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Archive for May, 2011

The Eye of the Beholder

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2011| 55 Comments »

Why is my liberty judged of another’s conscience?  –  1 Corinthians 10:29

In the discussion following last Tuesday’s column, there was a subthread which began with this comment by reader “M” in which she said that even though she might have been a bit put off by the joke which caused so much controversy (if you haven’t read that column, it’s best you do so before proceeding), she certainly didn’t approve of the way Dr. Greenfield was treated.  I agreed with her, saying “Bad taste isn’t a crime, nor should it result in a professional death sentence.”  Reader Tony replied to that, saying “I do not see what he wrote as tasteless or vulgar. I mean, if he had given some lurid depiction of a graphic sexual act that ended with a specific delivery method of giving semen to a woman, ok, that would be vulgar.”  I replied to him within that commentary, but I’d like to expand on that answer because the issues raised in my reply relate not just to the specific subject of that column, but the whole issue of prohibitionism.

Every person is an individual, with individual tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes.  We all have our turn-ons, turn-offs, comfort zones and pet peeves, and though some of these are influenced by gender, cultural background and life experiences, others are innate and often inexplicable.  I don’t have a clue as to why I’m so averse to green, leafy vegetables; my sisters aren’t and my brother loves them.  I was raised in the same house and fed the same foods, yet there’s something in my brain or biochemistry which causes me to find spinach, cabbage and the like so nauseating that even the odor of them cooking causes me to lose my appetite.  Clearly, it isn’t the fault of the foods; millions of people eat and enjoy them regularly.  My dislike for them is my problem, and I have no right to demand that others stop cooking or eating them merely because of my individual preference.  At the same time I have the right to have that preference, and one really easy way to wear out your welcome is to start lecturing me on how even though I’m extremely healthy and the perfect weight for my height and build, I “should” eat green leafy vegetables because they have some esoteric health benefit which I have yet to miss in over four decades of avoiding them.

I found Dr. Greenfield’s joke just a tad annoying; not nearly as annoying as rap or stepping in chewing gum, and not remotely as annoying as getting stuck behind someone who thinks it’s reasonable to drive at twenty miles per hour below the posted speed limit, but slightly irritating nonetheless.  That’s because even before I turned pro it always annoyed me when men try to pitch sex as something the man “gives” to the woman rather than vice-versa.  But like my aversion to greens, this reaction is something resident in me rather than in the comment.  The modern “Catechism of Offense” to which neofeminists subscribe, however, teaches that offensiveness is a property of the offending person or object rather than of the one who is offended; in other words, if a flower is yellow and you hate yellow, it’s the flower’s fault for “offending” you. And if a dog’s breath smells bad, that “badness” comes from the dog rather than your intolerance for biological odors.  Once one accepts the absurd initial premise, attacking the offender for “causing” offense is completely logical, and all neofeminist legislation deriving from that assumption makes perfect sense; e.g., since a man who compliments a woman is responsible for her unpredictable reaction he should be punished by a “sexual harassment” accusation, and since the very existence of porn and prostitution offend some women they must be banned.  It doesn’t matter that neofeminists don’t know any individual whore from Eve; it is her fault they are upset by the concept of prostitution, so she must suffer the consequences.

Of course, any sensible person recognizes that my aversion to spinach, depictions of male homosexuality and “I’m gonna give it to you” comments derive from my personality and not from the things I’m repelled by, so I therefore have no right to force cafeterias to stop cooking spinach, gay dudes to stop making porn or doctors to refrain from spooge jokes.  By the same token neofeminists have no right to demand the prohibition of prostitution, teetotalers have no right to stop others from drinking or doping, fanatical Christians have no right to stop others from having kinky sex, and legislatures certainly don’t have the right to send armed thugs to stop anyone from doing any of the above.  Though the Enlightenment Police may disagree, any individual’s right to dislike something is just as valid as his right to like something else; he even has the right to talk about it, to insult people who do whatever it is he’s opposed to, to tell them they’re going to Hell or to set up sick websites detailing how disgusting he finds whatever-it-is.  But his rights stop where others’ start:  As soon as he moves beyond mere talk to action (and that includes demanding someone be fired or agitating politicians to make laws against whatever consensual behavior offends him), he has infringed on others’ rights and therefore committed an act of evil.  This is what the principle of tolerance is all about:  You don’t have to like me or what I do or say, and vice versa.  But neither one of us has the right to control what the other wants to do with his body, money or time, no matter how badly it offends us.

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Clueless Wonders

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2011| 24 Comments »

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.  –  Lord Beveridge

Syracuse, New York is about 300 kilometers from New York City; not exactly commuting distance, even for a serial killer.  Still, one would think that the Syracuse police would have something better to do with their time and money than to emulate the tactics and rhetoric of suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is almost twice as distant.  As we’ve discussed before on several occasions, the prohibitionist antics of Pittsburg area cops have turned them into heavily-armed clowns:  ludicrous, but dangerous.  They devote absurd amounts of manpower and scandalous sums of money to persecuting whores, then issue ignorant and asinine statements to the press…and it looks like the police of Syracuse are following in their footsteps, as demonstrated in this April 25th article from the Syracuse Post-Standard:

Syracuse prostitutes and patrons seeking their services have increasingly turned to the Internet and escort ads to avoid detection, meaning fewer prostitutes walking the streets.  Syracuse Police Sgt. Jim Staub estimated nearly 90 percent of the city’s prostitution trade has gone online over the past year or two.  So last fall, the police vice squad decided to follow the prostitutes into cyberspace.  The vice unit’s five-month sting recently led to the misdemeanor arrests of 17 suspected prostitutes and 19 men accused of seeking sex for money.  More arrests are expected, police said…

The Syracuse brain trust

You’ve got to be impressed in a weird sort of way with people who are so aggressively ignorant and unselfconsciously stupid that they actually boast about it.  As regular readers know, 85% of prostitution was already non-street-based even before the advent of the internet, and though some streetwalkers have indeed turned to internet advertising the statement that “90 percent of the city’s prostitution trade has gone online over the past year or two” demonstrates a truly stupefying level of ignorance, even for a cop.  Note also the typical police insistence on framing everything as it appears to their warped minds; whores and clients are said to use the internet to “avoid detection”, despite the fact that they themselves admit (in the paragraph below) that “the ads are not concealed.”  I suppose the Super-brains of Syracuse also believe that the owners and customers of Amazon.com are trying to “avoid detection” as well.  It never occurs to the sick police psyche that ALL businesspeople use the most effective means of advertising available, and that indoor sex work is safer on every level.  Their insistence on trying to predict escort-client behavior by a fallacious model of criminality is the reason this undoubtedly expensive operation only managed to catch fewer than 20 each of hookers and clients over five months:

To catch them, detectives posted ads and responded to ads in the adult sections of Backpage.com, Escort.com and the Syracuse New Times, said Staub, who led the investigation.  The ads are not concealed and “don’t leave much to the imagination,” he said…The police set up an apartment for an undercover officer to meet the prostitute or patron, then recorded that person agreeing to a trade of sexual favors for money.  Detectives appeared and asked the suspect for identification, then let him or her go.  Only after the sting was over did the police make arrests, authorities said.  Lt. John Corbett, head of the vice squad, said the police caught more suspects by waiting to arrest.  Hiding the undercover operation was crucial.  For example, a suspected prostitute became suspicious and warned others online about the police operation, Corbett said.  After that, officers had to change tactics and move locations.

You might wonder how these Brainiacs imagined that letting people go actually got them more arrests, but that’s because you aren’t a hopeless lawhead.  Because prostitutes and clients are defined as criminals, lawheads expect them to act like criminals, and cops define themselves as “better” than criminals.  They imagine that by changing hotel rooms but keeping the same strategy us poor, drug-addled whores and our sexually-depraved clients wouldn’t be able to figure it out; I’m sure what really happened is that everyone knew Syracuse was “hot”, and that the handful they captured were mostly girls who were too desperate to be careful and guys (13 of the 19 were out-of-towners) who failed to do their homework.

…Police contend that prostitution is hardly the victimless crime that some people say it is.  [Police Chief Frank] Fowler said police get complaints about prostitutes, including from residents who see people coming and going from locations where tricks are taking place.  And Corbett said prostitution can lead to more serious crimes, many of which aren’t reported truthfully.  Those crimes can include larcenies, robberies, assaults and extortion…Fowler said he hoped that publishing the patrons’ names would be a deterrent to all those who visited prostitutes in the city.  “They go about their daily lives disguising this behavior — bringing this behavior to their unsuspecting families and workplaces,” Fowler said.  Those who weren’t caught now know that the police are serious about catching them, he said.

Blah blah blah evil degraded whores, blah blah attracts crime, blah blah public nuisance…and I assume that melodramatically vague comment about “unsuspecting families” is a reference to the diseases we supposedly spread.  News flash, Chief Fowler:  We already know you’re serious about “catching” us.  What we can’t understand is why so many people are eager to swallow your lies and to allow you to indulge your sadistic sexual fantasies at public expense instead of doing the job you’re paid to do, namely catching actual criminals.

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Conjuration

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2011| 15 Comments »

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.  –  Wendell Phillips

Lawheads suffer from a sort of collective hubris; they honestly believe that a government can define reality by proclamation.  If lawmakers define a particular object or substance as “evil”, Presto!  It actually becomes evil in the minds of lawheads, even if it wasn’t the day before.  Define teenagers as children, and Alakazam!  They magically transform into helpless toddlers no matter what the lawhead’s senses and personal experience tell him.  But this legislatorial thaumaturgy is not limited to mere transmogrification; lawheads even believe in the power of governments to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy by conjuring things and events out of thin air.

A recent example of lawhead belief in these miraculous powers can be found in this article from the Washington Times of April 28th:

More than 80 percent of the 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by law enforcement agencies between January 2008 and June 2010 involved adult prostitution or the exploitation and forced prostitution of children, a Justice Department report released Thursday says.  The report, written by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), says 48 percent of the investigated incidents involved adults, while 40 percent uncovered the exploitation or forced prostitution of children.  The remainder, about 350 cases, involved allegations of labor trafficking…Under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, according to the report, human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person to perform labor or a commercial sex act through force, fraud or coercion [but] any commercial sex act performed by a person under age 18 is considered human trafficking, regardless of whether force, fraud or coercion is involved…

I’m sure even the sleepiest reader caught the bit of legal legerdemain in the last line; though the crime of “human trafficking” is clearly (and sensibly, except for the weird and unnecessary singling out of sex work from other kinds of labor) defined in the first part of the sentence, legislators conjure “victims” out of thin air by defining ANY prostitution by someone under 18 – even a fully-cognizant and willful act of prostitution by one who looks much older – as “human trafficking”, despite the total absence of either force or anyone to apply that force!  Long-time readers may remember that I was universally taken for “about 25” since I was 16, and that my first act of outright prostitution was an opportunistic one shortly after my 18th birthday; had this asinine law been in effect at that time, and had the opportunity arisen just three months earlier, I would have magically become a “victim” of “human trafficking” – and presumably, a “trafficker” would have obediently materialized to “exploit” me.

But the other sleight-of-hand here is a bit more subtle and appears in the first line.  See it?  “More than 80 percent of the…suspected incidents of human trafficking investigated by law enforcement agencies…involved…prostitution…” That sounds like a serious problem until one realizes that the “authorities” choose which incidents to investigate, and just because 80% of those they pursued involved allegations of sex trafficking does NOT mean that 80% of all incidents (or even all reported incidents) involved it.  Sex attracts the attention of cops just as it attracts the attention of anyone else, and one “teen prostitute” is vastly more likely to be reported and investigated than hundreds of sunburned guys picking vegetables.  Furthermore, carefully compare the first two lines with the third; did you notice the missing word?  In the reference to forced labor the word “allegation” is clearly stated , but it’s omitted in reference to prostitution in order to make those cases seem like proven ones when in fact they, too were mere allegations; according to the actual (conveniently not linked to the Times article) BJS report, only 30% of them were “proven” even by the lax standards of the Bureau of Justice.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr…[called] human trafficking… “modern-day slavery”…[and] said it was “an affront to human dignity,” adding that men, women and children were being exploited for sex and labor in “virtually every corner of our nation.”

Abracadabra!   Having defined victims into existence, Holder then waves his magic wand and disperses them to “virtually every corner of our nation.”  The word “virtually” is a bit ironic, since these victims are “virtual” in the computer science sense, in other words “nonexistent in physical reality”.

…According to the report, more than four-fifths of the confirmed victims of sex trafficking — about 83 percent — were U.S. citizens, while 95 percent of the confirmed victims of labor trafficking were either illegal immigrants or foreign nationals working legally in the U.S.  The report also said the confirmed victims of human trafficking were predominantly female and that among the confirmed sex trafficking victims, they were “overwhelmingly female” at 94 percent and made up 68 percent of the labor trafficking victims as well.  Most of the confirmed sex trafficking incidents involved the prostitution of children (about 60 percent) compared with adult prostitution (about 40 percent)…

Hocus-pocus!  Since we define “victims” any way we find convenient, these “statistics” are worse than meaningless; they’re made to order from nothing.  And considering that A) anyone under 18 is defined as a “child”; B) the definition of “sex trafficking” is ludicrously broad for those individuals; C) “child sex trafficking” is the witch hunt du jour; and D) “authorities” determine both which cases to investigate and the standard by which cases are “confirmed”, I’m actually amazed that only 60% of the “confirmed” cases involve “child prostitution”.  Perhaps Holderini felt that pulling too many “child victims” out of his hat might attract undue scrutiny from the audience and thereby reveal that his performance relies entirely on smoke and mirrors.

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Maman

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2011| 18 Comments »

Women…spend half our lives rebelling against our mothers and the next half rebelling against our daughters.  –  Lois Wyse

As I wrote yesterday, my mother was always disturbed by my “otherness”, especially my visions and apparent clairvoyance.  She rationalized these phenomena as “nightmares” (though they occurred while I was completely awake and only frightened her, not me) and declared that they derived from watching “scary movies” or reading “spooky books”, which were henceforth declared off-limits despite the fact that the incidents started long before I could read.  This of course made me want to read or see horror fiction even more than before, and I was able to do so because I had a confederate in my paternal grandmother.  We called her Maman, a French term for “mommy” which in South Louisiana is commonly applied to grandmothers regardless of their ethnicity.  In our family it was pronounced much like “maw-maw”, but I’ve also heard “muh-maw”, “mah-mah”, “mæ- mæ” (“æ” represents the short “a” as in “cat”) and several other versions; similarly, the common term for a godmother is pronounced “nuh-næn”.  Her pet name for me was “Little Bo Peep”, and she used it until the day she died (though once I hit my teens it was more often simply “Bo Peep”).

Maman recognized my personality as a case of the “apple not falling far from the tree”, since her late husband (my grandfather) and a number of his dozen siblings had been equally unusual.  She declared that the paternal line was descended from the “good people” and that I merely had the Old Blood in greater measure than usual, and that it was neither a good idea to attempt to suppress my natural gifts nor repress my independence.  Though she was not an openly unconventional person herself, she seemed to understand and appreciate unconventionality; she had, after all, married my grandfather, and openly favored my second sister (the other “black sheep”) and me.  She told me on many occasions that she felt justified in giving us preferential treatment since it was obvious to her that our mother did exactly the opposite, and if I came out all right despite maternal neglect it was largely due to the unconditional love bestowed on me by Maman.  When I got older I always found it odd that my mother had never seemed bothered by Maman’s defying her pronouncements or overruling her dictates on my behalf; either she actually didn’t mind (which seems unlikely) or was just trying to keep the peace (if so, I never saw any sign of resentment).  It was almost as though she felt I was more my grandmother’s child than hers, or that she was happy to abdicate responsibility for a little witch to someone who felt more comfortable dealing with her.

Indeed, it often seemed that way; from toddlerhood until about the age of 12 I spent the majority of my Friday nights sleeping over at Maman‘s house, and she would always fix pancakes for me the next morning.  When I got older she would pay me far too much money to cut her lawn every week, and usually made a cake for me; my favorite one was a simple yellow cake made in a ring pan and drizzled with powdered-sugar icing flavored with a powdered drink mix (I still make it for my husband today, and now it’s one of his favorites).  And if she had been to town for a doctor’s appointment or some such prior to one of my visits, she often bought horror comics for me because she knew I liked them.  I was allowed to watch as many scary movies as I liked at her house; I have particularly fond memories of a TV movie called Gargoyles  which premiered soon after my 6th birthday, largely because it became the basis for a favorite game among the neighborhood children for years afterward.  Naturally, I was always the girl who was abducted by the gargoyles and had to be rescued.

When I was a teenager we had many fascinating discussions about history; she enjoyed historical novels and would often pick my brain about the various events or periods dramatized in the books.  Like many rural women of her day she only had a 6th-grade education, but she was intelligent and skeptical and one of her favorite topics of conversation was Biblical contradictions and discrepancies, and areas of morality in which she disagreed with the teachings of the Church.  Soon after I became engaged to Jack she even told me in private that she thought I should just live with him for a while so as to be sure we were really compatible before marrying.  That really didn’t surprise me because when I was a teenager she knew I was sexually active long before my mother did; they both had exactly the same information, but Maman’s eyes were open while my mother saw only what she wished to see.  I don’t recall exactly how she let me know that she knew, but she told me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t think less of me for it and that she was sure God didn’t really care about things like that unless they hurt someone.  Coming from an uneducated Catholic woman born in rural South Louisiana just prior to the First World War, that was practically heresy.

Maman survived cancer twice, once in the 1970s and again in the 1980s, before finally succumbing to old age in 1997, just months before I started stripping.  I’ve often wondered how she would have reacted to it; she was offended by sexual content on television and vocally disapproved of revealing clothes, but I think she would’ve accepted my decision to do it as a means to escape debt.  I have no doubt that she would’ve said a novena for me because of it, but for my safety rather than my soul.  Though my mother often seemed to think nothing I did was right, Maman seemed to feel I couldn’t do anything wrong.

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Wild Child

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , on May 7, 2011| 16 Comments »

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue.  It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.  –  Oscar Wilde

In the commentary following my column of April 7th, Sexhysteria made the statement “Boys see the violation of rules as a heroic act of independence.” And Andrea replied,

Girls do, too.  Our acts are just a little different.  Swiping that first tube of lipstick comes to mind.  How many of us were GIVEN our first “not appropriate” shade (my was black)?  We had to use our babysitting money or steal it, and wipe away every trace before we got back home.

First push-up bra?
First thong?
First cigarette (thankfully, not a popular thing to do anymore)?
First copy of the Story of O?

I don’t think a rebellious heart is gender specific, but how we express it undoubtedly is.

I saw the potential for an interesting discussion in that comment, and since many of my posts have been rather heavy of late I thought a lighter one might be nice.  I’ve written about my childhood before and I don’t think I need to tell anyone that rebelliousness and unconventionality are bred deep in my bones, but Andrea’s post inspired me to talk about some of my adolescent rebellions.

As I’ve said before, my mother never quite knew what to do with me; in addition to my precociousness and independence I was a strange, moody child, prone to visions and flashes of insight which quite disturbed her.  I was the product of a brief flirtation with unconventionality in her early twenties, and I think she unconsciously viewed me as a sort of “punishment” for that flirtation.  I was never, ever maltreated nor denied any needs, and in fact my parents spent more on my secondary education than on that of any of my siblings.  But my mother seemed bound and determined to control my natural free-spiritedness and to delay my sexual maturation for as long as possible.  When I started my period a few months after my tenth birthday, she seemed almost angry about it; she asked if I knew what it was about and when I replied in the affirmative, gave me a box of pads and told me to read the directions.

But though she couldn’t hold back the natural developments, she sure could try to stop the social ones.  For example, I was forbidden to shave my legs despite the fact that, as I’ve written before,  I have the terrible combination of dark hair and translucently fair skin.  The first few months of 9th grade were thus an ordeal of mortification, and soon after my 13th birthday I decided I was going to shave my legs whether my mother liked it or not.  Of course, I had no idea what I was doing and though I mostly managed OK, I somehow gashed one of my ankles (with a safety razor yet) and could not stop the bleeding for a frighteningly long time (the scar was visible for years afterward).  I’m not sure when she realized I was doing it, because nothing was said; she just started buying more disposable razors.

Makeup was another forbidden fruit; due to chronically chapped lips I was allowed clear lip gloss from the age of 12, and when (at about 14) I started crying and fussing and carrying on about pimples she relented enough to allow concealer and powder, but colored lipstick, eye shadow and such were absolutely off-limits.  This actually worked out all right because I had been blessed with spectacularly long eyelashes and a lovely natural coloring which made everyday makeup unnecessary; years later I actually did most of my calls with no makeup at all because I didn’t need it.  Still, I was pretty excited when, after I turned 16, I was finally allowed to wear real makeup for the dates I was finally allowed to go on.  Of course, I really hadn’t waited for permission; I had already learned how to “do my face” years before from less-restricted friends, and in fact had often made up when going places with those friends (though I was always careful to wash my face thoroughly before coming home).

And though I guess my mother thought she was “protecting” me from sex by not letting me date until 16 (and even then restricting me to group dates for chaperoned events), she couldn’t stop me any more than prohibitionist laws stop prostitution.  As I’ve told before I lost my virginity on my 15th birthday to an 18-year-old LSU freshman, and by the time I had my first official “date” with a boy I was already two months into my first lesbian relationship.  Nor had the complete lack of sexual information from her done anything to stop my learning about the “normal” stuff from library books and the “kinky” stuff from various sources, including a shoplifted copy of Xaviera’s Fantastic Sex (I hated doing it but I knew the clerk wouldn’t let me buy it), a borrowed copy of The Happy Hooker and a garage-sale copy of My Secret Garden (see bibliography for both).  My copy of Story of O (which I still own) was obtained neither rebelliously nor secretly, though; I bought it in the UNO bookstore a few months after my 17th birthday.

There were a host of other small rebellions, many of them absurd or stupid when considered through adult eyes but important to me at the time.  Sneaking into R-rated movies at the age of 14 and 15, going out for walks late at night after everyone was asleep, wiring up a kill switch on my ancient black and white Motorola TV set so as to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone which aired after my bedtime (10 PM on school nights until I left home), and innumerable curfew violations which nobody recognized as such because I was a university student and looked about 25 even when I was 16 and 17.

Adolescent rebellion is born from an impatience with arbitrarily-imposed restrictions and does not necessarily end at 18 (or 21 nowadays) because parents don’t always automatically recognize those landmarks.  Though I moved out of the house for good several months before my 17th birthday my mother still attempted to re-establish control every time she saw me, so of course I had to resist and rebel in any way I could.  Judging by her attempt to restrict my employment choices at the age of 30 she never did accept that I had grown up, but most everyone else did; a family friend once said “Maggie was born adult”, and I still remember the day I finally knew most of the women in my family felt the same way.  I guess I was about 20 and there was an extended-family picnic; my father’s sister (who had a strong impish streak herself) had made a dessert popular at that time called “Better Than Sex Cake”, and as I took my very first bite she asked loudly, “So what do you think, Maggie?  Is it really better than sex?”  Instantly all the older women grew quiet, awaiting my answer; I took my time chewing and swallowing, then said, “it depends on who with.”  The sincere laughter and total lack of censure let me know with certainty that I had been accepted into the circle of adult women.

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May Updates (Part Three)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 6, 2011| 18 Comments »

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.  –  Ralph Waldo Emerson

This seems to be the month for twosies, ‘cause our first selection today is an update to the same column as our last item yesterday:

Welcome To Our World (January 20th)

The Wall Street Journal isn’t exactly known for publishing neofeminist rants, but the April 23rd  issue carried this rather bizarre manifesto which demands that fraternities be banned in order to “protect” helpless, fawn-like coeds:

The Greek system is dedicated to quelling young men’s anxiety about submitting themselves to four years of sissy-pants book learning by providing them with a variety of he-man activities: drinking, drugging, ESPN watching and the sexual mistreatment of women.  A 2007 National Institute of Justice study found that about one in five women are victims of sexual assault in college; almost all of those incidents go unreported.  It also noted that fraternity men—who tend to drink more heavily and frequently than nonmembers—are more likely to perpetrate sexual assault than nonfraternity men, according to previous studies.  Over a quarter of sexual-assault victims who were incapacitated reported that the assailant was a fraternity member.  It is against this boorish cartel that 16 Yale students and recent alumni asserted themselves in a Title IX complaint brought against the institution last month—a complaint that could cost the university $500 million in federal funds.  The claim concerns both the ways that sexual assaults are handled by the university and also the effect that various fraternity “pranks” have had on its female students…If you want to improve women’s lives on campus, if you want to give them a fair shot at living and learning as freely as men, the first thing you could do is close down the fraternities.  The Yale complaint may finally do what no amount of female outrage and violation has accomplished.  It just might shut them down for good.

As is typical of such neofeminist punditry, the author indulges in the sort of slurs that, if made by a male against women, would rightfully be called “misogynistic”.  And unsurprisingly, she demands blatantly unfair treatment in the name of “fairness”.  Sex workers are, unfortunately, used to these tactics; the questionable “studies” making exaggerated claims, the steamrolling of individual rights in order to protect adult women from their own sexual choices or to keep them from getting their feelings hurt, etc.  Interestingly, Jezebel writer Margaret Hartmann recognized this garbage for what it is, and wrote an article saying so; perhaps she’ll write an anti-prohibitionist column one day.

March Miscellanea – Backlash (March 22nd)

At the end of this sub-column I wrote, “I’m sure the police were only beating women up for their own good, to save them from those evil traffickers.  Or are whores still “dangerous criminals” in South Africa as we are in Florida?  It’s hard to keep track these days.”  Well, apparently the South African police have made up their minds:  we’re dangerous criminals.  Here’s the article from the April 30th Johannesburg Times:

Investigating officers this week revealed that their inquiries could uncover the identities of more wealthy clients killed in grubby hotels and guest lodges over the past six months…The infamous strip where the bodies were found…is characterised by overcrowded and dilapidated apartment blocks and rundown guest lodges and hotels…police dockets showed that all of the victims – believed to have been poisoned by [a] syndicate [of prostitutes] – were married and either owned their own businesses or headed up relatively large firms operating in the province…The bodies of five of the victims, who had already been buried after it was presumed that they had died of natural causes, [will] be exhumed; the police [will] conduct DNA and toxicology tests and other forensic procedures on the victims; and evidence in the police’s possession has led them to believe that all six men were carrying large sums of cash at the time they were allegedly poisoned…

Apparently, the South African police believe that it’s much more convenient to blame these murder-robberies on a gang of hookers than on regular gangsters (perhaps using fake prostitutes as bait); after all, chasing after real criminals rather than unarmed women could be dangerous.

They Just Don’t Get It (April 12th)

The Keystone Kops of suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania never seem to get tired of bullying whores.  Indeed, it seems that lies and trickery aren’t enough for them any longer, so they’ve graduated to employing the same Gestapo tactics which have become so common in serving drug warrants:  namely, smashing people’s doors in without warning in the middle of the night and pointing loaded weapons at terrified children.  Here’s the April 28th story from WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh:

Police from Moon Township were surprised by what they found — a woman and her kids — when they used a search warrant in connection with a prostitution case that involves a retired Pittsburgh police detective…police were looking for evidence in the case against Talib Kevin Ghafoor when they went to an address on Collins Avenue…early Thursday morning.  “Right now, she’s got her front door and back door smashed in,” said Harvey Moore, the father of a woman who lives in that home.  Moore told Channel 4 Action News that the woman and her children — ages 15, 5 and 4 — were asleep when a team that included SWAT members and state troopers approached the building and entered through the front and rear doors.

“The Pennsylvania State Police surrounded the house, and before they could knock and announce their identity, a person up on the third floor was looking out the window, and they felt their positions were compromised, so they conducted a forced entry into the house,” Moon Township Police Chief Leo McCarthy said.  The woman’s father said the family has been living there since February and was confused and startled when police arrived.  “She claims that, about a month ago, she switched homes with Mr. Ghafoor,” McCarthy told Channel 4 Action News.  “In other words, I’ll live in your house, you live in my house.”  McCarthy said Allegheny County records led police to the home, which he said is still registered to Ghafoor and has not been sold to the woman.  He said Ghafoor still had some of his belongings inside, which were seized…

You haven’t heard the best part yet; Ghafoor was arrested over a month ago and is scheduled for a hearing this week, so they could easily have served him with a warrant at that time at no taxpayer cost and with no danger to bystanders.  Of course, that wouldn’t have allowed them to play sadistic cops-and-robbers games with automatic weapons.  Still, the question remains…who did these buffoons expect to find in the house that led them to believe they would need a SWAT team?  An elite team of armed assault strumpets, perhaps?  I wonder if Pittsburgh area cops have been communicating with those from Johannesburg?

Real Men Support Sex Worker Rights (April 22nd)

“Deep Geek” produces a semi-regular podcast called “Talk Geek To Me” in which he often advocates for unpopular causes (including sex worker rights) and sometimes even reads my column aloud.  This week, his podcast consists of a 25.5 minute editorial touching on such subjects as the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the two-party system, socialism and sex worker rights.  He asked me to call attention to it and I’m happy to do so.

Whores In the News – Escorts.com Raided by FBI (October 29th)

Since the FBI raid in October the fortunes of Escorts.com have steadily declined; many clients and escorts abandoned their accounts immediately and many others continued to use them, but much more warily.  Before the end of last year girls started complaining about a plethora of fake reviews (obviously posted by pigs trying to establish themselves as “hobbyists”), then a couple of months after that the site deleted reviews altogether.  Finally, I just heard at about 9 AM today that the site will be closing as of May 31st.  My theory is that the management was forced to cooperate with the disease infesting it, but found legal loopholes so as to prevent their being used to trick their customers.  First they shut down ALL reviews in order to stop fake ones, then closed entirely to prevent the placing of entrapment ads (such as you’ll see mentioned in my May 10th column).  One final attempt at trickery:  A notice in red on the notice page states, “You must provide us with your full name and mailing address if you want a refund check.”  Please, ladies, don’t be stupid; if you provide that information your check will come with a free visit from the local constabulary, either immediately or after they use you as a Judas goat for the next few months.

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May Updates (Part Two)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2011| 55 Comments »

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.  –  Matthew 15:11

More articles which expand on concepts covered in past columns.

Harm Reduction (January 13th)

Yesterday we looked at how Portugal applied a harm-reduction approach to drugs which are still illegal in less-enlightened countries; here’s an article from the April 21st Guardian which examines a harm-reduction approach to dealing with those addicted to a drug which is legal nearly everywhere:

…the provision of a safe place for those drinkers who do not want to be “saved” or “cured”, would be a welcome development – and, at the St. Anthony Residence, in St Paul, Minnesota, this is exactly what drinkers are offered, free of charge.  For years, this “wet house” (one of four in the state) has provided shelter to its hopelessly alcoholic residents, at a cost of $18,000 per person per year.  Nobody has to attend therapy sessions; there is no 12-step programme and no homilies about hope or the future.  Similar facilities are available elsewhere in the US, and in Canada, where a study based around Ottawa’s “wet shelter” found that emergency room visits and arrests were reduced by around 50%, saving the individual drinker untold humiliation and pain and significantly reducing the bills of local taxpayers, while freeing up medical staff and police officers for other jobs.  Can it be doubted, then, that such programmes provide a win-win situation?  The drinker is taken off the street and out of the emergency room, the local community benefits and, though this is not altogether a solution to their problem, friends and family are eased of at least some of the pain that goes with loving a chronic drunk.  Meanwhile, within the limits of their condition, drinkers attending facilities like St. Anthony’s are surprisingly happy.

And that, perhaps, is the problem.  Hopeless drunks aren’t supposed to be happy:  they’re supposed to suffer until they see the error of their ways and submit to a cure.  Critics of the wet houses never say this, of course; they talk about wet houses “giving up” on people, about “writing people off” – and yet, though they may well be sincere, their opposition to harm reduction programmes raises serious questions about liberty and civil rights.  When a grown man who, whether drunk or sober, maintains, often with real cogency and persuasiveness, that he does not wish to be treated for what other people may think of as a “condition” but which he sees as an essential part of his identity, what right does anyone have to oblige him to seek therapy?  It may not be desirable (or rather, we may not see it as desirable) to be a chronic drinker, but it is not so long since it was seen as equally undesirable to be gay…

And while we’re on the subject of addiction…

Not An Addiction (February 11th)

CNN, that bastion of responsible journalism, published on March 28th a story in which irresponsible scientists (or perhaps irresponsible reporters misquoting scientists) claim that dietary fats affect the brain “in much the same way as cocaine and heroin” and that this means they are addictive.  It of course means nothing of the kind; for one things fats are needed by the human body while drugs are not, and for another thing “withdrawal” from fats does not produce physical symptoms.  Habituating, yes; addictive, no.

Scientists have finally confirmed what the rest of us have suspected for years:  Bacon, cheesecake, and other delicious yet fattening foods may be addictive.  A new study in rats suggests that high-fat, high-calorie foods affect the brain in much the same way as cocaine and heroin.  When rats consume these foods in great enough quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction, the study found.  Doing drugs such as cocaine and eating too much junk food both gradually overload the…pleasure centers in the brain…eventually the pleasure centers “crash,” and achieving the same pleasure–or even just feeling normal–requires increasing amounts of the drug or food…

The fact that junk food could provoke this response isn’t entirely surprising, says Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, M.D., the chair of the medical department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.  “We make our food very similar to cocaine now,” he says.  Coca leaves have been used since ancient times, he points out, but people learned to purify or alter cocaine to deliver it more efficiently to their brains (by injecting or smoking it, for instance).  This made the drug more addictive.  According to Wang, food has evolved in a similar way.  “We purify our food,” he says.  “Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread.  American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup”…

One last nitpick:  while I don’t expect journalists to be experts in everything they write about, a little basic research would be nice.  The reporter’s appalling ignorance of food biology is readily apparent from ignorant phrases like “delicious yet fattening foods”; high-fat foods are delicious to us BECAUSE they’re fattening, not in spite of it as she implies.  We evolved to survive harsh conditions, not to live a sedentary existence in the midst of plenty, so the foods our bodies crave most are those which enable us to consume the highest number of calories in the shortest possible time – namely fats.  The problem isn’t in so-called “junk foods”, it’s in our overindulgence in them.  Water has absolutely no nutrients and consuming too much of it is unhealthy, but I don’t see ignoramuses referring to it as a “junk beverage”.

Welcome To Our World (January 20th)

The latest people to be forced to endure government busybodies in their private affairs:  nursing mothers, in this article from the Washington Post of February 21st:

Women have been nursing other women’s babies for hundreds of years; it used to be called wet-nursing.  Now, technology is giving new life to this practice.  On the Internet, especially on Facebook, lactating women are forming “milk-sharing” communities where they post if they have a surplus or a deficiency of breast milk.  They then meet up in person to give or receive bottles of frozen breast milk…The prevalence of online sharing of breast milk is impossible to quantify, but it has caught the attention of the Food and Drug Administration.  Last fall, the FDA released a statement that recommended “against feeding your baby breast milk acquired directly from individuals or through the Internet” because unscreened donor milk could allow the transmission of HIV, chemical contaminants, some illegal drugs and some prescription drugs…The FDA’s statement encouraged women to consider milk banks instead of turning to the Internet.  Milk banks may charge as much as $6 an ounce; at that price, it could cost about $150 a day to feed the average 3-month-old baby.  The FDA does not regulate milk banks or milk-sharing, but it posted facts about these options after realizing that people were turning to the agency for information…the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA) operates nine nonprofit milk banks in the United States…The banks are designed to serve babies in neonatal intensive care units, says the group’s president, Jean Drulis, though they provide milk to healthy babies “when possible.”  HMBANA recently announced that all of its milk banks have a critical shortage…Plus, the milk is available only with a doctor’s prescription, and only some health insurance plans cover the cost…

As you might imagine, the idea of women thumbing their noses at busybody government “recommendations” and relying on their own judgment in an underground economy based on their natural, biological abilities pleases me to no end.

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May Updates (Part One)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2011| 7 Comments »

News reports don’t change the world.  Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.  –  Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Due to the record-breaking number of interesting articles lately, this month’s update column will be in THREE parts!  And that’s actually a good thing, because I’ve fallen a bit behind and this will give me a chance to catch up again.

BDSM (Part One) (September 15th)

In this article I mentioned that few escorts would consent to submit to BDSM activity with a client outside of a protected setting such as a brothel; well, this story from April 19th is a pretty graphic representation of why that is so:

Seattle police have arrested a 66-year-old suspected of kidnapping, raping, and torturing a woman in what court documents describe as a “torture room,” inside a mobile home in Tacoma.  Police say…John Joseph Hauff, picked up the 24-year-old woman…around 9:30 p.m. on April 2nd and offered to pay her for…”sexual role playing.”  Hauff told the woman he “wanted to tie her wrists to the bed posts and use an electric vibrator on her”…Police say Hauff then offered to pay the woman $100, and agreed not to tight her up too tightly.

The woman got [into] Hauff’s car…but became concerned about his behavior, and later asked [him] to pull over at a gas station, so she could buy some cigarettes.  While…at the gas station,  she texted a friend Hauff’s license plate number and address…and told the friend to call police if she did not contact [him] by midnight…Hauff…[then] told the woman “he needed to blindfold her and tie her hands to the seat belt so she wouldn’t see where he lived”…he took her to a dungeon built in a large mobile home, tied a chain around her neck and padlocked it.  Hauff then told her “he was the master and took all her clothes off and tied her to the wall,” police records say…The woman asked Hauff to let her go, but he told her “no”…and began plucking out the woman’s pubic hair, and then stuck electrodes to her and began shocking her.  He [tortured her in various ways] for about three hours…[then she] told [Hauff about her] text message…[after that] he untied the woman, paid her $200, and asked her not to call police before he dropped her off…Prosecutors have charged Hauff with kidnapping, rape, and assault.

I’m glad this girl had enough sense to tell a friend where she was going, else this story might’ve had a very different ending.  Apparently the victim was not charged with prostitution, and I found this quote in a follow-up story in the May 2nd  Seattle Post-Intelligencer:  “Speaking shortly after Hauff’s arrest, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Jim Pugel asked that any other women attacked by Hauff contact the police. Pugel stressed they would not be investigated for prostitution or vice offenses.”  Well, maybe.  As Brandy Devereaux pointed out recently, it’s not exactly like whores have any reason to trust cops, who have a long history of lying to us and worse (as the following story demonstrates)…

License To Rape (November 16th)

The most remarkable detail of this April 29th report from the Houston Fox affiliate is that, though it isn’t at all remarkable, the reporter seems to think that it is.  If people ever come to realize that cops raping hookers is a sadly typical occurrence, and that it’s the cop being PROSECUTED for the outrage which is the truly newsworthy detail of this story, maybe things will start to change.

He’s being called a rapist in blue:  A Houston Police officer could be going to prison for a very long time…26-year-old Demetrie Dixon was arrested for sexually assaulting at least 2 prostitutes… in northwest Houston.  Dixon…used his authority to detain and sexually assault the hookers, investigators said.  Friday morning, a Harris County jury returned a guilty verdict…against the rookie cop.  Prosecutors paraded a string of street walkers into the court to tell how they were victimized by Dixon…[he] faces 2 to 20 years for the convictions.

It might also be nice if media outlets would let their reporters know that it isn’t cute or clever to ridicule women testifying against their rapist by referring to them as a “parade of streetwalkers”.

Mecca (December 12th)

Some people realize that being a “Mecca” can be a good thing:

Well-known lawyer Geoffrey Fieger has an idea about how to improve Detroit’s economic prospects:  legalize marijuana and prostitution to help attract young people…Fieger’s proposal came during a taping of “Michigan Matters” during a discussion of ways to turn the city around.  “I could turn it around in five minutes,” Fieger said, according to Detroit Free Press columnist Carol Cain.  Fieger, a lawyer and onetime gubernatorial candidate, said he’d shovel snow and keep streets and parks clean.  “Then, I’d tell the police department to leave marijuana alone…I also would not enforce prostitution laws and I’d make us the new Amsterdam.”

Of course, it won’t happen; it makes too much sense.  Americans are far too obsessed with controlling other people’s behavior to adopt laws which would make money for the government instead of wasting it.  But speaking of reasonable policies…

Harm Reduction (January 13th)

Trish Regan’s article from the April 20th Huffington Post is about drug decriminalization in Portugal, but illustrates the general soundness of the philosophy of harm reduction and is therefore topical:

…A study commissioned by…the Cato Institute in 2006 found that in the first five years since the country decriminalized drugs, usage rates among teens in Portugal actually declined.  In addition, the rates of new HIV infections caused by the sharing of dirty needles plunged…As a result, the study’s author, Glenn Greenwald, concluded that the country’s decriminalization policy “has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does”…According to the…study, which cites state research…since decriminalization took effect in 2001, lifetime drug usage rates…in the country [have] decreased among several age groups, primarily among young teens…As expected, for some older groups (beginning with nineteen- to twenty-four-year-olds) there has been what Greenwald defines as “a slight to mild increase” in drug usage.  The slight increase, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron tells me, is to be expected, because a group of people might be willing to use drugs if there is no risk of major penalties.  However, “this is a small group, essentially on the margin,” he points out, and indeed, the study confirms it.  Regardless, Portuguese officials are clearly pleased with the country’s progress.  Here’s why:  for drug policy specialists, a demonstrated decline in drug use among adolescents is considered to be critical.  That’s because the behavior of individuals in their early years tends to have a major effect on drug-related behavior in later years.  In other words, if you can influence behavior in the formative teenage years, studies suggest those same teens, once grown, will be far less likely to try drugs.  They have essentially missed the window of opportunity when it might be considered most interesting and are therefore less likely to seek out recreational drugs as adults.

Greenwald points to…a 2008 study detailing drug usage trends in seventeen countries on five continents in which researchers concluded that the late adolescent years are critical in determining future, lifelong drug use: “In most countries, the period of risk for initiation of use was heavily concentrated in the period from the mid to late teenage years; there was a slightly older and more extended period of risk for illegal drugs compared to legal drugs”…Consider the Netherlands, where marijuana has been tolerated in pot “coffee” shops for years.  Per government statistics, Dutch youth are actually less likely to smoke pot than Americans are.  For example, 38 percent of American teens have smoked pot compared to 20 percent of Dutch teens…

First up tomorrow:  another follow-up to this same column.

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No Fun Shall Be Had

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on May 3, 2011| 43 Comments »

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor.  It seems to worry them.  –  Robert Benchley

My old friend Philippa endured a terribly chaotic life, but she had a fantastic gift for catchy turns of phrase, many of which I use to this day (including my oft-repeated “good fantasy, bad reality”).  And whenever she wanted to mock overly-serious people who seemed congenitally unable to get a joke, she would announce that “No fun shall be had!”  Unfortunately, in the 15 years since I last saw her, the people who seem to truly believe this have become much more powerful and established “the right not to be offended” over such outmoded notions as “freedom of speech”.  Whenever someone makes a joke that one of the tissue-paper-feelings crowd pronounces “offensive”, she and her sisters will begin the titular refrain, usually with the same effect (career-wise) for the joke-teller as a more famous hysterical outburst born of an overdeveloped sense of privilege, namely “Off with his head!”

Many of you probably heard about this absurd manufactured “controversy” in mid-April; apparently women who are strong and intelligent enough to make it through medical school, internship and residency still prefer to present themselves as delicate little flowers who have attacks of the vapors when a respected surgeon closes a Valentine’s Day editorial with a silly medical joke based on the study discussed in the column.  These supposedly-rational women reacted by loudly announcing that they were not amused and demanding the professional head of a man who was known for being a “a longtime mentor and advocate of women in surgery”.  And some of my readers wonder why I say a woman’s beauty and grace are more fit subjects for compliments than her intelligence.

But since the media is notoriously uninterested in “yesterday’s news”, I think it’s likely that few of you saw this response to the brouhaha from the scientists whose work the good doctor cited in his now-censored editorial:

…Lazar Greenfield, M.D. is no ordinary surgeon.  Until last week, he was the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons.  The man is the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that has saved countless lives as a means of preventing blood clots during surgery.  He’s a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan.  He has written more than 360 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, 128 book chapters and two textbooks.  He has served on the Editorial Board of 15 scientific journals and was also the lead editor of the Surgery News…In the February issue, he penned some thoughts on Valentine’s Day under the heading of “Gut Feelings.”  (“But Valentine’s Day is about love, and if you remember a romantic gut feeling when you met your significant other, it might have a physiological basis.”)…He…noted the therapeutic effects of semen, citing research from the Archives of Sexual Behavior which found that female college students practicing unprotected sex were less likely to suffer from depression than those whose partners used condoms (as well as those who remained abstinent).  Presumably it was the closing line that caused the controversy:  “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”

The attempt at…humor apparently didn’t sit well in certain quarters.  Dr. Greenfield resigned as editor of the Surgery News and gave up his stewardship of ACS after learning that his article had spurred threats of protests from outside women’s groups.  In an interview with the Detroit Free Press last Wednesday, Dr. Greenfield explained:  “The editorial was a review of what I thought was some fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women.  It impressed me.  It seemed as though it was a gift from nature.  And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments.”

The story has been big in the scientific community, but…there is one take I thought missing and noteworthy — that of the three psychologists who authored the peer-reviewed article cited by Dr. Greenfield.  So I tracked down Steven M. Platek, Rebecca L. Burch, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr.  Speaking for the group, Dr…Platek…offered this analysis:

Frankly, we think people are over reacting to the comments made by Dr. Lazar Greenfield.  There is growing evidence that human semen has the potential to produce profound effects on women.  We have replicated the effects showing female college students having sex without condoms are less depressed as measured by objective scores on the Beck Depression Inventory.  We’ve also examined the data as a function of whether the students were using hormonal contraceptives, whether they were in committed relationships, and how long these relationships have lasted.  The anti-depressant properties of semen exposure do not vary as function of any of these conditions.  It is not a question of whether females are sexually active, since students having sex with condoms show the same level of depression as those who are not having sex at all.  We have also received numerous semen testimonials from other women who attest to the anti-depressant effects of semen exposure and these accounts often include the use of control trials (i.e., comparisons generated by switching from condoms to unprotected sex, or vice a versa).  Only 5 percent of the ejaculate is sperm.  What’s left is seminal plasma, which is a rich concoction of chemicals, including many that have the potential to produce mood-altering effects derived from hormones, neurotransmitters, and endorphins.  There are even female sex hormones in male semen.  Within a hour or two after insemination, you can detect heightened levels of many of these seminal chemicals in a woman’s bloodstream…How can someone be asked to resign for citing a peer-reviewed paper?  Dr. Greenfield was forced to resign based on politics, not evidence.  His resignation is more a reflection of the feminist and anti-scientific attitudes of some self-righteous and indignant members of the American College of Surgeons.  Science is based on evidence, not politics.  In science knowing is always preferable to not knowing.

Steven M. Platek
Rebecca L. Burch
Gordon G. Gallup, Jr.

Dr. Greenfield was of course subjected to the same process I wrote of in my column of April 26th:  the subjugation of scientific fact to a political agenda.  And considering that prostitutes are subject to the same persecution for the same “sin” (representing a reality which is abhorrent to neofeminist dogma), I deeply sympathize with him and hope that his experience at least serves to call attention to the pall of intellectual repression which has descended over American academia.

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Real Heroes

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , on May 2, 2011| 51 Comments »

Heroism—that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant.  –  Friedrich Nietzsche

In our lifetimes we have seen the collectivists redefine the word “hero” from its traditional meaning to “anyone who survives a nasty experience”, then more recently to “anyone who works for a government in any job which might carry some element of danger.”  And now, apparently, police departments are trying to refine the word again, to mean “a cop who shoots unarmed citizens in the back”.  Somehow, I think the latest redefinition isn’t going to catch on in the public mind; oppressive regimes often award cops medals and citations for brutalizing people and enforcing tyrannical decrees, but such awards of “heroism” never seem to mean much to those on the receiving end of the brutality.

There is a popular myth (promoted by cops themselves) that the job of police is to protect people, but this is not true and never was; the job of police is to enforce laws and arrest those who break the laws.  Police are not empowered to act to “protect” anyone when no law has been broken, and they themselves inflict considerable harm on those whom they declare (whether truthfully or not) to be in violation of arbitrary laws which are not designed to protect anyone.  Furthermore, the Supreme Court of the United States specifically ruled in 2005 that police do not have the duty to protect people from harm.  Yet, gun-control fanatics live in a fantasyland (based no doubt on television cop dramas) where the police nearly always arrive in time to “protect” people…despite the fact that common sense, statistics and the highest judiciary in the country all say otherwise.  And even when the law clearly requires police to act, they are notoriously disinterested if the victim is a prostitute.

It seems pretty clear that a wise person provides for his own defense, and this is especially true for whores.  But when a person foolishly fails to exercise due diligence, or when proper protective measures fail or are overwhelmed, it’s good to have backup.  And since the cops are incapable even when they don’t pose as great a danger as the original threat, who’s a working girl to call on?  Well, a group of weapons and combat experts in New York have volunteered for the job; last week Brandy called my attention to this story about the New York Initiative, who first announced themselves to hookers via this ad on Craigslist:

Hello, pretty lady!

I’m writing you on behalf of a group called the New York Initiative (We are not affiliated with law enforcement), and with the hopes that I’ve created a system that will help keep you safe when you go on dates! You can find our Facebook page through Google, as well as Google us with the words New York Press or Superheroes Documentary 2011 to find out what we’re about (Craigslist doesn’t allow me to post our URL)…yes, we look a little funny, but believe me when I say that we are all quite competent and capable of doing the things we say.

So with that out of the way, let me just get down to business…The Long Island Killer is out there.  He’s a scary bastard, and it’s starting to seem like he is focusing on you pretty ladies because some people are slower to report you missing, and also because apparently the law doesn’t respect your personal choices and that means cops are slower to follow through when it comes to you.  Well, I’m here to say F*** THAT.  We respect you as human beings, we believe in personal freedoms and think that you’re doing something that is absolutely your choice to do.

So rock on, ladies…We are on your side.  With that said, we are here to help…

The rest of the ad details their alert system and advises a check-in system such as I myself have advised in the past.  Now, some have branded the NYI as vigilantes, dismissed them as eccentrics or subjected their ad to PC nitpicking, but only the willfully blind could fail to see that their professed viewpoint is a HELL of a lot more enlightened than that of the damned cops or the soi-disant “women’s groups” who only speak up for women who are willing to accept their poisonous catechism of victimization and infantilization.  The following is an excerpt of a story republished from the April 24th Daily Mail on a website dedicated to real-life superheroes:

Self-styled superheroes have offered their help in fighting the serial killer thought to be behind the murders of over a dozen prostitutes in New York City.  The New York Initiative (NYI) – a group of vigilantes who model themselves on comic book superheroes – have posted an advert on classified ads website Craigslist offering ‘rescue teams’ for hookers whose clients turn violent.  NYI, who identify themselves as a group of ‘martial arts trainers, security specialists, emergency first responders, drug counsellors, former military police and former law enforcement’, are also offering free martial arts and weapons training to the women.

…The group is offering ‘a number to call and a few one-number or one-word codes you can say or text to us so that we can contact someone to assist you with a possibly violent date.’  They add:  ‘We will react quickly and without hesitation every time, using our considerable contacts to the full extent of their reach.’  And they promise not to involve the police unless there is a risk of ‘serious danger’.  The New York Initiative patrol the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan by night, attempting to deter crime.  Though they are loosely affiliated with the so-called Real Life Superheroes, unlike their more colourfully-dressed counterparts they tend not to wear masks and capes.  According to their website the group is composed of 11 members, with roles ranging from medic to combat specialist.  ‘Our primary goal will always be to help those in the most need to the highest ethical standard and to the maximum effect,’ they say…

Think or say whatever you like about them; until and unless I find out that they’re not what they present themselves to be, I would call the NYI before the NYPD any day of the week.  These are people who are doing what they believe in, working to help others without asking anything in return but the satisfaction of knowing they’re doing the right thing.  And IMHO the world needs more like them.

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