It looks like Anthony Weiner — otherwise known as Carlos Danger, and otherwise otherwise known as Hillary Clinton scapegoat #347 — is actually going to do time for having cybersex with a fifteen-year-old girl [n.b.: link is saucy]. Granted, Weiner’s only looking at two years in prison whereas you or I would be locked up forever and a day, but that’s neither here nor there.
That’s not what I came to talk about today anyhow. What I want to talk about is this part here:
In the evening of January 23, 2016, a 15-year-old girl (the “Minor Victim”) initiated contact with the defendant by sending him a direct message on Twitter. Over the next several hours, the Minor Victim and Weiner exchanged a series of messages, ranging from the mundane to the provocative…
There is no dispute that the Minor Victim repeatedly suggested that she and the defendant participate in video chats on Skype… Thus, although it was the Minor Victim who initially sought out Weiner, as the Government readily concedes, Weiner immediately responded to the Minor Victim’s overture and willingly participated in the offense conduct thereafter…
In approximately March 2016, after several months of intermittent exchanges, communications between the defendant and Minor Victim largely stopped. The Minor Victim made efforts to re-engage, but was met with limited responsiveness.
Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not here to defend pedophilia, lord knows, nor am I here to try to make excuses for Weiner’s behavior. Weiner’s conduct was at least repulsive and wildly inappropriate, was clearly in violation of existing law, was arguably in violation of even proper libertarian law, was surely a violation of proper morals — you name it, he violated it. No, what I’m here to talk about is the way government ruins our ability to understand language.
Consider the persistent use of the word "victim" in the court documents. It was the so-called victim who initiated contact, the victim who persistently led Weiner along in an inappropriate direction, the victim who expressed her fondness for "older guys" even though she knows it’s illegal, and the victim who attempted to continue their relationship after Weiner, for whatever reason, ended it. This is a highly peculiar use of the word "victim," which insane anarchist madmen define as:
one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent: such as
a (1): one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions
(2): one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment
b: one that is tricked or duped
A case could surely be made that the "minor victim" was "acted upon by an agent," but that’s stretching the definition absolutely as far as it will go; so far, indeed, that most people would no longer recognize it. Orwell, as you may recall, wrote extensively about the state using corruption of language to control the thinking of the people, conditioning them through "doublethink" to accept that war is peace, that freedom is slavery, and that ignorance is strength. So too we see in this case, as we’re expected to accept that someone who willfully instigates a series of sexual encounters with another party could possibly be the "victim" of that party’s actions. This is nonsense upon stilts, to borrow a phrase from notorious authoritarian ratbag Jeremy Bentham.