A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices. – Johan Huizinga
Besides the fact that it’s just a great word, juxtaposition is an incredibly useful tool for demolishing moronic arguments and ridiculous articles. Many times, all I have had to do to demonstrate the absurdity of a fallacious comment is to repeat it almost exactly with a few words changed, and let my readers’ brains do the rest. But I recently discovered a case in which a journalist had done most of the job for me; all I had to do was copy and paste. The story below in block quotes was published by TV station WXIA in Atlanta, Georgia on January 5th; the interpolated sections in italics are from a story which appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper only five days earlier (and which I’ve already quoted in TW3 #131).
As many as 60,000 college students taking part in the Passion 2013 Conference are discovering the harsh reality that slave labor and sex trafficking are real problems…”It’s true, girls are being bought and sold against their will…Sex trafficking and slavery are realities right here in our city.” Atlanta is considered one of the major hubs for child trafficking. It’s estimated that 500 underage girls are working the streets of Atlanta on any given night…
The City of Atlanta was under siege by human traffickers. Some 1,000 Asian women and girls ages 13 to 25 were being “forced to prostitute themselves” in the city, a 2005 internal police email said…Had agency leaders questioned the estimate, they would have found it defied common sense. If it were true, one in eight of the city’s Asians would have been sex slaves…
The young people at Passion want to do their part to end it. They’ll donate money this week to open two new…safe houses in the U.S., train thousands of law enforcement officers and rescue 10 women from the sex industry in Atlanta…
…The Atlanta Police Department won a $450,000 three-year grant, and the city chipped in an additional $150,000…police identified 216 potential victims…But this count was later revealed to be grossly inaccurate. Auditors for the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General could find documentation for only four victims…The Bureau of Justice Assistance made a mistake that added 93 victims to the count. Atlanta had actually reported 123 victims. The city could not explain the 119 that auditors couldn’t track. Police said the figures were reported by a city employee who retired before the Justice Department inquiry…
The group held a candlelight vigil for victims of sex trafficking and slave labor on Thursday night outside the Georgia World Congress Center.
“We are told by the State Department that every year 15,000 people are trafficked into the U.S. But then, where are they?” said Elzbieta Gozdziak, research director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University… “Why are the numbers so small? Is it because the scope of the problem is not as big as they say?”…Those numbers are proof that the fight against human trafficking has gone wrong, U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said…”Either the government is doing an unconscionably poor job of finding victims or there are not that many total victims in the first place,” Grassley wrote.
The egregiously-falsified numbers for Atlanta derive from a bogus study done in 2010 by the Schapiro Group, a marketing firm in the business of creating fake statistics to “prove” whatever the client wants “proven”; the project was bankrolled by the “Women’s Funding Network”, a front for Swanee Hunt’s “Demand Abolition” group, and was widely trumpeted until it was nationally debunked in a Village Voice article, “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science”; since then all available online copies of the “study” have conveniently vanished, so if any of you know how I can locate one for my archives please let me know.
In any case, it’s not surprising that self-identified “Christian youth” believe this nonsense; many of them probably believe far sillier things without any proof whatsoever. But when the “true believers” are public officials, and the money they’re flushing down the “trafficking” toilet was stolen from your pocket rather than their own allowances, I think it’s fair to expect a bit less credulity.
I’m super impressed with how much money they managed to attract for their little farce, especially compared with the “results”.
I’ll have a look in a bit and probably get back to you sometime this weekend.
A copy of the report has been sent to your inbox, Maggie. The WFN has indeed attempted (clumsily, I might add – broken links abound) to remove all records of it from their site. They inadvertently left a titled broken link to an older version of the study in the bibliography of an old press release. That gave me the title, which made finding the report easy as pie. Mmmm pie.
The sad thing is that so many people are so very eager to believe that terrible things are happening all around them that they don’t even bother to question the “facts” being tossed at them or to make any attempt to verify them. You would think that they secretly want it to be true.
Life is boring when everything is OK. If it weren’t for the imminent zombie apocalypse I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.
Evidence suggests that the zombie apocalypse happened years ago….
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And here’s the real bit:
“…The Atlanta Police Department won a $450,000 three-year grant, and the city chipped in an additional $150,000…”
Cops go where the money is. They will spend time and energy on chasing non-existant trafficking victims or terrorists if that’s what bring in the money.
Absolutely true.
I think it would save a lot of time if they just told us what cities aren’t a major hub of trafficking. That makes about 28 cities I’ve seen described this way. It’s only a matter of time until every city is a major hub of trafficking.
The problem is even more severe in cities that aren’t considered major hubs because of the lack of attention
Bravo! 😀
We find so few victims of trafficking because of all the attention we’re paying to it drives them away! 🙂
It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as applied to human trafficking! We can either count them or say where they are but we CAN’T Do Both!
For every 300,000 child sex slaves we think we know about but created out of thin air, there are another 300,000 still out there… in thin air.
What I find interesting is that a cash strapped police department I know of has the most pragmatic approach towards drugs and whores.
1. Leave the druggies alone unless they do something dumb or obvious. Crackdowns lead to more violence as the balance of power has be disturbed.
2. Leave adult whores alone. It’s no one’s business.
Personally, I think being cash strapped helps them understand their priorities better.
You know, I think my old home town is a major hub of human trafficking. Sure, there’s only about thirty thousand people in the whole place, but that little town has problems, and human trafficking causes problems, so that’s probably it. It’s almost exactly in the middle of the continental US, and it has two high schools (maybe three, if the Protestants have got hopping since last I checked). Also, I hear a teenager got pregnant there last year. Surely an innocent child wouldn’t have done anything like that unless a slaver put her up to it?
Yeah, obviously a major hub. The feds should give them a million bucks to do something about it. Like fix the icky tasting water. It’s easier to fight slavers when you don’t have that bad taste in your mouth.
LMAO!
Didn’t Peter Sellers do a movie about getting conquered by the US so they could get money to rebuild? Sounds like you’ve brought the foreign policy gambit to the domestic front. Kudos!
Yep. The Mouse That Roared, and extremely funny.
“The group held a candlelight vigil for victims of sex trafficking and slave labor ”
Whilst wearing Nike trainers, occasionally listening to their iphones and making the odd “random” comment on facebook.
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