trenton

When comparing humans to animals, I believe the way human institutions are structured likely contributes to maladaptive behavior on individual levels due to the belief that these structures are necessary for the collective good. For example, cases of animals sexually abusing juveniles of their kind is significantly less common in the wild compared to when animals are institutionalized. Putting animals in captivity tends to disrupt their natural attachments, contributing to various maladaptive behaviors. Likewise, human structures are likely unhealthy for individual humans in a variety of ways that might lead to maladaptive behaviors including suicide. The starkest example would be something like a death camp. While in a death camp, the survivors often held onto their bonds with loved ones as a form of meaning, knowing they would not face the darkness alone. I haven't read much about suicidal behaviors in animals, but I believe it is significantly less common compared to humans. Humans seem to have a cognitive layer which makes them more likely to lose the will to live compared to animals, including ideologies that glorify things like suicide bombings as a political tool. In such situations "survival" has changed from protecting the body to living on in the memory of others through infamy. The human self seems to take on many different identities compared to animals, therefore in some contexts depending on how the self is defined, suicide might be seen as acceptable from that point of view.

I have been reading about people who survived extreme circumstances. I am currently reading Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. I have found some valuable lessons in how to manage one's relationship with suffering. I started exploring difficult situations like these partially because I noticed discrepancies in how moral philosophy is taught in western countries. I noticed that if applied consistently, then most people would fall in line with Nazis and remain passive during a genocide. I therefore began challenging the moral frameworks with extreme scenarios that do not match western assumptions about love, meaning, purpose, morality, and existence. This included love in the darkest moments possible. I have found many interesting psychological insights that overlap with many areas of life including my relationship with death and human connection. Some of it made me cry due to imagery of a parent holding their dying child while singing a lullaby about how precious the child is regardless of circumstances. I found that these lessons in love and resilience are relevant for me when I navigate darkness largely alone. I have found secular frameworks that offer equivalent benefits to religion without requiring faith in a supernatural entity or Savior. Love is something that cannot be taken away even in death as the being lives forever in your mind and heart along with the warmth they gave when alive. It is something that gives a person the will to live even when all else is lost. This relates to an abusive situation I try to navigate with my family. I'm looking for psychological tools to prepare myself to potentially become split from an abusive family forever and find new meaning outside of the narratives they imposed on me. It is something I face largely alone and sometimes it contributes mental health problems by undermining my will to live. Much of my research focused on perpetrator psychology as in my previous thread, but the deeper problem is how perpetrators have impacted my relationship with meaning, life, purpose, love, and so forth. So what is the will to live? Personally, when my family was cruel to me, I felt my reality fall apart along with my identity. The identity crisis never fully resolved. Part of me knew that my family was feeding me lies as they had no real moral philosophy. I sought to ground myself in truth, believing that the truth is what I live for. If I reject truth, then I reject myself, making self love in a sense impossible if I must be erased and live a lie such as a false identity. I came to spirituality partially because of seeking the true self. Learning was a method of seeking truth while using epistemology as a survival strategy. It seems that the will to live is not merely a cost benefit analysis based on the pros and cons of staying alive. The consequentialist philosophy which western education is biased toward might guide someone toward this kind of assumption. There seems to be something prior to any rational or irrational cognitive layer that can be bypassed through love and without needing to argue with the content of the mind such as the exact right answer when struggling to find the words for experience. I seem to be leaning toward a detached, arational relationship with the mind, seeing that rationality or irrationality can be bypassed toward a deeper and more present being. The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different? Why does it refuse to be erased? It seems to desire unconditional love, both offering and receiving. Maybe it is the work of some spiritual force, or maybe it is the structure of human survival, or maybe it is both. I don't really know what the will to live is or why it operates in this way. It is like a creative force seeking expression no matter the content of experience. A relevant thread of this inquiry may be what is will. As for the will to live, what is it at it's core? It seems to be a creative force of love seeking truth to know itself. This seems to be at the heart of my will to live and why I haven't killed myself. What do you think?

Maybe the question I need to ask is the following. If someone has lost the will to live or is consumed by meaningless suffering which offers no hope of a better future, then what exactly is needed to re-establish a will to live? What exactly was lost that led to a person losing this will to live, and how can it be countered? The fear of death doesn't seem to be universal as some come to welcome death given specific grievances. This can lead to suicide. What exactly was taken away such that the will to live is now gone and what is needed to restore it? This applies also to situations where the person is alone with nobody to help them as well.

I think it would help the situation of research for prevention were not as guarded. There are programs to help men understand what leads to sexual offenses and how to inhibit these behaviors. However, the restricted nature of this knowledge prevents men from having the knowledge that could be used to accurately self reflect and develop stronger inhibitions against these behaviors. One of the common problems is the attachment disruption. In this case men are often vulnerable to peer pressure leading to opportunistic offenders. Personally, I have many inhibitions against sexual violence, but my core vulnerability is social isolation and attachment disruption caused by family abuse and childhood sexual abuse. This can create the OCD profile of heterosexual shame and the fear of becoming a predator. I have so far done the best I could to educate myself and prevent offenses. If other men did this kind of research and self reflection, then it would likely help prevent offenses as is the case for Stop It Now. The stigma around this topic of predatory inclinations prevents people from seeking help. Other cultures have better protections in place to prevent sexual violence. Currently, I need social connection, but my ability to find these connections has been undermined by my family. Sometimes men in such a position find belonging among anti social actors such as sex traffickers who glorify prostitution and sexual assault. In my case I did not cater to peer pressure, but I also wasn't believed when I tried to report sex trafficking. Initially I objected to the behavior, but later fell silent due to fear of retaliation. By the time I spoke I wasn't believed.

@Rafael Thundercat I read the slide show I found in the link. A lot of it matches what I was thinking. I have a lot of the same information, but I draw a different conclusion from what you did in regard to hatred. In this post, the author describes a limited circle of concern. The men are not concerned about the woman, but rather what other men think about them. In that sense, they do not act out due to a hatred of women, but rather from a complete disregard or lack of caring or love for women. This actually helps my point of view make even more sense because it explains even more why men view women as objects. They are instruments for male status rather than something hated. This is an absence of love for women. I do remember feeling love for a women even when others disapproved. My love led to a sense of defiance and protectiveness of her. In that case my circle of concern was prioritized to the woman rather than the audience watching me. There is also a difference in men's attitudes toward women depending on the culture which the author seems to imply based on how men should speak to each other. I maintain that women are not hated in this context, but rather they are not cared for due to the circle of concern making them a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.

@Rafael Thundercat I understand that this behavior is truly outrageous, but I can explain the criminology behind it. First of all, this profile is likely sadistic. They take sexual pleasure in the suffering of their victims or their inability to consent. This behavior is not necessarily just directed at women without their knowledge, but it is also directed at children and animals. It is the love of power and domination which drives the behavior rather than hatred for a person. Hatred for women is typically in cases such as grievance offenders. They might be mad at a woman for cheating for example. This offender often operates under the entitlement worldview in which women are held as objects for him to control. Sadistic offenders operate from wanting the joy of causing suffering rather than acting off of hatred for women as in the case of a murder rape. In the case of drug facilitated sexual assault or DFSA, this profile probably operates under the entitlement worldview as well in which he sees women as less than or as objects. At the same time, this woman didn't really do anything to lead to an actual or even perceived grievance which would constitute hatred. In this case, it seems to be not only an absence of empathy, but also wanting a sense of status from a community of rapists in which this behavior is glorified. Such communities also glorify child sexual abuse and animal sexual abuse. The goal of this profile seems to be using the trophy such as a recording to seek validation from rapists. The inverse moral hierarchy such groups operate under is that the more outrageous the behavior they can get away with, the more they use it as a mark of status. This in a sense has nothing to do with hatred of women, but rather using them as objects to achieve this goal of power and domination. Anybody could be a target, including other men in cases such as prison rape.

@Rafael Thundercat Much of this knowledge comes from direct experience with organized crime. I witnessed these operations because my father was responsible with his gang and he forced my participation. I made a thread with a lot of my analysis on criminology. You should be able to access some of this research through reading books on psychopathy, but there are several profiles that will need to be pieced together. There are still specific things I don't have access to. Here is a thread where I give much of this information. It includes a document in which I describe child sex trafficking. I witnessed frame up scenarios as well in which evidence was manipulated to target victims. I was nearly destroyed by falsified evidence and manufactured circumstances.

Given my research on perpetrator psychology, this doesn't surprise me. I myself have done a lot of research on criminology. There is restricted research especially around aspects of sexual predators such as these. I only accessed the information relevant to prevention and even that has information that is more restricted than it should be. It is well known that organized criminals try to access this research to offend more effectively. Something like this is inevitable given the environment we live in. Child sex traffickers for example would be especially interested in getting a hold of this knowledge. Given that they already are spreading this information, it makes it even more important that the research be less restricted around prevention and protection.

@gettoefl I have a question about forgive them as they know not what they do. Sometimes it appears that they do know what they do. For example, the sadistic pleasure in degrading me feels hard to ignore. They seem happy to cause me suffering and keep me beneath them. This makes me confused about forgive them as they know not what they do. When there is apparent ill will and intentional harm, I find it much more difficult to forgive them. I feel a burning hatred and deep contempt for those who harmed me. Their degradation is unacceptable and intolerable. I understand that part, but I am lost on the forgiveness piece. I can't seem to let go of this resentment I hold toward people who degraded me, seemingly on purpose with sadistic pleasure.

I don't know if actualized has made this connection or not yet, but I want to make it explicit. There are considerable overlaps between grand conspiracy theories and cult behavior. I say "grand" because my position is that small local conspiracies are regular whereas coordinated intergalactic conspiracies by lizard people lack sufficient proof. Those who have contemplated this probably already noticed. A cult is in a sense a major conspiracy that is often relatively organized such that it hides abuse even when it is against a large number of people and is severe. It often includes sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and forms of coercion that make people afraid to leave. They extract people for money and can trap their children in a fate so undesirable that a mother can't stand to watch her children become pawns in the scheme, forcing her to leave them behind along with her husband. The way the cult maintains itself is essentially through conspiracy theories. Any outside information is claimed to be manufactured by those in power to discredit the organization that threatens them. The government for example, is claimed to be covering up child sex traffickers and pedophiles and that they are inventing lies about the cult to attack their legitimacy them. By controlling the media, they make everybody thinks the group is terrible while they are fighting against this dangerous evil. Meanwhile, the cult is basically where the conspiracy theory should be applied as they exploit lots of people in an organized manner. The cult is the very thing it claims to fight against in its conspiracy theories. I witnessed this when I visited the church of scientology. I started asking a lot of questions about how the ideology is structured, what they believe, why, and so forth. I seem to have gotten a lot of surface level answers without much depth. They didn't mention the psychiatry until much later. I told them that I had done some research on scientology. I said that there were several past scandals that the church was responsible for. There is a lengthy list of controversies here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies When I told them about things of this nature, they told me that they never heard of it. They maintained that those in power were oppressing them by spreading lies and manipulating the media. These were reports from multiple countries, not just one government. This would require a grand conspiracy to fake. I saw some inconsistencies in terms of how they addressed other religions. On one hand they maintained that they welcomed all religions and appear to have embraced some form of subjectivism, but at the same time they have a symbol clearly based on the cross. My grandma seems to have been concerned about how Jesus was depicted as an ancient spiritual teacher rather than literally God. She wanted to maintain that Jesus was God, meanwhile I was skeptical that the church would take a stance on Jesus in this way if they were supposedly open to all religions while embracing some form of spiritual subjectivism. I sensed some kind of contradiction in that they wanted to claim freedom from ideological influence while having an ideological agenda in the conclusions being drawn. There was a meeting about past lives after having drinks and snacks. There were a few videos that I didn't find very convincing. To me it seemed like a few rare isolated incidents or coincidences in which a person meets someone and claims to know them. You can let me know what you think about past lives, but I'm not sure about it. We played some kind of memory game in which we pretended to be acting out past lives. People seemed to find the whole thing funny. I had a ton of questions, but there wasn't enough time to answer them. Once the meeting was over, we were given papers to discuss what we intended to work on. I told them about my situation and it immediately closed doors. I told them about PTSD from child abuse and psychiatric complications such as hospitalizations linked to depression treatments. Apparently for my situation past lives wouldn't help and people who took medicine arouse suspicion from the group. They didn't tell me why though. They then tried to sell me a book even though scientology doesn't apply to me. It did not add up. Maybe cults are bothered by people who ask a lot of questions and seek the truth. The sales pitch seemed second nature to them as they still want you to buy something. From this experience, maybe we can say a problem with conspiracy theories is that they can be used by people with ulterior motives to disengage critical thinking and allow them to insert a narrative in which counter evidence is easily dismissed. It seems to be a very reliable method for producing close mindedness. At the same time, I have also witnessed frame up situations in which a victim was framed by falsified evidence or a set up by organized criminals. For some reason these conspiracies are taken much less seriously including in a court of law. There is no sufficient investigation, but it does happen frequently. This would be close mindedness in the opposite direction when a court refused to recognize the evidence as compromised and manipulated. Identity theft is a simple and common example of people imprisoned due to a conspiracy by organized criminals. It looks like the problem is that conspiracy theories if used a certain way, create a closed loop with an unfalsifiable position. Courts don't seem to want to allow people to make unfalsifiable positions even if the consequence is that innocent people are routinely jailed due to frame ups. This is why I along with many people I met simply don't believe the propaganda of "innocent until proven guilty." The trial is more like a formality rather than a genuine inquiry into the truth of the situation. I remember that there is supposedly a distinction between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure what the distinction would be. If someone would like to clarify this, then that might help. I seem to be split from actualized on the point that conspiracies happen constantly on smaller scales, but grand conspiracy theories seem to be what is actually being criticized as they feed cult dynamics such as in the case of trump supporters crying "fake news."

@zurew Thank you for your input. The way I approach it, I don't even look at ridiculous conspiracy theorists that talk about things like lizard people or things of that nature. I think attacking the category "conspiracy theory" logically doesn't make sense. Conspiratorial thinking is justified in some smaller contexts aside from a global scheme with extreme organization. I think it would be fair to say that we should not make drastic claims which outpace the evidence. This is the core argument that applies to most false conspiracy theories that make up elaborate stories. There is probably better language we can use to describe what is being criticized if "conspiracy theory" is technically the wrong category to be attacking. Instead we should probably attack the category of "elaborate delusional conspiratorial thinking with no basis in reality and without sufficient evidence." Aside from this category, maybe "conspiracy theory" as a category is fine within narrow or smaller contexts with strong evidence such as a church hiding a sex scandal.

I have an update regarding monster narratives. I have been reading about the psychology behind the Holocaust. I have some interesting findings regarding the bystanders, the rescuers, the revolutionaries, and the perpetrators, and I have mapped out their thought processes in an interesting way that explains the dynamic. Some of this deserves its own thread, but I did find the moral philosophies of bystanders, rescuers, and revolutionaries fascinating. It is important to understand them because statistically speaking we are most likely to be bystanders in the event of a genocide due to consequentialist reasoning rather than deontological reasoning of rescuers or the combination of both which leads to the conclusion of a just revolution. I found it eerie that my revolutionary reasoning happened to somewhat align Hamas' reasoning for destroying Israel as they do have legitimate grievances, but they did target civilians which made it worse. One of my findings was that the need for belonging which drives people to gangs, terrorists, and organized criminals is a psychological need that can scale all the way up to genocide. Similar to how psychological profiles can be conditioned to become desensitized to child sexual abuse, they can also be conditioned to become desensitized to mass murder. Part of the cause is that group belonging includes racism, religious extremism, and nationalism. Interestingly, I found that the ideological content could be almost anything. The core reason for going along with atrocities in all forms including genocides includes belonging to a group regardless of the philosophical justifications they have. The pattern persists across gangs, religions, and genocidal governments. This is why rational arguments cannot change such people as rational justifications are not required to meet the belonging need. On some level, I have also deconstructed the hero narrative. Heroes often have psychological vulnerabilities that mirror perpetrators in subtle ways, but they do exist. It has given me some clues for recovery such as in the case of grievance offenders specifically. People with severe trauma also look for symbolic way to compensate their pain. This can lead to displacement analogous to offenders who displace their rage on a different target. however, for trauma survivors symbolic victories over other cases by protecting other victims while important, will not resolve the underlying trauma that often drives hysteria and moral panic around child sexual abuse as the most vocal advocates are those who were abused. If I can find a way that grievance offenders can be treated, then it likely mirrors trauma survivors in some ways because they both seek out symbolic victories that are ultimately rooted in another target. It is a form of displacement as a psychological defense mechanism.

I have been doing some research on different psychological profiles of criminal offenders, particularly violent offenders. I found some information that challenged the monster narrative and created what some call "moral vertigo" when one can deeply empathize with a perpetrator and see their humanity while simultaneously recognizing the severe harm they cause. I could see the similarities in myself and many of these perpetrators as well as the human vulnerabilities that principate extreme acts. This included sex offenders of various profiles with the most challenging one perhaps being incest cases. In most cases when a parent sexually abuses a child, it is not out of sadism, but out of extreme brokenness and cognitive distortion leading to a twisted sense of harmless love. I found this helpful to me in a way because if such people are not monsters, then I am not a monster either. I also found the psychological mechanism by which institutional sex scandals emerge which is likely important for prevention. Much of this research is restricted, and potentially over restricted due to the fear of this knowledge being used by dangerous offenders. However, some information that could be used to protect people include the knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities such as a lack of belonging, making a person more likely to be swayed by peer pressure as in the case of some opportunistic or situational offenders. The actions of such offenders are harmful and they must be stopped, but they are still not monsters. For the most part, perhaps in more that 90% of rape or homicide cases, I could clearly and empirically refute the monster narrative. There are however some extreme cases which seem to have formed the basis of the monster narrative to begin with. This would be profiles such as sadistic offenders or psychopathic serial killers and rapists. I'm almost done reading a book about psychopaths and I seem to be understanding the general patterns. Starting with sadistic offenders, they are rare but the most dangerous. These are the type who often show early signs of behavioral and developmental problems in childhood. They often start off by torturing animals while using masturbatory reinforcement for intricate sadistic rape fantasies. They are more likely to target random strangers and take sexual pleasure in terrorizing victims for extended periods of time. They often tie their victims up and collect trophies from this person while calibrating their terror to just the right amount to keep the victim from losing consciousness or dying of a heart attack. This profile often has multiple victims and likely contributes to many unsolved murders because most murders are committed by someone you know rather than a stranger, making it more difficult to solve. The sadistic offender is more likely to exhibit traits of psychopathy. As for my research on psychopaths, I have found some interesting thought patterns they exhibit. They seem to closely mirror my family that deeply traumatized me. For example, my father and his gang would pay money to have sex with children including me. My father exhibited early signs of psychopathy such as animal cruelty and later became a career criminal who would boast about his exploits including using death threats to coerce people for money. Meanwhile, my mother like my father would use love instrumentally while pitting me against the other parent. My mother would treat her suicide threat as a little tiff of no real significance while magnifying anything that could be framed as wrongdoing on my part. My mother may be more of a narcissist than a psychopath compared to my father who showed an absence of moral conscience and little care for his children despite what he would say on the surface. I wrote a document on circumstantial evidence to help law enforcement in cases like those of my father and his gang. I found that criminal gangs often operate on an inverse moral hierarchy. A person who feels like an outsider to society finds belonging with criminal organizations. From there, these people prove commitment to the gang by performing acts that are universally condemned including child sexual abuse. A father who trafficked his own child would be given strong reputational incentives within the gang by showing his level of commitment to the point that he is not even loyal to his own child. The rape of child is more so about symbolically undermining the society that they hate than it is about the specific child. They take on universal condemnation while causing severe harm to society. This is especially prevalent in cases of school shootings in which the goal is to cause maximum harm to society by targeting its most vulnerable members in a place where they congregate. They pursue infamy by intentionally acting as evil as possible. I found it interesting that in psychopathy, this person usually attaches no emotional significance to different words or actions. This is what allows them to treat murder with the same degree of significance as what you had for breakfast this morning. For example, "Well, you know, it was like any other ordinary Tuesday. I woke up at my normal time, had some waffles and drove my girlfriend to her job. When I went out for some Starbucks, I later encountered this other guy who was kind of pissing me off. So, I slashed his throat and dumped his body in the river. After that I remembered that a new movie came out in theaters that my girlfriend would love to see. After shooting some hoops at the park, I went with my girlfriend to watch Despicable Me and we loved that movie. We both slept soundly, ready for another day tomorrow." They often insist "I am kind of a 'in the now' kind of guy. I told you I wasn't a serial killer because that was in the past and it is over and done with. But anyway, what's for lunch?" The sadistic psychopathic serial killer / rapist seems to be the kind of thing that I would call evil. They seem to most closely match the monster narrative, although I can still see their humanity in perhaps brain disruptions or developmental complications which which may have led to this kind of disposition. The moral indifference to having 30+ bodies buried in one's basement creates an act so atrocious that language strains to capture the severity of such acts, hence we call them monsters. However, from their point of view, they are the real victims because nobody understands them. Perhaps, we could in a sense say that such offenders are amoral in that they have no attachment to any moral constraints and thus apply them based on self-interest and survival. The rest is a matter of navigating externally imposed rules based on when it benefits them. This often allows the psychopath to get away with a lot of crimes, especially white collar crimes when they have no regard for the harm caused to the population while enriching themselves. The fundamental question I seem to be grappling with seems to be "if God is good then why is there evil?" Of course, there are a lot of different perspectives I could take on this issue. In any case, how would you deconstruct the monster narrative? Do you think sadistic psychopathic serial killer / rapists or child sex traffickers are evil? Would you have an argument for why such people are fundamentally good? I'm curious as to how you would address these psychological profiles. I'm not entirely confident for the most extreme offenders who were the source of the monster narrative to begin with.

@Carl-Richard Okay, thanks for clearing that up. I actually have a ton of conspiracy theories and they are all very specific and calibrated to the evidence. There are plenty of conspiracy theories that explain criminal cases, institutional cover ups, and government corruption. Firstly, conspiracy theories are very relevant to law enforcement for prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, and police investigations. This includes all kinds of frame up scenarios and set ups perpetrated by criminals with the intent to frame their victims while avoiding accountability by manipulating the evidence such that it misleads investigators. I have witnessed this personally multiple times. This includes cases of police corruption such as accepting bribes from drug traffickers, falsified evidence such as police officers planting drugs during traffic stops, the suppression of exculpatory evidence by the prosecution because they prioritize winning a case at the expense of truth, various cases in which people were set up and tricked into appearing to commit crimes by a third party of criminals who deceived them, gang activities in various contexts, institutional cover ups for financial fraud or child sexual abuse, my experience with an attempt to frame me for kidnapping, my experience with witnessing specific gang activities due to my father's involvement, various cases of insider trading among government officials, businesses engaging in calculated law breaking to ensure that they profit even after being sued, and so on. The conspiracy theory in cases like these are part of the investigative process rather than necessarily definitive conclusions. For example, if you go to a school in which a teacher was reported by five or more students for inappropriate touching, but then the school rather than reporting him to the authorities instead moves him to another location, then this is a common cover up to protect the institution's reputation. It is a similar method to church scandals in which priests are moved rather than prosecuted. A reasonable inference an investigator would make is that multiple reports from several witnesses describing similar behavior is likely indicative of an institutional cover up. My biggest concern about discrediting conspiracy theories is that when people are victims of frame ups, they are often not believed. The justice system handles these situations poorly and the investigations are often not done in a sufficient manner to secure the necessary exculpatory evidence. The lone victim of the frame up is often the only one with the knowledge of how the frame up works. The general population typically has a poor understanding of frame ups by organized criminals such as cases of identity theft, sex trafficking, or kidnapping among other examples. There are actually many possible frame up scenarios that challenge the current evidentiary standards including digital frame ups where the law is still very much behind technology. The gaps in the legal system and its evidentiary standards is what allows organized criminals to exploit the gaps to frame innocent people while avoiding consequences. Complete investigations are often expensive and time consuming, making truth seeking structurally difficult to seek in frame up scenarios as the defendant must become the prosecutor of organized criminals who manipulated the evidence to make him seem guilty. By this standard, "conspiracy theorist" includes FBI agents investigating a criminal network that they suspect has committed serious offenses but haven't yet received confirmation beyond the circumstantial evidence which appears to implicate the bad actors. "Conspiracy theory" includes investigators making hypotheses as to what the organized criminals may have done to aid in discovery. I think the problem with discrediting "conspiratorial thinking" generally is that it doesn't seem to account for cases of reasonable inference based on documented patterns and corroborating evidence. If I am going to say there is an epistemic problem with conspiracy theories, then the actual criticism should be that they are often made without sufficient evidence which would make the claims more grounded. By this logic, the problem isn't simply conspiratorial thinking because there are different epistemic standards that can be used when making conspiracy theories and engaging in conspiratorial thinking. We should probably say that wild speculation without evidence is the problem rather than just conspiracy theorists making conspiracy theories, otherwise we end up with a bunch of people saying, "sometimes conspiracy theories are true, therefore there is validity to making conspiracy theories in certain contexts." There are however types of conspiracies and frame ups that the general population typically has no understanding of, leaving the victims of criminal conspiracies and frame ups vulnerable to being accused of making "wild stories" when in reality they are telling the truth. Many stories of legitimate conspiracies are often dismissed due to seeming crazy, which in of itself is an epistemic failure. This seems to be the real reason why I find this subject triggering and I felt the need to post in this thread.

That is an interesting analogy. I don't quite understand it. What is your reasoning for this? Is it because I could in theory say "something bad probably happened somewhere but we don't know what." I did consider that maybe if I applied this standard universally, it would essentially be a hunch. I might say that I have a bad feeling about that guy. I can't put my finger on it, but I don't like it. He has got some bad vibes. I don't know what but he probably did something bad. If applied universally, it starts to seem ridiculous. At the same time when applied just to the context of government cover ups, there is a real phenomenon that cover ups happen but we don't what was covered up because of the cover up. Do you maintain that it is wrong to say that successful cover ups likely happened?

My next argument seems even stronger in my opinion, but this is unrelated to the first. I believe that on some level conspiratorial thinking and conspiracy theories are necessary for justice to be possible in many cases. For example, sometimes there are conspiracies by organized criminals to frame innocent people. I have some questions about what you think of the following claims. Scenario 1: I didn't commit financial fraud because there were organized criminals who stole my identity and used my social security number to make me appear to have committed crimes I didn't commit. Scenario 2: I didn't attempt to kidnap this child. I was set up and tricked by criminals falsely claiming to be this child's relatives while I in reality had no intent of harming this child by claiming to know these relatives mistakenly. Scenario 3: There are organized criminals who frame sex trafficking victims for prostitution. How do you engage in conspiracy theories or conspiratorial thinking when somebody makes claims like these? Once you have witnessed frame ups like these by organized criminals, you become much more open minded to conspiracy theories because they are on some level needed for recognizing these scenarios. I do want to note, that for some reason I feel triggered by this subject of conspiracy theories. I feel the need to type insistently on this subject. Part of the problem might be because I believe in a conspiracy theory that there exists within the American government white collar criminals who do insider trading. What exactly are we labeling "conspiracy theory" versus blatant and undeniable reality? Is it not a conspiracy theory to say that there exists police corruption in forms such as using police stations to cover up drug trafficking operations due to bribery from organized criminals? Can we define conspiracy theory? To me a lot of this is just undeniable reality. The Epstein files might be another example of a very transparent cover up. How exactly should we think about the Epstein files if we are not going to use any conspiratorial thinking regarding government cover ups? It seems completely necessary to me in some cases to apply this mode of thinking. It is probably instructive to figure out why I feel triggered and what to do.

@moonawakening444 Here is the full document. I haven't had anybody review it yet, but I would like help to improve it. I see the systemic failures that enabled this behavior and I hope there are ways to prevent it. This post will be long. Organized Crime and Circumstantial Evidence My name is Trenton Rothan. I am writing this message in the hopes of helping law enforcement or advocacy groups combat organized crime. I was exposed to organized crime against my will as a child due to my father being involved in criminal gangs who for the most part evaded consequences. They were involved in many illegal activities including drug distribution, sex trafficking, coercion, gang violence, money laundering schemes, and sometimes police corruption which enabled their actions. In this document I would like to describe some of what I witnessed along with circumstantial evidence that would corroborate my story and make it more believable when child witnesses report these types of things. There are however limits to our current evidentiary standards which often allows organized criminals to frame their victims while evading consequences. There may also be overlap in trauma research in terms of understudied sexual identity shame in heterosexual males due to being associated with an actual adult male perpetrator. Spiral Dynamics A relevant model for understanding criminal psychology and possible systemic solutions would be Spiral Dynamics or similar models such as Integral Theory or Ego Development Theory. In Spiral Dynamics the stages of cognitive and moral development from bottom to top includes beige, purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, and turquoise. Stage red in particular is a common set of psychological patterns in organized criminals in contemporary societies. Stage red is characterized as tough, ruthless, thrill for conquest, impulsive, vengeful, exploitative of systems, sexually exploitative with a sense of power or sadism, and oftentimes a complete lack of a moral compass. In some environments, this kind of psychology is seen as a valid survival strategy due to intimating other bad actors who might victimize stage red, such as another gang. Sometimes boys develop this attitude in response to being sexually abused or groomed into future perpetrators through sex trafficking. Preventing these crimes is complex because a person with this mindset will use any exploit available to them within any system to continue their way of life. Stage blue often emerges in response to the lack of morality in the previous stage. Therefore, religion is often used in an effort to rehabilitate some bad actors with an emphasis on strict moral codes presented as absolute infallible truth. The struggle between good and evil can also be seen in police officers who attempt to deter bad actors through punishment. However, due to being impulsive, stage red often commits serious crimes without thinking through the consequences. Oftentimes, bad actors continue their crimes until they are finally caught and punished, at which point some of them start to rethink their lifestyle. However, this method is unreliable as it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to catch all bad actors, meaning in most cases just desserts aren't actually possible. Stage blue can be prone to violence through religious or ideological extremism, which is relevant in some cases of understanding the psychological background of violent criminals. Due to being ethnocentric, stage blue can sometimes be prone to racism, xenophobia, or strongly condemn non-conformists such as LGBTQ+, which is relevant for some hate crimes. A person with religious or cult-like justifications for their crimes are resistant to rehabilitation if they believe God gave them the authority to engage in violence. Preventing these crimes would require that churches not glorify violence against political or religious enemies. Stage orange might be relevant for understanding white collar crimes because this is the stage of calculated transgression for optimization in which rules are treated as obstacles. This might include corrupt business practices such as wage theft or environmental destruction. Under the current system, Americans are often left with the impression of a two-tiered justice system with the rich often escaping consequences due to prosecution being more difficult compared to poor defendants. Our current government is considered stage orange and is in many ways captured by corporate interests, thus making justice nearly impossible in many cases. These organized criminals are often responsible for financial fraud, but in some cases there is also sexual abuse by business leaders in work settings or other areas. Perhaps a concerning psychological background in such people is that they often view workers or poor people in a negative or even dehumanizing way, which on some level would make abuse feel psychologically justified. In order to deter these crimes, the punishment needs to be strong enough to outweigh the benefit of corporations engaging in calculated law breaking. Stage green is especially vulnerable to stage red. Stage green is often more compassionate and loving which can make them vulnerable to manipulation such as through love bombing. They might fall for scams such as false charities due to being too compassionate, or their forgiveness and mercy might be exploited and capitalized on. Stage green in this society is often left leaning rather than right leaning. They often emphasize things like harm reduction, rehabilitation, or crime prevention through social safety nets rather than through policing as they often fear police brutality. This might be where the stereotype “bleeding heart liberal” comes from. Although stage green is usually less violent than the previous stages, there are cases of political extremism such as in antifa or protests that start out peaceful but later get out of hand. Stage green might feel justified in committing crimes if it believes that the law is fundamentally unjust anyway and the rules need to be challenged as in the case of civil disobedience during the Civil Rights era. Changing unjust laws or systems might therefore prevent these crimes. Stage yellow is a type of cognitive development that uses these types of models to understand human behavior. Stage yellow attempts to integrate the strengths of each mode of thinking while being cognizant of the backfiring mechanisms. Stage yellow is often open-minded, nuanced, focuses on big pictures and systems thinking, and develops expertise in research and education. Integrating developmental models such as these to understand different ways of thinking and facilitating communication between stages is common in stage yellow. This might be relevant for bridging gaps in issues that are very polarizing as the right and left often use very different ways of thinking with different values and priorities. Corruption is much less common at higher stages of self-awareness and moral development, but stage yellow is still not above ego and selfishness. There might be intellectual dishonesty and deception. In some cases, stage yellow might be intellectually arrogant due to its understanding of complex systems which could potentially be used to justify calculated rule breaking for the greater good. A whistleblower or a hacker-activist exposing corruption might use complex ethical reasoning for this rule breaking. Stage turquoise is rare in today’s society. It is often characterized as deeply spiritual with a strong focus on consciousness. Turquoise is non-dogmatic and combines enhanced states of consciousness with an understanding of different stages. Perhaps people like Sadhguru or Eckhart Tolle might be stage turquoise as they place a strong emphasis on self-transcendence. Stage turquoise often focuses on human well-being on a large scale, emotional mastery, and radical not-knowing as part of epistemic humility. There may be practical wisdom in emotional mastery as it may prevent impulsive behaviors as in some cases of bullying in schools, thus potentially reducing long term negative impacts with meditation being used to enhance self-awareness. Social and Emotional learning demonstrated that emotional mastery to some extent reduces bullying, though it is not perfect. The closest example of stage turquoise crimes I could find are maybe high profile cases of spiritual leaders claiming to be enlightened, but in reality using spirituality to cover up sexual abuse. This casts doubt on if they are really enlightened and above ego. The main risk is that their spiritual teachings might eventually lead people into dogmatism or spiritual extremism even with best intentions. This could happen after they die, even if their community was completely peaceful at the time of their presence. Various religions might mention people who seem to operate at this level of development, but ultimately use the teachings to justify harm in the absence of the original messenger. It is worth mentioning that people do not always operate from a consistent stage. Someone might in one part of their life operate from one stage, but in a different area in another part of their life. For example, a seemingly good father at home could be working for a company engaged in financial fraud, which would mix blue and orange. Maybe a person describes high moral or intellectual ideals, but in practice is much less developed. Maybe under normal circumstances a person is usually peaceful until an intimate partner cheats on them, leading to a crime of passion, thus mixing red with another stage of development due to impulsive behavior. My Father Christopher Paul Hamann was my father. He had an extensive criminal record involving drug distribution and child support evasion. He had children by multiple women including highschool girls like my mother, though due to a five year age gap being allowed, it was not considered statutory rape when maybe it should be. My father proceeded to abandon his children he had with at least two women that I know of as he fled the State to avoid paying child support. My mother had extensive legal battles, only to discover that child support enforcement was often ineffective at compensating mothers like her. Child support enforcement might take his license away, only for him to drive without a license. Similarly, men who don’t pay child support might end up in jail while the victims remain without compensation in an unstable home. For the most part, my father remained out of jail despite owing approximately 300,000 dollars in child support. He would argue that he was doing his best to help the kids, and this sympathetic sounding argument covered his criminal lifestyle. Some of the mechanisms for child support enforcement include taxing a paycheck from a job or taxing property. However, my father had methods for evading both of these. He would jump from job to job, so that he could not be taxed due to inconsistent income. He would also pay his landlord in cash which he received through illegal means as part of a money laundering scheme, thus avoiding the property tax. This money was often stolen from family members such as when he broke into mom’s house, or the money would be received from other gang activities which seemed to mainly be drug deals to my knowledge. Sometimes my father would boast about his exploits, mentioning money made from drug deals, glorifying gang violence and death threats, and prostitution deals. Although I initially assumed the prostitutes were adult women selling themselves, I would later discover that prostitutes could be victims who are sold by other men, and the victims could also be children including me. My father was often impulsive and manipulative. He would suddenly run out of the house in the middle of the night, taking money, and going to meet his gang. He would also treat me as if I were special, giving me lots of positive praise while threatening to disown me if I reported his crimes. This was combined with incoherent religious messaging in which he would condemn a teenager for masturbation while soliciting minors for prostitution. He claimed to believe in karma, arguing that people gave him money for his drugs because he made good drugs and did the right thing by not mixing poison in the heroin he was selling them. This gives a psychological profile of someone who is deeply irrational from an intellectual standpoint because in reality the underlying logic is power and whatever serves him. His ideology is therefore inconsistent, similar to a Nazi ideology which is logically incoherent, but has a fundamental message of power and dominance. The details are changed as needed to suit them. My father also appears to have been operating under the “just world fallacy.” From his point of view, so long as he could get away with these things, it was as though God was on his side. He believed that good things happened to good people and bad things happened to bad people. In the mind of organized criminals, this is disturbing because it mirrors patterns in how a psychopath thinks. If a person is stupid enough to fall for their tricks, then to the psychopath, that person deserved to be hurt and they deserve to benefit from hurting them. This is what happens when the just world fallacy is filtered through a psychology rooted in power and control. I was often isolated from the rest of my family while my father would be mixing apparent love with threats. This created a dynamic in which my sisters learned to associate me with a perpetrator and therefore started turning against me. I was the easier target which therefore made me a more compelling scapegoat compared to our father involved in a violent gang. I felt as if I were alone trying to navigate not just my father, but also another unstable abusive situation with Mom and my stepfather involving drugs and domestic violence. Teens from unstable homes are often the most vulnerable to sex trafficking due to the isolation from other family members. In the case of my father, he also wanted me to give him information about Mom and Mike which he later went on to use in court with success. It was suspicious how he got this information, but the court didn’t question it and instead investigated Mom for drugs. My father had ties to police corruption through his father Gerald Hamann. Gerald was a former gang member who later became a police informant. He reported some gangs, but didn’t turn his son into the police despite knowing of his crimes. My father claimed he had extensive involvement in crime with Gerald, but I don’t know which parts are true and which parts are fabricated. The part that concerns me is that these stories are plausible given the context of both of their criminal histories, access to weapons, violent histories, and connections to the police in a way that would prevent accountability. In his free time, he would look like a normal man. He would play videogames, read books, and listen to music. One thing I noticed is that he listened to a lot of dirty rap music that glorified criminal behavior. This music on its own does not necessarily have a connection to real criminal activity. However, a finer psychological point is that the music a person listens to often speaks to their identity on some level. This becomes more blatant when the music is used in the context of actual ongoing criminal behavior. It becomes a sign that he actually resonates with the things being said in the dirty rap music that glorifies violence. This makes me wonder if it might be possible to reduce criminal behavior by allowing for edgy raps that have stronger moral messages while still being badass. An example might be criminals who reformed. If stage red values respect and admiration, then sometimes the military or aiding police becomes a gateway to reform. Other times it leads to corruption in the form of a revolving door between police officers during the day and gang members during the night. My father showed some signs of wanting to be different. He feared that his kids would not respect him if they thought of him too negatively. He needed to keep secrets from the family while claiming to want to break the cycle of criminal behavior. Sometimes having a child inspires criminals to change, but in my father’s case it didn’t. Instead he put the burden on me to fix what I didn’t break while involving me in things I didn’t want to be involved in despite claiming to keep family separate from criminal activities. He would talk about breaking the cycle of crime while actively perpetuating it, claiming to be a product of his environment. The stories he told of his childhood involved racially motivated gangs in both directions. He became associated with criminals early on and was described as an asshole by his sister. He put a cat in the microwave while his mother minimized the behavior and became defensive. Although child sexual abuse is common in youth gang members, it is unclear if my father was “initiated” through such abuse. If he were, then that would explain escalating aggression, but the aggression may have been present regardless of such abuse. He came from a father that was also a gang member and later became a police informant. My father learned to glorify violence and power, including his father’s violence such as death threats and beatings. He had learned that his behavior was only bad if he got caught. The Incident Although my father usually did drug deals with his gang, there was an incident that added another dimension to his criminal behavior that I found disturbing. Back when I was in highschool, my father took me to his gang in the middle of the night. He had previously mentioned prostitution deals, but I didn’t think this included children until I was sexually exploited. Once he brought me to his gang, he left me in the car as he walked off and disappeared from my sight. He had been talking in code frequently to disguise his intentions, including numbers and colors. I waited alone until Dad returned from his deal with someone code named Fat Ass. I never saw this man or any of his supposed five other gang members including a woman. They seem to have set up this situation well to ensure that I would have as little information as possible. This made my report ineffective by the time I tried to tell the police what I witnessed. When Dad came back, he said that Fat Ass would give me 600 dollars if I spent the night with him. He for some reason seemed happy about this, as if on some level he felt a twisted sense of pride or being special for having his son offered to a gang. At first I was confused about what exactly he wanted me to do when spending the night with this man. Because children with autism are more trusting and prone to literal interpretations, I thought he meant that he wanted me to literally sleep with Fat Ass rather than figuratively, meaning have sex with him. The reason I hesitated is because 600 dollars sounded like a lot of money for minimal effort. Therefore, I started to grow suspicious until I remembered that Fat Ass was the man who had supposedly hired prostitutes in other deals. I discovered that these deals also involved children when I was the subject of this deal. Ultimately, I didn’t take the money. I was torn between seeing my father as someone I needed to trust to protect me while reconciling it with the reality of his criminal lifestyle. I fell silent and became heavy after being exposed to trafficking deals. I began to fear that my father and his gang may have done deals like these before with other minors. This turned into survivor’s guilt in which my silence felt like enabling. These feelings seem to be driving me to document what I know about organized crime in the hopes of protecting other victims, bringing perpetrators to justice, and preventing these crimes where possible. Therefore, I would like to describe how circumstantial evidence might be applied to cases like mine along with how it might help to catch perpetrators. It will be important to highlight the limits of evidence, as organized criminals often have deep knowledge of the legal system and know how to manipulate evidence to sometimes frame their victims. Circumstantial Evidence in My Case The sexual exploitation of a minor is often extremely difficult to prove. In my case, I was set up by organized criminals who used coded language, hid their identities, spoke behind closed doors by word of mouth without texts, and exploited the trust of a child toward his father while being linked to police corruption that enabled the behavior. Because of factors like these, the majority of organized criminals for the most part evade significant charges. Therefore, the justice system has been relying more and more on circumstantial evidence which is more difficult to hide even for organized criminals while still implicating them through indirect proof rather than hard evidence that is easier to hide such as a gun or a body. In my case, the proof at first seems nearly impossible, but upon closer inspection it is possible to build at minimum probable cause, even if not beyond a reasonable doubt without a further complex investigation. Using what I know about my father, I can reason backwards to see what the signs were that would implicate him. First of all, my father had an extensive criminal record, including drug distribution offenses that would implicate gang activity. His crimes included fleeing the State to avoid paying child support, after which he structured his lifestyle around avoiding these taxes. He was later caught with a pipe in his car by law enforcement, possibly because a gang member left it there or he was using it himself. There was a broad continuation of the same criminal lifestyle even after he supposedly passed all of his drug tests after being caught the first time. Secondly, organized criminals often have a money laundering scheme. This makes sense because the money they are getting is through illegal means, and then often used for seemingly legitimate purposes. In my case, my father owed about 300,000 dollars in child support, owned property, and had multiple jobs. Normally someone would pay a tax on their property for child support, but in the case of my father he didn’t due to paying the landlord in cash. This combined with inconsistent income tied from jumping from job to job, would implicate a money laundering scheme with which to avoid paying child support because the paycheck is also supposed to be taxed for child support. There are likely many other reasons for money laundering schemes that organized criminals could use. In cases like these, a person with a criminal record that implicates gang activity such as drugs, weapons, or sexual offenses combined with a pattern of tax evasion, would implicate that there is a continued criminal lifestyle. Thirdly, in my case my father was less careful with the text messages he sent me. He was confident that I would not report him, which he seems to have been right about. Some of the messages on my old phone included things like Dad saying he would gank my stepfather. This would actually be treated as hard evidence in a court of law, had I had the courage as a child to turn my father into the police for his gang activities. In other cases there likely are damning text messages that are never recovered due to children being too afraid to become a legal enemy of a parent. My father likely had the contacts of other gang members on his old phone, which would establish an ongoing relationship and criminal lifestyle. Proving sexual exploitation specifically would be the hardest to prove, even if my father were implicated in drug and gang related offenses. Once again, I did not realize what I was witnessing or grasp the significance until later on. In this case, I was the child closest to my father, spending the most time with him on his property. Given his ongoing criminal lifestyle, I would have been exposed to gang activities. The closest thing I can think of that might implicate sexual abuse would be my father’s broader criminal lifestyle and character. If my father is the kind of person who shows very little care for his children such as by evading child support while having children by multiple women, then this person would be very careless, reckless, or dangerous. This kind of character, given an ongoing criminal lifestyle, would be the kind of person to endanger his own child by exposing him to gang activities. In my case the specific endangerment was being solicited by a gang for child prostitution which my father facilitated by bringing me to them. However, in order to prove that the specific mechanism of endangerment was sexual exploitation, that would likely require finding out who these other prostitutes were that the gang was hiring. I don’t see how I could prove sexual exploitation specifically while being an isolated witness against an organized gang without corroborating this kind of testimony. Even if I can’t prove sexual exploitation specifically, there should be sufficient evidence to prove child endangerment in the form of criminal socialization and foreseeable risks such as violence from a criminal gang. Lesser charges might still be possible even if sexual exploitation specifically cannot be proven, and depending on the severity, the lesser charges might be sufficient to ensure a just outcome regardless of absent proof of child trafficking. Relevant factors would include contributing to the delinquency of the minor or using a child to manipulate court outcomes. In my case my father not only said he would disown me if I reported his crimes, but he also wanted me to gather dirt on Mom that he could use against her in court. This put me in a loyalty conflict in which I was forced to choose between two bad parents. I sided with Dad because Mom and Mike were using drugs and destroying the house, causing me to fear for the safety of my siblings. Once Dad got this information, it then changed the legal outcome of the court. Mom was treated with increased scrutiny while being made to take drug tests due to knowledge my father could not have had without me. This therefore helped him to avoid consequences. If a person gets this kind of information that they shouldn’t have, then it might implicate some form of spying. In this case I was used as a pawn due to coercion behind the scenes that the court could not see was happening. I was being forced to make adult legal calculations without guidance as both parents were unsafe. Courts should probably be more skeptical of people giving this information they shouldn’t have other than through hearsay. If a child gave him this information along with this broader criminal lifestyle, then this would implicate something very serious in that I was being coerced into aiding in a felony. I would like to help law enforcement and advocacy groups, but sometimes people like me get charged instead of the people doing the coercion as the truth seems to be too complex for courts to handle easily and routinely. In my case, I showed repeated signs of distress and suicidal ideation that was often ignored in schools when I mentioned these things in creative writing. I would write stories involving me committing suicide or I would mention gangs and domestic violence. It was not until I publicly confessed to homicidal thoughts that the community reacted, leading to Mike’s eviction and my mother coming off of the drugs. Maybe children who write about suicide in creative writing should be taken more seriously in schools as it could lead to discovering serious abuse. My father was the son of a former gang member who became a police informant. This would create a strong incentive to cover up crimes while seeming legitimate. Maybe gang members who become police informants should be treated with more scrutiny if they have family members involved in crimes that implicate gang activities. There might be other factors, but I don’t know what else would implicate my father in these crimes. My hope is that these circumstances can be used to better detect gang activities in other cases, such as men with criminal records related to gang activities who owe hundreds of thousands in child support while being implicated in a money laundering scheme. Maybe these circumstances should be seen as more suspect and potentially leading to the discovery of drug, weapon, or sex trafficking, thereby protecting present and future victims. Limits of present evidentiary standards Although circumstantial evidence can be helpful in detecting likely offenders, there are serious limits. Organized criminals are very familiar with the legal system because they want to know the gaps and the most effective ways to exploit them. This includes manipulating evidence to frame their victims while they remain free. A few examples of frame-up scenarios and set ups include sex trafficking framed as prostitution, identity theft, blind mule set ups, middlemen in money laundering or kidnapping schemes, or rape by coercion from a third party. In situations like these, bad actors often set up the situation such that it is hard to implicate them while the manufactured circumstances falsely implicate the victim. These scenarios directly challenge the evidentiary standards used in a court of law as it is often impossible to prove intent, yet innocent people are easily found guilty anyway. Epistemically, it is impossible for any legal system to distinguish between a genuinely guilty person and a successful frame-up in that by definition, all available evidence would have been manipulated to make an innocent person appear guilty. A simple example of a frame-up could be planted drugs discovered during a traffic stop. Although corrupt police officers doing this lead to explosive cases, there are other possibilities such as a vindictive relative planting evidence in someone’s car without their knowledge. In situations like these it would require impossible knowledge to avoid incriminating oneself as the evidence of drugs in a person’s car strongly implicates them regardless of claimed ignorance. Technically, intent is supposed to be proven, but in practice it often isn’t, leading to many successful frame-ups. Perhaps these scenarios could be mitigated through harm reduction and rehabilitation designed to make addiction less common combined with decriminalization or other measures. The fewer drug addicts there are, the less money there would be flowing to the gangs selling the drugs. In sex trafficking scenarios, prostitution is often used as a set up. It serves to make the victim more afraid to tell the police as they risk being charged themselves even if in reality they were being coerced into the situation. This was part of the set up I witnessed as well and sometimes this leads to a serious miscarriage of justice in which victims of rape are charged with being child prostitutes. Police corruption sometimes aids in this set up if there are informants fabricating police reports in the gang’s favor. Unwitting middlemen are often exploited as fall guys despite in reality having no criminal intent at all. This isn’t just in blind mule set ups, but it could be a kidnapping set up. For example, a couple could falsely claim to be the relatives of a child when in reality having no relationship to the child. This could be part of a trick to isolate the child with an unwitting middleman in a kidnapping frame-up. Once the child is isolated with a man falsely claiming to know relatives who don’t exist, the child will panic and the man will be made to seem like a child predator. The circumstantial evidence would likely be strong but misleading. Identity theft sometimes has clear exculpatory evidence that is overlooked. For example, defendants are often charged with crimes they allegedly committed while they were in jail. This should clearly exonerate them if a person can’t be in two places at once. However, sometimes the justice system fails and charges these people again anyway as it is hard to believe them once the falsified criminal record is established. Living any decent life is essentially impossible when a person is constantly framed for financial fraud by someone hacking their bank account while using their social security number. Rape by coercion from a third party is not very well discussed, and it challenges the way sources like the Center of Disease Control describe the nature of the crime. For example, the rape of males is often classified as “made to penetrate.” This is misleading because it implicates a female perpetrator which isn’t necessarily true. It could be that a man was made to penetrate through coercion by a third party in a scenario in which the woman is also a victim. The incentive to do this would be to frame the victim for rape through DNA evidence and potentially use the woman as a witness against the apparent rapist. In reality the ones creating the situation of mutual rape would be the rapists. This situation commonly emerged in government military experiments and concentration camps, but sometimes human traffickers force people into situations like these as well. “Made to penetrate” likely lumps scenarios like these together with female perpetrators. There should be a separate category such as “coercion by a third party” versus “envelopment.” According to the CDC, 79 percent of men reporting “made to penetrate” reported only female perpetrators. There are likely cases of “made to penetrate” by male intimate partners or via coercion by a third party with multiple perpetrators, but there isn’t a clear category in the CDC for this scenario of mutual rape with a male and female victim. In all of these frame-scenarios, the only reasonable defense for the victim is to become the prosecutor of organized criminals who have deliberately manipulated the evidence to frame them. This is an extremely high burden of proof that is nearly impossible to meet in many scenarios. In practice, the victims of a frame-up are often poor and can’t afford an expensive investigation and a sophisticated defense. At the same time, the way investigations are set up often allows the prosecution to set up the narrative from the beginning and only show the defense attorney the gathered evidence shortly before trial. This can and does lead to exculpatory evidence being overlooked, not necessarily out of malice, but out of simple human errors such as confirmation bias. My recommendation would be to allow joint investigations between the defense and prosecution. This would be an effective measure against falsified evidence while ensuring exculpatory evidence isn’t overlooked. There would be a much more transparent process behind how the evidence is gathered while allowing the defense attorneys to build stronger positions. However, this may require changing the current incentive structure of the justice system which is presently geared toward mass incarceration and rapid case management to clear dockets, often at the expense of quality and proper investigation. Miscarriage of justice is likely in these situations because justice is impossible without truth. Police corruption Police corruption is a significant factor in organized crime because such criminals are the ones most likely to exploit this corruption. Fabricating police reports from informants is one of the methods of using police corruption, but it is not the only way. This can include cases such as infiltration of the justice system by gang members, bribery, drug trafficking, and police brutality linked to gangs. In extreme cases of police corruption, law enforcement has been caught enabling organized criminals through a combination of these corrupt practices. Therefore, anti-corruption is critical for effectively fighting organized crime or else the corruption of law enforcement will be exploited by these gangs. An example of extreme police corruption would be a Mississippi case announced on October 30, 2025. This case included 14 law enforcement officers, two of which were sheriffs. These officers were arrested for enabling drug trafficking by accepting bribes. Some officers accepted bribes as high as 37,000 dollars while enabling drug trafficking. Police vehicles and uniforms were used to cover up the scheme by making it seem legitimate. This isn’t the only example of extreme police corruption in Mississippi in recent years, but it demonstrates clearly how corruption enables organized criminals. Reducing police corruption is a complex endeavor, likely requiring several overlapping methods. There would likely need to be external bodies investigating misconduct rather than relying on internal resolutions which often enable cover-ups. Even the highest level of government such as the CIA rely on internal investigations when there are serious scandals, casting doubt on whether or not these investigations are genuine due to the lack of transparency. Other measures might include whistleblower protections, reallocation of funding to prevent crime where possible rather than risking police misconduct, or potentially removing qualified immunity which has been used to shield officers for excessive force, sexual misconduct, or theft. Furthermore, corruption extends even to public officials in ways that make combating organized crime seem unrealistic. Sometimes there are government officials who benefit from organized crime such as white collar crimes, insider trading, sex trafficking, and many other corruption scandals. This is the highest level of organized crime, leading to many cover-ups that damage faith in the government that is supposed to maintain order. The Epstein files are one of many examples of extreme government corruption enabling organized crime. Therefore, anti-corruption and accountability for government officials is critical for stopping organized crime on a systemic level in that corrupt officials sometimes benefit from these criminals. This is a complex and difficult issue beyond the scope of this document, but it is worth mentioning this because fighting organized crime has serious limits if the ones that are supposed to maintain order are the ones responsible for organized crime. Recommendations for detection and prevention Organized criminals are often difficult to detect because they use their knowledge of evidentiary standards to avoid detection. They exploit every loophole that is available in order to carry out their plans. This not only includes every legal loophole, but also every structural weakness in society that allows them to avoid detection and accountability. Given that determined bad actors will look for any exploitable weakness, it makes it nearly impossible to design a system that would prevent this organized crime completely. Combating organized crime is therefore a non-trivial matter and the answers don’t seem obvious. The changes necessary might be radical or counter-intuitive. Firstly, circumstantial evidence has been increasingly relied upon for investigating sophisticated bad actors. Although organized criminals can easily hide hard evidence, it is difficult even for them to hide the suspicious circumstances they create due to the nature of their crimes. In the case of my father, he racked up about 300,000 dollars in child support while owning property and not paying taxes on that property for child support. This kind of behavior implicates a money laundering scheme which is in reality common across various types of organized crimes. Therefore, anti-money laundering measures seem to be the most promising and universal approach to organized crime whether they are involved in sex trafficking, drug trafficking, or weapon trafficking. One of the measures attempted was to require landlords to verify the source of the payment before taking money from a client. Oftentimes landlords prefer hard cash and don’t question where it comes from even though this easily allows tax evasion by drug dealers. However, measures like these were previously lobbied against and therefore never implemented. If they were implemented, then somebody like my father would not have been able to maintain his scheme as it would force transparency on his part, creating a legal vulnerability that would complicate organized crime. Perhaps there are other anti-money laundering measures that could be used to interfere with these operations, but in practice they are difficult to implement. The alternative to anti-money laundering laws would be to focus on preventing crime rather than punishing it after it happens. If organized criminals usually get away with these operations anyway, then law enforcement can’t be relied upon consistently to stop them. Therefore, measures for preventing crime would reduce the burden on law enforcement who would have to carry out lengthy and expensive investigations while improving public safety. Combating organized crime through harm reduction is likely more realistic. For example, drug consumers contribute to the demand for drug traffickers. If drug users are given access to rehabilitation and harm reduction, it would prevent money from flowing toward organized crime. Similarly, human traffickers sometimes post child sexual abuse material on porn sites in an attempt to profit further from their trafficking operations. There are measures being put in place to prevent this material from spreading such as by using AI to efficiently scan targeted sites with known distribution of such material. This material can then be flagged and blocked more efficiently to prevent it from spreading. This kind of job is more difficult for humans to do because it is psychologically disturbing to look at this material and slow to sort through millions of pornographic images on the internet. An AI might be better suited for this kind of work to protect the mental health of human workers while doing the job quickly. One of the methods for redirecting funds from criminal enterprises might include widespread government education on how to do legal entrepreneurship effectively and how to find these opportunities and capitalize on them. The idea is that organized criminals often make a rational financial calculus when considering their crimes. If someone sees legal opportunities available to them and they believe that this is a legitimate path they can follow, it changes the calculus. On its own, this would likely have a small impact on organized crime while potentially becoming a strong source of investment for the community by helping small business start-ups succeed. In order to have a significant impact on organized crime, it would likely require other measures such as access to start-up money, criminal record reform that presently bars people from these opportunities, and other social safety nets and economic investment. Once again, combating organized crime remains complex and non-trivial. A change in education that may prevent children from becoming criminals is comprehensive age appropriate sex education for minors. It is important to teach children about boundaries and consent because a significant portion of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by other youth. Sometimes when children are sexually abused, they develop a desire to reclaim power and therefore act more aggressively. This pattern of behavior can lead to disengagement in schools which in turn can lead them to turning to crime. Child sexual abuse perpetrated by youth is often under discussed, but preventing it is important both for preventing severe trauma in victims while also preventing the perpetrator from continuing this behavior while risking the victim also becoming a perpetrator. Usually, victims do not become perpetrators, but sometimes they do depending on how their shattered worldview pieces itself back together due to reaction formation. Child Disengagement in Schools Another aspect of reducing crime includes addressing at risk children in schools. Some children have behavioral problems which make them more resistant to obeying authority. Although schools repeatedly give these kids punishment and detention, they don’t change and eventually drop out of school, leaving them vulnerable to organized crime. These children likely recognize that their lack of power is being exploited while moralizing language is used in an attempt to shame them into submission and control. They have a different worldview that is sensitive to this power discrepancy compared to other children while believing that the school is not actually serving their interests. Such children might look for belonging elsewhere, such as other groups of people who were frequently told that they were bad people. These people may be in a position to offer them a sense of autonomy, money, and power through criminal exploits. Schools using punitive methods of discipline may not recognize that they are reducing the child’s sense of autonomy rather than giving them hope that they can control their future through becoming better students. They are instead repeatedly punished for getting into fights and doing whatever they want with a disregard for the rules and their consequences. Perhaps a better disciplinary measure is needed for such children. Rather than inflating their ego even more through trying to scare them and threaten them which they will mimic in adulthood, schools may more effectively help at-risk students by giving them a better deal while helping them to maintain a sense of control over their lives. They want a sense that respect flows in both directions rather than being expected to respect adults that don’t respect them, with one example being adults being allowed to cuss while children can’t. Offers made to these students would need to convince them without the use of moral language, but rather through practical language for achieving what they want. This can be accompanied by school counselors who learn their grievances with the current system while giving them steps to build the life they want through education. If school fails to offer them a better deal by making compelling promises that can be kept with progress reports, then criminal gangs might do a better job of offering these kids belonging, money, power, and autonomy than any formal legal system ever could. More punishment will eventually lead to recidivism as the children don’t believe the system actually serves their interests both in childhood and in adulthood. This could be a method of rehabilitation rather than punishment applied to school systems in addition to criminal justice systems. Heterosexual Shame An overlooked aspect of trauma research is heterosexual shame. Typically, research on sexual shame focuses on LGBTQ+ because it is more systemic rather than context dependent as in the case of straight shame. This is a critical gap in trauma research because heterosexual shame can emerge as a consequence of a child being associated with an adult sexual predator, therefore causing them to view normal sexuality as inherently predatory. Part of my trauma recovery involves heterosexual shame, not just out of what my father did, but also due to facing accusations by my mother in regard to predatory behavior when I was six. She equated me to a child molester and threatened me with jail. This wasn’t the only example of sexual identity abuse because she also fabricated stories about tissues used for masturbation in an attempt to embarrass me as well as she and the family showing signs of wanting me to be gay as if it were desirable. A possible explanation for this apparent preference for my gayness would be the fact that my sisters and my mother felt my father was a sexual predator and therefore felt safer with me not having a sexual attraction toward women. I noticed apparent disapproval from this side of the family in that they would withdraw support and love while becoming colder should I express being straight. Meanwhile my proclaimed Christian father insisted that being gay was sinful. I grew up in my household as an only boy without the guidance of any father while learning that my sexual desires and curiosity made me dangerous when my father was the true source of the harm in this family system. This pattern is typical across other forms of sexual shame. For example, LGBTQ+ are frequently characterized as sexual predators. There is an infamous 1960’s homophobic ad about child predators as they were treated as identical. Similarly, today pedophile and child molester are often used interchangeably despite not being technically identical. A pedophile often internalizes deep sexual shame because of their feelings even if they don’t act on their sexual attraction to children. Meanwhile, a child molester is typically motivated by power rather than sexual pleasure and is more likely to act on these desires than a pedophile. This shame prevents pedophiles from seeking help and may make children more vulnerable as a result if these pedophiles do not instead die by suicide which is also unacceptable. A child molester demonstrates a clear lack of sympathy for the victim’s suffering whereas a pedophile may have sympathy for a child’s suffering and therefore not act on their desires, although some pedophiles do act on these desires. Closing I hope that this document helps in understanding perpetrator psychology while protecting present and future victims from organized crime. Combating organized crime is difficult for many reasons. People who do horrible things operate from a different worldview than most people are used to, making their behavior seem incomprehensible. It becomes difficult to understand why people would do such things. Additionally, organized criminals are both sophisticated in their methods and determined to exploit any weakness available to them in a social system. It becomes nearly impossible to close all weaknesses within a social system even in theory, and then in practice there is often a lack of political willpower to close the identified weaknesses, exacerbating the problem. The changes necessary to combat organized crime therefore often seem threatening to the current social order, radical, politically risky, or counter intuitive due to rehabilitation seeming “soft.” I may struggle with the trauma inflicted upon me by my family and organized criminals, resulting in survivor’s guilt among many other psychological complications. However, I also have unique strengths in the form of my deeply logical and analytical approach to understanding systems. I would like to use my strengths to give others the help that I deserved but did not receive. References Beck, D. E., & Cowan, C. C. (1996). Spiral dynamics: Mastering values, leadership, and change. Blackwell Publishing. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and stalking among men. https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/intimate-partner-violence-sexual-violence-and-stalking-among-men.html Hare, R. D. (1993). Without conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us. Guilford Press. Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books. Lew, M. (1990). Victims no longer: Men recovering from incest and other sexual child abuse. Harper & Row. Mississippi Today. (2025, October 30). FBI arrests delta sheriffs. https://mississippitoday.org/2025/10/30/fbi-arrests-delta-sheriffs/ Wilber, K. (2000). A theory of everything: An integral vision for business, politics, science, and spirituality. Shambhala Publications.

@Leo Gura I have a question about a conspiracy theory. I believe there are epistemically sound conspiracy theories so long as we are honest about what we don't know. I'm curious if this is an example of an epistemically sound conspiracy theory. The CIA probably did something bad, but we don't know what because they covered it up. Sometimes governments cover things up and we don't know what they did, and our government probably did successful cover ups as well, likely including something bad. The CIA also has a history of documented misconduct and various scandals, suggesting that they probably did other bad things as well, but we don't know what. Any scandal or misconduct through the history of the CIA is proof that the CIA might have done other things that we haven't yet discovered. Is this reasoning sound? I also find it funny because it is intentionally unfalsifiable while simultaneously being the point of how cover ups work along with self-aware paranoia about "something bad." The policy suggestion that this conspiracy theory would entail would be whistleblower protections because there are probably whistleblowers trying to tell us that the CIA did something bad, but we can't hear them.

Do you think this guy is evil? Why or why not?

@Eskilon It was a stray cat. I didn't want to keep him. In this case I cared for the cat because it was the right thing to do. Eventually, someone adopted him. I know I am biased toward humans and I get annoyed by animals, however on principle I understood that this cat needed care until we could get it somewhere safe. Just because I feel a certain way toward animals and they often annoy me like this stray cat that gets under my legs and makes me trip, doesn't mean I won't care for the animal anyway out of an intellectual moral reasoning rather than an emotional attachment to animals. Does that clear it up?

I have encountered a dog owner who seemed to think it was no big deal when his dog bit made and tore my pants. He just walked away saying sorry and didn't do anything to pay. He just let his dog on a long leash run across the street and bite me. I'm scared of dogs and he said the dog wants to say hi. It looks like people get really infatuated with their pets to the point that they care very little or are blind to the harm they cause. I would need to do research on why people get this infatuated. My sister is infatuated with animals. Maybe it is because she views animals as fundamentally more innocent than humans as humans have a nasty mind. In my case, I would prefer not to own any pets. I have an instrumental sense of love because of how I was raised. I see the pet as a liability and feel inconvenience rather than connection. For me it is easy to choose the human child. I call this human bias. The human bias is what I define as a human bias in which humans are biased toward humans rather than animals. Although we can argue that humans are more valuable, this is a consequence of human bias toward human bias. Our reasoning is itself not applicable to the value of animals beyond subjective utility or any other number of philosophies invented by humans. I logically understand that animals are worthy of love and respect, but I don't want them. For me it is more abstract that animals are not really less valuable than humans. We just act this way for our social survival. In the case of dog owners, there might be psychological studies we can find to understand why they act this way.

For anybody interested, I have a long document, about 12 pages single-spaced. It is about organized crime, focusing mainly on stage red. This was my first draft, and there might be some mistakes in it. I have given a copy to a couple of people I know in preparation for review, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. I will give you the sections related to my father and circumstantial evidence as it is most relevant for understanding the "monster." If you are interested in the full document, let me know, but I made it by myself without help. Here are some snippets from the document. One thing I didn't mention was grooming behaviors. I didn't understand this very well, but grooming is being criminalized and it explains much of what my father did to me to prepare me for exploitation similar to other child predators. My Father Christopher Paul Hamann was my father. He had an extensive criminal record involving drug distribution and child support evasion. He had children by multiple women including highschool girls like my mother, though due to a five year age gap being allowed, it was not considered statutory rape when maybe it should be. My father proceeded to abandon his children he had with at least two women that I know of as he fled the State to avoid paying child support. My mother had extensive legal battles, only to discover that child support enforcement was often ineffective at compensating mothers like her. Child support enforcement might take his license away, only for him to drive without a license. Similarly, men who don’t pay child support might end up in jail while the victims remain without compensation in an unstable home. For the most part, my father remained out of jail despite owing approximately 300,000 dollars in child support. He would argue that he was doing his best to help the kids, and this sympathetic sounding argument covered his criminal lifestyle. Some of the mechanisms for child support enforcement include taxing a paycheck from a job or taxing property. However, my father had methods for evading both of these. He would jump from job to job, so that he could not be taxed due to inconsistent income. He would also pay his landlord in cash which he received through illegal means as part of a money laundering scheme, thus avoiding the property tax. This money was often stolen from family members such as when he broke into mom’s house, or the money would be received from other gang activities which seemed to mainly be drug deals to my knowledge. Sometimes my father would boast about his exploits, mentioning money made from drug deals, glorifying gang violence and death threats, and prostitution deals. Although I initially assumed the prostitutes were adult women selling themselves, I would later discover that prostitutes could be victims who are sold by other men, and the victims could also be children including me. My father was often impulsive and manipulative. He would suddenly run out of the house in the middle of the night, taking money, and going to meet his gang. He would also treat me as if I were special, giving me lots of positive praise while threatening to disown me if I reported his crimes. This was combined with incoherent religious messaging in which he would condemn a teenager for masturbation while soliciting minors for prostitution. He claimed to believe in karma, arguing that people gave him money for his drugs because he made good drugs and did the right thing by not mixing poison in the heroin he was selling them. This gives a psychological profile of someone who is deeply irrational from an intellectual standpoint because in reality the underlying logic is power and whatever serves him. His ideology is therefore inconsistent, similar to a Nazi ideology which is logically incoherent, but has a fundamental message of power and dominance. The details are changed as needed to suit them. My father also appears to have been operating under the “just world fallacy.” From his point of view, so long as he could get away with these things, it was as though God was on his side. He believed that good things happened to good people and bad things happened to bad people. In the mind of organized criminals, this is disturbing because it mirrors patterns in how a psychopath thinks. If a person is stupid enough to fall for their tricks, then to the psychopath, that person deserved to be hurt and they deserve to benefit from hurting them. This is what happens when the just world fallacy is filtered through a psychology rooted in power and control. I was often isolated from the rest of my family while my father would be mixing apparent love with threats. This created a dynamic in which my sisters learned to associate me with a perpetrator and therefore started turning against me. I was the easier target which therefore made me a more compelling scapegoat compared to our father involved in a violent gang. I felt as if I were alone trying to navigate not just my father, but also another unstable abusive situation with Mom and my stepfather involving drugs and domestic violence. Teens from unstable homes are often the most vulnerable to sex trafficking due to the isolation from other family members. In the case of my father, he also wanted me to give him information about Mom and Mike which he later went on to use in court with success. It was suspicious how he got this information, but the court didn’t question it and instead investigated Mom for drugs. My father had ties to police corruption through his father Gerald Hamann. Gerald was a former gang member who later became a police informant. He reported some gangs, but didn’t turn his son into the police despite knowing of his crimes. My father claimed he had extensive involvement in crime with Gerald, but I don’t know which parts are true and which parts are fabricated. The part that concerns me is that these stories are plausible given the context of both of their criminal histories, access to weapons, violent histories, and connections to the police in a way that would prevent accountability. In his free time, he would look like a normal man. He would play videogames, read books, and listen to music. One thing I noticed is that he listened to a lot of dirty rap music that glorified criminal behavior. This music on its own does not necessarily have a connection to real criminal activity. However, a finer psychological point is that the music a person listens to often speaks to their identity on some level. This becomes more blatant when the music is used in the context of actual ongoing criminal behavior. It becomes a sign that he actually resonates with the things being said in the dirty rap music that glorifies violence. This makes me wonder if it might be possible to reduce criminal behavior by allowing for edgy raps that have stronger moral messages while still being badass. An example might be criminals who reformed. If stage red values respect and admiration, then sometimes the military or aiding police becomes a gateway to reform. Other times it leads to corruption in the form of a revolving door between police officers during the day and gang members during the night. My father showed some signs of wanting to be different. He feared that his kids would not respect him if they thought of him too negatively. He needed to keep secrets from the family while claiming to want to break the cycle of criminal behavior. Sometimes having a child inspires criminals to change, but in my father’s case it didn’t. Instead he put the burden on me to fix what I didn’t break while involving me in things I didn’t want to be involved in despite claiming to keep family separate from criminal activities. He would talk about breaking the cycle of crime while actively perpetuating it, claiming to be a product of his environment. The stories he told of his childhood involved racially motivated gangs in both directions. He became associated with criminals early on and was described as an asshole by his sister. He put a cat in the microwave while his mother minimized the behavior and became defensive. Although child sexual abuse is common in youth gang members, it is unclear if my father was “initiated” through such abuse. If he were, then that would explain escalating aggression, but the aggression may have been present regardless of such abuse. He came from a father that was also a gang member and later became a police informant. My father learned to glorify violence and power, including his father’s violence such as death threats and beatings. He had learned that his behavior was only bad if he got caught. The Incident Although my father usually did drug deals with his gang, there was an incident that added another dimension to his criminal behavior that I found disturbing. Back when I was in highschool, my father took me to his gang in the middle of the night. He had previously mentioned prostitution deals, but I didn’t think this included children until I was sexually exploited. Once he brought me to his gang, he left me in the car as he walked off and disappeared from my sight. He had been talking in code frequently to disguise his intentions, including numbers and colors. I waited alone until Dad returned from his deal with someone code named Fat Ass. I never saw this man or any of his supposed five other gang members including a woman. They seem to have set up this situation well to ensure that I would have as little information as possible. This made my report ineffective by the time I tried to tell the police what I witnessed. When Dad came back, he said that Fat Ass would give me 600 dollars if I spent the night with him. He for some reason seemed happy about this, as if on some level he felt a twisted sense of pride or being special for having his son offered to a gang. At first I was confused about what exactly he wanted me to do when spending the night with this man. Because children with autism are more trusting and prone to literal interpretations, I thought he meant that he wanted me to literally sleep with Fat Ass rather than figuratively, meaning have sex with him. The reason I hesitated is because 600 dollars sounded like a lot of money for minimal effort. Therefore, I started to grow suspicious until I remembered that Fat Ass was the man who had supposedly hired prostitutes in other deals. I discovered that these deals also involved children when I was the subject of this deal. Ultimately, I didn’t take the money. I was torn between seeing my father as someone I needed to trust to protect me while reconciling it with the reality of his criminal lifestyle. I fell silent and became heavy after being exposed to trafficking deals. I began to fear that my father and his gang may have done deals like these before with other minors. This turned into survivor’s guilt in which my silence felt like enabling. These feelings seem to be driving me to document what I know about organized crime in the hopes of protecting other victims, bringing perpetrators to justice, and preventing these crimes where possible. Therefore, I would like to describe how circumstantial evidence might be applied to cases like mine along with how it might help to catch perpetrators. It will be important to highlight the limits of evidence, as organized criminals often have deep knowledge of the legal system and know how to manipulate evidence to sometimes frame their victims. Circumstantial Evidence in My Case The sexual exploitation of a minor is often extremely difficult to prove. In my case, I was set up by organized criminals who used coded language, hid their identities, spoke behind closed doors by word of mouth without texts, and exploited the trust of a child toward his father while being linked to police corruption that enabled the behavior. Because of factors like these, the majority of organized criminals for the most part evade significant charges. Therefore, the justice system has been relying more and more on circumstantial evidence which is more difficult to hide even for organized criminals while still implicating them through indirect proof rather than hard evidence that is easier to hide such as a gun or a body. In my case, the proof at first seems nearly impossible, but upon closer inspection it is possible to build at minimum probable cause, even if not beyond a reasonable doubt without a further complex investigation. Using what I know about my father, I can reason backwards to see what the signs were that would implicate him. First of all, my father had an extensive criminal record, including drug distribution offenses that would implicate gang activity. His crimes included fleeing the State to avoid paying child support, after which he structured his lifestyle around avoiding these taxes. He was later caught with a pipe in his car by law enforcement, possibly because a gang member left it there or he was using it himself. There was a broad continuation of the same criminal lifestyle even after he supposedly passed all of his drug tests after being caught the first time. Secondly, organized criminals often have a money laundering scheme. This makes sense because the money they are getting is through illegal means, and then often used for seemingly legitimate purposes. In my case, my father owed about 300,000 dollars in child support, owned property, and had multiple jobs. Normally someone would pay a tax on their property for child support, but in the case of my father he didn’t due to paying the landlord in cash. This combined with inconsistent income tied from jumping from job to job, would implicate a money laundering scheme with which to avoid paying child support because the paycheck is also supposed to be taxed for child support. There are likely many other reasons for money laundering schemes that organized criminals could use. In cases like these, a person with a criminal record that implicates gang activity such as drugs, weapons, or sexual offenses combined with a pattern of tax evasion, would implicate that there is a continued criminal lifestyle. Thirdly, in my case my father was less careful with the text messages he sent me. He was confident that I would not report him, which he seems to have been right about. Some of the messages on my old phone included things like Dad saying he would gank my stepfather. This would actually be treated as hard evidence in a court of law, had I had the courage as a child to turn my father into the police for his gang activities. In other cases there likely are damning text messages that are never recovered due to children being too afraid to become a legal enemy of a parent. My father likely had the contacts of other gang members on his old phone, which would establish an ongoing relationship and criminal lifestyle. Proving sexual exploitation specifically would be the hardest to prove, even if my father were implicated in drug and gang related offenses. Once again, I did not realize what I was witnessing or grasp the significance until later on. In this case, I was the child closest to my father, spending the most time with him on his property. Given his ongoing criminal lifestyle, I would have been exposed to gang activities. The closest thing I can think of that might implicate sexual abuse would be my father’s broader criminal lifestyle and character. If my father is the kind of person who shows very little care for his children such as by evading child support while having children by multiple women, then this person would be very careless, reckless, or dangerous. This kind of character, given an ongoing criminal lifestyle, would be the kind of person to endanger his own child by exposing him to gang activities. In my case the specific endangerment was being solicited by a gang for child prostitution which my father facilitated by bringing me to them. However, in order to prove that the specific mechanism of endangerment was sexual exploitation, that would likely require finding out who these other prostitutes were that the gang was hiring. I don’t see how I could prove sexual exploitation specifically while being an isolated witness against an organized gang without corroborating this kind of testimony. Even if I can’t prove sexual exploitation specifically, there should be sufficient evidence to prove child endangerment in the form of criminal socialization and foreseeable risks such as violence from a criminal gang. Lesser charges might still be possible even if sexual exploitation specifically cannot be proven, and depending on the severity, the lesser charges might be sufficient to ensure a just outcome regardless of absent proof of child trafficking. Relevant factors would include contributing to the delinquency of the minor or using a child to manipulate court outcomes. In my case my father not only said he would disown me if I reported his crimes, but he also wanted me to gather dirt on Mom that he could use against her in court. This put me in a loyalty conflict in which I was forced to choose between two bad parents. I sided with Dad because Mom and Mike were using drugs and destroying the house, causing me to fear for the safety of my siblings. Once Dad got this information, it then changed the legal outcome of the court. Mom was treated with increased scrutiny while being made to take drug tests due to knowledge my father could not have had without me. This therefore helped him to avoid consequences. If a person gets this kind of information that they shouldn’t have, then it might implicate some form of spying. In this case I was used as a pawn due to coercion behind the scenes that the court could not see was happening. I was being forced to make adult legal calculations without guidance as both parents were unsafe. Courts should probably be more skeptical of people giving this information they shouldn’t have other than through hearsay. If a child gave him this information along with this broader criminal lifestyle, then this would implicate something very serious in that I was being coerced into aiding in a felony. I would like to help law enforcement and advocacy groups, but sometimes people like me get charged instead of the people doing the coercion as the truth seems to be too complex for courts to handle easily and routinely. In my case, I showed repeated signs of distress and suicidal ideation that was often ignored in schools when I mentioned these things in creative writing. I would write stories involving me committing suicide or I would mention gangs and domestic violence. It was not until I publicly confessed to homicidal thoughts that the community reacted, leading to Mike’s eviction and my mother coming off of the drugs. Maybe children who write about suicide in creative writing should be taken more seriously in schools as it could lead to discovering serious abuse. My father was the son of a former gang member who became a police informant. This would create a strong incentive to cover up crimes while seeming legitimate. Maybe gang members who become police informants should be treated with more scrutiny if they have family members involved in crimes that implicate gang activities. There might be other factors, but I don’t know what else would implicate my father in these crimes. My hope is that these circumstances can be used to better detect gang activities in other cases, such as men with criminal records related to gang activities who owe hundreds of thousands in child support while being implicated in a money laundering scheme. Maybe these circumstances should be seen as more suspect and potentially leading to the discovery of drug, weapon, or sex trafficking, thereby protecting present and future victims.

@Ziran in the case of grievance rapists, they usually target someone in an intimate relationship, partially due to the entitlement worldview. This worldview was actually prevalent throughout history due to women being considered property of men and expected to submit. In fact, marital rape wasn't fully criminalized in America until 1993 due to the assumption that the relationship automatically confers consent. Sometimes rapists operate under these relational assumptions such that they believe they are justified in using force against an intimate partner to get sex and to them it isn't even rape. The same is still the case in less developed country where women are seen as property and expected to submit. The entitlement worldview is part of the problem, and it can worsen if they expect infidelity. In that case the grievance might be so bad that they could rape and murder and intimate partner. However, they might sometimes attack strangers. These strangers or random women that they barely know just might happen to remind them of a past woman they felt betrayed by. Therefore, raping this woman symbolically destroys the type of person he now hates. They seem to be triggered by loss of control and power, which is well known in domestic violence cases, making it dangerous when a woman tries to leave. The disturbing implications is that the one documented rape at the time of the murder, is only the tip of the iceberg of a long brutal history. This rapist likely sexually abused this woman many times before she tried to leave him, and this is implied in relationship studies of abuse cases, but not always clearly and starkly stated. The rapist often says "that bitch deserved it." Defense attorneys often look horrible when they try to defend these people, but our system does require due process for such people and some kind of attempt at a defense even when the behavior seems indefensible.

I finished reading a book called "Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare. I think it gives some pretty good explanations as to how psychopaths function, how they think, and the limits of our current system for handling people with such conditions. Treatment attempts are known to often backfire by teaching psychopaths how to fake progress and learn to manipulate even more effectively. It seems to truly be difficult to get a determined psychopathic offender to just behave themselves without trying to screw people over. To this day our justice system doesn't really have a good answer for such offenders. Preventative and proactive measures in early childhood seem to be the best bet, but with our current system focused on reactive measures, it would be difficult to make such a leap. It might require restructuring the incentive structure of our justice system which seems to focus on mass incarceration rather than crime prevention.