Donald Trump has not been accused of paying for sex, but several supporters protesting outside of his trial on Monday wanted to make it clear that they have. It seems the crowds that come out to protest the persecution of the former president are getting smaller, and weirder

Today, however, the crowd had thinned to a handful of true believers and true characters – those who don’t leave their house without a giant flag, a bullhorn, and an offensive T-shirt they made themselves.

It’s not only that the crowds are getting smaller, it’s that they are getting significantly weirder.

Of the people willing to step up to a microphone outside the courthouse and defend Mr Trump for allegedly paying off a porn star to hide his alleged affair from prospective voters, two offered something of a wild defence: that they opposed the charges because they too had paid for sex on more than one occasion, and assumed most men had done the same.

It didn’t matter to them that Mr Trump is not being accused of paying for sex, but rather accused of having embarked on several extra-marital affairs and falsifying business records over payments made to hide those affairs from the voting public in 2016.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Well, let’s legalize prostitution. Regulate it, tax it, legitimize it.

    Conservatives: hell no, we can’t have that depravity and vice. We need to punish women for sex outside of marriage. Oh, yeah…and no abortions for them either. (Unless it’s my daughter or mistress)

    • TenderfootGungi@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If we are going to make it illegal, we really need to flip the laws and make it illegal to hire one. This would give those in the business a legal way of asking for help.

    • ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      It makes my head hurt how ridiculous conservatives are and how they spin things. They’re only making their lives harder. Imagine the amount of tax revenue that could be collected from legalizing prostitution.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It’s not a homogenous group. You’ve absolutely got libertarians on one end, wanting to dissolve the state and legalize a market for children as sexual commodities on one end. And then you’ve got the Holy Rollers on the order end, who think coffee and cigarettes need to be next on the chopping block.

        They formed an alliance of convenience to crush the labor movement. But now they are very awkward bedfellows.

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It’s obvious that they don’t because they only ever work one variable (spending) of the fucking equation:

          spending - income = deficit

          Even if you stop all of your spending entirely, you’ll remain in debt forever if you never have any income, so it’s a losing way to fix the problem, but that won’t stop them or their idiot voters from insisting upon it.

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      7 months ago

      I see this sentiment a lot from the uneducated crowd, but unfortunately human trafficking seems to increase whenever sex work is legalized so I cannot condone it.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        7 months ago

        Human trafficking is there, anyway. The victims tend to be afraid, because they’re forced to do otherwise illegal things, and therefore don’t want to come forward. So what often happens under legalization is that a whole bunch of victims suddenly come out, which is now recorded as an increase in human trafficking.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        “Uneducated”

        I think you need to do some reading, friend. Human trafficking is already a big problem. Legitimizing sex work and regulating it removes t some of the incentives to operate behind the scenes, just like legalizing pot, and frankly you get rid of the whole under-age thing because no government entity is going to allow that.

        S/he’s right.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          7 months ago

          I wish it were true, but it’s really not. Human trafficking increases in both countries that legalize sex work and also countries where the humans are trafficked from. Tons of studies over many decades illustrate the cold hard truth.

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Well, damn…you’re right. TIL.

            https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

            The study’s findings include:

            Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.

            The effect of legal prostitution on human trafficking inflows is stronger in high-income countries than middle-income countries. Because trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation requires that clients in a potential destination country have sufficient purchasing power, domestic supply acts as a constraint.

            • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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              7 months ago

              The problem with these case studies are that they are small. If you don’t know what’s what and your pimp tells you it’s illegal and you can’t go to the police, you might believe them. If it’s widely and commonly known that it’s legal and that the police will actually help you, then that will change the results. That and if you throw the weight and resources of, oh let’s say, DEA marijuana enforcement against human trafficking, that will also change the results.