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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Never underestimate the stupidity or laziness of criminals.

This is true, but doesn't distinguish between criminals. The degree of carelessness that is effective in a child trafficking ring is much narrower than that of a fraudulent ebay listing scam. I can easily believe that someone set up a bot to scam pedos trying to buy kids online. Even if they're caught, they're never anywhere near any actual kids. It's harder to believe that an established child sex slave operation would risk everything to cut corners in an online shopping cart app.

The degree of carelessness that is effective in a child trafficking ring is much narrower than that of a fraudulent ebay listing scam.

I mean, maybe?

The first time one of Jeffrey Dahmer's drugged victims stumbled out of his home nude and managed to make it to the police to beg for help, Dahmer assured them it was just a drunken lover's dispute and the police turned the victim back over to him without further investigation. He wasn't caught until the second time that happened years later.

There do exist competent police task forces that investigate their area of remit hard and track down the criminals, but my impression is that there's a rather small number of them nationally and they are pretty narrowly focused on one or a few cases at a time. I expect it's not actually that hard to fall into the cracks. But I could be wrong.

Not to say that the average child trafficker is as safe as the average small-scale pot dealer in a white neighborhood, or anything. Just that I'm not sure the magnitude of the difference is that great, or that it depends on the trafficker being orders of magnitude more competent and careful.