Maybe ask first? As if it’s not incumbent on him to do his homework first.
The issue is that this guy is very close to the president, as is the pimp/trafficker who ran the establishment. It would seem there is a good chance there is some sort of connection there, rather than a big f’in coinkydink. That is news and it deserves to be investigated, regardless of anyone’s personal views on the morality/legality of what happened.
The fact that the president is refusing to even distance himself from the guy adds more fuel to the fire. If this were some other sports team owner with no ties to the president, yes, it’s less newsworthy. Add to that the Trump’s history of soliciting sex workers/paying for sex and, well, I think anyone could be forgiven for thinking there might be fire where all that smoke is coming from.
You’re starting from the assumption that the main motivation of the media here is to pick on Trump via Kraft, rather than Trump potentially having a role in all of this. The truth actually matters here.
funny how it doesn’t. I don’t give a shit when any of the people listed in that do it either.
again…national news should not be “XYZ person wanted a quickie”. I want real fucking news. This shit belongs in the Enquirer as far as I am concerned, regardless of the named individuals.
I think causality is kind of running the other way here. Less that power twists people into thinking less of others, and more that people who are oriented towards dominance seek power and we’ve sort of collectively lifted every check on that.
I don’t think that there is a difference between sex work and human trafficking.
One becomes the other. Repeatedly legalized sex work has immigrants coerced into sex work with threats of “we brought you here; we know where your family lives back home and we got a guy there now” as coercion.
And Germany and the Netherlands found that type of coercion impossible to challenge due to the immigrant’s home country’s law enforcement not having the resources to deal with it.
So at this point I don’t see a difference; I just see myopic thinking.
Leaving aside the Trump connection, how is it not newsworthy when someone with that much money and power commits a crime? It sends the message to the rest of us plebs that hey, they get to play by different rules.
Just because you don’t think he’s done anything morally objectionable doesn’t mean he should be immune from coverage when he’s done something illegal. Nor does it mean Kraft should be the poster boy for the general wish of readers on this site to make sex work legal.
It’s not the job of news media to decide what is and what isn’t morally acceptable.
Good thing that doesn’t happen then. Instead, they report “Powerful or influential XYZ person committed this criminal act and was charged with a crime” and “Powerful or influential XYZ person paid sex traffickers for access to a sex slave”. Me, I’m glad they call the powerful and influential out for that. Clearly you don’t think it’s a big deal but a lot of us do.
You may want to read about the legal brothels in Nevada and how they handle it. It’s a world away from human trafficking.
I should leave it there, but when have I ever done that? Also, I don’t expect anything I say here to change anyone’s mind on this topic. But who knows?
I would argue that one becomes the other when nothing is done to prevent it, or legitimately help the victims and punish the villains.
Outlawing sex work certainly doesn’t help the situation, because people are going to fuck, and as long as “money” is a thing, wicked people are going to supply monied people with captive people to fuck, that they wouldn’t be able to easily fuck otherwise, in exchange for some of that money because that’s all they value. The more difficult the laws make that, the more money they can charge for their service. The more they can make, the more incentive they have to provide the service.
This is pie-in-the-sky thinking on my part, but I feel that’s when the government needs to step in and do some good for once; work with the other governments to help these people out of that situation. And bring a smack down on the perpetrators across all borders.
If there were consequence at both ends for human trafficking – I mean real “pray to Jesus you make it out alive, and you’ll never do it again” consequences – Perhaps there might be a downswing in human trafficking.
By saying that legalizing sex work invariably leads to a situation where a sex worker’s family is threatened implies that keeping it illegal does what exactly? Keeps things as they are, where a woman brought over from another country has NOWHERE to turn to for help in that country without also ending up in jail or dead? How is that going to do anything to fix the situation?
There are no laws that will put an end to the oldest profession outside of “nobody gets to fuck anybody for any reason ever.” And even then…
What laws against sex work do is shove it into the darkness so Joe Public can pretend it doesn’t exist. It also adds grist to the prison mill in the form of sex workers who can’t buy themselves out of an arrest. It clears non-violent offenders off the streets, and their absence increases demand. And the jackals that fulfill that demand are the ones with the money to insulate themselves from the system; either through bribes or bail.
The ones doing this shit have the support networks. The victims don’t. And in a country where it’s illegal, they never will.
Sex work is one of the only ways that some people can survive in a society that deems them unfairly unfit to live such as our capitalist hellworld. Many of my trans friends would starve without the income from sex work, which, when done on their terms, is a very pleasant job in an otherwise very unpleasant world. Criminalizing sex work is just an excuse to further criminalize the existence of persecuted minorities.
If you want to stop human trafficking, then you need to examine the kind of world we have built where some people can have so much institutional power over other people. i.e. you need to examine capitalism.
It’s not really pie-in-the-sky thinking. If sex work was legal and sex workers were being threatened they could call the police. I bring this up all the time, but in New Zealand a prostitute sued the owner of the brothel they worked at for sexual harassment. When people’s profession isn’t criminal and they get in trouble, they go through normal channels for help*.
I think that prostitutes need a self-regulating professional college. That would actually help people who wanted to work in the field and make it considerably harder to coerce people. It would let the rest of us know that if we wanted to purchase sex we could do so from someone reputable, and it would allow from some public safety standards (e.g. regular STI testing) without criminalizing the profession.
* I recognize that normal channels are far from perfect, they are better than the situation human trafficking victims are in.
I agree. And I think having a wide pool of sex workers would make it even less of a financial bonanza to bring in trafficked people from the outside. Especially if the government wasn’t predisposed to imprisoning the sex workers.
A college is a good idea for learning and dispersing good ideas, but should not be a requirement. Otherwise again, you are just introducing a barrier for the people that have the least resources to deal with it. I think the only way to handle this is to base our law around consent.
E.g. you mention wanting to prevent STI transmission. I think that would be better handled by improving our sex education, making reproductive health free and easy to access, and punishing violations of consent such as when a person signs off saying they have been tested and don’t have an STI, and then are found to have knowingly lied about not having an STI (and this could either be a provider or a client).
Yeah, that enters another of our shittier than shit realms where the average person is routinely fucked; for-profit education. At least in the US. College may be affordable in other countries.
But nothing says that a college like that couldn’t be handled outside of the private sector, and without the dirty fingers of free enterprise getting involved. And that would avoid “Trump Prostitute University” from happening. And now that’s all I’m picturing.
