Most victims don’t know they’re being exploited. – many trafficking fanatics, who apparently believe they get to define other people’s experiences for them
“Sex trafficking” hysteria is growing so rapidly now that in any given week one can see almost as many of these as one cares to look for (consider the effect that has on Kevin Bales’ media-report-driven “algorithm”). Here is a selection of the more interesting ones from the past few weeks, done in TW3 style.
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nury Martinez said…she wants city officials to come up with better methods for curbing prostitution, beyond arresting sex workers who end up returning to the streets after a brief stint in jail…she is “exasperated by the reality that…it just isn’t working…it’s time for…additional legal tools…targeting the sickening demand for prostitutes”…Martinez is hoping to…go…after those who exploit the prostitutes and engage in human trafficking…Pimps have also adopted new tactics that include shuffling prostitutes through Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Seattle…to make it harder for police to recognize [them]…
I suspect the notion that whores are “trafficked” in a circuit by “pimps” is a warped view of touring.
Critics say a satirical sex-traffic awareness campaign, that issued a fake callout for children to become sex workers, backfired. But the organization behind the campaign is calling it a success. Posters by Edmonton’s Chrysalis Human Trafficking Network, read: “Now recruiting: Child sex workers”…The Twitter feed was ultimately shut down…Jacqueline Linder, executive director of Chrysalis, said…”It looked real and it was meant to look real”…
No, it did not “look real”, as you can see for yourself by clicking on the picture; it looked like ugly prohibitionist bullshit of the sort we’ve seen before. Jemima has more on the sleazy fanatics at Chrysalis, including a typical bogus “checklist” with items designed to describe just about any young person.
Even among “sex trafficking” fetishists, it’s rare to see such raw, unfiltered misandry outside of neofeminist hate sites:
…Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape Criminal Justice Training Specialist Krista Hoffman…said…”One of the big problems with sex trafficking is our cultural acceptance of prostitution…[Pimps] don’t mind beating girls up around the face”…One study found that purchasers…actually like the appearance of bruises and cuts. “When it looks like girls are beaten up a bit it heightens the excitement for them,” Hoffman said…
Only in the twisted fantasy world inhabited by neofeminists could anyone claim that the stigma and criminalization inflicted on whores indicates “cultural acceptance”. And only an evil fanatic with almost no attachment to reality whatsoever could imagine that the average man wants to have sex with a woman who has obviously been beaten.
Inspector Haynes just can’t understand why sex workers “don’t even realize that they are victims“:
Five women believed to be sex-trafficking victims have been rescued by police during raids on nine suspected brothels in Birmingham. Police…said they were determined to put a stop to “modern day slavery” in the region…Officers…seized mobile phones, cash, laptops and paraphernalia relating to prostitution…Detective Inspector Darren Haynes said…”Tonight’s action…is about protecting people who more often than not don’t even realise that they are victims”…
The agency-denying, lie-spreading nun-SOAP cabal is at it again:
…Beginning this week, a group of 200 volunteers, including 30 nuns, will be cold-calling or visiting 300 New Jersey hotels to talk about the Super Bowl’s dirty little secret: prostitution…everybody knows hookers follow the game. But most…see only a victimless crime, a business arrangement between consenting adults, where the women are willing opportunists and the men just out for a good time. The nuns don’t see it that way. They see victims…The volunteers…will be distributing soap…with the coalition’s hotline number on the wrapper, so a girl being forced into prostitution has a lifeline…
Since Kevin Bales’ widely-quoted “estimate” is based on media reports, it was only a matter of time before it grew even more ridiculous:
There are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now, according to a comprehensive new report issued by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation. This is not some softened, by-modern-standards definition of slavery. These 30 million people are…chattel in…absolute ownership…Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe…are blighted particularly by sex trafficking, a practice that bears little resemblance to popular Western conceptions of prostitution. Women and men are coerced into participating, often starting at a very young age, and are completely reliant on their traffickers…You don’t have to go far to see slavery in America. Here in Washington, D.C., you can sometimes spot them on certain streets, late at night. Not all sex workers or “prostitutes” are slaves, of course; plenty have chosen the work voluntarily and can leave it freely. But, as the 2007 documentary “Very Young Girls” demonstrated, many are coerced into participating at a young age and gradually shifted into a life that very much resembles slavery…
Of course, this is absolute poppycock; none of these so-called “slaves” are chattel slaves unless the legal systems of their countries officially recognize slave ownership, and most aren’t even coerced by any legitimate definition of the word. As regular readers have seen, claims of “sex slavery” in Southeast Asia are dramatically exaggerated, and the claims about Eastern Europe are both exaggerated and twenty years out of date. The documentary mentioned is prohibitionist “average entry at 13” propaganda, and if the reporter wanted to quote old stories from his newspaper he should’ve tried this one.
NSA says sex workers & associated parties are valid drone targets, then hides the admission:
There was an odd statement from NSA in the middle of yesterday’s WaPo story describing how NSA facilitates CIA’s drone mission… “The NSA is ‘focused on discovering and developing intelligence about …foreign intelligence targets, such as terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers’,“…I believe this is the first time since the Snowden leak that NSA has suggested its “valid foreign intelligence targets” include “human traffickers and drug smugglers”…the WaPo explained [that it was] “withholding many details about those missions, at the request of U.S. intelligence officials“……and…the reference has now been removed from the story…
Canadian “authorities” are nearly as obsessed with “trafficking” porn as American ones:
Brianne answers the knock, expecting to see the…man with whom she negotiated sex-for-money over email…Instead, two police officers step inside…“We’re not here to arrest you,” the officer says to Brianne. “We’re here to help you.” Women who are victims of human trafficking don’t fit the profile you might imagine…these girls could be your daughter, says Det. Mark Benallick…of the Toronto Police…“What begins as a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship progresses to increasing control, until these women are treated as slaves…These pimps have the ability to spot vulnerable girls in a crowd…and instantly know which ones can be manipulated”…
Note the increasing tendency to ascribe magical powers to pimps.
Not just the US; the entire world!
Two girls excitedly walk off their plane that just landed in Paris…their happiness is snatched from them as they are betrayed, dragged and forced into a hard-to-escape lifestyle…Many are familiar with the depiction from the movie Taken, but many fail to realize the reality that lies behind [it]…the University of West Georgia…is…close to one of the biggest sex trafficking hubs in the world…Atlanta International Airport is…a target for human traffickers…the U.S. is not that different from well-known sex trafficking countries such as Czechoslovakia. FBI reports that Atlanta is the center for the sex-trafficking of adolescence and around 200 to 300 youth are prostituted in Atlanta a month…
What planet do these people live on, where “sex trafficking” is “unrecognized”?
Although largely unrecognized, sex trafficking in the U.S. is a serious problem, and its victims needs the loving support that the Catholic Church can give…Candace Wheeler, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Restoration Ministries…[said] “These girls need the body of Christ, and the body of Christ needs them”…According to the Department of Justice…300,000 children are at risk of sexual exploitation each year…girls at risk for sex trafficking… “have typically been violated before the age of five”…
How much lower in age can the filthy masturbatory fantasies of “trafficking” fetishists go?
Pop stars cause sex trafficking!
On Sept. 20, Rihanna tweeted…about a female performer from an illegal sex show she attended in…Thailand…officials say they used Rihanna’s tweets to help lead them to the arrest of the club’s owner. Christian Film & Television Commission founder Ted Baehr says…”Most times these female performers are held in captivity against their will, and most are sold into slavery at young ages and don’t live past the age of 20 because of working conditions and highly-addictive drugs used to keep them in slavery”…Baehr says…Rihanna is supporting the international sex trade…
This is the second time we’ve seen the magical slave-philter, but I guarantee it won’t be the last.
A Tale That Grew in the Telling (TW3 #329)
…Talking about the prostitutes she met whilst filming Jodie Marsh On The Game, [the model-turned-bodybuilder said]…“Mostly the thing they had in common was they’d all been forced into it by a man. And their lives were shit…One girl — who had a gang bang in Germany where 15 men had sex with her one after the other — said she loved it…I’ve been celibate for two and a half years but that put me off sex even more…It made me think nobody is coming near my body ever again”…
I’m glad to hear that, Jodie; it’s best for the world that control freaks like you never breed.
Remember, many huge police operations have found virtually no “sex trafficking” in the UK:
…trafficking of foreign women to be sexually exploited in the UK is worth at least £130 million, a Home Office report suggests. The annual revenue generated by one female sex worker was estimated as £48,000…Organised crime was responsible for all such trafficking…A study…in 2009 identified 2,600 foreign women in England and Wales who were victims of [sex] trafficking…A further 9,200 were identified as vulnerable to being trafficked… Understanding Organised Crime: Estimating the Scale and the Social and Economic Costs, warned that the £130 million figure was likely to be an underestimate. It estimated the social and economic costs…at £890 million…
A Tale That Grew in the Telling (TW3 #341)
Educated white American feminist goes “undercover” in a Turkish brothel; blah blah blah “piece of meat”, blah blah blah “traffickers and pimps”, blah blah blah “girls sold for sex”. Because only educated white feminists are sophisticated and brave enough to take risks to make a living (you know, like by going into Turkish brothels), and only educated white feminists are magically protected from the mustache-twirling pimps with their magical pimp vision and mind-control potions; all other women everywhere are asexual simpletons who could NEVER EVER EVER make valid decisions that contradict feminist dogma.
“seized mobile phones, cash, laptops and paraphernalia relating to prostitution”
Which will then be sold online
“don’t even realise that they are victims”
Actually I’m sure they are very aware that they are the victims, they just differ as to who are the persecutors.
“The NSA is ‘focused on discovering and developing intelligence about …foreign intelligence targets, such as terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers”
Also foreign diplomats, politicians, negotiators and just about anyone else the NSA thinks will enable the NSA to gain advantages or benefits in the same way any other government department is likely to try and use its power to benefit itself.
If all those Thai bargirls are slaves, how come so many men from the West end up marrying or living with them? (And often getting ripped off by those same “helpless” girls)
“have typically been violated before the age of five”
What planet do these people live on anyway???
Damn … that really pisses me off.
But you know where it comes from? The witch is frustrated because the harder she fights this war – the fewer results she sees. So it’s now time to take it out on the guys.
NSA: It’s out of control. And the bad thing is – we NEED the NSA doing good work for this country. Now there’s this shit about tapping Angela Merkel’s phone – W-T-F ??? At the end of this line the NSA will be stripped and emasculated to the point it’s no longer an effective intelligence agency. And – it’s the people on the inside who will have “done it” with their overreaching.
Off topic but I was just thinking yesterday how the movie “Terminator” is such bullshit. SkyNet was an awesome, self-aware computer system – created by the U.S. Government.
But now we know … the U.S. Government could have never created it … witness the complete disaster of the ObamaCare website! LOL
http://rexharrisonshat.com/healthcare/
Make sure you hit “apply”
” Now there’s this shit about tapping Angela Merkel’s phone”
Latest count is 35 leaders:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls
Yeah, I don’t agree with the ‘they like them a little beaten up’ thing, either. I’m more likely to feel protective toward her than aroused by it. Of course, I’m not one to like women who are submissive outside of actual sexual encounters, anyway, and even then, it’s just a flavor I’m willing to sample, not something I look for.
Hoffman is completely disconnected from reality.
\
The US government invented the Internet, went to the Moon, and has won a few wars over the last couple of centuries.
“…the U.S. is not that different from well-known sex trafficking countries such as Czechoslovakia.”
Czechoslovakia??? Hello! If this so-called reporter’s grasp on her subject matter is as good as her grasp on geography and world events, when there has been no Czechoslovakia for more than two decades, there is little credibility that can be extended to her.
BTW, I love the juxtaposition of the two comments that had been made to the piece at the time I looked at it.
These trafficking hysterics are just plain scary.
It’s hilarious, isn’t it? I originally intended to devote a whole column to that article; it’s a real train wreck.
Hilarious, and pathetic. It goes to the heart of the issue of accuracy and credibility, a topic I delve into with my university journalism/mass media students.
I have posted the same comment I made here on the article on The West Georgian web site. It is showing as awaiting moderation. Can’t wait to see if they actually allow it to appear.
And by the way in the Czech Republic prostitution is legal, so errm…why exactly would they need to “traffick” prostitutes there?
Jodie Marsh said “Seventy per cent of the girls I danced with were lesbians. They’d turned to women because working there had put them off men.” So she’s saying that women can become lesbians because of bad experiences with men. That’s a very old-fashioned view of lesbianism, and I should think a lot of lesbians would be offended by that.
She also said about Amsterdam prostitutes “70 per cent of the girls doing it have been trafficked”. I think when she says 70 per cent of a group of people are something what she actually means is that she’s guessing that most people in a particular group of people are something. She seems to think that by using the figure of 70 per cent it makes her sound more believable.
The current position of so-called political lesbians is:
1. Women choose heterosexuality.
2. It’s the wrong choice.
3. The natural, healthy choice for women is lesbianism.
I used to think this was just an excuse for lecherous women’s studies professors to hit on their straight students, and I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind on that. But these political lesbians can be quite brutal to women who make the choice to have sex with men.
I often wonder how women let them get away with saying things like, “They’d turned to women because working there had put them off men.” Do their own experiences and desires not prove the lie of it?
I mean, that is an incredibly fringy sentiment with just about 100% counter evidence from the world at large, but people seem to let it go past as if, “Hey, yeah, that makes sense.”
*Note: This is not about lesbianism, bisexuality or pansexuality. This is purely about the idea that sexual orientation is entirely an act of political will.
What PWW said. I can always spot a political lesbian by the reaction she has to things such as cosmetics, fashion, and other feminine trappings. Political lesbians and misogynists have amazingly similar views on traditionally feminine things. I worked with one at the writing center who spent 30 minutes complaining about the name of a Lancome mascara, which is called “Doll Eyes”: “Oh, so, women are supposed to look like inanimate objects in order to be attractive to men? That’s so dehumanizing! I can’t believe you’re buying into that shit, Aspasia!”
Plus, wtf happened to Jodie Marsh? She is a former Page 3 girl, so as far as I’m concerned, she’s suffering from a bit of whorearchy.
I think Jodie Marsh’s problem is that she didn’t charge enough when she did sell it, and/or she squandered the cash on multiple boob jobs, face/lifts, or bad investments and she now no longer commands a living wage with her pussy so, she’s become bitter. Maggie explains very well how lack of pussy can make men turn into freaky, weirdos and even rapists. Well, lack of dick can and does turn women into bitter, angry, shrews.
That sounds about right.
My latest kink (no, not that sort of kink) is Asian cosmetics and skincare. About 90% of them are devoted to getting women to think they can look like anime characters and selling products to that effect. Products aimed at 40-year-olds like me are packaged in cutesy jars with colorful labels.
Incidentally, despite the outward trappings, many dermatologists and cosmetic chemists I know tell me that Korean skin products are 5-10 years ahead of Western ones in terms of science.
PWW, this only happens with lesbians. I’ve never met or read about a man who “turned gay” because of his bad experiences with women. The “manosphere” is full of blogs describing the most overwrought woman-hatred, never does it lead to a man becoming homosexual. It leads to a MGTOW or a man who hires sex workers.
If I’m wrong about this, I’d like a link.
@Sasha: “PWW, this only happens with lesbians. I’ve never met or read about a man who ‘turned gay’ because of his bad experiences with women.”
I have known men who “turned gay” after bad experiences with women, and I have to say it has been a tempting proposition to me after some of my divorce experiences (raising the question why gays and lesbians would want to get married, but that is a separate issue beyond the scope of this thread).
The fallacy of the whole argument rests on the question of whether someone chooses their sexual orientation, or it chooses them. If you adhere to the generally accepted theory that one is or is not gay, or straight, or bi, or whatever, either we have women (and men) who are naturally inclined to be gay or bi, or are masquerading as such for political and/or psychological reasons. Speaking strictly anecdotally, I think the men I knew who “went gay” after their bad experiences with women were gay to begin with, and just acknowledged it after their heterosexual train wrecks.
Frank, that’s the key point I think. Straight men who have been badly treated by women, are still straight men and still want sex with women. Their hardwired (yes I do think sexual preference is mostly something you are born with) desires don’t change with circumstance.
No argument there, Sasha. But by the “hard-wired” theory the same would apply to women, too. The man-hating feminists may not want sex with men, but they were already lesbian or lesbian-leaning before grafting on their ideology and hatred.
Yes, in a logical world it would. 😉 But I think the point (was there a point? I’ve forgotten LOL) is that for a misandrist feminist, being a “lesbian” can be a political statement unrelated to their *actual* sexuality (which of course they do not acknowledge), whereas the same phenomenon among men is so vanishingly rare as to be unheard of.
Actually, that’s not true. Women are much more sexually fluid than men; our preferences actually can change with circumstances in a way we just don’t see in males.
That’s what I meant. 🙂
I’m not repulsed by the thought of sexual contact with a woman but I’m not wildly turned on by it either. I am, however, wildly turned on by the fact that Mr. Sasha is wildly turned on by it. I joked to Krulac that one of these days I’ll give him (husband) a threesome for his birthday.
However I don’t think it’s nearly as common for women to be turned on by male homo- and bi-sexuality. (I am, lots of women are not.) But I’m aroused by it in a general way, and would not ask Mr. S to touch a man sexually. He’s just not into it, and I’m perfectly fine with that. But I sure can fantasize, and there is a nice collection of bisexual/ménage erotica in my Kindle.
Quite a few women like a little bit of yaoi. Especially among the younger set, who don’t consider it as icky.
>”But now we know … the U.S. Government could have never created it … witness the complete disaster of the ObamaCare website! LOL”
The ACA website wasn’t created by the government. The work of creating the website was outsourced to private companies.
As for the whole bruises thing, that’s the lurid fantasy of a mind that’s excited by that sort of thing. When I was working as an independent escort, one of my specialties was the rougher side of it. The gentlemen I saw were always very careful to stay within bounds. They were most definitely not “turned by bruises”.
Yes, I’m aware of that … I work for the government and that’s the way most things are developed. Because you won’t need the developers after the thing is built – you hire contractors to build it and then they go away after completion of the job.
However, the Government specs the “thing” and OVERSEES the job. You can think of it this way – the Government built it using “temps”. I have done this very thing on many jobs over the course of my 30 years working for the DoD. If the contractor I hire does a lousy job – the fault is mine unless somehow he pulled off an outright fraud. And since the ObamaCare website is an utter disaster – it is an indication that it got very little COMPETENT attention from HHS … and Sebelius should be fired for wasting $600M of our taxpayer dollars on this “thing” – which some experts are saying may have to be totally scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.
And CC … this is pretty much a standard outcome for anything the government does – it’s four times as expensive – and never works the way it was planned. The only exception is – we in the government are pretty good at building things that kill people and break shit – given enough dollars to do it. DoD does a fairly good job usually – but we have all kinds of R&D organizations and design engineers.
The people in the Obama administration are incompetent – and this pretty much proves it. It’s because … they are “community organizers” and none have ever worked in the private sector nor had to PRODUCE anything – ever. In fact, these guys are socialists for the most part – who disdain the private sector. It was doomed to failure from the beginning.
And now – here we are barely two weeks past a government shutdown in which Obama REFUSED to negotiate on ObamaCare implementation – REFUSED to delay it one year and what’s gonna happen now?
He’s gonna have to delay it. If he doesn’t – his signature legislation will crash and burn over the next 6 months because you cannot sign up everyone by “phone” for something that requires comparison shopping.
This is REALLY a mess of the first order.
I’m looking forward to enrolling in ACA, my current employer does not offer health insurance and private insurance is simply not affordable. Sorry to burst your bubble, Krulak, but ACA may well prove to be a lifesaver for me.
That said, the website is a complete fuckup. Sure, millions of users, but it’s a fricking REGISTRATION FORM, old hat by web standards. I was watching a news analysis show (The Young Turks) where they had a couple of web developers on to discuss the issue and they pointed out that PornHub and some other porn sites handle streaming videos for millions of users daily without so much as a hiccough. Somebody at HHS was truly, deeply, asleep at the wheel over this one, and as for the Canadian contracting company, they deserve to go out of business. All I can think of is Bob and Dave McKenzie sitting in an office that looks like a fish camp, swigging beers and saying “This HTML stuff is a fricking bear, Dave, what say we have a beer and let it go for the day, you hoser?”
Uh, Pat, it IS private insurance that is offered under ACA. And in 45 of 50 states, the rates have gone UP under the new law, not down. In some cases by 100s of percent. On average nationwide, rates under the ACA are 99 percent higher for men, 67 percent higher for women. Maybe you’ll qualify for a subsidy, but meanwhile many companies are converting their workers to under 30 hours of work a week to avoid the major penalties being put on them, and hundreds of thousands of people — 300,000 this week in Florida alone by one insurer — with existing health insurance are being cancelled or forced into far more expensive policies.
Get to the facts and you’ll find out you’ve been sold a bill of goods by the same dishonest and incompetent government that fabricates those “trafficking” statistics Maggie does such a good job of debunking. I do like your Bob and Dave image, though. If only it were that prosaic, or that funny. To summon another, much older image: “T’aint funny, McGee.”
Only $600m wasted? Come to the UK and see how the government wastes £billions in failed computer projects.
Don’t forget NCMEC – ck out their guestimating of sex trafficked youth: http://medilldc.net/2013/10/flawed-foster-care-system-leaves-youth-vulnerable-to-sex-trafficking-lawmakers-say/
And, the Regent law student who support this http://regentfamilyrestoration.blogspot.com/search?q=molina+royce
Ck out her blog pic – it matches the CAS campaign pic http://www.casre.org/our_children/
The government is “pretty good at building things that kill people and break shit” because that’s what it cares about. That’s where a lot of profit is for big corporations.
The ACA websites are complex, because the law is very complex, and the law is complex because it was written not to provide high quality low cost health care to Americans, but to preserve insurance company and other corporate profits over all else.
As for the shut down? The ACA was voted into law. It was found constitutional. The President was re-elected running on it. Let’s place the blame where it belongs, on a group of renegade house members who didn’t like losing, and their corporate sponsors.
Not quite; the government is “pretty good at building things that kill people and break shit” because the only thing that distinguishes a government from other big corporations is the widely-accepted lie that it has a moral right to inflict violence. Since violence is THE single distinguishing characteristic of government, it’s hardly surprising that what it’s best at is “killing people and breaking shit”.
Agreed. But don’t take my comments to mean I think we do it extremely “efficiently” … all I’m saying is that … after paying a pornographic amount of money – at least you normally have a product that works. Though … I’m not sure about this new Zumwalt class destroyer.
I would put a slightly different twist on things. Governments are good at (or less bad at) the core function sort of things that governments have traditionally done. For example, governments are competent at making war, building roads and supplying water because they have been doing that sort of thing since ancient Rome.
But when the government branches out into stuff like trying to deliver healthcare or cure poverty, well, we get what we get.
Maggie, PLEASE write a book. PLEASE. You summarise complex things so well that you might be the next famous pampletheer…right up there with Lysander Spooner’s Natural Law essay. 8 pages that summarise all the law and all the politics I have ever needed. When i came across it I was stunned at how perfectly he had captured how I thought. Better than I ever could have tried to express it in words.
Absolutely not – whether or not ObamaCare is “law” or not – the House of Representatives still initiates funding under the constitution and they chose not to fund the damn thing. What they did was CONSTITUTIONAL and, if it wasn’t – why aren’t they in jail? No one called this a “constitutional crisis” not even the liberal media so what they did – they were in their rights to do and in fact. They were elected to represent their voters – they did it.
You know what IS LAW though? There is a law that says the border is supposed to be secure. There is a law that says illegals crossing into the country are to be deported. Like it or not – there’s a law for that.
But the Obama administration isn’t enforcing that law.
Know what else was law? The Defense of Marriage Act. I didn’t agree with it but IT WAS law and Obama chose not to defend it.
There’s a LAW that says no taxpayer monies are supposed to fund abortion. Yet we give millions to planned parenthood every year. Again – it seems Democrats don’t want to enforce the law here.
So please – let’s not “cherry pick” which laws elected lawmakers are REQUIRED to support. It’s well established that the house was within it’s rights. The last offer from the Republicans was to simply delay ObamaCare for one year. Obama’s people called them “terrorists” and Obama told them he wouldn’t negotiate.
NOW – he’s going to have to delay it. And guess what … as the President – HE DOES NOT HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO DELAY THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A LAW. The constitutional way of delaying was proposed by the House of Representatives and summarily rejected by Obama. Now he’ll delay it with an executive order – incredible.
And yeah – the ObamaCare law IS complicated – it’s longer than the bible and probably longer than all three of Shelby Foote’s books on the civil war – and it took him almost 60 years to write his three books. This law was written in haste … by people who are incompetent and have no clue about health care or the insurance industry – it’s doomed to FAIL.
In fact – it already is a failure – we will just now spend BILLIONS on trying to “re-animate” this corpse.
Also … everyone IS aware that the ObamaCare mandate penalty, which is assessed by the IRS when you OPT OUT of ObamaCare and do not pay health insurance …
Is not subject to the provisions of subtitle F of the tax code (liens and seizures in order to recover taxes due).
Not having insurance cannot be prosecuted either criminally nor civilally. And, although i suppose the IRS could confiscate your “return” at the end of the year for failing to have a health insurance policy – if you structure your taxes, as I do, so that you have NO return …
You do not have to pay the penalty! 😀
Two problems with this … the ObamaCare law is not workable unless healthy people buy insurance. If they don’t – the system will fail.
Second – if all Americans who seek to avoid the personal responsibility start restructuring their taxes so they have no refund at the end of the year – this will seriously decrease Federal tax revenues – because the status quo allows the government to collect interest on that “return” until they return it to you. This will mean less funding for other programs.
It’s really a nightmare – this law.
And of course, when you send money to the IRS, you can’t designate what that money goes to pay… So it may be true that the IRS can’t go after you for not paying the “penalty”… But they can allocate every dollar you send them to that penalty first, and then go after you for non-payment of your other taxes.
‘There is a law that says illegals crossing into the country are to be deported…. .. But the Obama administration isn’t enforcing that law.’
Are you sure about that? Everything I’ve read on the subject says that this administration has been enforcing immigration laws with greater effort and deporting more people than has ever been done before, even though the number of people entering the country illegally is lower than it has been in a very long time.
Now now, you duck-billed fella, don’t go getting complicated on us. OBAMA BAD! That’s all you need to know.
There are some other things the government cares about, too: Intruding into our lives in every way imaginable, and perpetuating itself.
The law is complex because its crafters did everything possible to pay off their corporate backers (the one thing you have right in your analysis) with little to no concern for the general populace. It was voted into law by a parliamentary sleight of hand without a single vote from the opposition party at the time. And some 80 of those who backed it were lame duck legislators who were voted out of office in 2010 in the biggest sweep in more than 70 years. The “Constitutional” finding was another semantic trick, one that even the crafters and backers of the law had not thought to use and in fact had argued against. Never once in polling has the ACA garnered a majority of support from the American people. And the President ran on other issues, and was voted in by the people who have most to gain from the exploding welfare state under his Administration.
We have two choices in judging this Administration, neither of which should be acceptable to the American public: It is utterly dishonest, or it is utterly incompetent. My own view is that it is both, the worst of all possible worlds.
It’s funny, but megalithic private corporations manage to put up far more complex web sites with orders of magnitude greater numbers of choices and don’t seem to encounter the same catastrophic issues the USG has foisted on the public. One IT analyst said that the price tag would indicate that something like 500 work years (years!) was put into its construction, at a cost of well over $600 million (million!) dollars, the little testing done weeks before its launch showed that it could not even handle a few hundred, let alone millions, of visitors, and to add insult to injury, we gave all that U.S. taxpayer largesse to a Canadian (Canadian!) company. And not a single person, wherever on the food chain, has yet to suffer a single sanction or consequence for this debacle.
I, too, used to work for the USG, and the tendency to continually re-invent the wheel was ever-present, needlessly costing millions of dollars and leaving the government in a technological black hole, years behind the state-of-the-art. I remember auctioning off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of obsolete Wang (Wang! Which only the U.S. State Dept. stuck with as the company went down the toilet) hardware as children’s furniture since not even 1992 Algerians would pay a dime or a dinar for it as IT equipment.
You can throw out all the pro-government or pro-Administration blather as you wish, but the facts are obvious to anyone who cares to look at them with even a modicum of fairness or dispassion. To return to the subject of this blog posting, this same dishonesty and incompetence — and throw in malevolence for good measure — goes into the USG’s “trafficking” witch hunt.
>”What they did was CONSTITUTIONAL and, if it wasn’t – why aren’t they in jail?”
What they did was to shut down other government activities, holding them hostage, trying to force the President to nullify his own best accomplishment. And come on. Rich people don’t go to jail, hardly ever.
The President is the chief executive officer, and has the responsibility for enforcing laws. But, like law enforcement everywhere, he gets to pick and choose which ones he enforces the hardest.
I don’t believe the ACA is good law. As I said, it’s main goal is to protect the profits of big insurance. And yes, some people’s rates will go up. But it does make at least a step towards fixing a huge problem in the USA, just as other programs have.
Since when does feminism equal hatred of sex?
In the mid 1980s, the anti-sex feminists won the power struggle within mainstream feminism (thanks in large part to the AIDS epidemic). Since then, the most powerful and influential feminists have all been anti-sex.
Maggie, you do know that a WOMAN who writes the words you write here has the effect on a MAN of basically seeing her transform into the princess of fairy tales that you would happily get fried by dragons to defend right? I mean you do know this right? 🙂
So, DagoG,you are saying that there are certain things that Maggie is not allowed to write – not because they are untrue, but because other third parties might possibly react wrongly?
…
Oh, hang on – smiley face. You see this sort of pedestalisation as a *good* thing. Your post was meant as a compliment. It was white-knightery.
Carry on.
Yup. Second paragraph got it right. Never even occurred to me it could be read another way. Still don’t actually… But I may be kinda simple that way.
He’s trying to stick in a backhanded insult, Dago. White-knigtery and “pedestalization” are, in his mind, bad things.
I recognize your compliment for what it was, and I am sure our esteemed hostess is grateful of it. She’s a lady that way.
(well lookit that, here I am white -knighting too. Must be contagious. 😛 )
Your hostess did indeed see it as a compliment, and was indeed grateful of it. 🙂
Hahahahah thanks for the explanation, because honestly, that backhanded insult went compketely unnoticed by me. Truly. Now that you spelt it out I see it too and it still makes me laugh. “Men” like that have gone so long without pussy (or good pussy anyway) they have morphed into acid bitches (just like women who don’t get enough good dick). Luckily I am oblivious to both male and female types of acid bitches, they are, after all, inconsequential to my life. Thanks for the illumination tho 🙂
Re: Child pornography. The sickest part of these cases is that they treat nudity as pornography. Maybe there is more to these pictures, but if there is the articles don’t say so.
Nudity is not pornography, it is not sexual. The human body is beautiful at any age. The sickness lies with the prurient gaze of the prudes.
Apparently I commented on the wrong page. I had just read an article about teens being arrested for child pornography for taking nude pictures of themselves.
That’s okay. Your point is still a valid one, and I think you’ll find that nearly everyone here would support it.
When I was a stripper, I knew a few women who had started sex work while underage. All of them were runaways from abusive homes. One woman told me that she had run away at age 15 to become a truck stop prostitute. She said, “It was better than staying home and doing the same thing for Daddy.” It’s awfully disingenuous to refer to these girls as ‘trafficked,’ when what they’ve really done is escape from abuse.
It was obvious to me then that these girls had few options other than prostitution because of laws against child labor. If they’d been allowed to get legal jobs they might have done so. But even the ones who were 16-17 and legally able to work, were afraid to apply for a legal job, because they might be apprehended by the authorities and sent back home or to foster care.
If the trafficking fanatics really cared about these kids, they would give them real options for becoming emancipated and supporting themselves. If runaways had options for making a living other than begging, stealing and prostitution, they might choose them. Even adolescents just pick the best option available.
Here’s a current “trafficking case” that actually sounds plausible. I’m running it by you to see if you’ve heard anything about it.
Heard and wrote about.
“targeting the sickening demand for prostitutes”
I haven’t fully developed this idea: but I think there are two distinct methods by which we regard things as “evil”.
First, evil is that which provokes *fear*.
Second, evil is that which provokes *disgust*.
This person calling men wanting to have sex “sickening” shows that she is operating out of theory 2.
A while ago, I thought that theory 1 was legit and theory2 not, and that all the badness of people interfering in other peopel’s lives was the result of using the illegitimate theory 2 to measure badness. Now, I’m less sure it so clear-cut.
Daniel Kahneman had just discussed the (abysmal) performance of financial pundits when he wrote this; it is generally applicable:
“We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”
I guess I missed “Imaginary Evils,” or I would have written this sooner:
The whole Great Britain BS about trafficking has no real leg to stand on, as i demonstrated in my March 2012 article, “Making Sex a Crime.” http://www.opednews.com/articles/Making-Sex-a-Crime-by-Richard-Girard-120324-103.html
I will quote from that article:
“This (a bill in the British Parliament establishing Draconian punishment for sex trafficking) was in answer to the ‘Poppy Report,’ and other research papers that estimated there to be tens of thousands of trafficked women in Great Britain, perhaps as many as 80,000 .
However, newspaper investigations have called into question both the numbers stated by the Poppy Report, as well as its methodology . A six month investigation by British police of 800 brothels turned up only 167 possible victims of sex trafficking .”
I will not say sex trafficking is non-existent, but in the Western European democracies, U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it is not a significant problem.
Oops–as Fiorello LaGuardia once said, when I make a mistake it’s a whopper, and I don’t mean the one you get at Burger King. I did see “Imaginary Evils,” I was simply distracted by another part of the article.
My bad.
A Fantasy of Hate
If guys find bruises and cuts sexy, then why do even the hot women in movies who are supposed to be tough fighter types never get bruised or cut? She could beat up the guy three times her size with her wondrous waif-fu,* and the ratings-mongering networks would have the perfect excuse to put sexy black eyes and busted lips on these women. And yet, they don’t do that.
Pyrrhic Victory
This is what happens when, out of fear, we demand that the police, or the military, or some other branch of the government do “whatever it takes” to keep us safe from the barbaric hordes Very Bad People out there. We say that, sure, it’s fine to do signature strikes on terrorists because, well hell, terrorists! And next thing you know, they’re blowing up hookers with a HELLFIRE missile.
The Widening Gyre (TW3 #317)
Rhianna is SUPPORTING the international sex trade? A lot of celebrities make a big deal of FIGHTING it. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that some prohibitionist group tried to recruit her, and she said no, so now she’s a co-conspirator herself.