A consortium of International Women’s Whatever NGOs put out a frantic statement in advance of the vote scheduled for July 24 to oust Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
I'm so enjoying the ICC imploding that there's no room for sorrow.
Well, there's a teeny bit of room for sorrow that I won't get to read Part 2. It was cruel of you to make Part 1 so entertaining.
[If I had no shame I'd beg you for a comp read. But I need every shred of dignity I can resurrect after whoring out my integrity for the sake of the nation to vote for Trump in '24 for the first and presumably only time. I don't regret it and my dainties remain all sparkly. But still. Signed, nice old lady on social security. Well, not "nice," maybe. But old on social security, that part's true.]
Yes, I laughed out loud as well. Sometimes tragedies like this carry a dark humor. The people described in this fiasco are bad people, the kind that you would tell your kids to stay away from on playgrounds.
If this weren't so serious it would be hilarious. This isn't a Senate race where this kind of silly stuff goes on all the time. This is a man who has been removed from his job without the kind of legal process that is due for justice's sake.
I know what you mean, but I also wouldn't diminish the "seriousness" of the Platner affair. Even though it's well on its way to getting memory-holed, of course.
Just got off the phone with the hotline. Told them: "I feel triggered. Just got done reading a Michael Tracey article, and it made me feel like he violently fingered my butthole." The ICC would put pretty much all political leaders in a cell if they could.
The ICC should be dismantled, not reformed. Its legitimacy was always fake: no constitutional consent, no American jury, no Article III judge, no accountability to the people whose liberty it threatens. But the Khan scandal shows the rot inside the priesthood itself. International law’s mandarins cannot even handle their own workplace drama without leaks, anonymity games, NGO hysteria, media laundering, and bureaucratic collapse. Yet these are the people who want power over American soldiers and Israeli leaders. Spare us. The ICC is not a court of justice. It is a transnational HR department with arrest warrants.
Good article though I would agree with the view that grooming and seduction are synonymous. No such word quite like grooming had existed for all of human history until the year 2000. It basically literally means seduction but with negative connotations. What they tried to do is to apply the concept of "grooming" to adults seducing 'children' as part of the global push for pedohysteria. However, what has never been quite defined is what is a 'child'. The early 2000s push for pedohysteria was to globally redefine teenagers as children hence why they could catch so many 'groomers'. That piece of shit Chris Hansen once caught a 19yo 'grooming' an imaginary 15yo.
The 2020s push is to now redefine adults as children so seduction would literally always be negatively called 'grooming'. Quite frankly, adults grooming little children has never been much of a problem because its hard to seduce little children - they aren't interested! Teenagers though are much easier to seduce. Oh right, yeah, OK, sorry teenagers are asexual victims. Sure. Yeah. Whatever. Even when they both get convicted of raping one another... Right...
I just hope the whole thing collapses. Making all relationships between adults a criminal offence should destroy the human race through low birth rates. In practice they'll probably just randomly arrested people for it if they are accused - kind of like witches in the middle ages.
Lanning dates the origins of the modern usage of "grooming" to the 1980s, at least within his primary law enforcement context. I think I found examples of its use in academic/social work contexts in the 1970s. Here's Lanning, from the 2018 journal article I linked in the piece:
"The concept and use of the term grooming gradually emerged during the 1980s with the growing recognition of cases perpetrated by extrafamilial acquaintance offenders (i.e., sexual exploitation of children ). Between 1975 and 1985, law enforcement in the United States became increasingly aware of acquaintance offenders and the special investigative challenges they presented. As a large department, in 1977 the Los Angeles (California) Police Department (LAPD) was even able to establish a specialized unit, the Sexually Exploited Child Unit , to specifically investigate cases in which offenders from outside their family who were not strangers (i.e., acquaintances) sexually victimized children. Several other law enforcement agencies around the country soon learned from and copied the specialized work of this unit."
"During the mid-1980s, the FBI allowed me in my assignment at the Behavioral Science Unit to bring together at several seminars at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, most of the few investigators then specializing in such extrafamilial sexual exploitation of children cases. At these gatherings, the concepts of seduction and grooming were increasingly discussed and formalized. The emerging law enforcement experts in this area increasingly disseminated these concepts through networking and training presentations at seminars and conferences around the country. They were not likely, however, to write books and journal articles on the topic."
Fascinating I didn't know it dated back to the 1980s. My memory of it was when it exploded into the mainstream with the creation of a "grooming" law which happened in the UK in 2003 I believe. But I guess as usual with these things the ideas would have been floating around longer behind the scenes.
Call me cynical though but I'm dubious whether the term was ever about genuinely 'predatory' adults manipulating children. Especially as something conjured up by law enforcement I imagine it was more about manufacturing crime than anything else, which is certainly what happened as soon as the first 'grooming' laws came into effect. This was to the point that courts all over the world ruled that a 19 year old talking to a 60 year old pedo hunter posing as a 15 year old (HELLO Chris Hansen) is committing a 'grooming' offence. Who's the predator now?
Dare I move into more controversial territory but the idea that a persons age - and no other factors at all - can move how we view a persons behaviour towards them from perfectly fine to completely evil and predatory I find a bit extraordinary. I can't remember if I posted it on here before but a few years ago The Guardian - that bastion of feminazi British propaganda actually did an article that was completely the opposite of their usual narrative and really questioned the whole concept of running around killing pedophiles: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/03/paedophilia-bringing-dark-desires-light
I wonder if the people Lanning was busily locking up were really guilty of trying to commit real harm or just a lesser version of today's hysteria? It sounds though like Lanning maybe quite old school and is finding the ever increasing heights of lunacy - with grooming expanded to any sexual relationship at all - to be uncomfortable.
"But there was no way for Israel to surreptitiously engineer what was obviously the paramount factor here: an institutional culture in which “accusations” are just never going to be handled rationally." Ok, but the Zionist's certainly have the ability to take advantage of this situation and exacerbate it. Is it "funny" (appears to be consensus regarding this substack) how easily manipulated people are to focus on a tongue in an ear when there are children being shot in the head. If the ICC or its equivalent does not exist what entity would sit in judgement of the sadism running rampant around the globe?
Likely labeling the "power dynamic" a sex crime is being taught in women's studies classes as we speak. What you're describing is a Webster's rewrite that has been forced on us now for what seems like forever. We can all look forward to the day when the left totalitarian government's ministry of truth decrees its punishment for crimes against language.
Well, “the first thing I would say” (to borrow what is evidently a phrasing much favored by Sarah Hishan-ymous), is that that hotel room narrative does indeed plumb some new depth of stupidity and WTF-edness. Maybe with the next colleague she comes on to on a business trip, instead of being wide awake but demure and using that to accuse him of assaulting what he could only have thought to be a sleeping person, next time when she gives verbal consent to sex she can say “yesh” instead of “yes,” meaning that she (although in fact cold sober) could only have been deemed by the guy she asked up to her room to be intoxicated beyond the point where legal consent was possible. And there’s your rape right there.
The ICC is fighting important and controversial battles, like the one against Israel's genocide, and the institution is being destroyed from within by catfighting. Bourgeois feminist power-plays, along with all the other victim cards being worked for their total careerist worth, has destroyed the serious left. Great piece!
There is a vast subterranean sea of boiling rage brooding throughout the body politic, and the Palestine rallies are merely giving that energy a pathway to come bubbling up to the surface. Is there not a kind of cowardice in the Western youth who align themselves with the Palestinian cause? A submission to a lifetime of conditioning that it is always illegitimate to take one’s own side? Could their solidarity be no more than sublimation of their own repressed anger, at what is being done to them? The Palestinians are getting pushed off of their land – yes, and so are you. (Canada) The Palestinians are being subjected to inhuman violence by the occupation forces – yes, and so are you. (Canadians) The Palestinians are being psychologically tortured – yes, and so are you! Yet you dare not complain about what is being done to you...as an Anglo Canadian I have been culturally genocided.
The Palestinians need to go to Egypt or Jordan and done with this nonsense.
Largely agree with MT in re all things Epstein, and, at least on its face, this seems much the same. That said, unlike Hishan, Graham Platner’s accusers were pretty explicit about the details of what they were alleging, and Michael’s analogizing the two just feels sloppy.
Not all women but I agree with the sentiment that feminism is utterly vile and many women have been captured by it. There's lots of completely useless old women in parliament. They could be old and wise - that's great - but they are old and stupid. That's really bad.
I should probably add though there are an awful lot of men who seem to at least go along with it if not actively support it. I can only guess they just like to gain power reckless to the consequences it has to society... And some are just stupid and believe feminist lies too.
I think men are natural competitors. Your buddy is going to put you down in front of a beautiful woman. Your enemy will believe, or at least take advantage of, any sexual misconduct allegation against you.
On this subject, male solidarity isn't a thing and probably won't ever happen. There is very little incentive to not join the pile-on.
Yes, because unfortunately males have become weak and think like w0e-MEN. NO FACTS, NO EVIDENCE, FAKE EVIDENCE, IMPROMPTU LAWS, fixed around the narrative, and weak men will think like menopausal w0e-MEN and call everyone 'Pedo' simply because they don't like them. I see what you just said as MEN betraying their calling to defend TRUTH and following w0e-MEN like Adam did.
Michael, as a relatively new subscriber, I’m commenting for the first time. (But as a 75 yo with a failing memory, it might not be the first time.). Based on your past analysis and prose, I am looking forward to your second round on this topic. I do hope you will address the rather mundane issue of workplace sexual harassment. In my working life, I began to pay attention to a lot of the development of that issue in the early 1980s, and of course, being a human being who lived since then, I have many friends and colleagues who have lived through the personal trauma that infidelity in the work place brings. As for the power dynamic, there was lots of successful litigation in the 80s and 90s, and every large organization had lots of rules and training to try to reduce the risks of sex between a boss and the boss’s subordinate. In my experience, when a boss was caught “consensually napping” with a subordinate in any normal corporation or NGO since the 1980s, there would be discipline, and a very high percentage of the time the boss would be demoted or fired, and the subordinate would hire a lawyer and try to get compensation for all of their alleged losses. That said, I’m very intrigued at the conflation of grooming children and adults and am sure you have a lot more to say that will be worth everyone subscribing. Just saying, I have found that you have a lot of important things to say about the evolution of relationships and litigation post Epstein, which prompted my subscription.
Michael, I would never have epithetized you as "Bringer of Joy" but I pretty much laughed my way through this and it made a hilarious start to my day.
The stuff you're great at, you're really great at. You wield a big skewer and you skew with it equal to a masterful knight with a sword.
I hope you alternated between laughing and crying.
I'm so enjoying the ICC imploding that there's no room for sorrow.
Well, there's a teeny bit of room for sorrow that I won't get to read Part 2. It was cruel of you to make Part 1 so entertaining.
[If I had no shame I'd beg you for a comp read. But I need every shred of dignity I can resurrect after whoring out my integrity for the sake of the nation to vote for Trump in '24 for the first and presumably only time. I don't regret it and my dainties remain all sparkly. But still. Signed, nice old lady on social security. Well, not "nice," maybe. But old on social security, that part's true.]
Yes, I laughed out loud as well. Sometimes tragedies like this carry a dark humor. The people described in this fiasco are bad people, the kind that you would tell your kids to stay away from on playgrounds.
My mirth sadly ended with the heads-up of paywall to come, though.
If this weren't so serious it would be hilarious. This isn't a Senate race where this kind of silly stuff goes on all the time. This is a man who has been removed from his job without the kind of legal process that is due for justice's sake.
I know what you mean, but I also wouldn't diminish the "seriousness" of the Platner affair. Even though it's well on its way to getting memory-holed, of course.
Just got off the phone with the hotline. Told them: "I feel triggered. Just got done reading a Michael Tracey article, and it made me feel like he violently fingered my butthole." The ICC would put pretty much all political leaders in a cell if they could.
The ICC should be dismantled, not reformed. Its legitimacy was always fake: no constitutional consent, no American jury, no Article III judge, no accountability to the people whose liberty it threatens. But the Khan scandal shows the rot inside the priesthood itself. International law’s mandarins cannot even handle their own workplace drama without leaks, anonymity games, NGO hysteria, media laundering, and bureaucratic collapse. Yet these are the people who want power over American soldiers and Israeli leaders. Spare us. The ICC is not a court of justice. It is a transnational HR department with arrest warrants.
Richard L that is brilliant: trans national HR department with the arrest warrants. That is absolutely perfect.
I’m glad they destroyed Khan because the destruction of Khan will be the destruction of themselves. Hopefully.
And right out of the gate: 🤣 "A consortium of International Women’s Whatever NGOs" 🤣
loved that line as well
Good article though I would agree with the view that grooming and seduction are synonymous. No such word quite like grooming had existed for all of human history until the year 2000. It basically literally means seduction but with negative connotations. What they tried to do is to apply the concept of "grooming" to adults seducing 'children' as part of the global push for pedohysteria. However, what has never been quite defined is what is a 'child'. The early 2000s push for pedohysteria was to globally redefine teenagers as children hence why they could catch so many 'groomers'. That piece of shit Chris Hansen once caught a 19yo 'grooming' an imaginary 15yo.
The 2020s push is to now redefine adults as children so seduction would literally always be negatively called 'grooming'. Quite frankly, adults grooming little children has never been much of a problem because its hard to seduce little children - they aren't interested! Teenagers though are much easier to seduce. Oh right, yeah, OK, sorry teenagers are asexual victims. Sure. Yeah. Whatever. Even when they both get convicted of raping one another... Right...
I just hope the whole thing collapses. Making all relationships between adults a criminal offence should destroy the human race through low birth rates. In practice they'll probably just randomly arrested people for it if they are accused - kind of like witches in the middle ages.
Lanning dates the origins of the modern usage of "grooming" to the 1980s, at least within his primary law enforcement context. I think I found examples of its use in academic/social work contexts in the 1970s. Here's Lanning, from the 2018 journal article I linked in the piece:
"The concept and use of the term grooming gradually emerged during the 1980s with the growing recognition of cases perpetrated by extrafamilial acquaintance offenders (i.e., sexual exploitation of children ). Between 1975 and 1985, law enforcement in the United States became increasingly aware of acquaintance offenders and the special investigative challenges they presented. As a large department, in 1977 the Los Angeles (California) Police Department (LAPD) was even able to establish a specialized unit, the Sexually Exploited Child Unit , to specifically investigate cases in which offenders from outside their family who were not strangers (i.e., acquaintances) sexually victimized children. Several other law enforcement agencies around the country soon learned from and copied the specialized work of this unit."
"During the mid-1980s, the FBI allowed me in my assignment at the Behavioral Science Unit to bring together at several seminars at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, most of the few investigators then specializing in such extrafamilial sexual exploitation of children cases. At these gatherings, the concepts of seduction and grooming were increasingly discussed and formalized. The emerging law enforcement experts in this area increasingly disseminated these concepts through networking and training presentations at seminars and conferences around the country. They were not likely, however, to write books and journal articles on the topic."
Fascinating I didn't know it dated back to the 1980s. My memory of it was when it exploded into the mainstream with the creation of a "grooming" law which happened in the UK in 2003 I believe. But I guess as usual with these things the ideas would have been floating around longer behind the scenes.
Call me cynical though but I'm dubious whether the term was ever about genuinely 'predatory' adults manipulating children. Especially as something conjured up by law enforcement I imagine it was more about manufacturing crime than anything else, which is certainly what happened as soon as the first 'grooming' laws came into effect. This was to the point that courts all over the world ruled that a 19 year old talking to a 60 year old pedo hunter posing as a 15 year old (HELLO Chris Hansen) is committing a 'grooming' offence. Who's the predator now?
Dare I move into more controversial territory but the idea that a persons age - and no other factors at all - can move how we view a persons behaviour towards them from perfectly fine to completely evil and predatory I find a bit extraordinary. I can't remember if I posted it on here before but a few years ago The Guardian - that bastion of feminazi British propaganda actually did an article that was completely the opposite of their usual narrative and really questioned the whole concept of running around killing pedophiles: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/03/paedophilia-bringing-dark-desires-light
I wonder if the people Lanning was busily locking up were really guilty of trying to commit real harm or just a lesser version of today's hysteria? It sounds though like Lanning maybe quite old school and is finding the ever increasing heights of lunacy - with grooming expanded to any sexual relationship at all - to be uncomfortable.
"But there was no way for Israel to surreptitiously engineer what was obviously the paramount factor here: an institutional culture in which “accusations” are just never going to be handled rationally." Ok, but the Zionist's certainly have the ability to take advantage of this situation and exacerbate it. Is it "funny" (appears to be consensus regarding this substack) how easily manipulated people are to focus on a tongue in an ear when there are children being shot in the head. If the ICC or its equivalent does not exist what entity would sit in judgement of the sadism running rampant around the globe?
A sad day for International Kangaroo Court
"His name was Karim Khan. He pulled a Khan Job... on the international community" - Punishing puns from Netanyahu in that Fox clip.
Things you should never do as a man:
- Work with or have children (this could lead to pedophilia & ritual abuse claims)
- Work as a supervisor or "boss" for adult women (this could lead to grooming and ultimately--if you try to ride it out--rape claims)
- Run for office (same as above)
- Date
- Be an "elite"
Things you should do as a man:
- If you need a job, work as a janitor, but not in a school
- If you need a hobby, join a coven, but as a lowly "familiar"/slave
Likely labeling the "power dynamic" a sex crime is being taught in women's studies classes as we speak. What you're describing is a Webster's rewrite that has been forced on us now for what seems like forever. We can all look forward to the day when the left totalitarian government's ministry of truth decrees its punishment for crimes against language.
Well, “the first thing I would say” (to borrow what is evidently a phrasing much favored by Sarah Hishan-ymous), is that that hotel room narrative does indeed plumb some new depth of stupidity and WTF-edness. Maybe with the next colleague she comes on to on a business trip, instead of being wide awake but demure and using that to accuse him of assaulting what he could only have thought to be a sleeping person, next time when she gives verbal consent to sex she can say “yesh” instead of “yes,” meaning that she (although in fact cold sober) could only have been deemed by the guy she asked up to her room to be intoxicated beyond the point where legal consent was possible. And there’s your rape right there.
The ICC is fighting important and controversial battles, like the one against Israel's genocide, and the institution is being destroyed from within by catfighting. Bourgeois feminist power-plays, along with all the other victim cards being worked for their total careerist worth, has destroyed the serious left. Great piece!
Israel’s actions in Gaza are completely justified and proportionate.
Trolling or psycho?
Psycho, lol.
There is a vast subterranean sea of boiling rage brooding throughout the body politic, and the Palestine rallies are merely giving that energy a pathway to come bubbling up to the surface. Is there not a kind of cowardice in the Western youth who align themselves with the Palestinian cause? A submission to a lifetime of conditioning that it is always illegitimate to take one’s own side? Could their solidarity be no more than sublimation of their own repressed anger, at what is being done to them? The Palestinians are getting pushed off of their land – yes, and so are you. (Canada) The Palestinians are being subjected to inhuman violence by the occupation forces – yes, and so are you. (Canadians) The Palestinians are being psychologically tortured – yes, and so are you! Yet you dare not complain about what is being done to you...as an Anglo Canadian I have been culturally genocided.
The Palestinians need to go to Egypt or Jordan and done with this nonsense.
See psycho, lol.
I like her interview stilettos.
Largely agree with MT in re all things Epstein, and, at least on its face, this seems much the same. That said, unlike Hishan, Graham Platner’s accusers were pretty explicit about the details of what they were alleging, and Michael’s analogizing the two just feels sloppy.
Wrong, and if you actually read M. Tracey's essay on the Platner matter, you might know better.
I have a nice big Platner followup coming soon. Was almost done, but then I got sidetracked into the ICC fiasco.
The Platner story seemed like yet another example of when idiots collide.
w0e-MEN are receptacles for Satan. Britian is a disgusting Matriarchy/gynocracy.
I DON'T believe ANY of Britian's FALSE charges on Andrew Tate. The British are ruled by menopausal old bags
Not all women but I agree with the sentiment that feminism is utterly vile and many women have been captured by it. There's lots of completely useless old women in parliament. They could be old and wise - that's great - but they are old and stupid. That's really bad.
I should probably add though there are an awful lot of men who seem to at least go along with it if not actively support it. I can only guess they just like to gain power reckless to the consequences it has to society... And some are just stupid and believe feminist lies too.
I think men are natural competitors. Your buddy is going to put you down in front of a beautiful woman. Your enemy will believe, or at least take advantage of, any sexual misconduct allegation against you.
On this subject, male solidarity isn't a thing and probably won't ever happen. There is very little incentive to not join the pile-on.
Yes, because unfortunately males have become weak and think like w0e-MEN. NO FACTS, NO EVIDENCE, FAKE EVIDENCE, IMPROMPTU LAWS, fixed around the narrative, and weak men will think like menopausal w0e-MEN and call everyone 'Pedo' simply because they don't like them. I see what you just said as MEN betraying their calling to defend TRUTH and following w0e-MEN like Adam did.
All fair points
Michael, as a relatively new subscriber, I’m commenting for the first time. (But as a 75 yo with a failing memory, it might not be the first time.). Based on your past analysis and prose, I am looking forward to your second round on this topic. I do hope you will address the rather mundane issue of workplace sexual harassment. In my working life, I began to pay attention to a lot of the development of that issue in the early 1980s, and of course, being a human being who lived since then, I have many friends and colleagues who have lived through the personal trauma that infidelity in the work place brings. As for the power dynamic, there was lots of successful litigation in the 80s and 90s, and every large organization had lots of rules and training to try to reduce the risks of sex between a boss and the boss’s subordinate. In my experience, when a boss was caught “consensually napping” with a subordinate in any normal corporation or NGO since the 1980s, there would be discipline, and a very high percentage of the time the boss would be demoted or fired, and the subordinate would hire a lawyer and try to get compensation for all of their alleged losses. That said, I’m very intrigued at the conflation of grooming children and adults and am sure you have a lot more to say that will be worth everyone subscribing. Just saying, I have found that you have a lot of important things to say about the evolution of relationships and litigation post Epstein, which prompted my subscription.