Perverts, Degenerates and Sociopaths

Sue Lyon in Lolita (1962)

S.J. Reidhead has an excellent examination of the characteristic problems of pro-pedophile apologists in the “Free Kate” movement, an inevitable consequence of the arguments that the Hunt family has made in defense of the accused sex offender Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt.

From the beginning, both Kaitlyn’s parents have been dishonest about the case for the simple reason that, if they had been honest, the response would have been: “She ought to take the plea bargain.” The creation of a false narrative of victimhood was the only way for them to gain widespread sympathy. Once the truth about the case became public (the facts have been compiled at Support Honesty), the “Free Kate” movement lost mainstream support, and what was left was a hard core of fanatics, many of them evidently suffering from emotional disorders.

Meanwhile, however, S.J. Reidhead writes:

If you start surfing the internet, you will find that there are numerous articles popping up, along with sites, saying that the whole problem of pedophilia is hysteria.

This argument — that pedophiles are so rare that only “hysterics” worry about them — is often accompanied by pious lectures about the importance of understanding these pedophiles we shouldn’t worry about. And occasionally you find them citing “studies” which, upon further investigation, were authored by notorious pedophiles.

I’ve occasionally called attention to the case of Lawrence Stanley, whose 2002 arrest in Brazil I was the first American journalist to report. Stanley was the author of widely-cited “research” asserting that child pornography was both extremely rare and relatively harmless. Few knew it at the time, but Stanley is also a pedophile. Under the pseudonym “N.S. Aristoff,” he was editor/publisher of a quarterly newsletter called Uncommon Desires (“the voice of a politically conscious girl-love underground”) and, under other aliases, including “L.A. Stanaman,” he operated “Alessandra’s Smile,” which marketed pedophilia-themed merchandise including European nudist videos which can perhaps best be described as “soft-core kiddie porn.”

Stanley was arrested in Brazil, where he had been living for four years as a fugitive, having been convicted of sexually abusing children in the Netherlands (and similarly charged, but never prosecuted, in Quebec). At the time of his arrest, Stanley was operating a Web site that featured photos of girls ages 8 to 14 “modeling” swimsuits and underwear in what a police officer described as “sensual poses.”

Stanley’s career as a child pornographer and “girl-love” advocate were not mentioned, of course, when his dubious research was cited in the controversial 2002 book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Kids from Sex. Judith Levine’s book became a cause célèbre among some liberals for its arguments dismissing concerns about child molestation as a “moral panic” and repeatedly citing Lawrence Stanley’s work as proving the rarity of child pornography.

Such was the effectiveness of my reporting about Levine’s book that, if you order it on Amazon, you’ll find she added a foreword to the paperback edition in which she mentions me as part of the “anti-sex” (!) forces she blames for making her book controversial. But the controversy was Levine’s own fault because her argument — that parents were harming children by trying to protect them from perverts — is exactly what the perverts themselves have been arguing for years, and Levine’s book repeatedly cited not only Lawrence Stanley, but also multiple contributors to the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika.

A ‘Volatile’ Sense of Self-Worth

Lawrence Stanley came immediately to mind when I saw an analysis by Joyce Anthony cited in S.J. Reidhead’s article today:

Pedophiles appear to have narcissistic and antisocial (psychopathic) traits. They lack compassion for their victims and express no repentance for their actions. . . .
Pedophiles are irresponsible and psychologically labile.  The pedophile’s sense of self-worth is volatile and deregulated. . . .
Narcissistic pedophiles claim to be infallible, superior, talented, skillful, omnipotent, and omniscient.

Oh, let’s re-read that passage again:

Narcissistic pedophiles claim to be infallible, superior, talented, skillful, omnipotent, and omniscient.

That describes Lawrence Stanley to a tee — a lawyer who, in characteristic Wile E. Coyote fashion, believed he could out-smart the forces opposed to his sick obsession. Every time he got away with it (as in 1993, when he beat the rap on a federal charge of importing child pornography), this convinced him that he was superior to his antagonists, and he kept at it until he found himself in a Brazilian jail.

This brings us to a point it’s taken 700 words to a reach: Have you ever wondered what’s wrong with all these kooks on the Internet?

Because I sure as hell have.

Regular readers of this blog need no introduction to the parade of Internet Troll All-Stars with whom I’ve crossed paths over the years. For some reason, I’m an irresistible troll-magnet and, in the course of these encounters, it usually becomes obvious that the troll has personality traits similar to those described by Joyce Anthony — narcissistic, antisocial, lacking compassion, psychologically labile (i.e., prone to mood swings). And you don’t have to do too much scratching of the surface of the “Free Kate” movement to uncover such psychological tendencies among those who are fanatically committed to legalizing sex with 14-year-olds.

Perhaps this is not merely a coincidence, IYKWIMAITYD.

You may have noticed also that the Internet Troll All-Stars generally tend to be filled with a vindictive rage toward Republicans. And perhaps this is likewise not merely a coincidence.

Remember that child pornography that Lawrence Stanley’s “research” claimed did not actually exist, even while he was importing and/or producing it? Well, the Bush administration came into office determined to crack down on that stuff on the Internet. The Bush administration coordinated this with their crackdown on sex trafficking and “sex tourism” under the name Operation Predator which, in its first four years of existence, had reported more than 9,000 arrests. So much for the non-existence of pedophiles, eh?

All during the Bush years, there were a series of high-profile raids, many of them coordinated through Interpol with European authorities, to shut down online child pornography networks. In November 2001, “Operation Landmark” resulted in raids in 19 countries and, in July 2002, “Operation Twins” targeted a German-based network:

The gang was “a group of paedophiles who exchanged photos and videos of violence committed against their own sons and daughters and other children,” Italian police said.
The gang’s activities included the production and distribution of child pornography and abuse of children. Abuse was filmed and broadcast in “real time” over the Internet, police said.
The investigation began in Sweden more than a year ago but rapidly broadened to other countries. Europol, based in The Hague, the Netherlands, coordinated the operation involving 12 countries, including the United States, Canada and Switzerland.

Two years later, in July 2004, police in the Ukraine raided a porn operation that involved more than a thousand underage girls:

Police said the agency had attracted around 1,500 girls aged from eight to 16 to their offices in the capital Kiev, Kharkiv in the east and Simferopol in the south.
“The pictures (of the girls) were then sent to the United States and Canada via Internet channels,” Yarema said.
Police also froze the bank accounts of the agency, which earned “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars” in the past three years.

Another big raid came in March 2006:

Federal and international authorities have charged 27 people in nine states and three other countries in connection with an Internet child pornography ring that federal authorities say is one of the worst they have discovered.
“The behavior in these chat rooms and the images many of these defendants sent around the world through peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and private instant messaging services are the worst imaginable forms of child pornography,” Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said at a news conference in Chicago, where the indictments were announced Wednesday.
Federal and state charges, including the manufacture, possession and distribution of child pornography, have been filed against 13 people in Illinois, Tennessee, Michigan, Nevada, Florida, New York, Arizona, Hawaii and North Carolina. Charges have also been brought against 14 defendants in Canada, Australia and Britain.

These are just a few examples from the worldwide crackdown on child pornography. But they didn’t nab all the perverts, of course, which means there are still a lot of creeps out there who remember the Bush era bitterly as “When The Good Stuff Went Away.”

Troll Psychology: Monsters on the Internet

Does this explain some of the otherwise inexplicable rage reactions one encounters among Internet trolls? Are some of these people vindictively lashing out at conservatives online as proxies for “Religious Right” forces the perverts blame for the stigmatization of their addictive cravings and the Bush-era crackdown that deprived them of their online fix? Perhaps you remember this case:

The classic example of the troll mentality was Michael Brutsch, a.k.a. Violentacrez, the notorious “jailbait” troll on Reddit.
In the free-for-all environment which the proprietors of Reddit seemingly encouraged, Violentacrez’s domineering id-monster act flourished. There were no limits he would not transgress, no sensibilities he failed to offend, and anyone who tried to get in his way was denounced as a crybaby, a “pussy.” . . .
There are many words to describe Brutsch’s online behavior, but the important word is antisocial — a hostility to rules, a defiance of authority, an unwillingness to cooperate with others. Rules exist for a reason, and if you have a problem understanding why “distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls” is against the rules . . .
Dude, do I even need to finish that sentence?

Let me hasten to add that I have no way of knowing if Violentacrez ever did anything illegal, online or otherwise, but he certainly seemed to have “narcissistic and antisocial (psychopathic) traits” and to be “irresponsible and psychologically labile.” IYKWIMAITYD.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” as a famous cartoon expressed the way in which the anonymity of the online world enables people to hide behind artificial personas. The company that employed Michael Brutsch as a 49-year-old computer programmer in Texas had no idea he was also “Violentacrez,” the id-monster who presided over an online fiefdom of “jailbait” and “creepshots.” Oops.

The troll’s fear of exposure — someone connecting their Internet alias to their real-life identity — often feeds into a paranoid worldview. Such people typically lash out at scapegoats and express hostility toward law enforcement and other authority figures. Which brings us to another familiar character . . .

John Tiessen is a supporter of the “Anonymous” and “Occupy” movements who made the mistake of attacking the Jester, a hacker who is an avowed enemy of both of those movements. Tiessen falsely claimed to “know” that the Jester is a child molester (which is strange, considering no one even knows who the Jester is) and — surprise! surprise! surprise! — the Jester discovered that John Edward Tiessen pleaded guilty in 1992 to third-degree sexual assault. Tiessen explained his offense in a weird 17-minute YouTube video rant:

“That’s just one of many things that I’m accused of and today I still have a hard time with what I did. I know I’m guilty. . . .
“The coke whore that I picked up promised me a blow job if I gave her coke and then she tried to renege on it, and I said, ‘No, you’re going to do it.’ . . .
“Don’t ostracize people who are coming out of prison. . . .
“I’m a f–king true freedom fighter. . …”

Thanks for the crazytalk, John. And because we have no access to the police report of your 1992 sex offense, we’ll just have to take your word that you were the victim of a lying coke whore who tried to cheat you out of a blow job, rather than guilty of any other category of offense listed under Minnesota Criminal Statute 609.344.

John Edward Tiessen is both a convicted sex offender and a lying Internet troll, but certainly we have no evidence that John Edward Tiessen has any perverse interest in children. The hard drive on his computer may be clean as a whistle, as far as we know.

When You Turn Over the Rock

The point is, we don’t know very much about these characters who pop up on the Internet spewing incoherent rage, but when we find them engaging in such activity in support of an accused sex offender like Kaitlyn Hunt, shouldn’t we be just a wee bit skeptical of their claims that their interest in the case is strictly a matter of being concerned about civil liberties and social justice?

When I encounter a raving lunatic like “Queer Spring 2013” obscenely attacking anyone who criticizes the “Free Kate” movement, certainly I’m suspicious about the source of their vehement fanaticism. We don’t know these people, and we have to judge them based strictly by their online behavior, which is atrocious. And you really never know what you’ll find until you turn over the rock:

CANCUN, Mexico — Mexican authorities have arrested a former university professor who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in the resort city of Playa del Carmen.
Prosecutor Gaspar Armando Garcia Torres said Walter Lee Williams, 64, is wanted on charges of sexual exploitation of children and traveling abroad for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts with children. . . .
The indictment alleges Williams traveled from Los Angeles to the Philippines in January 2011 to engage in sex acts with two 14-year-old boys he met online in 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement Monday.
While in the Philippines, Williams allegedly engaged in sex acts with both boys and produced sexually explicit photos of one of the boys. . . .
Until 2011, Williams was a tenured professor at the University of Southern California where his field of study was gender development. Williams was also affiliated with the Buddhist Universal Association of Los Angeles, California, according to the FBI.
“Williams has an extensive history of travel throughout the South East Asia region, specifically the Philippines,” the FBI said. “He has reportedly resided in Indonesia, Polynesia and Thailand.”

The professor’s “field of study was gender development,” and I suppose banging 14-year-old boys could be considered “research,” eh?

Just another typical Democrat on his way to federal prison. And speaking of going to prison for sex with 14-year-olds . . .

We know quit a bit about Kate Hunt.  She comes from a family who doesn’t appear to practice impulse control. . . .
Their vocal supporters who appear to stop at nothing to attempt to prevent anyone from speaking out on the situation are either friends, family members, or a small group of individuals . . . [who] are not of the most savory character types.

Is everyone who supports Kaitlyn Hunt also a perverted degenerate? No. Some of them are just crazy. And some are just liberals.

But I repeat myself . . .