Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever. – Voltaire
As I’ve pointed out many times, moral panics do not gradually increase in intensity and then fall off just as gradually; they are more like virulent illnesses which increase in intensity until there’s an almost complete breakdown of the system they infect, followed by a comparatively-rapid recovery after the crisis point. Some of my readers are skeptical of my prediction that we’re nearing the end of the hysteria; they point out that things seem to be getting worse, not better. But as I said on New Year’s Day:
This doesn’t mean that things will get steadily better from now on; in fact, they may get worse in some ways…In “The Widening Gyre” I referred to the “trafficking” myth as “an increasingly-erratic cultural meme spinning wildly out of control, whose far-flung debris is going to cause a lot more damage before it finally disintegrates”, and now that it has entered this last and most dangerous phase we should expect to see a lot more people hurt even as ever-larger numbers of people speak out against it ever more vocally. Because it’s a useful tool of social control and a versatile excuse for tyranny, governments (especially the US government) will work hard and invest huge sums to continue the panic well beyond the time when it would have died naturally; that, however, can only work for so long, and once the edifice of prohibition starts to collapse the US will no more be able to halt the process than the communists could stop the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
I recently ran into an example of this governmental exploitation of the hysteria in a Tennessee newspaper; though it bears the declarative title “Human Trafficking: Reality in Franklin County”, it would be hard to imagine an article more disconnected from reality. Not only does it make the usual bizarre and unbelievable claims supported by bogus, discredited and misattributed “statistics”; it does so in a way that makes the motives of the cops and other “authorities” vomiting out this filth incredibly transparent to anyone not locked in the throes of “trafficking” fever. I apologize for the extreme choppiness and lack of logical arrangement in the rest of this column; the source material really is that bad (as you can see for yourself) and the only way to correct that would be to rewrite it entirely.
Franklin County ranks high in human trafficking cases, with more than 100 incidences…in a two-year period, according to a 2011 study.
Quoting a thoroughly-debunked study so extreme it’s used as anti-American propaganda is always a good way to open a “sex trafficking” article. Quick synopsis: the study’s claims are totally unsupported by local police records.
…sex trafficking is not something that just happens in other parts of the world. It is happening in the United States, in Tennessee and in residents’ own backyards…
The Profession of Faith is also obligatory.
Recorded statistics show the multi-billion dollar industry of human trafficking has grown to the second largest crime industry in the world.
“Recorded statistics” show exactly the opposite, but this evidence-free and demonstrably ridiculous claim is another classic opener.
…The reason for the higher numbers in Franklin County is two-fold. One reason…is…proximity to the Georgia Border. Karen Karpinski…[of] End Slavery TN…said…“Atlanta is one of the top cities in the U.S. for minor trafficking”…
As I’ve documented in posts labeled “King of the Hill”, practically every city, town and village in the US claims to be a “major center” of “sex trafficking”, and the statement is always rationalized by some irrelevant feature like the presence of major highways or rivers, proximity to another place, remoteness from other places or whatever else “officials” can think of. The most astonishing part is that there are no statistics on “sex trafficking”, not even bogus ones; these claims to being the “top hub” or whatever are often attributed to the State Department or FBI or some other “authority”, but they’re literally made up, and based upon nothing.
Karpinski went on to say, “TBI quoted a recent report from the Shaperio [sic] Group out of Atlanta…”
Here’s a look at that Georgia “study”, more about the Schapiro Group’s methods, and one more article for good measure. “Charlatanry” would be a mild term for their work; “criminal misrepresentation” is a bit closer to the truth.
…The high number of reports in the county could also be attributed to the fact that Franklin County is uniquely qualified to recognize and tackle human trafficking…Police Chief Dennis Young explained… “This is not that we have more of these crimes, but instead it shows that we are more proactive in finding and rescuing these children”…
“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow
…“child pornography has become a billion dollar industry”…
This is a very common claim; however, it’s difficult to imagine how it could be true given that most child porn is traded on the internet with no money changing hands, and the majority of the images have been circulated amongst pedophiles for decades. While there is certainly a market for new material (generally produced in the developing world), even the most generous legitimate estimates place the size of that market in the tens of millions, not the billions. I’m sure everyone can agree that legal adult porn is a vastly-larger market, yet even it was never as large as the popular narrative claims and has dramatically shrunk in the past few years due to free content on the internet. But now we’ve reached that transparent motive I mentioned at the beginning:
Drugs are a major contributing factor in the sex trafficking industry and local law enforcement officials realize that stopping the flow of drug related crimes could help reduce the occurrence of human trafficking. Young stressed the importance of…[creating] an environment where drugs cannot exist…It is not uncommon to see cases of children being traded for sex in drug cases…
Here’s the real reason for this massive pile of bullshit. Small counties in rural Tennessee aren’t going to get much in the way of federal “anti-trafficking” funds (compared to large cities) no matter how absurd their claims; this whole boondoggle is just a way to whip up flagging support for the failed drug war by implicating drug dealers in the currently-popular moral panic. Hysteria takes a shortcut around the rational brain, so most readers will never even notice that desperate addicts doing desperate things has absolutely nothing to do with the supposed “sex trafficking industry”, any more than cops murdering dogs has anything to do with organized military actions. Even so, the (unnamed) reporters apparently feel the need to bury this deep in the bowels of the story; they continue on after it with more bogus and misattributed statistics, then repeat the propaganda that the FBI’s “Innocence Lost” pogrom against over a thousand adult sex workers “focused” on “rescuing children” (in reality, underage hookers were locked up and criminally charged). Next, it dwells on Tennessee’s new “anti-trafficking” laws in loving detail (including the one that allows the state to abduct the children of sex workers or clients) before wandering off into one of the inane and fantastical pimp classification schemes so popular with the “law and order” variety of “trafficking” fetishist; this particular one has elements that appear to be updated versions of the lurid masturbatory fantasy that “white slavers” frequently abducted naïve young women from dance halls. And given their identical origins in the sickness of prohibitionism, I’m sure there were “authorities” in the 1920s who told their frenzied disciples that bootleggers were mixed up in the “white slave” trade as well.
Well Franklin County could sure do with some Federal funding for air traffic control for pigs. I wouldn’t want to go outdoors there without a strong umbrella.
The first time I ever heard of white sex slave trafficking it was from a 1970s soft-core mag (“Man” or something like that) where even to my fevered teenaged brain it was obvious the ‘eye-witness accounts’ were all being made up to titillate sick readers (sicker than me at least).
I would suggest Kevlar over titanium supports. And hip waders.
The reason I believe that we are still having to deal with this problem has a great deal to do with the failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970’s. Women are now having to get their rights “One Piece At A Time” (with apologies to Johnny Cash), rather than deal with new problems in a sane fashion (HIV, Prostitution, Sex Trafficking, etc.). It has also allowed the not cases to take over the feminist movement completely, because the sane ones got burned out in the 1970’s fighting to pass the ERA.
This is brought home most eloquently in the television series “Boardwalk Empire”, where the character of Nelson Van Alden, a Prohibition agent who is an ostentatiously strict Christian, frequently invokes God to his underlings and tells them that stopping the flow of booze will also stop immorality, out-of-wedlock sex, and popular music and turn everyone into, well, him.
The pilot also features a great scene of frothing proto-feminists at a Temperance League meeting. In the next episode, it is revealed that the leader of the league is a follower of Margaret Sanger.
Damn! I LOVE “Boardwalk Empire” and can’t wait for the next season!
I really LOVE how Nucky Thompson was one of the most avid proponent of prohibition … simply because he KNEW he’d make a killing running booze once it was outlawed!
It’s really a great series – complete with hookers … both and good and bad ones.
Gretchen Mol’s sex scenes as Gillian almost blow away Nicole Kidman’s in “Hemmingway & Gellhorn” – but not quite. That scene of Gellhorn and Hemmingway riding dirty during a bomb attack with the ceiling coming down on them – and they don’t stop – is STUPENDOUS! Also the line …
Gellhorn: “Is this is what you want?”
Hemmingway: “It’s what I NEED!”
Jimmy and Pearl…they broke my heart. One of my favorite prostitutes in fiction.
Margaret is a prostitute too, although she hates to admit it. She makes herself a rich man’s mistress in return for money and support for her children. That’s in between her bouts of Catholic piety and temperance. LOL
And Gillian HOO BOY she is eevil! I love Nucky and Chalky White and Mickey Doyle and his funny giggle. Great writing, acting, music, and design. Outrageously wonderful clothes. Maggie, if you put the DVD on your wish list I bet somebody’d buy it for you. 😉
Tony Laciura, who plays Nucky’s butler Eddie, is an old acquaintance of mine from the opera biz.
I imagine that the spread of legal marijuana is panicking the wowsers just a tad, too. So we have the Feministas panicking because young women want nothing to do with them, the Fundies panicking over Gay Marriage and related changes, and the Drug Warriors panicking over “the weed with roots in hell” (and the notion that somebody might ask them to work for a living).
I wonder if they decided to go after prostitutes consciously, or if it’s simply an unconscious attempt at transferring attention to something that doesn’t make them look like idiots.
You are quite right, and it is the same with tobacco-control nutters freaking out over e-cigarettes. It simply doesn’t compute.
That actually makes perfect sense once you understand that the anti-tobacco Crusade isn’t about health, it’s about “How dare you indulge in a vice that I find yucky!” and “Why don’t you do as you are told! Don’t you listen to your betters?!?”.
The anti-tobacco nits don’t care how long you live, as long as you do so as an obedient little prole.
It has never been about health. It is, as you say, conforming to their narrow standards of vice and virtue.
“Obedient little prole”. I might have to steal that line. 😉
For me it is about health. I watched my mother die of lung cancer, both of my grandmothers and my eldest sister die of emphysema, and I’m allergic to tobacco smoke. So don’t you dare tell me it is not about health.
Chill, freegirard.
I am terribly sorry for your losses, truly. And I myself made the decision to quit smoking after my second bout of bronchopneumonia. But the industries that have grown around prohibition (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sex work, põrn) are morality-based. The harm-reduction approach does not fly with them. If there is a way to get the high/result without the dangers, they’re still against it, THAT is why I say it isn’t about health to the professional prohibitionists.
Sasha, you are missing the point. You are generalizing and stereotyping. There are those–such as myself–who oppose smoking in particular, and tobacco in general, on principle, not because they are some sort of nut case. Tobacco is the only product that you can use, as directed, that has a 50% chance of causing your death. Do not lump us all in one group! That is what pisses me off.
Smoking is indeed bad for your health … but everyone who smokes now should know that.
The tobacco lawsuits weren’t about health – they were about putting money into lawyer’s pockets. It wasn’t about putting down the tobacco companies or eliminating their profits … it was about RE-CHANNELING those profits to some pretty scurrilous places.
http://www.openmarket.org/2007/06/15/court-blocks-use-of-tobacco-settlement-as-slush-fund/
Mike Moore, Democratic Attorney General of Mississippi created a slush fund with the state’s lawsuit money – and he didn’t even go to the state legislature or the governor to do it!
He created an organization to promote a healthier Mississippi – then he fuckin’ shot a forward pass to himself with the state’s funds and gave himself a job as the CHAIR of said organization. All of this … all of this … without even the slightest “by your leave” to the voter’s elected representatives.
And he’s not the only one … Carla Stoval, a Republican Attorney General in Kansas diverted her state’s tobacco settlement funds to organizations run by her fucking relatives.
And …
These are goddamn blatant crooks – who would be literally crucified on an oak cross were this the United States of Krulac.
So the bottom line is … the tobacco lawsuits simply took money from a bunch of idiots who were subject to the laws of the United States – and therefore could be controlled by them – and sent that money to a bunch of legal thugs who can’t be touched by it.
Mike Moore just accepted a job in Washington, DC. I hope a bus runs over his ass while he’s up there.
This.
And furthermore, if every smoker in this country were to give up cigarettes tomorrow, the government would be deprived of all those delectable sin-tax dollars to play with.
To retcon and paraphrase PJ O’Rourke, taking money away from government is like taking whiskey and car keys away from teenage boys.
I used to shred my parents’ cigarettes and flush them down the toilet when I was a kid. Now I’m less extreme, but there are still two ways smokers piss me off:
1) smoking in closed public areas or very near the entrance to one, forcing other people to breathe their smoke
2) throwing cigarette butts anywhere, sometimes not even properly put out
I totally empathize, SomeGuy!
So if there were a way for nicotine addicts to get their fix without any second-hand smoke (or first-hand smoke for that matter), or butts, or ash, or indeed any combustion at all, would you be okay with that?
I’m okay with smokers getting their fix in open places or in their own private places and throwing their butts in ashtrays (or trash cans if they put them out first). I’m also okay with the so-called e-cigarettes (though I don’t know whether there’s any nicotine in them). So if they get it without the unpleasant side-effect, all the better.
Good, sensible answer.
The professional prohibitionists are NOT okay with it. It is sinful, and smokers deserve to be punished for their sins with death, illness, social opprobrium, and high taxes. Getting the nicotine without the negative side effects is, to their eyes, gaming the system.
E-cigs and e-liquids can come with nicotine or without.
I’m a non-smoker. I bought an e-cig (a kit with two, actually) so that when family members who are smokers come to visit me, I don’t have to either send them outside or let them stink up my place.
Yes, e-liquids come in various nicotine strengths, from more than most combustion cigarettes to very little to none at all. They also come in a variety of flavors, including various tobaccos but also fruits, chocolate, macadamia, etc. Nicotine addicts can puff like a bunch of chimneys in my little apartment and I don’t end up smelling like the Marlboro Man.
I not only don’t want them banned, I think they should be allowed in restaurants, on airplanes, and in hotel lobbies.
You are certainly in the minority, Sailor. I have loads of flavors of e-liquid: mostly tobacco but also desserts and a few fruits. I even make my own as a hobby. The vapor dissipates fast with no smell. Sometimes Mr Sasha can guess what I’m vaping by the aroma of the vapor. 😉
The prohibitionists have tipped their hand. Smoking was banned in most public places because secondhand smoke supposedly posed a danger to nonsmokers. with the littering issue a distant second. Now that there’s a nicotine product with no smoke and no litter, they are forced to admit their agenda.
I think in the beginning the bans were about the health hazards of second hand smoke (and the general unpleasantness of same to a non-smoker). After some time, though, people got the idea that the bans were because “smoking is bad.” So now that there is a way to “smoke” w/o the original concerns, well, it’s still bad, ain’t it? So don’t do it!
It’s not unusual for me to be in the minority, but here I suspect it’s not such a small minority. As these things get more popular and non-smokers experience being around them w/o getting smoked out, I think opposition will dwindle…
Unless of course the anti-e-cig cause can be linked to something else, like anti-China sentiments or such.
I used to frequent an E-cig forum (still drop in from time to time). It is disturbing when legitimate concern about quality control over products made in China (read: nearly everything) veers into China-bashing.
Sadly, I think you are being overly sanguine about opposition dwindling. Especially now that big tobacco companies are getting into the act. Their admittedly reprehensible behavior in the past taints all their endeavors. Previously (and mostly, still) e-cig sellers on the Net are independent mom-and-pop operations. I buy my much of my equipment and juice from small companies whose owners I call by name. The packages sold at 7-11s and drugstores are mostly crap. You have to do a little online investigating to avoid buying a junky set that will (no pun intended) burn out in a few weeks.
I’m hoping that the involvement of big tobacco means that politicians don’t dare touch them. Well, I would like a little quality control.
I found a guy on YouTube who seemed knowledgeable and helpful, and asked his advice. I ended up paying $75 instead of $25, but my e-cigs (which admittedly aren’t used as often as a smoker’s would be) still work after a little over a year, though I have had to replace parts from time to time.
“Local officials say Mole Root, Montana is one of the biggest trafficking hubs in the country. ‘It is connected to a road, and inhabited by people with money making it a prime market for gangs looking to sell girls’. While Mole root is an isolated mountain town connected only via a dirt road, traffickers could transport girls using helicopters, or one of those sci-fi drilling to bore through the earth.
Or rivers; don’t forget rivers! Or black magic!
Pimps can attain the power of flight using a potion made from the fat of an unbaptized male child
Good thing it’s not an unbaptized female child; who would they sell into sexual slavery?
The name of the pace is Mole Root, and both moles and roots are underground. So a system of secret tunnels via which traffickers can do their evil deeds without leaving behind any of that pesky evidence seems utterly reasonable. Sure it does.
Pardon me if this quote is a bit clunky, Maggie, I’m not sure how it works on wordpress:
“Some of my readers are skeptical of my prediction that we’re nearing the end of the hysteria; they point out that things seem to be getting worse, not better.”
I wonder if part of that stems from that while it may be true that more people in society at large are beginning to see the trafficking hysteria, war on drugs, etc., for the frauds they are, what difference does it make when the police state, which you prove at least twice every week is very much alive and well, continues to make sure the lunatics run the asylum?
I’ll admit I find it hard sometimes to not become hard-bitten and cynical about the future when many stories I find here (not all, but many) are about police and governments doing horrible things, yet no one seems to know a way out short of revolution, which to paraphrase Krulac’s words a couple of days ago, would bring down a lot more than just the elements in our society that are actually detrimental.