Hacker News Reader

Comment by fwungy | Hacker News Reader

The implications of this ruling are mind boggling. Simply doing business with someone who is committing a crime, even if you didn't know, is a crime by this logic. By extension any business using Salesforce is also now engaged with a criminal enterprise and thus criminals too.

Interestingly enough the BackPage prosecution was headed up by Kamala Harris to make it look like she was doing something about sex trafficking. I wonder if her finger is on the scale. It's all so stupid. She's good at that.

View on HN

"I wonder if her finger is on the scale."

I think she's too busy leading the AI Taskforce...

"leading"

I was with you until:

> Interestingly enough the BackPage prosecution was headed up by Kamala Harris to make it look like she was doing something about sex trafficking.

How is it that politicians (in this case the CA and TX Attorney Generals) doing something to reduce sex trafficking is bad?

The very term “sex trafficking” is a kind of newspeak to make a very common thing sound like the worst possible version of it (when you hear the term, you probably think of someone being stuffed into a hot shipping container and moved around like a full-on slave). Sex trafficking is just any kind of work involved in organizing prostitution that isn’t prostitution itself - which can still be very unethical and at its worse the thing I described, but also something fully consented to by all parties.

If you consider sex trafficking to be “all prostitution that isn’t 100% freelance” you might reconsider whether it’s a purely bad thing. Of course, because of the use of the term “sex trafficking” by design arguing from this premise isn’t something people and especially politicians are willing to do in public, which is why the term has had so much success in criminalizing and prosecuting prostitution in recent years

> If you consider sex trafficking to be “all prostitution that isn’t 100% freelance”

Given the response to sites like Backpage, the modern-day Puritans are evidently happy to throw 100% freelance work into the "trafficking" bucket as well.

As many sex workers point out, the more you push sex work underground, by criminalizing even being around it, the more control "Pimps" and similar folks get. A sex worker can't go to the police or the Labor board if their employer is doing bad or illegal shit.

> How is it that politicians (in this case the CA and TX Attorney Generals) doing something to reduce sex trafficking is bad?

This would be fine, if the narrative wasn't FALSE.

How do these suits not get dismissed as moot since this original narrative about Backpage is factually wrong?

It is sort of like the lesser version of "think of the children".

Yes we need to protect children, but when that is the argument it is a huge red flag that someone is trying to force the argument by relating it to something that we all agree is terrible. that is, trying to bypass normal understanding of the problem.

I say this as a lifelong Democrat: Kamala Harris is the worst sort of useless political moron.

Because it was about looking like doing something, and doing something in that case made it actively worse. They not only made sex trafficking harder to track but attacked the greatest cooperator they ever had.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com