I put in a lot of effort responding to everyone who made a good-faith post; I never insulted anyone; all exchanges were relatively on-topic.

I would have just PM'ed the mods to ask, but it looks like the PM feature has been removed, or maybe I just can't find it.

Who was you before?

A bit intimate question, but anyhow.

You don't need to answer.

Because your victim blaming sucked, and your thread sucked.

Your posts definitely gave off a pretty creepy vibe and being a politics subforum of a poker site is weird and creepy enough already without the need to add to it.

‘Tis a creepy place.

sounds like you must have posted something that was contrary to the popular SJW philosophies

might wanna give the thread a once over before you cape up too hard.

I gave honest critiques of evidence people presented. My questioning the victimhood of people soliciting illegal transport to the US who in no articles were shown to be held against their will (the usual threat to hold them was deportation—i.e., being sent back home) is better than the prevailing infantilizing of these women as helpless and feckless.

And as a mod you can't give a better reason than disagreeing with one aspect of my viewpoint, and the vapid cop-out of "your thread sucked." If it sucked, let it die of its own volition. If it's attracting posts that are against the rules, punish the offending posters. But just locking a thread because you don't like that the OP isn't being proven wrong on a position you don't like, especially in a politics forum, is pathetic.

I'm thinking this has everything to do with it, although the philosophies I was testing weren't necessarily SJW. People just don't like having their political beliefs questioned, and when they can't defend such beliefs, they lash out with emotional protests, and if they have the option, just block the discussion altogether, like cowards.

If you are really interested in finding out about victims, why not go to one of the groups who helps victims of trafficking? Why not volunteer there? Nobody really took you seriously because you were not serious about learning anything. If you were you would not make your number three source, after CL ad investigation and deep pondering in solitude, randos on a poker forum--prove me wrong!

Good news is you have a few lib haters to infantilize you as a helpless and feckless victim of SJWs. Sweet!

Lol

If I'd participated in the thread, I would have been arguing against OPs position, although others pretty much covered it.

I don't really see any reason it needed to be locked, though. I don't find the two reasons given compelling

1) Victim blaming -- I definitely agree with this criticism of the OPs position, but as a reason to close a thread it seems weak to me. We reasonably ban people from espousing certain views (e.g. racism), and there's a variety of good reasons to have boundaries that define what's acceptable, even if and we often disagree about exactly where they should go. So it's always going to be a judgement call, but in this case it strikes me as unnecessary, and pretty post hoc. None of the good reasons which exist for banning some racist/sexist/whatever expressions apply very strongly IMO (I don't consider "it's offensive" to be one of those reasons).

2) The thread sucked -- there's a lot bad posting and OPs posting is not way worse than average. It's hard not to take this one to just mean "your thread sucks because you have an opinion I think is stupid." Which I don't think ought to be sufficient to warrant moderation.

caveat: IMO YMMV :P

Since we're just giving opinions here:

1) Thread sucked, way worse than average

2) Good job by the mods

To be clear, I have no doubt my opinion is in the minority among politics regs.

You guys must realize deep down you're wrong about this. What do you even mean by saying the thread sucked? Actually try to flesh out what you mean by that. It reminds me of the arguments I faced in the thread: no evidence, just a bunch of arrogance and ignorance.

As for victim blaming, as well named says above, that's not a reason to lock a thread. And is there no instance where people called victims are actually largely responsible? You act like it's some cut and dried case of kidnapping and enslavement. The victimhood starts by being born poor in Guatemala, or born dumb and to ****ty parents in the US, and then to ameliorate their circumstances, they choose to be taken to the US and do unpleasant work, because it's a preferable option. One of my points was that they're always free to just get deported and/or try to seek asylum. In the entire thread, never was a single instance shown where a woman was held forcibly to the point they couldn't go to authorities for either help or to be deported.

You guys in the politics forum just dislike me because I vitiate your arguments and reduce you to falling back to "thread sucks. you suck too, victim blamer," and then you run from the discussion. But I trust you have an unpleasant sense that I'm right, and that legalizing prostitution and bringing back CL casual encounters and Backpage would not worsen the plight of trafficked women, and that even now trafficking is much less of a problem than people who argue the contrary believe.

Yeah, not weird or creepy at all ... Of all the topics in the world for your very first post on a forum you dedicate two threads to "proving" sexual slavery doesn't exist. Vitiation is all well and good but why vitiate on this particular topic?

Like, if the very most important thing in the world to you is craigslist prostitutes it's time to reevaluate some of your life choices.

I had to wear a condom reading that aids infested thread

OP, it appears that your posts in that thread were your first 2+2 posts on that account. How does that even occur?

You have a keen interest in issues pertaining to prostitution and human trafficking and you decide to create an account on a poker website to vent your views? That does not make any sense.

Not every issue is worthy of a thread on 2+2 (and you can interpret that in any way you want). Having said that, there are many "off topic" forums on 2+2 and maybe a forum other than the Politics Forum will be more welcoming to your thread, though your topic may well be on the fringe (or even beyond the fringe) of even the most "off off topic" forum.

whosnext, I originally made it in OOT, which is less of a hostile and antagonizing-jerk-ridden forum, but it was moved to Politics. Twoplustwo is nominally a poker forum, but you know full well that most of us on here don't play poker anymore, and it's one of the top forums on the internet to discuss various topics. (I defy you to suggest to me a better place where I could post to have a discussion on this topic. I would bet even reddit would give less engagement than here, despite being a bigger site.)

I used to post on this site years ago, but have since lost that password, and I'm not even sure what the username was. But on my to-do list was to try and understand the reasoning why Craigslist's casual encounters got shut down (a site I used for consensual, hhhhhhhhhhhomosexual activity), and the limited looking into it I did referred me to the argument that there's this sex trafficking problem in the US, which tied into many of the same people contending that legalizing prostitution would actually worsen this trafficking problem. So to try and understand the situation better, I posted on here. Does that seem reasonable to you?

Tom, how disingenuous do you have to be to say I made TWO threads on this topic, on which I must be obsessed? I made one thread to try to get info on an issue that didn't make sense to me, and that thread got locked unfairly, so I had to make another asking why it was locked. And again, I've never hired a prostitute, and it's a pathetic overstatement to say it's the "most important thing in the world to me." Why do you engage this way with people you've never met?

At one point, I had an arrangement with the oot mods that if a thread popped up in either of our forums that would arguably better belong in the other, we should lock the thread rather than moving it, because the OP was obviously bad at foruming and at reading so as to have missed the appropriate forum, and thus we should not be inclined to hope that the thread would actually be successful in the other forum, because the OP was bad. This was clearly the case here.

Maybe try posting it in craigslist rants and raves section.

ATF is not where threads too ****ty to live in politics get resurrected.

As a concession to fellow ATF mod well named, I'll re-open this thread. Feel free to complain about Wookie locking more threads than I do or whatever else he does that sucks.

DO NOT TURN THIS INTO A THREAD ABOUT SEX TRAFFICKING OR START REHASHING ARGUMENTS ABOUT SEX TRAFFICKING FROM THE ORIGINAL THREAD OR YOU'LL GET A BAN.

Guerdon, ATF doesn't want or care about your thoughts on sex trafficking. This thread will stay open if you can limit yourself to talking about what a terrible mod Wookie is why your thread shouldn't have been locked, without going in to any of the nonsense that got the thread locked in the first place. (Feel free to talk about what a ****ty mod I am as well.)

Wasn't he in partially in charge of P2 when it was shut down for being awful? Maybe you should check with Chaz and see if he has any critiques of your modding.

The thread was awful and not producing any content other than the OP thinking human trafficking was a fine price to pay for prostitution. As usual with wookie, it went on too long and could have been closed much earlier.

I reiterate what I said in the o/t thread that this is a sensible decision.