness or apology but rather self-congratulation; they’ll explain that the reason the sky didn’t fall was because of the hysterical prediction and the ludicrously expensive and vastly-overblown “precautions” it inspired. Just as airlines now refer to all arrival and departure estimates as “on time” no matter how long they were actually delayed, so government agencies claim to have been correct no matter what the actual outcome of their predictions.
The most recent example of this was, of course, the prophecy that an army of gypsy harlots tens of thousands strong would descend upon the Dallas area for Super Bowl Week like a swarm of marauding locusts, consuming every teenage girl in its path and leaving the entire area awash in venereal disease and the crime which police love to claim “inevitably follows” prostitution like cops after doughnuts. Sensible people like yours truly tried to explain that these predictions are made for every major sporting event nowadays and literally never come true, but obviously the “authorities” ignored that because the truth didn’t provide an excuse for tightening the government’s grip a few notches. And since vast efforts were made and millions of dollars spent to chase bogeymen, officials couldn’t very well admit they were wrong; so, we get this bold-faced lie on the Texas Attorney General’s website instead: North Texas Law Enforcement, Attorney General’s Office Prevent Human Trafficking Surge At 2011 Super Bowl:
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott today announced the preliminary results of a joint local, state and federal law enforcement effort to crack down on human trafficking during the 2011 Super Bowl…a total of 133 arrests.
…“Thanks to a coordinated enforcement, public education, and deterrence effort, Texas-based law enforcement officials were prepared to respond if we encountered human trafficking victims – or the ruthless criminals who trafficked them,” Attorney General Abbott said. “By working proactively to prepare for the nation’s most high-profile sporting event, Texas was uniquely positioned to crack down on traffickers and provide much-needed help to their victims.”
Sexually exploited human trafficking victims are effectively forced into committing a crime – which means that they are both victims and offenders. In one case, the Attorney General’s Special Investigations Unit and Grapevine police officers arrested a female and charged her with prostitution. After she was released from custody, the woman told the Attorney General’s Special Investigations Unit that she was a sex trafficking victim and identified her trafficker. On February 11, Dallas police officers and NTTTF members successfully located and arrested Joshua Andrews, 39, and charged him with Trafficking in Persons. Andrews, a suspected gang member, was taken into custody at the Dallas County Jail. The NTTTF connected the woman with crime victim advocates to help her recover from her trafficker’s abuse.
Sixteen members of the Texas congressional delegation commended the State’s human trafficking prevention efforts surrounding the 2011 NFL Super Bowl in Arlington. In a letter to Attorney General Abbott, the congressional members said: “As you know, domestic minor sex trafficking impacts the lives of thousands of American children each year in states across the country, including Texas. Your efforts in Texas are an example of what can and should be done to protect children at risk for and victimized by sexual exploitation”…
Wow, what a circle-jerk. If these “officials” got any more exuberant in their praise and congratulations of each other, it would be a homosexual orgy (which I’m sure violates some sort of law in Texas). Even with an undefined, open-ended time period (we’re told the “operations” went “through Super Bowl Sunday” but not when they began) the best they could do was 133 arrests, not all of them for prostitution, in the ENTIRE Dallas-Fort Worth area. Considering that we’ve already been told 23 prostitution arrests is typical for five days in Dallas, we can guess that 22 over 2½ weeks isn’t unusual for smaller Arlington; let’s go out on a limb and imagine 23 arrests in Fort Worth and 24 in all the other suburbs (Grand Prairie, Irving, etc) put together and that gives us roughly 92 prostitution arrests in the entire Metroplex that week. Add 41 unspecified “other” arrests (which an ambitious police department could easily manage in one raid) and we get 133 without even breaking a sweat. And of all that, how many alleged “human traffickers”? One. And how do we know he’s a “trafficker”? Why, on the testimony of an arrested streetwalker who had a choice of going to jail as a “criminal” or to a shelter as a “victim”, of course! Does anyone else detect a faintly Swedish odor on these proceedings?
But just in case anyone else has the rudimentary math skills necessary to work this out as I did, Attorney General Abbot tells us that it would have been worse had thousands of cops and millions of dollars not been dedicated to this boondoggle.
Taxpayer: Why did you spend all that money and devote all that manpower to harass prostitutes?
Greg Abbott: To keep the human traffickers away.
Taxpayer: But human traffickers don’t follow major sporting events!
Greg Abbott: See how well it works?
As a Brazilian poet and singer once said, there is no way to ever stop a politician from claiming credit for what he didn’t do / for what didn’t happen (both translations would be correct). Clearly this can be expanded to any human group who is claiming to do something about / fight a non-problem.
And clearly they are just following the wind. The number of stories in the media that did seem to expect ‘something big’ to happen in the Super Bowl isn’t small (just with a superficial googling, I found this, this, this, this, this, this, this — and this from a pastor’s blog (and even this, from the office of the Attorney General of Texas).
All of this in the first page of a search that had another 10 to go.
In the same search, I found only one article that showed some understanding of the exaggerations and guesswork involved: this one.
I guess predicting the apocalypse is always more fun than debunking it. People love catastrophe movies like 2012 more than claims that life just goes on as normal, no matter how well-founded the latter are.
The reason that last one had some understanding is because he contacted yours truly and interviewed me by telephone; I wasn’t directly quoted but did direct him toward materials he could use (I mentioned it in my column of February 3rd). But you missed this one, which IMHO was much better.
I see that other one even directly mentions you. Having an effect, aren’t we? 🙂
It is indeed better. It didn’t show up in the first page my google search probably because it doesn’t contain the word “exploitation” which was part of my search string.
Let’s hope this continues to happen. You have a lot of good facts and well-reasoned (albeit sometimes emotionally laden) pieces that deserve as wide an audience as they can get.
Emotionally-laden? Well, I am a chick, after all. That reminds me of something an old and dear male friend once said to me: “You’re very rational, for a woman.” He meant it as a compliment so I took it as one. 😀
That reminds me of a scene from Family Ties:
FEMALE PUPPET: Mr. Keaton, how long have you been interested in women’s rights?
ALEX PUPPET: That’s a pretty good question… for a girl.
You certainly don’t hide your feelings about a number of topics: cops, radical feminists, traditional visions of prostitution, the Swedish model, anti-sex attitudes, etc. But this is not bad — it all depends on the intended audience. Some people are better convinced by clear and well-motivated emotions, because they resonate with them — women and men included (Whoever says men aren’t emotional hasn’t studied history much.)
In other contexts it is better to be as detached as possible and simply present the facts. (Laura Agustín usually does that, and hey — she’s a chick, too!) But only some contexts are like that. And reading through your texts it is obvious that you can deal with facts just as efficiently. Obviously you could write emotionlessly if you wanted, you just sometimes choose not to. Which is fine.
I’m in general a defender of emotions in fact-laden discourse. The only problem with them is when the emotions make us forget some facts — or then when we let our emotions be used as weapons by our enemies. Other than that, they’re more than OK.
When I heard the joke, it was to keep the alligators away.
I heard it on Sesame Street in the 1970s. I think it was Bert taking the credit for an alligator-fee neighborhood.
Oh,yeah, there are plenty of variations; sometimes it’s a machine that keeps the whatevers away instead of a behavior. But none of the variations are any more ridiculous than the ones the “authorities” want us to swallow. 🙁
The deceptiveness practiced by the activists on this occasion is worse than you stated. I live in Texas so I did some digging. The figure of 133 arrests for trafficking really represents 132 in the 4 years from Jan. 2007 til Jan. 2011 plus the one (1) arrest at SB 2011. With this being the actual truth, the Tx AG trumpets that his task force – “up until the end of SB 2011” nabbed 133 evil doers. Were you supposed to think all that was from the SB? Unless you followed the links and read the actual report why would you not?
Pointing this out to certain activists got me called on facebook, in so many words, “obviously you are a child rapist yourself” by a middle aged lawyer woman. This seemed odd to me because FB uses real names. Think about that for a minute.
I did some digging on this. The figure of 133 aressts for trafficking are from Jan 2007 til Jan. 2011 for the whole state. There was one (1) arrest for Trafficking for the entire SB period. Anyone can follow the links to the actual report. It is an open state document.
I just looked back at the site…the wording isn’t very clear, is it? I took “a total of 133 arrests” to mean arrests of any kind during the undefined Super Bowl period, but your interpretation may be the correct one. Either way they’re wildly exaggerating and using unclear language.
Clarification. There were 132 arrests up til Jan. 2011 plus one during the SB. This is what the Tx Ag used to whip up into a story of his great success in stopping the evil doers at SB 2011.
[…] when it came to pass that it was all a big lie. Maggie McNeill discussed the circle jerk circus here. We all laughed. Ok now the village is laughing. I mean come on, it’s one thing to be able to […]
“When I heard the joke, it was to keep the alligators away.”
The first time I heard it was in the 60’s, in the title of Alexander King’s book, May This House Be Safe from Tigers. He attributed it to a Zen Buddhist rather than a comedian, if there’s any difference.
Yes! My papa first told me that version when I was a child, some 20 years ago, so I always think of Buddhist monks & magic tiger dust. Snake oil in any other form…
[…] “133 separate human trafficking related arrests,” a number obtained by dishonestly representing every vice arrest made in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex during the two and a half week period around the game as a “trafficking” case (the number has since become part of the […]
[…] The numbers that are often quoted regarding the supposed epidemic of sex trafficking around major sporting events are large enough to sound threatening but small enough to sound plausible – at least as long as the audience is ignorant of some basic figures. For instance, in all of 2010 the FBI estimated there were some 62,668 people arrested in the United States for prostitution or commercialized vice, defined as the “unlawful promotion of or participation in sexual activities for profit, including attempts.” Anyone who knew that figure would automatically scoff at the notion that tens of thousands of girls were sold into sex slavery that same year during the Super Bowl in Miami. But most people had no frame of reference. They took the estimates in the media at face value, helping to perpetuate the myth. After the fact, when the actual numbers don’t live up to the estimates, the local authorities claim that’s proof that their efforts to squelch the epidemic were the reaso…. […]