You’re riding a real fine line here. You call him out for being a bully, but how is that any different than what Dan Savage did to Rick Santorum? (which was hilarious, BTW) But you don’t call him a bully?

Brutalizing a bully isn’t bullying. It is justice. The shit (haha, pun) that comes out of Santorum’s mouth about his fellow humans is bad enough. The fact that he wants to use the force of law and the power of the state to brutalize and harass honest people who he finds morally objectionable makes him a pretty fucking fair target.

So the difference? Santorum is a frothy shit head who wants to use violence (aka, people in uniforms with guns) to enforce his fucked up sense of morality at gun point on honest citizens… while the Village Voice is a newspaper. That is a pretty stark difference.

News paper != violent psychopath looking to brutalize millions with the power of the state.

“Hey @disney @dominos,” he tweets, “Are you aware that you are advertising on a site that owns and operates a digital brothel?”

I didn’t get what the “digital brothel” line was about. Apparently he’s referring to an erotic services classifieds site owned by Village Voice.

…intimidating and bullying any perceived criticism into silence.

Comparing what Ashton is doing to Scientology is way off base. It is 100% fair to say this tactic is used regularly in Hollywood to control and abuse others. Doesn’t make it any better, but L. Ron Hubbard didn’t come up with “shunning” in a fever dream you know.

I mean, petty just doesn’t begin to cover it

I don’t know what Ms. Jardin has against people who work for human rights but don’t use the neatest methods… as if a neat method (adhering to her specs) is even possible.

You know what I liked about the “The Diary of a Young Girl?” Ann Frank was revealed not to be some fat, white pudgy dip from Atlanta, Georgia pretending to be a teenage girl.

And Ashton Kutcher is not some magical man who discovered there is a problem with sex slavery in the world. He is the only putz who actually thinks he (and ONLY he) has the power to end it.

Al Gore did not invent the Internet so it could be abused this way!

It is horrible, but it is just as evil to rescue these kids from one hell, and then throw them into another by denying them the care and help they need to become functioning human beings again.

To go a step further, how many other kids – in other, less media friendly hells – could be helped by the tens of millions of dollars we are spending to help this ( relatively ) tiny group of kids? How many kids that are sexually exploited by their families and foster families could be found and rescued? How many throw aways could be helped, how many kids of parents with substance abuse problems counseled and helped? There really are hundred of thousand of those?

The resource allocation is stupid, and causes other people to suffer. Whether you grasp it or not, it is possible to find child prostitution totally and completely evil, and still realize that we are spending too much on it because of BS information like 100,000 kids.

I think you read my comment wrong, or I was inarticulate. Or hey, its the interwebs so why not both.

Wasn’t condemning the Village Voice for having escort ads. I believe the more we can legitimize sex work; the more we can mitigate its less savory consequences.

Wasn’t condemning the Village Voice for their article’s attempt to correct a gross misrepresentation of the already suspect study about at-risk young-uns’. Bad facts makes bad policy.

I was pointing out how needlessly provocative it was to write the article in the key of “Fuck You, Ashton. Yeah, I’m talkin to you ‘Real’ Man”. Entertaining for the rest of us; maybe you get some backpats for putting pandering celebrity-hood in its place.

But with a dog in the race (the in-my-opinion reasonably legitimate escort ads), VV’s motives for the article are suspect and they actually just screwed the pooch by making it personal.

Very Greek tragedy of them.
1) Newspaper fears losing (erotic) advertisers due to over-reach of anti-trafficking celeb effort
2) goes on offensive (literally) by needlessly attacking the messenger in addition to countering their inflated evidence
3) Provokes the over-reaction they feared
4) Lose their mainline advertisers
5) Somebody else $$profits$$

And please, for the love of God, don’t drag Orly Taitz into this.

This sort of numbers inflation is actually very common in the various anti-sex-trade movements. It’s seen a lot in the anti-sex-trafficking world, but I’ve seen similar things in even local-level prostitution discussions.

If you want to convince people to support your cause, start with the truth.

It’s impossible in a forum like this to use rough numbers to make a point like in a face-to-face conversation. Trying to do so was silly of me. The numbers stand there, available for the sort of deep analysis that will always prove them wrong.

Allow me to eschew numbers and restate my overall point.

If the problem was anywhere near as big as Ashton says, a public awareness campaign wouldn’t be necessary. We’d all be familiar with the problem because we would have all run into it at one time or another.

Thus, something more is at play here. Perhaps the purpose of lying about and inflating the numbers is something other than creating public awareness or working towards fixing the problem. Perhaps the reason is simple ego gratification. Perhaps it’s just incompetence. My cynical old brain tends to think, whenever I see something that makes a big splash and is this ridiculous, that somebody has found yet another way to make a buck off of fake good works. Overall, though, I don’t know anything for certain about the motivations of those behind such silly numbers.

But I firmly believe that spouting ridiculous numbers hurts more than it helps.

I also sadly conclude that such exaggerations are too often a successful way to manipulate public opinion for less-than-noble purposes. The “big lie” is a great way to get laws passed that abridge basic freedoms, whip up support for an unjustifiable war, etc. When big lies are told, I like to challenge people to take a deep breath, calm down, and ask some (usually pretty simple) questions to test whether or not what they are hearing is even halfway plausible.

That’s pretty much all I was saying.

Reasonable? Or not?

And if you are against human trafficking then push to have prostitution legalized so it doesn’t have to hide and it can be monitored. Laws shouldn’t be based on the “what if it was my daughter” test. That is bogus.

So I read the VV article. Looks like AK is fighting to cover the ass of himself, the hollywood “charity consultant” who advises “hip” hollywood on how to spend their cash, and nothing, actually, on the real live underage prostitutes police and other groups actually rescue. Meanwhile, VV appears to have spent some time & money looking into the situation, interviewing people intimately involved in underage prostitution in the US, police departments, and then coming up with a more realistic estimate. And went back with these numbers to see if they seemed reasonable. Much more than AK troubled himself with.

There are many people in the US, who enjoy the power and prestige of the appearance of caring about some critical issue. Often, they sometimes actually care. More often we see knee-jerk legislation enacted to “protect the children”, by the same people gutting other programs that actually do children & their families some good.

Case in point: the anti vaccination crusade led by Jenny McCarthy. Even after the original investigator admitted fraud in his study, confirming many medical researcher’s own findings that these vaccines were NOT causing autism, the movement lives on… with no sign of stopping by Jenny, who sees any medical disagreement as “Proof of the Conspiracy”.

So speak out, but when your argument is proved bullshit, have the common decency to admit you were wrong – and prove yourself a bigger man – then trying to cover your ass with a boycott campaign.

I don’t know what Ms. Jardin has against people who work for human rights but don’t use the neatest methods.

Well, I can’t speak for her, but my take on it is that she values honesty.

I know that may sound fuddy duddy in today’s blog-o-sphere, opinion-driven world, but think of it sort of as “steampunk ethics,” and that may make it a little more palatable.

Children are abused by people they know, which is why I avoid contact with children.

I’m really not sure about that you’re trying to say here, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out quite right.

If you are going to use numbers and dates, why even bother if they are wrong? Might as well just always make stuff up, and then when corrected or questioned, make sure that the discussion then becomes about the person who brought up the information, not the information itself.

Is this really that important? The VV is half-trash anyhow. Ashton seems to have good motives, but a fragile ego. Looks to me like he isn’t the only guy with ego issues in this fight, either.

I’m a nerd-lover. I don’t like it when my favorite people succumb to pettiness. I wish you’d stop and just move on to actually interesting stuff. Affix a photo-shopped, unflattering picture of Mr. Kutcher to a dartboard in your office and stop with the silly public slapfight already.

I believe in the existence of the “big lie” as much as you do, but also kind of get the feeling that there’s more going on around us than we actually pay attention to. The most common thing I think I hear or read (when some big bust goes down or some poor kid is found dead or abused) is how so few people ever suspected a thing.
I’ll readily admit that I don’t really know diddly about my neighbors. You could be conducting arms sales right next door and I would think it was a lemonade stand.

But that’s exactly the kind of situation the fear-mongers feed on, isn’t it?

“Although comprehensive research to document the number of children engaged in prostitution in the United States is lacking, it is estimated that about 293,000 American youth are currently at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation.”

From the US Justice Department.

In Austin, the house already got busted when I found out. It was a high-profile case at the time, and the young women were promised housekeeping jobs and had been kept prisoner in the house the entire time. Not even the neighbors really knew until someone started to question the amount of traffic in front of the house and called police, because they thought it was someone dealing drugs.

Actually, the Chisinau incident was disappointing. An acquaintance of mine was seeing a woman who worked in the police department. He relayed the information, but not sure where that went. Who knows? She said it’s understood that SOME police keep an eye and an ear out for anything because they frequent the brothels, and help to spread disinformation for the pimps.
The deal wasn’t consummated on the spot, either. More of a “we’ll get back to you later” kind of thing.
I was just as disgusted with the American as the pimp, anyway. His attitude was “fuck the business (trip), I’m horny and need to get laid”. He was the one who was pressing for the deal to get done, and making a bad impression as an American.

You see something, you say something. Yeah, one wishes one could do more, but I’m not Liam Neeson and this isn’t a movie.

Why do people want to shut down the messenger? Kutcher can either win or lose his argument by doing just that. Have a conversation. But asking people to not listen is plain wrong.

Disgusting. Wake up.

The folks here using Kutcher’s discredited numbers to argue that the problem is very small are a more important issue. That issue is denial.

Using the number of arrests as a proxy for the actual size of a problem is silly with even casual consideration.

We now know that just the Catholic Church, just in Ireland, kept thousands of child sex slaves at any given time, for decades, up until the 1990s. And you think the scale of the problem in the entire US is a few hundred? That’s outside the the realm of plausibility.

So what motivates the denial? Is it just too depressing to live in the real world.

I seem to remember that he was later accused of denying the genocide in Cambodia after he published a piece where he pointed out that the proof of genocide in East Timor was equally strong. The people claiming he was denying the genocide in Cambodia were intentionally misrepresenting him.

What is quite striking about the US media however is the low standard of evidence that they apply to scare statistics like Kutchers and the exceptionally high standard of evidence they demand in other areas.