Some good investigative journalism

[KCHobbyer]

Burried in one of the Houston forums is a very good thread that I have copied and pasted. It shows exactly who to point fingers at for this new era. Below is his post:


Watching the cctv of the amendment. https://tlcsenate.granicus.com/Media...&clip_id=16145
You can use the double arrows to move up and down in 3o second increments. Look from 4:22 to 4:25, those three minutes over 4 hours into the session where a handful of committee members 'snuck' in this amendment after the primary bill was authored while no one was paying attention. You can see it's just one conservative (Dan Patrick?) and a few feminist senators that have ushered in this new era for Texas... The original bill lacked the felony wording.

[Wiesbadenwillie]

your link doesn't work

[KCHobbyer]

Fixed:
https://tlcsenate.granicus.com/Media...&clip_id=16145

Looks like she was the one specifically who slid the provision in.

[Big Ed]

The recommendation is in Dan Patrick's 2020 sex trafficking report. All those list crawler ads were proof that trafficking was growing during covid... So anyway I guess this felony rule was on people's minds they just needed to wait until late in the session to slip it via an amendment in a senate committee with rules suspended. It's completely possible I missed something somewhere but from the best I can tell this is the only discussion of the felony in the 2021 legislature.

[KCHobbyer]

First off we owe a debt to Big Ed, who I failed to properly credit. The above post was his work not mine.

I'm hard pressed to believe this website is full of trafficking fans. I also don't doubt that some women are trafficked. However, there is no attempt by the law to separate trafficking and prostitution. Its almost like trafficking is the excuse to attack the other.

[mynameismudd]

You are exactly correct - consensual sex, paid or not, should never be a felony. Its complete bullshit. trafficking makes up a very small amount of prostitution, that is why nationwide trafficking arrests have been embarrassingly low despite all the effort put forth to stop it. They hide behind trafficking to legislate moral behavior. And do you know anyone that looks toward government for their moral guidelines? That being said - I think they all knew about it, and didn't want it up for debate.

[peppyleppy]

Many thanks to Big Ed for this top notch detective work. Always interesting to see the cogs turning that make this shit hole work. So my question is basically why did Patrick do this? Was this to Shanghai johns into the prison industrial complex?

[Ralph Fults]

Originally Posted by peppyleppy

Many thanks to Big Ed for this top notch detective work. Always interesting to see the cogs turning that make this shit hole work. So my question is basically why did Patrick do this? Was this to Shanghai johns into the prison industrial complex?

This was a play to the Evangelical complex.

[kochu]

Originally Posted by Ralph Fults

This was a play to the Evangelical complex.

Not just the Evangelical complex but also to the the feminist shithole.

[Big Ed]

You have the case where authoritarian religious people have mostly won out over libertarian religious people. At the same time radical feminists have won out over liberal feminist. Feminism in Italy had pornstar politicians. In the US we get Janet Reno assaulting Waco and we get Tipper Gore assaulting music. Those trends never really stopped they just got more sophisticated in their messaging so now we have these propagandized trafficking narratives. As a political reference Christianity has never really stood for anything consistently over time because the Bible contains every contradictory message one could ever include and a lot of the cultural references are simply lost in the modern era. I suppose in the current iteration popular in the US, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" no longer applies like it used to.

[Ralph Fults]

Originally Posted by Big Ed

You have the case where authoritarian religious people have mostly won out over libertarian religious people. At the same time radical feminists have won out over liberal feminist. Feminism in Italy had pornstar politicians. In the US we get Janet Reno assaulting Waco and we get Tipper Gore assaulting music. Those trends never really stopped they just got more sophisticated in their messaging so now we have these propagandized trafficking narratives. As a political reference Christianity has never really stood for anything consistently over time because the Bible contains every contradictory message one could ever include and a lot of the cultural references are simply lost in the modern era. I suppose in the current iteration popular in the US, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" no longer applies like it used to.

I knew Janet Reno was responsible for Waco! Even though it occurred 12 days before she was sworn in as Attorney General, she was already running things. She was a devious one, that Janet.

[BigBamboo]

Interestingly I was sitting next to two female government officials at dinner the other night and I overheard them talk about how stupid the solicitation felony component is in that bill. They openly agreed with one another it doesn’t stop sex trafficking. But voters ignorant to that fact just blindly vote yes to the bill.

[oldphone14]

Originally Posted by BigBamboo

Interestingly I was sitting next to two female government officials at dinner the other night and I overheard them talk about how stupid the solicitation felony component is in that bill. They openly agreed with one another it doesn’t stop sex trafficking. But voters ignorant to that fact just blindly vote yes to the bill.

Worse than being ineffective, study after study shows criminalization leads to higher john/ pimp abuse rates, higher rates of STI's, and higher rates of abuse by police.
'
There is no study that shows sex trade criminalization leads to a better outcome than regulation and oversight.

Also, (even though its in fact SUPER rare) human trafficking increases with higher criminilization...it goes even further underground (not not less available) and its whack-a-mole.

[Soccerjunky]

The REAL libertarians (such as self) don't understand why the phony libertarians - - who claim to extol individual liberty out of one side of their mouths, but legislate morality out of the other - - don't get called out for their hypocrisy.

Let's call this one as it is, shall we? It's not sufficient to decline to spend money at these places - - these imposter libertarians have to impose their morals on everyone else in the form of draconian criminal laws. When scorn does not work, resort to prohibition and law enforcement violence is not far behind.

And the laws that legislate morality don't work anyway. There is a reason that prostitution is described as the "oldest profession," and that reason is that one can always monetize the need for physical and erotic stimulation. There is always a market (i.e. a supply and a demand). These laws just end up driving those more scared of law enforcement off the radar, and it increases the demand by diminishing the supply, making the economic case for trafficking more viable.

Exhibit B - the "Drug War" (also referred to as a part of our tendency to declare "War on Nouns," that includes our misbegotten "War on Poverty," the "War on Addiction," the "War on Terror," and the "War on COVID," all prosecuted with equal inefficiency). As we ramped up our fight to interdict the supply of drugs, we made the economics of smuggling and selling of illegal drugs more and more viable, and spawned the REAL wars among Central American governments and drug gangs. At the same time, the ubiquity of drugs, their availability at high prices, and their depredations in addiction and destruction, has never been greater.

Exhibit C - Prohibition. I could go on.

When will we learn that banning personal behaviors we do not like by fiat NEVER works. Better to live and let live.

I'm off my soapbox now.

[BigBamboo]

I believe it about trafficking going further underground. Other illegal activities prove that out.

I’m curious if prostitution were legal in this county nationwide other than in Pahrump would the government take the hell out of the industry? What sort of taxes are imposed on the Vegas brothels?