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Journal by DeathMonkey
An alleged sex trafficker walks into a women's event at a Trump hotel....
Oh sorry, did you think that was the beginning of a joke?
A sex trafficker walks into a women's event at a Trump hotel
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
-- Andy Warhol
(Score: 4, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 07 2021, @05:57PM (7 children)
This guy really knows how to make himself look innocent!
Reports: Rep. Matt Gaetz sought blanket pardons from President Trump [usatoday.com]
Matt Gaetz fought revenge porn bill, arguing snaps of ex-lovers were ‘his to use’, former lawmaker says [independent.co.uk]
Gaetz showed lawmakers nude photos of women he claimed to have slept with: report [thehill.com]
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz was the lone vote in the House against an anti-human trafficking bill. [politifact.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @06:18PM (4 children)
I tried not to judge him based on looks, but it quickly became clear he is as much of a choad as he looks like. The amount of influence someone's personality has on their appearance is quite strange.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 07 2021, @07:08PM (3 children)
Butthead is like "uh huh huh huh don't compare me to that buttmunch!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @07:34PM (2 children)
Are you mocking Gaetz or the trafficker-in-chief?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 07 2021, @08:44PM (1 child)
Gaetz is currently in the lead with credible trafficking allegations. So currently, he IS the trafficker-in-chief!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 07 2021, @08:56PM
Florida Man goes to Congress! What could possibly go wrong? Or than the trafficking, and insurrection, and frat-boy levels of crassness and illegality?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:52AM
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/politics/matt-gaetz-pardon-donald-trump/index.html [cnn.com]
A spokesperson for Gaetz, however, denied to the Times that his pardon request was related to the Justice Department investigation.
"Entry-level political operatives have conflated a pardon call from Representative Gaetz -- where he called for President Trump to pardon 'everyone from himself, to his administration, to Joe Exotic' -- with these false and increasingly bizarre, partisan allegations against him," the spokesperson told the outlet.
"Those comments have been on the record for some time, and President Trump even retweeted the congressman, who tweeted them out himself."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:41PM
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2021/04/08/tallahassee-man-arrested-child-porn-charges-florida-election-commission-lawyer-attorney/7137060002/ [tallahassee.com]
Figures these fuckers would be drawn to the penis of America.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @06:52PM (1 child)
Rightwingers never like admitting that Republicans can be bad, goes against the party loyalty ethos.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 07 2021, @07:12PM
And QAnon is only interested in pretend trafficking happening in pretend basements.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday April 07 2021, @08:46PM (1 child)
An accused rapist, a fascist, and a self declared "king of bankruptcy" walk into a bar . . .
The bartender says: Hello, Mr. Trump, do you want a Diet Coke as usual?
How about the CIA daily intelligence brief, the product of billions of annual dollars, in the format of one page with pictures?
Would you like crayons with that?
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:12AM
Trump prefers sharpies.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday April 07 2021, @09:02PM (55 children)
So what was the "sex trafficking"? From the story:
Words mean things. Having sex with a possibly mildly underage woman that happens to cross state lines isn't sex trafficking. Even if she's being paid for it. It undermines the meaning of the word to have it used so spuriously.
Sounds like bad law that needs to be reversed outright. I see no need for the federal government to be involved at all.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 07 2021, @09:26PM (6 children)
Good point. At present, the easiest place to find human and sex and drug traffickers is on the US/Mexico border. They were listening when Joe Lieden said "surge the border".
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 07 2021, @11:32PM (2 children)
Is your engine stalling? I see you tried to post but it's just making this weird repetitive noise, sounds like BUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUTWHADDABOUT.
Miiiiight wanna get that looked at :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 07 2021, @11:57PM (1 child)
There's not even a hint of "whatabout" in that post. Biden created the crisis on the border, and if he's rational enough to understand anything at all, he's decided to start building Trump's wall to head off some of the worst of his own surge.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:43PM
So you've given up any semblance of rationality and just push rightwing narratives? Wish I was shocked, I miss the 90s when conservatives at least faked having morals.
On the note of immigration, humanity really needa to get over toxic nationalism.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:27PM (2 children)
That is absurd. No reason for them to stick around at the border once they make it into the US.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 08 2021, @09:12PM (1 child)
We're speaking of the traffickers here, the coyotes. The live on the border, because that's where the business is at. The people who are traficked are moved elsewhere, rapidly, but the predators who live on their misery have no need to move on.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 08 2021, @09:26PM
I see what you mean. I was thinking of the trafficked not the traffickers. We were thinking of different things.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 07 2021, @09:31PM (15 children)
Right....transporting underage hookers across state lines and literally being investigated for the crime of sex trafficking is somehow NOT sex trafficking.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 07 2021, @11:46PM (6 children)
It's not trafficking when His Tribe (TM) does it! Silly monkey, the law *protects* the ingroup and *binds* the outgroup, not the other way around! Justice is like groceries, you buy it fresh when you need it, from a trusted supplier you've known since you were kids...!
...*Christ.*
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:09AM (5 children)
It's not trafficking when Your Tribe (TM) does it either.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:25AM (1 child)
"No u!" again, and it's not even true. Wow. Fucking wow.
Have you forgotten I worked with victims of human trafficking and sexual abuse, Hallow? Are you that much of a worthless, memoryless shitstain? I've posted on that dozens of times already. You're a piece of shit and always will be, and you will never, ever be able even to touch me, let alone drag me down to your level.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:19AM
Irrelevant. Even if I had your experience with victims of human trafficking and sexual abuse, it would not change the meaning of sex trafficking one bit. It doesn't matter who travels with underaged prostitutes across state lines for immoral purposes, it's still not sex trafficking. It would not make this bad law even a little less bad.
In other words, you've bragged about that numerous times, mostly now in contexts like this one that are irrelevant to that experience. I can't drag you down even a little, but you can.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:25AM (2 children)
How many of the other tribe are currently being accused of child trafficking?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 08 2021, @11:51AM (1 child)
All of them, if you listen to places like Gab and such =P
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:29PM
fusty outed himself apparently
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=42919&page=1&cid=1135420#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 07 2021, @11:59PM
Indeed that is the case. There seems to be a lot of woo to the definition, but I get that it's some combination of illegally smuggling people, kidnapping, slavery, etc for sexual purposes. None which appear to apply to Gaetz's acts.
There's a bad history to this. For example, a predecessor law, the Mann Act [wikipedia.org] was used to punish consenting adults who just happened to cross state lines. The Wikipedia entry I linked to above gives five examples of people who were harmed by the law for extramarital affairs and deliberate attempts at blackmail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:59AM (5 children)
If the worst of the allegations are true, looks likes sex trafficking to me.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:26AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:56PM (1 child)
Every time I think you just cannot possibly sink any lower, you prove me wrong yet again. Unbelievable!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @07:40PM
The narrative veers off the rail already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @09:05AM (1 child)
Well many laws already conflate consensual underaged sex with rape.
And underaged people sexting each other with distribution of child porn.
To me in cases of consensual underaged sex where one party is an adult, the adult perp should be thrown into prison till the "victim"/victim is 21 then the "victim"/victim is asked to confirm whether it was rape or not. If the victim is dead/seriously incapacitated or still considers it rape the perp continues in prison for a "normal rape sentence" starting from when the victim would be 21. But if the "victim" doesn't think it's rape then the "perp" goes free.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @07:41PM
Exactly, so our imprudent congresscritter is alleged to be guilty of both statutory rape and sex trafficking. What's next? Sex terrorism maybe?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:53PM
Bet he put them up in hotels [redstate.com] too huh?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 07 2021, @09:31PM
Words mean dollars. Print the ones that make the most.
Things could be worse, at least the camera loves him
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @09:59PM (4 children)
So if I steal the car you don't drive much then it isn't as big of a deal and I should just have to give it back without punishment? Words do mean things, and just because it is not quite as despicable as trafficking a 10 year old doesn't make it better. Part of the reason these laws exist is because young humans are easily misled and have raging hormones that can lead to bad decisions. I'm shocked not really how suddenly context is so important for Republican crimes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:08AM (3 children)
What does "steal" mean here? If it means what it usually means, where you actually take the car without permission and drive it off, that's stealing. If some poorly written law calls "stealing", say, your car door dinging the side of my car, then it's not stealing no matter what the law in question calls it.
Actually it does by definition of despicable. The problem here is that we don't actually have trafficking. Just FYI.
Yes, yes. Do it for the children. I've heard that all before. It doesn't make the law less stupid because there are poor reasons for the law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:47PM (2 children)
It is funny how you insert a narrative of innocence as if this is yet another example of PC culture run amok. Not a good look for you, but par for the course with STEM bros like yourself who disdain "soft sciences."
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:53PM
khallow is not a STEM guy. As I understand it, he works at a hotdog stand in a national park. I just don't want to see us STEM folks painted into the same corner with him.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @09:30PM
Well, now that you mention that, yes, it is. Here, PC is across the board, including the rightwing religious folk. But it's still running amok.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:36AM (24 children)
You wouldn't, but the fact remains he may have committed a crime.
The BBC go into a bit of background. [bbc.com]
This NY Times piece is also interesting. [nytimes.com]
It makes this point:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:39AM (23 children)
I'm perfectly fine with those federal statutes going away completely. This isn't a place where the federal government is needed, especially given the entrapment that is often involved in these cases. Here is a Florida local example [floridapolitics.com]:
[...]
The rest of that story describes hours of attempts to lure the target into breaking the law. It finishes with:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:43AM
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:08AM (8 children)
I'm sure you are fine with that, but the department of justice is not and prosecutes people for breaking those laws. Sometimes those people go to jail for a long time.
I would expect an elected member of your Federal government would know that, and not break those laws.
I also expect he is assuming he is above the law and this won't impact his lifestyle at all, but he might be wrong about that. We will see.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:22AM (6 children)
Sounds like another compelling argument to not make that a federal law then. We get less people going to jail for a long time for nonsensical crimes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:49PM (3 children)
So you are mixing bad policing with the law? Sounds like you need a brain transplant.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @06:02PM (2 children)
We have both in this case. Bad law typically encourages bad policing IMHO.
One way to deal with bad police is to curb the scope of what the police can enforce. Here, there's no compelling reason for federal law on prostitution, even underaged prostitution. States can handle that just fine.
And keep in mind the entrapment angle that I explicitly stated as part of my "mixing" at the beginning of this thread. When the goal is to catch a quota of perps rather than prevent crime, you get some hideous abuses.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:48PM (1 child)
I still don't see what that has to do with Matt Gaetz
but as usual, The Onion nailed it. [theonion.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @09:31PM
I meandered a little. But I had a segue each time. There's no leap of logic.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:42PM (1 child)
That sounds like an argument that could be made, but in this case it is not the law.
The really ironic bit is that the creepy weirdo in question belongs to the republican party who tend to be the religious moralizers. Come the next election I wonder if his constituents are going to think of him as a creepy weirdo who chases young girls, or if they're going to look at the (R) and vote for him anyway?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @09:31PM
As I mentioned earlier, it shows poor judgment.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:52PM
> Sometimes those people go to jail for a long time.
> I also expect he is assuming he is above the law [dailymail.co.uk]
> We will see.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:31AM (10 children)
And where, exactly, is the entrapment there? Guy wasn't forced to do anything he didn't want to do by the police.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @07:20AM (9 children)
Force isn't the only means of entrapment (I doubt it's common at all). Making the crime possible in the first place and deceptively easy is another way. I've heard a saying on the matter: it is inhumane to subject a person to too much temptation. I can't say what sort of person was caught in the sting operations of the story I linked. But there's a lot of desperate, lonely people out there. And I bet a bunch of them are desperate and lonely enough to fall for a honeypot operation like of the story I linked.
Second, my take is that the majority of these people caught up wouldn't have committed crime in the first place, if the police hadn't enabled it. The rational point of such operations should be to catch people who are committing crimes anyway not to enable and encourage otherwise law-abiding people to commit staged crimes.
And those things lead to my third point, that there's considerable harm being done to these people and society because otherwise law-abiding citizens are being criminalized and put in prison, often for significant sentences. That's a huge drain on society's resources. And then when released, are often punished for the rest of their lives due to various laws and regulations that convicted sexual offenders are required to follow (such as reporting their whereabouts and being put on public lists).
While I didn't find an FBI sex trafficking example at the moment, I know of other notorious examples for entrapping people. Two such examples are getting charged with lying to the FBI rather than a real crime (the Martha Stewart [wsj.com] sort of crimes). Second, is the entrapment [rollingstone.com] of fake terrorists.
But then maybe we don't have anything better for the FBI to do than arrest stupid, desperate, or gullible people?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @09:12AM (8 children)
Still don't see the entrapment. The FBI didn't make them do it in any of those, regardless of how tempting, and didn't even create the idea of using bombs in the second example. If anything, you seem to view police stings and undercover work in general in the negative as the net you cast for "entrapment" would seemingly rope in it all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @01:35PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @01:49PM
This is a dangerous game the FBI is playing. Not only are they making criminals out of people who wouldn't otherwise be criminals, they may be making victims out of people who wouldn't otherwise be victims.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:01PM
To give an example, this highly selective power can be turned against political opponents and their families. Enough honeypots, fake terrorist plots, bogus tax evasion schemes, and so on, someone will be stupid or unlucky. And now, someone you care about is in jail because you said the wrong thing or embarrassed the wrong power-that-be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:27PM (4 children)
AKA - khallow got nuthin but handwringing over the possibility of misconduct and the slippery slope possibilities
fine to worry about such, but not fine to apply such worries to real cases without proof one way or another, otherwise you become the boy that cried wolf
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @07:45PM (3 children)
Misconduct happened and it's quite a slippery slope here. It's not a fallacy when you have the real deal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:53PM (2 children)
You provided a lot of information about things OTHER than this case, yet you want to say "misconduct happened" like we should just accept that as true? You're really losing it man.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @08:56PM (1 child)
Who knows how long it'll take before that statement is shown to be a lie? Should we take it on faith when the NSA (and US intelligence in general) has a long traditional of saying things that they don't mean?
The FBI has this sort of track record. Why should we wait years for the truth to come out when the same symptoms of entrapment exist as before?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @08:56PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @01:15PM (1 child)
Wow, they were persecuting one of their own. Was he the son of a political opponent?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 08 2021, @06:08PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 08 2021, @04:16PM
No pardon for you.