When I accused them of projection in the past, I didn’t think it went this far. 
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I guess sexual predation and pedophilia are planks in the GOP platform.
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Of course the irony being that it’s the right who wants to never ever tell kids anything about sex, because then they might HAVE it! And somehow teenagers still keep right on boning and everyone’s just mystified.
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Try YELLING some MORE. It REALLY helps MAKE your ARGUMENT.
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So… “Pizzagate” is real, but part of the Trump campaign. Makes sense, given the projection involved whenever Trump says anything.
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That may well be propaganda.
One claim about liberalism, common in textbooks, is that a major discontinuity divides classical from twentieth-century liberals – James Madison from Franklin Roosevelt, Adam Smith from John Maynard Keynes. Both left and right seem to agree about this purported reversal in theory and practice. Contemporary welfare programs, conservatives assure us, represent a betrayal of the liberal legacy. And progressives in principle agree: we would never have implemented Social Security and a progressive income tax if we had not turned our backs on the devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of eighteenth-century liberals.
But is this true? What is liberalism? What was it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Was its original promise fulfilled or betrayed? Have American liberals, following Roosevelt, simply misappropriated a term that originally meant the opposite of what it has come to mean today?
Of course, you’ll probably argue that the author hasn’t read enough Marx.
That seems strange to me, that the child porn charges would be worse than the trafficking.
It implies (to me) that the “young boy” was not in fact under-age, but neither Cory’s summary or the linked article says. In other words, it seems like the “trafficking” is simple prostitution, and not some kind of child sex crime. I could be wrong, but it would seem that having pictures of underage people is a harsher crime than having sex with them.
If I’m right, the linked article is actually a bit misleading – it not unethical – with the “young boy” part, trying to make it seem like a child sex crime when it’s not.
Yea, we all enjoy a good work up of righteous indignation when a hypocrite burns, but still…
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All political communication is propaganda. Sophisticated propaganda relies upon framing and selection rather than dishonesty.
I’m obviously presenting my views from a socialist perspective, because I’m a socialist. But if I were pushing for maximum rhetorical advantage, I wouldn’t be splitting liberalism between classical and social.
Instead, I’d be lumping them together. Doing that would make it easier to tar modern liberalism with the crimes of the pre-20th century classical liberals.
“Sounds about right”
—Every Black Person serving life on a minor possession charge
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For proper outrage-calibration purposes, the teen was 17.
Refresh my memory-- where do you live?
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See here:
The Liberal Party of Australia, the Liberal Democrats in the UK, the Liberal Party of Canada: all centre to centre-right. That’s what liberalism is.
US folks tend to think of liberalism as left, but that isn’t because US liberalism is different from global liberalism. It’s because the real US leftists were suppressed and erased during the Red Scares.
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Your implication is wrong.
“Trafficking” is prostitution yes. In this case of a child.
Quoting:
The prostitution of children is prohibited by 18 U.S.C. § 1591. This statute makes it a federal offense to knowingly recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide, obtain, or maintain a minor (defined as someone under 18 years of age) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that the victim is a minor and would be caused to engage in a commercial sex act. “Commercial sex act” is defined very broadly to include “any sex act, on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.” In other words, it is illegal both to offer and to obtain a child, and cause that child to engage in any kind of sexual activity in exchange for anything of value, whether it be money, goods, personal benefit, in-kind favors, or some other kind of benefit. Section 1591 also makes it a crime for individuals to participate in a business venture that obtains minors and causes them to engage in commercial sex acts.
[…]
If the victim was under the age of 14 or if force, fraud, or coercion were used, the penalty is not less than 15 years in prison up to life. If the victim was aged 14-17, the penalty shall not be less than 10 years in prison up to life.
So - definitely a minor and judging by the sentence - between 14 and 17.
Child pornography?
Minimum jail time 15 years for enticing a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for purposes of producing visual depictions of that conduct.
The maximum sentence for the child porn offences OTOH is 30 years, for the trafficking it’s potentially life.
As for why you’d drop the one set of charges in return for a plea in relation to the other, that’s a question for proponents of the plea bargain system.
The only good reason I can see is to spare the minor from having to testify, have his pics shown round a courtroom, etc.
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