April 14, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
A lot of...urban legends [are] old wine in new bottles. - Benjamin Radford
A Broker in Pillage (#863)The Notorious Badge (#976)South Korean prosecutors have sold bitcoin...[stolen from people they branded] criminals...turn[ing] a profit of around 12.3 billion won (around US$10.9 million)...the [excuse used for the robbery was that the victim was]..."the operator of [an] illegal pornography site"...While the U.S. government has been auctioning [stolen] bitcoin since 2014, Korean prosecutors have held on to the [stolen] bitcoin for the past four years...[until] March 25, the exact day when the country's [politicians]...classifie[d] crypto as "virtual assets"...
Twitter's connection to movies exploiting sex workers isn't usually so direct:
The Last Shall Be First (#977)After receiving rave reviews at last year's Sundance festival, the full trailer for Janicza Bravo's Twitter-storm dramedy Zola is finally here...the film follows Zola (Taylour Paige), a Detroit waitress who strikes up a friendship with a customer named Stefani (Riley Keough). Together, they head to Florida to earn some money stripping at a club where Stefani has heard dancer tips are excellent. As the trip progresses, Stefani puts Zola and herself in more insane and dangerous situations, including run-ins with a nameless pimp and some Tampa gangsters... Zola is based on a viral Twitter thread posted in October 2015 by Detroit-based stripper A'ziah "Zola" King...detail[ing] a weekend of debauchery that quickly descends into a hellish whirlwind of sex, murder, and near-suicide...
Arkansas [politician]s passed a bill...that would flatly prohibit medical professionals from providing any sort of gender transition treatments to minors ...the...act...forbids the prescribing of puberty blockers to suppress hormones, bans genital reassignment surgeries, and bars any medical treatment that would "alter or remove physical or anatomical characteristics or features for the individual's biological sex" or "instill or create physiological or anatomical characteristics that resemble a sex different from the individual's biological sex"...[it] further forbids medical professionals from referring minors to any doctor who could provide the forbidden treatments...says that public funds may not be granted to any entity that provides trans treatments to minors, declares that medical transition treatment procedures are not tax-deductible forms of health care coverage (regardless of age), and prohibits the state's Medicaid program from providing coverage for these treatments for minors. Medical professionals who defy the law could lose their licenses to practice in the state...
It's impossible to miss the resemblance of this strategy to that of imposing arbitrary restrictions on abortion providers.
US "authorities" keep pretending "because sex" is an excuse for any tyranny:
The Widening Gyre (#1103)...a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected a defense petition that the court order federal Judge Susan Brnovich's recusal from the Lacey/Larkin case...due to an "appearance of partiality" created by prejudicial statements made by the judge's husband, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, concerning...Backpage...The trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 23 ...
It was only a matter of time before "sex trafficking" scarelore invaded TikTok:
"OK, so I saw this TikTok that Target is the new sex trafficking hub"...Makenzie Jade says in her video. She then tells a story about being followed by a man...in...her local Target, then being circled by two additional men with nothing in their shopping carts...Over the past week...there have been dozens of [similar] videos, some with millions of views, in which young women from all over the country describe being followed by strange men or women in Target in what they [fantasize is] an attempted trafficking operation...what[ever] that...means...experts are highly skeptical of these reports. "I have never heard a case of anyone being abducted from Target in my 20 years in this field," says Jean Bruggeman...of Freedom Network USA,
[ the largest coalition of groups actually concerned with exploitation rather than simply using it as a cover for persecution of sex workers] ...the TikTok rumors...adhere to a familiar pattern of...urban legends intended to spread hysteria...Dubious rumors purporting to raise awareness about the "realities" of sex trafficking are nothing new...
In a sign that the hysteria is dying, note that even the perennially-clueless Rolling Stone bluntly calls this what it is ("hoax") rather than deferentially referring to it as a "mistake" or the like.
Predictable ConsequencesOh look, somebody at Washington Post realized how tone-deaf their initial coverage was:
[When cops raided] three massage businesses...they [branded with the moralistic epithet "]illicit[", they vomited out a lot of filth about]..."human trafficking and child exploitation" [to]...cover [up the fact that the disguised cops raped sex]...workers, then arrested them...local media outlets...[then abetted the outrage by outing the cops' victims, complete with names and] photos of their mug shots on the evening news...[barfing up the magic word "]illicit[" has for decades given disguised, lying thugs a court-approved pretext for raping]...spa workers...[none of whom were inter]viewed by The Post ...[but after decades of these repeated atrocities, a few politicians] are [finally] beginning to propose new limits on [rape] by police, which [any person with a functional moral compass should understand] serves to dehumanize - and [deepl]ly traumatize - the very women the raids are [claimed by psychopaths] to help. The...[rapists in] law enforcement, experts said, [nearly always] go unpunished...
As you can see, the article is still replete with copsucking, but some editor appears to have at least some inkling that maybe they're on the wrong side.
Pyrrhic Victory (#1124)Still think this djinni can be crammed back into its bottle?
A...facial recognition tool designed [to give government even more power over individual lives] has been quietly deployed across the [US] with little to no public oversight...more than 7,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 [government] agencies nationwide have used Clearview AI to search through millions of Americans' faces, looking for p[otential victims]...BuzzFeed News has developed a searchable table of 1,803 publicly funded agencies whose employees...used...the [surveillance] tool before February 2020. These include local and state police, [ICE], the Air Force, state healthcare [bureaucracies], [politicians'] offices...and even public schools. In many cases, [bureaucrats] at these agencies [claimed to be] unaware that employees were using the tool; five [lied]...in response to questions about it...210 organizations denied any use...1,161 [others ignored] questions about whether they had used it...Hoan Ton-That, the company's cofounder and CEO, [expressed glee that his invention has done so much to undermine privacy and empower cop shops]...
What makes it worse is, cops just keep blatantly lying about it:
Despite statements from the NYPD in early 2020 stating that it had no relationship with... Clearview AI, documents...reveal that the company was an acknowledged vendor to the department from as early as 2018, and that it continue[s] to enjoy a congenial relationship ...that [has] included in-person meetings and customer support from Ton-That [himself]...
