Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness. – Sophocles
If you haven’t heard about the “teenage exorcists” yet, take a look at this short interview from Vice in which the girls helpfully explain that you can “catch” demons by having sex with prostitutes because “Satan can’t just go into anybody that he wants to. He has to have a legal right.” Apparently, they think harlots are licensed agents of the Devil, which A) would probably surprise Jesus, and B) seems to mean they’ve got us confused with witches, and witches with Satanists. But since they also seem to confuse demons with STIs and mental illness with mythical metaphysical monsters, this is not really very surprising.
Now, most people in the general public and nearly all of my readers may chuckle over the earnestness with which these sheltered young women declaim their outlandish beliefs, but it wasn’t so long ago that the same news agencies who seem inclined to mock them now were reporting stories of gigantic Satanic conspiracies with a straight face. Furthermore, those same agencies, and probably many of the same reporters, accept and repeat the ridiculous stories of the “trafficking” hysteria with the same level of credulity these girls display in discussing demons; as I’ve pointed out before, the “trafficking” narratives are practically identical to those of the Satanic Panic, except that the shadowy all-powerful organizations abducting hundreds of thousands of nubile virgins from their families are now called “pimps” instead of “cultists” and are supposed to be motivated by evil greed rather than evil religious fervor. There is the same focus on lurid BDSM sex, the same impossibly-high numbers of victims and sex acts per night, the same claims of vast criminal organizations, the same inability to catch any of the supposed perpetrators and the same total lack of physical evidence. In Sweden, Satanic cults, “sex trafficking”, “repressed memories” and “patriarchy” are part of one seamless narrative, and in the rest of Europe “trafficking” cults are said to control their victims with black magic.
So really, it was inevitable that the black magic connection would reach the United States as well; “trafficking” rhetoric has grown increasingly wild and bizarre for over a year now, and the age of the supposed victims has been slowly creeping down toward the range of those in the daycare sex abuse branch of the larger Satanic hysteria. I haven’t seen a whole story devoted to it yet (though that’s just a matter of time), but hints are starting to appear in typical “sex trafficking” stories. For a long time now “pimps” have been credited with preternatural powers of persuasion, but this is the first time I’ve seen it cross over into the quasi-supernatural:
…Sheila Simpkins McClain’s life was fractured by violence. At around age 14, McClain left home and became involved in prostitution…Now, years later, McClain has dedicated much of her life to working with women who are coming out of situations similar to hers. She’s the assistant resident manager for Magdalene in Nashville, Tenn., and an intervention specialist with End Slavery Tennessee…Pimps, McClain says, can almost hypnotize young women…McClain helps to break that spell…
Yes, McClain does use the qualifier “almost”, but the reporter also uses the word “spell” in the next line despite the fact that hypnosis is neither magical, nor can it induce a person to do anything she is strongly opposed to doing. The general public, however, believes otherwise, and it is clear that the idea McClain is trying to project is one of paranormal power. There is no way to tell whether she believes this herself or whether it’s just a useful lie; she also claims that the internet has increased the ability of pimps to control whores, when even a large fraction of cops and other political prohibitionists recognize it’s the exact opposite (which is why they’re so desperate to persecute online ad sites that make it much harder for them to catch a large number of hookers by raiding a single brothel or stroll).
That story appeared on NPR, which abandoned its façade of journalistic skepticism a long time ago; this one from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune doesn’t even make the pretense of it. Author Christine Stark (a staunch disciple of Dworkin who has referred to animal testing as a “system of prostitution”) uses “trafficking” as a direct synonym for “prostitution”, utterly denies that sex workers exercise any agency whatsoever, and vomits out a number of bogus “statistics” such as the astonishingly-ridiculous claim that 98% of sex workers are homeless. But while these are typical rhetorical devices in these anti-whore, anti-male screeds, even Melissa Farley might hesitate to make the revolting claim with which Stark concludes her deranged attack:
…Duluth harbor is notorious among Native people as a site for the trafficking of Native women from northern reservations…to be sold on the ships and in Duluth and Superior. Native women, teen girls and boys, and even babies have been sold for sex on the ships…
As I’ve pointed out before, the common lie that the “average prostitute enters the trade at 13” automatically implies that a huge number of underage hookers are literal babies. But because most of the people who repeat this idiocy are far too stupid to understand that, I don’t think most of them actually believe that large enough numbers of men want to rape infants to support a commercially-viable enterprise; Christine Stark does, though, and is willing to say so in print. How the disappearance of all these babies is covered up (even in a marginalized population) she cannot say, but it’s not difficult to see the resemblance between Stark’s sex-trafficked infants and those the Satanists were supposed to have produced in droves by impregnating young girls, then wiping their memories and returning them to their homes. And if one can believe that the magical hypnotic powers of “therapists” can “recover” memories, it certainly isn’t that much of a stretch to believe in the magical hypnotic power of “pimps” to erase them. Or the magical power of demons to possess someone via sex. Or the magical power of teenage girls to drive said demons out.
You can’t catch me that way. :p
Don’t let that stop you having a lot of fun trying though, krulac ;).
I’m running through the girls as fast as I can … I will find you yet! 😛
I know enough about you to know you’ll be hiding in a blonde!! That cuts down the “search pool” considerably!
Do these religious types read the Bible at all? Secular prostitution is treated as an innocuous behaviour compared to actual sins:
Proverbs 6:26-34 (NIV translation):
For a prostitute can be had for a loaf of bread, but another man’s wife preys on your very life.
Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?
Can a man walk on hot coals without his feet being scorched?
So is he who sleeps with another man’s wife; no one who touches her will go unpunished.
People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his hunger when he is starving.
Yet if he is caught, he must pay sevenfold, though it costs him all the wealth of his house.
But a man who commits adultery has no sense; whoever does so destroys himself.
Blows and disgrace are his lot, and his shame will never be wiped away.
For jealousy arouses a husband’s fury, and he will show no mercy when he takes revenge.
As late as 2004 I was doing paralegal work on the appeals of people who had been convicted of child sex abuse – including Satanic abuse – based on no evidence whatsoever beyond ‘recovered’ memories. Typically the convictions were from the late 80s and early 90s for events alleged to have happened in the 60s and 70s.
By then the notions were largely debunked and such evidence was no longer acceptable in Australian courts, but because defence lawyers hadn’t challenged the scientific validity of the evidence in the original trial such a challenge could not be made during appeals (unless you could get a paper debunking such theories accepted as ‘new evidence’ – which is a whole lot harder than it sounds).
I don’t think all the cases I’ve ever worked on were for people who were actually innocent but in these cases I’m fairly confident that not a single appellant had done anything remotely resembling what he had been convicted of – nor do I think the judges who rejected their appeals (or, more often, their leave to appeal) believed them guilty. Nearly everyone involved was bound by legal proceduralism.
Successes of the ‘recovered memory’ appeals I was involved with?
One.
The daughter of the appellant had divorced the ex-cop who convinced her she’d been raped by her father as a very young girl and she retracted her ‘recovered memory’ testimony. Even then it was a close run case.
Legal barriers to freeing those who are clearly innocent, are concentrated evil.
My apologies for the errant comma.
That would have to be a very emotionally wearing outcome, to see innocent people unjustly incarcerated and kept there by a legalism. What an atrocity.
Thank you for your insight and empathy.
It was indeed emotionally draining – but not as draining as my work with the families of death in custody victims.
The American experience is a little different and goes to illustrate the truth of Martin Niemoller’s quote, “First they came for…”
In America, custody abuse started with marginalized folks and has since graduated to more general victims. Yet, until a citizen is abused or someone close to them is, they tend to take the mainstream line about how difficult a cop’s life is.
I started out as a classical liberal type in high school and went the rounds with my law and order father about the problem of unaccountability in law enforcement. Until my younger brother was victimized.
Of course, part of the problem is that there are honorable cops out there, particularly in earlier epochs. Those were the folks my father knew and thought it was absurd that they would behave in any such manner. He may have been right.
But that doesn’t address the structural problem of an organization without accountability; such a structure will, over time, select for the worst types of individuals. And that is what is happening in America.
So I understand the blind spots that many Americans have about cops. Unfortunately, I’m convinced that most of them will not change until they have a encounter that demonstrates the problem to them personally. And then they find that they are marginalized by the experience.
But what I don’t find reasonable is the reporting policies of most of the major media in the US. They have the facts, but rarely report them and when they do, they try to make it look like these are exceptional cases and do their best to shield the corrupt institutions with their excessive use of passive voice and describing the perps as “ex-policemen” as if they had already exited the police force before they victimized the citizenry.
This sounds like re-hashed “cultist” interventionist crap from the late ’70’s / early ’80’s. Remember when kids (adults usually) would run off and join a cult and give all their possessions to the cult and the parents would hire a tough guy to kidnap them back, put them in a dark hotel room and “de-program” them?
Fun times … fun times …
I live among priest-kings, like Sheriff/Ayatollah Grady Judd of Polk County.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-08-10/news/os-grady-judd-polk-sheriff-questions-20130810_1_grady-judd-florida-sheriffs-association-polk-sheriff
God is first and foremost in my life and always will be. And not only will I always evoke the name of God and doing what’s right, but I am disturbed on those that want to be politically correct and shy away from recognizing that God is our creator, that God is responsible for this earth being here and us being here. And I’m certainly not going to shy away from God, and I’m certainly not going to shy away from the fact that having a moral community is as indispensable to our progress as any other tenet of growing a good, lawful, safe, ethical society.
For example, somebody has asked, “Why do you do prostitution round-ups? That’s just two consenting adults having sex for money.” And there are a lot of reasons that that statement is wrong — among them human trafficking. (Florida is) recognized as number three in the nation in human trafficking.
These girls are as serious as cancer. Trust me Judd believes in witchcraft and demons every bit as much as they do, and if he isn’t saying it to the cameras, he’s just being prudent.
Here’s an example of what these types say when the cameras aren’t rolling:
http://www.alternet.org/story/84043/an_atheist_goes_undercover_to_join_the_flock_of_mad_pastor_john_hagee
“I told my nephew to look around the house,” Fortenberry continued. “I said, ‘Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘That’s your problem.’ So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that.”
I’m never sure if the misandrist radfems are using the fundamentalists, but I actually think it’s the other way around. Look at how they come up with branding for them! Does anyone think that Sheriff Grady Judd would stop opposing sex work if he didn’t have the trafficking mythology to back him up? Hell no! But it gives him something to say to the Orlando Sentinel other than just, “The Lord has tasked me to stop these wicked fornications.” (Even though he’s barely hiding that…)
pww,
One wonders if the Ayatollah Judd would have the gumption to stop a child sacrifice a’la Abraham and Isaac. And one wonders if tearing the HP book in half and throwing it out the window is an archetype and pre-figuring of what he’d like to do; tear J.K. Rowling asunder and defenestrate her.
pww,
I think that the fact that J.K. Rowling used toilets as a secret entry into the Ministry of Magic and this historical case make the Good Sheriff’s case for him. What say you?
/sarc – directed at Judd, not pww.
No worries, I understand. A lot of satanic ritual abuse cases in Florida were lead by saintly radfem Florida prosecutor, Janet Reno… these people really are made for each other…
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/14/books/nightmare-in-country-walk.html
Yikes!
I’d forgotten that episode. But then, Janet Reno did go on to burn a village in order to save it. So I suppose…
If they have nothing to fear, then you must create something to fear.
Leo Strauss political philosophy teacher to many in our current government.
( it is alleged he said this)
Strauss was also in total agreement with Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. Difference is, Strauss liked having the masses opiated. He said that the leaders should encourage religiosity and patriotism in the lower classes, though they needen’t take such things seriously themselves.
Yeah, Strauss did. And I hope that crypto-fascist SOB has an especially warm spot in Hell with two personal demons to call his own tormenting him.
And if he doesn’t, I’d be willing to donate to a fund to HIRE those two demons.
The ‘magickal’ power of teenage girls seems to be a borrowing from the Japanese manga/anime ‘magical girl’ trope.
Or from the Salem witch trials.
I’m only saying something here because it would be really, really weird if I didn’t.
Ashton Kutcher is, as I type this, machinating in his Bat Cave, imaging all the ways he can stop all those rascally baby-fuckers. I can just hear him now: “These babies are forced to service up to 100 clients a day, sometimes without even getting a break for nap time or peek-a-boo.”
“Satan can’t just go into anybody that he wants to. He has to have a legal right.”
You mean that evil spirit, that prince of darkness, that fallen angel, that Lord of the Flies Beelzebub has to petition the gummint for an “occupational license” (heh heh) to assert his “legal right” to possession? Lordy! I din’t know the gummint was so powerful. Maybe we’re afraid of the wrong entity here!
Now, be fair; given the rumored probable destination of many attorneys, it seems only proper that His Infernal Majesty would be a stickler for proper procedure and due process. Of course, since the only entity capable of granting such rights to The Prince of Darkness would be the Lord Almighty, that leads to all sorts of theological implications…
LOL!
There I go, forgetting precedent. Job 1:12.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand.
To quote my favorite teenage super-hero;
“Note to self. Religion … Creepy.”
It is staggering how completely and utterly stupid and disconnected from reality people can be in this day and age. It is truly pathetic, but Churchill had it right: “the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter”.
Funny – I never used to question the superiority of a democratic system.
Now … I do.
Well, Sweden will be made an absolute Monarchy when I conquer it … of that, I’m determined! 😀
Democracy only works if the citizens of that democracy do not treat it as a spectator sport, which far too many Americans do now a days. If we would get off of our lazy asses, democracy works fine.
By the way Krulac, by what right do you claim the throne of Sweden?
By the same right Carl XVI Gustaf does: force of arms. Yes, yes, heredity, but the reason THAT line is the one to inherit the throne instead of some OTHER line is exactly that: force of arms.
My army against Krulac’s: I’ll take that bet.
There is a reason that the Catholic Church only allows their most mature and specially trained members of the priesthood to become exorcists: If there is a Devil, and there are demons that possess people (Heaven and Hell, Horatio, Heaven and Hell), it requires a strong will and a carefully tested faith to prevent the exorcist from being taken over themselves by the possessing demon.
There are thousands of requests for exorcisms every year to the Catholic Church. Most are turned down, because it is nothing more than mental illness–schizophrenia, et al.–treatable by the medical profession. Less than 1% are considered actual possessions–at least in the U.S.–and are dealt with very quietly by the Church.
These girls, if there is a devil, etc., have probably been possessed by demons and are being used to further Satan’s ends.
PS–Satanic cults. I have met one young woman in my life who claimed to have been brought up in, and escaped from, a Satanic cult. The Satanic group she claimed was responsible was real: my Wiccan friends had told me to stay away; they were a bunch of nutcases. The story that she told seemed plausible: and she seemed relatively sane. But whether or not it was true, I do not know. Insufficient data either way, and a real skeptic does not make his mind up in advance just because it is outside one’s experience.
Further deponent sayeth not.
In addition to the silliness of babies being “sold for sex”, Thhe scenario that Stark is pushing of people going down to the docks in Duluth and buying women being offloaded from one of those massive freighters they show in the image from that article is just insane. It seems like every American city, no matter how small or insignificant, is in a competition to promote how they are some kind of major hub of trafficking like it’s some bizarre form of civic boosterism.
Well it IS a form of commerce, and civic booster types love commerce!
I wonder if the notion that sex workers spread demons is coming from the same sort of pre-scientific public health messages that ban followers of some religions from eating pork or shellfish.
Didn’t Jahweh tell the Moses Mob to genocide the Midianites because their women had been spreading demons to the Jewish men (Numbers 31)? The fact that He told them to kill everyone except the young women who ‘had known no man’ (taken as slaves instead) is kinda suggestive. And the fact that He even told them to wipe out the ‘beasts of the fields’ makes you wonder about the sexual practices of the ancient Israelites.
I wonder if the notion that sex workers spread demons is coming from the same sort of pre-scientific public health messages that ban followers of some religions from eating pork or shellfish.
Yeah, those would be the same “health” messages that sexually segregate menstruating women in temples and mosques, because impure.
Someday if a girl is ever asked if she is menstruating, I’d like her to refuse to say one way or the other. Make them check. 😉
“Satan can’t just go into anybody that he wants to. He has to have a legal right.”
I’m not sure that makes Satan a vampire, a bailiff or a cop – only cops probably wouldn’t bother with ‘legal rights’ these days.
Vampires aren’t conventionally held to be particularly legally bound – they need an invitation to enter your home, that’s all (and if Harry Dresden is one to listen to, that’s a general matter of breaking in being disruptive of the aggressor’s magic).
It’s devils that are legalistic (not even demons, just devils) – and that fits. They’ve got their mythology straight… they just don’t realize that that’s what they’ve got straight.
Maggie wrote:
NPR just did another “trafficking” story with bizarre claims today, on a new nationally syndicated show “Here and Now” originating from WBUR.
See
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/08/15/former-prostitute-program
One “money quote”:
Even at today’s street prices that’s enough blow to turn someone into a babbling idiot in a hurry. Of course, maybe it did.
But the real idiots are the gullible listeners who believe this kind of crap. The “reporters” who present these fantasies as if they were fact, without a scintilla of skepticism, are simply evil.
These girls are only one step, if that, away from the “God is an asshole and I like it that way” school of Christianity.
Religion: Humankind’s worst idea since… well, ideas.
You remember Humans, right? Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the self aggrandising, lying, fornicating, killing machines?
Just like the first sly git that said “How can I outwit these warriors I can’t take down in a fight… I know! ‘The gods must be appeased’!!”
Absolute fekking trainwreck now, isn’t it? Brilliant idea…not😠