The Fatal Ensnaring of Dan DePew

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/05/the-fatal-ensnaring-of-dan-depew/

by neonate • 7 years ago

46 8 7 years ago

neonate• 7 years ago

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.

mindslight• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

solidsnack90002• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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...

solidsnack90002• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

The Fatal Ensnaring of Dan DePew

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