How can people reasonably be expected to conform their behavior to the law when it is impossible for them to figure out what actions it proscribes until after they’ve been arrested and prosecuted? – Jacob Sullum
It looks like prohibitionists are getting more desperate:
A car bomb was defused in…[the] parking lot…[of] Paradise, one of Spain’s largest legal brothels…masked men sped up to the brothel in two cars. A man got out of one…and shouted he was leaving behind a car with a bomb in the back…it took a bomb squad several hours to deactivate the device…Town Mayor Sonia Martinez said she would take action to try and close Paradise, because it “seriously damages the image of the town”…
This is exactly why most whores in legalization regimes refuse to register:
…In a piece titled, “The gun owner next door: What you don’t know about the weapons in your neighborhood“, the [New York] Journal News [published] the names and addresses of local residents who are licensed to own handguns…[in] Westchester [and] Rockland…counties…The article includes an interactive map…
Nor is this the only lesson the anti-gun crowd could learn from sex work legalization regimes; those who have studied them could explain to Sarah O’Leary that when the police are allowed to “regulate” something, corruption and abuse are the inevitable results:
…It’s unrealistic to think we can get the estimated 300 million guns off the streets…Lawful gun owners…are not the ones who endanger the masses of us. The ones who use massive amounts of ammo against innocents do…If we used law enforcement venues…to regulate gun owners’ access to ammunition, we would greatly limit the unstable person determined to commit mass murder…Require gun owners to log on to a centralized government website to order their ammo, then pick it up at their local police stations…the only places where anyone can legally buy ammunition. Put limits on how much ammunition can be purchased at any given time, and over any given period…
The density of ignorance in this article is truly mind-boggling. O’Leary imagines “mass murderers” use more ammo in a spree than target shooters use in an afternoon, that police are incorruptible, that a centralized database is a good thing (see article directly above) and that people can’t make their own ammo; in fact her level of ignorance approaches that of sex work prohibitionists, and that’s staggering indeed.
In the profoundly perverse minds of “trafficking” fanatics, teaching someone to keep herself safe or work more efficiently is a “crime”:
…Police say 25-year-old Emilie Cook negotiated a $500 deal for herself and the teen to have sex with…an undercover cop. “[She]…was instructing a 16-year-old runaway on how to conduct prostitution,” said Trooper Melissa Matey with Louisiana State Police. “The 16-year-old has been taken into custody, and…[Cook] has been booked in the Orleans Parish Prison for trafficking children for sexual purposes…state police is [sic] anticipating more arrests and this case is ongoing…”
Note the pretense that this simple example of mentoring is part of some larger criminal conspiracy.
A new and revolting twist on “involuntary porn” extortion sites:
Potential Prostitutes is only the latest sleazy site to wed personal photos to public humiliation…any woman may be be anonymously tagged as a prostitute…in a browsable “offender” database seeded with mugshots of convicted prostitutes. Entries may be removed by those listed…[for] a hefty removal fee. Along with Predators Watch, a nearly-identical sister site…it’s part of a growing fad for shakedowns that exploit public records, police mugshots, compromising Facebook photos and other embarrassing personal information…the sites were registered to a P.O. Box in Stockholm, Sweden, in the last few weeks…Its Twitter feed consists only of a burst of links to prostitution stings and scandals from early November. Status People reports that only 6 percent of its followers are “good”, the rest being fake or inactive accounts…[Ken White of Popehat] writes that…”Courts are still determining application of Section 230 to extortion sites, [but] even the most generous application…wouldn’t apply if…the purveyors of the site were themselves the ones populating it with pictures under the guise of users doing it…Moreover, Section 230 is not a defense to criminal charges. Extortion is a…federal crime…[and if] the site makes deliberately false statements…to extort money, it…may [constitute] fraud…”
Consider how closely this statement from a third-world militocracy resembles American anti-whore rhetoric:
Burma’s new quasi-civilian government has vowed to improve its record on tackling human trafficking…police chief Yam Len Mun…noted that Burma has already moved from tier three to tier two in the [US Trafficking in Persons] report…he said…the first priority for next year should be to educate workers in every factory in the country about the dangers of human trafficking. Other…measures…include setting up telephone hotlines in border towns…and…[setting] up rehabilitation camps for trafficked workers who have been rescued…
The US Senate asking someone else to be a “responsible global citizen” is unbelievable hypocrisy, its ignorance is shocking and its embrace of “sex trafficking” is just sad. But its sending the demand to the wrong corporation is totally hilarious:
The Senate passed a resolution…that calls on the newspaper Village Voice “to act as a responsible global citizen” by taking down its “adult entertainment” section of its classified advertising website…“The numbers are rising, in part because it has become frighteningly simple to order a child prostitute on the Internet…” Sen. Mark Kirk…said…“Just a few clicks on this site easily enables ‘johns’ to purchase children for sex. Law enforcement believes that the existence of Backpage encourages the recruitment of victims for sexual exploitation because it allows traffickers to operate out of sight from police patrols”…Kirk said that experts estimate that each year as many as 300,000 children are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation in the United States and cited cases where those prosecuted for such crimes have used Backpage.com to advertise…“The profit-first mentality at Village Voice Media, which prioritizes the rights of pimps, not children, must end.”
The Mystic Mother of the Phoenix Goddess Temple was arrested again after investigators said they found her posting ads on backpage.com seeking sex in exchange for cash “donations.” Tracy Elise, 51, was re-arrested on December 13, fifteen months after her initial arrest for running a suspected brothel. Elise insists her church was misunderstood because it combines spirituality and sexuality…Prosecutors argue that the Goddess Temple was a ruse for prostitution and even though religion was discussed…that doesn’t change the fact that money was expected after sex…
Posting a new Backpage ad while awaiting trial for prostitution is such an incredibly bad idea, I must assume either the cops are lying or Elise is trying to create a test case.
I received
two extraordinarily generous gifts this week: from Juan Iglesias, a copy of Vincent Price’s highly-regarded 1965 cookbook A Treasury of Great Recipes; and from Dr. Brooke Magnanti, over a kilogram of jelly babies plus several packets of Parma violets. Thanks so very much to both of you!
.
It’s gratifying when others see the resemblance between decriminalization of drugs and prostitution: “Now that a couple of states have made it clear that pot is legal within their own borders, it looks like the momentum has shifted on drugs…Perhaps now is a good time to start directing some attention to another prohibition, and that is prostitution…” While the author buys into “sex trafficking” hysteria and the “dirty whore” myth, he nonetheless recognizes that criminalization creates most of the problems, and that is a good sign for the future.
Though England fought off the Labour Party’s last attempt to persecute sex workers and clients by imposing the tyrannical Swedish Model, the misogynistic puritans who run the party are at it again: “The government is coming under increasing pressure to…follow…Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland…[in imposing] the so-called Nordic model…”
Kristof’s awfulness is becoming so obvious, even the ignorant (such as someone who writes without a hint of sarcasm, “Paul Krugman is right about everything“) recognize him for what he is:
Nick Kristof travels the globe rescuing sex workers by getting them arrested and then attempting to find them jobs in sweatshops…His writing always features morally unambiguous black-and-white heroes and villains. The heroes are frequently rescuing helpless maidens. Kristof declines to see complexity in every great crisis he tackles, and largely refuses to acknowledge that money and American “intervention” are frequently
…the cause of [them]…Kristof’s reliance on anecdote and personal narratives above all else…lead him to deeply stupid conclusions…
Metaupdates
You may remember that when New York wanted to unconstitutionally punish people who had already served their sentences, it simply applied political pressure to get private corporations to do its dirty work for it:
New York State has teamed up with several major online game services to purge another 2,100 accounts held by registered sex offenders…New York’s Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) requires convicted sex offenders to register all of their email addresses, screen names and other online identities with the state. That information is passed along to sites and services so they can show predators to the door…
Obviously, there’s no possible way guys caught pissing in public or having sex with their girlfriends could ever start new anonymous accounts and not tell Big Brother about it.
While Hollywood figures are lining up to climb on the “sex trafficking” bandwagon, Bollywood figures are beginning to support decriminalization:
…Legalising prostitution in India would be a step…to bettering…conditions…Prohibiting all activities related to prostitution…does not seem to be curbing the booming sex trade…Prostitution has been in existence since organised society came into being, and…these women provide services to all existing societies even today.
Isn’t it time we give…[them] the respect and dignity they deserve?…
…a Montreal jury acquitted special-effects artist Rémy Couture of “corrupting morals” by creating gory photographs and short films…The government said his images were obscene…
Another judge acquits “trafficking” witch hunt victims due to a total lack of evidence:
A federal judge…overturned the convictions of three men on sex-trafficking charges…based on the government’s failure to prove the men were part of a single, overarching conspiracy…[and] because the government failed to turn over [to the defendants]…documents [which] showed contradictions in the testimony of the government’s principal witness…The [alleged] victim testified…that she was used as a prostitute…starting at age 12. But…new evidence…suggests…[she] lied about her age…[and was actually] 18 or 19…
I’ll bet those pearl-clutching Welsh academics didn’t expect this:
…Former madam Becky Adams, who is taking part in a Swansea University project examining youngsters in the sex trade, said that the market was almost flooded with people trying to pay their way through university…“The market is almost flooded with them…An hour used to be £150 in the 90s and now you can find an hour for £70 or £80. That is a result of supply and demand because there are so many more people at it. And you cannot just blame the Eastern Europeans…”
This Week in 2010 and 2011
Beside the original “Presents” post and my previous columns for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, this week also featured two columns about whore goddesses, a response to criticism from another activist, a biography of the Madame de Pompadour, a deconstruction of the ridiculous claims of “social scientists”, a report on Google’s support of anti-whore activism and my answers to reader questions on vaginal looseness, sluts, P411, anal sex, penis size and talking to children about prostitutes.
RE: What a Week!
I get that it’s easy for people to oppose random topics or actions in the abstract when one has zero exposure to them, but I just don’t get this level of fanaticism. Suppose they thought the workers needed rescuing; their best case scenario with this course of action is to murder a bunch of them. I mean, what the hell?
RE: Welcome To Our World
Since ‘register the whores’ is one of the more common moderate positions I come across, I think this provides an invaluable test case for what would happen if such a registry ever existed (and why it would never work).
RE: The Mote and the Beam
Check out Google Ngram; you can actually plot various terms by their frequency of appearance in 5.2 million books. If you plot ‘satanic panic’ and ‘human trafficking’ you can actually see the moral panics in graph form: http://tinyurl.com/bvgolgc
Very cool! Had the internet been bigger in the ’90s I’m sure the graph would’ve been even more telling. As for the bomb, I think it’s extremely interesting that the “bomber” announced his intent, that the squad was able to disable it and that a politician immediately used the incident to argue for the brothel’s closure.
Funny story … here are some (not all) of the questions government employees are required to ask when they receive a bomb threat against a US installation …
“Who are you?”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Uhm … where did you hide the bomb?”
“When’s it going off?”
“What kind of bomb is it?”
An FBI agent once told me that yes, most bombers are stupid people and will likely answer one or more of the above questions.
I still didn’t believe him.
Indeed. They basically changed to a more moderate form of victimization, with the government tagging in for the bomber.
Fuckin’ A …
http://www.newrochelletalk.com/content/map-where-are-journal-news-employees-your-neighborhood
LMFAO!
When guns are outlawed … I will become an outlaw.
Unmitigated outrage.
I checked, and some of the girls I know are in this database. I’m contacting them now, just in case they haven’t seen it.
Although … I AM wondering if some of the women listed didn’t “report” themselves just to get free advertising.
Uh, I think that’s the precise opposite of true. If prostitution is out in the open, it’s harder to engage in illegal activity.
Two more things:
Traffic Jam: I bet you the newspapers trumpeted the arrested of the traffickers and will still talk about how she was forced into prostitution at age 12. very few will run the correction, including the “18 or 19” age correction.
Also, I love the “too much to think” image! I may have to steal that.
Re: Welcome to our World
And, naturally, not a peep from all those braying about “ban all the guns” and “we’re safer without them”. Not. One. Peep. And these are the same folks who don’t understand how (mainstream, Democrat) liberals get called hypocrites. The Bill of Rights, while listed separately, are all depend on each other to work.
Most of the anti-gun crowd I know have never been around guns, so they agitate to get rid of them because of a fear of the unknown. They believe all sorts of wild myths about guns and gun owners that, if applied to certain other groups, they would quickly peg as prejudicial. While my family didn’t own any guns outside of a BB gun, we had plenty of friends and neighbors who did. We know a lot of game hunters, mostly retired airmen that my father befriended when he was in the USAF.
Re: Capricious Lusts
Go Bollywood! This is especially surprising considering the very conservative expression of sexuality within the films and even among its stars.
Go Bollywood! This is especially surprising considering the very conservative expression of sexuality within the films and even among its stars.
More conservative in many ways, but Bollywood and Indonesia seem more open to giving ex-porn actresses star billing in mainstream movies, such as Sunny Leone and Sola Aoi respectively.
PotentialProstitutes.com is another IsAnybodyDown.com, and has already attracted the attention of lawyers who I’m sure will soon sue them into oblivion.
https://randazza.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/you-have-got-to-be-kidding/
I was rather surprised the the Huffpo commentariat took O’Leary to school on her proposal. I hardly expected that.
But then again, they hired Radley Balko so they can’t be all bad, right?
As I’ve pointed out to both Laura and my brudder-in-law, countries which don’t have very many guns, like Britain and Japan, tend to not have near as many of these mass shootings as the US. Then again, countries with a lot of guns, like Switzerland and Canada, tend to not have near as many of these mass shootings as the US. There’s something about American culture which contributes to this, and it goes far beyond “there’s too many guns.” Whatever it is, we’d better fucking fix it, and fast. Gun control is about to become a moot point thanks to 3-D printing. The comparison I like to use is: “Imagine how much more of a failure the War on Drugs would be if anybody could grow a pot plant in his living room, and it only took a few hours to go from seed to mature plant. And you could download seeds off the Internet. For free.”
“…any woman may be be anonymously tagged as a prostitute…”
I’d hate to be be anonymously tagged as much of anything. If I want to be be tagged, I’ll do it myself.
Well, thank goodness those 2100 pervos can’t, um… play video games anymore? How exactly does this protect anyone? Is anybody trying to stop them from buying candy? At least that would make a little sense.
I think I’ve seen all of one Bollywood movie, though I’ve seen bits and pieces of others. I intend to see some more. Glad they’re coming out on the right side of things, and maybe our own show biz biz can learn a thing or three.
Spot on! I was just mentioning this the other day to the other guys I work with. We have several 3D “printers” and a couple of CNC machines and we calculated we could crank out AR-15 clones – fully automatic – at a rate of about two copies per day (our shit works a bit slow). The only thing we cannot make (possibly) … are the springs used in the action and trigger block, so we’d have to find a solution for that. Right now – you could simply buy them from a spring manufacturer for a very small cost.
They’re absolutely chasing their tails when they think they can control guns. You’re right – they need to address the root causes.
Buttressing your point, Sailor…
I should note that this is from a study done in 1972 before the draconian gun laws passed in the UK. I find this quote from Colin Greenwood regarding the differences between England and America to be “spot on.”
These comments about the relationship between firearms control or availability and the use of firearms in crime can be applied to all violent crime. It is true that there are more robberies involving a firearm in the U.S.A. than there are in Britain. There are also more robberies involving knives and more in which the only weapon was the hands or feet of the assailant. If it is suggested that the easier availability of fireamrs is a cause of firearms robberies, is it also suggested that knives are less readily available in England than they are in the U.S.A., or that American criminals have more hands and feet than their British counterpart? What can be shown is that American criminals are more willing to use extreme violence and the causes of this are linked to many ethnic and social factors, but not to the availability of any particular class of weapon.
Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, edited by Don B. Kates, Jr., Pg. 37
from “Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales, Cambridge University, Institute of Criminology, by Colin Greenwood, Superintendent of the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)
The potential of using 3-D printers to make firearms has been mentioned on this very blog, and more recently by Rachel Maddow, who isn’t anybody’s conservative. That both countries with few guns and countries with lots of guns have fewer gun massacres than the US was pointed out by no less a liberal than Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine.
The United States is not Canada (or France or Britain or Japan or Germany or…), and we may not be able to just “do what Canada does,” but damn, can we at least admit that there might be something worth learning?
Dear Maggie, I’ve been following you blog for the last 3 months and I’ve been enjoying it greatly. Today’s seen my first two dissappointments. You sniped indirectly at Paul Krugman who has a lot in common with you. He has a great intellect, he’s a great stylist, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly and yes he’s been right about almost everything. Why is it so? Because he is a lot less ideological than you think: just like you he loves logic and evidence based policies. He’s willing to compromise in the name of efficiency which is very much what is at the basis of the harm reduction philosophy you embrace…
A second source of dissapointment are your gun views. Not sure what they are but i have a feeling that you’re about to make the same antiprohibitionnist arguments. Let me just say that at the wrong end of a gun fight there is rarely a consenting adult not to say a consenting child.
Pardon my “foreign” English and i hope you appreciate my comparing you with a Nobel prize…
A reader who married a whore, is dating one, is running Marathons with another, is the Godfather of another’s children, is still seeing some and is the flatmate of yet another…
Not related to this post. Wanted to draw your attention to Sophie Hayes book ” Trafficked”. In your opinion, a genuibe but rare case or yet another lie waiting to be exposed? (by you?).
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