
The Fatal Ensnaring of Dan DePew - neonate
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/05/the-fatal-ensnaring-of-dan-depew/
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mindslight
The age-old takeaway is that if you have abhorrent proclivities, become a cop.
You get a wage and the resources to create entire scenarios and then get to
play hero to everyone, including yourself. And if it accidentally gets out of
hand and goes further than you'd like, you just end up a bigger hero!

One has to wonder if the prevalent stereotype of the creepy pedophile only
came about because the socially intelligent ones just go to work at the FBI.

~~~
fabricator
That prevalent stereotype exists, because it makes it easier to convict
inconvenient people with fabricated evidence.

Need to make a quota? need to sweep some freaks off the street? Smear some
hard drives with data and then kick the door down.

Haul the loser fu jour infront of a jury, hold up a plastic baggie, with your
HDD prop inside, make up an indefensible story, and explain to the jurors that
they don’t even want to know what’s found on that device.

And all in a day’s work. Keeping the streets safe from... ones and zeros on
magnetic media.

~~~
BigJono
Honestly I would have called bullshit on this before reading the OP, but if
everything that journalist is reporting is true, then it's an absolutely
terrifying abuse of power by the police.

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solidsnack9000
The conclusion is unexpected:

 _No doubt, the two cops who sat around a hotel room trading violent fantasies
with DePew and Lambey saw themselves as on the side of social justice. So do
all of us rushing to pronounce guilty verdicts on anyone accused of sexual
misdeeds now. We, too, have predator quotas to fill. As with the DePew jury or
the Meese Commission, for sexual-justice-seeking Twitter mobs, evidence is
still optional._

 _Fantasies about perpetrators permeated all levels of Dan DePew’s case, and
we’re never more beset by fantasy than when asserting the purity of our
motives. Never more perverse—and punitive—than when trying to prove that it’s
other people who are the sadists._

~~~
vanderZwan
Not if you take into account that moral outrage has a self-serving component:

> _When people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don 't affect
> them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a
> "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new
> research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social
> scientists refer to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest,
> wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or
> reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person._

> _Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one 's sense that they are a moral
> person and, accordingly, research on guilt ﬁnds that this emotion elicits
> strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing
> one's actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to
> reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at
> third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral
> outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining
> justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity._

Emphasis on the "outrage" part, which I presume to be a step or two beyond
simply _acknowledging_ that something is unfair and wanting to address it.

[0] [http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-
serv...](http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serving)

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neonate
I know the material is ghastly, but it's such a well-written article and takes
a bit of a different angle on the story. I found it hard to stop reading.

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solidsnack9000
_One hears the term “grooming” more and more—once confined to suspected
pedophiles and their prospective victims, now it’s applied to any relationship
marked by disparities in age or power._

The term is also ubiquitous in sprint planning :/

~~~
bryanrasmussen
right, I was doing a project at a big finance bank and whenever we had to
groom stories one of the British devs was always upset at the term because
grooming was something pedophiles do - I hadn't ever noticed the term in
context before but afterwards I did.

