You are sitting here like cattle! Is this America? – Robert Small
I really do try to balance all the stories of bureaucratic tyranny and police brutality with light, funny or fascinating items; some weeks it’s just a lot more difficult to do that. This week’s first video, a cute comedy based on Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead in the eighth chapter of Luke (trust me) was provided by Antonio Lorusso, and the second, on performing Shakespeare with original pronunciation, by Franklin Harris. The first two items below (and the “puppy” part of the third) were provided by Radley Balko, but the first part of the third came from Grace (who also contributed “PTA”) and the “Alzheimer’s” part from Cop Block (who also contributed “bystander”). The first seven between the videos were supplied by Brooke Magnanti, Nun Ya, Jesse Walker, Gideon, Popehat, Mistress Matisse, and Mike Siegel (in that order); Mike also provided “dead horse”.
- When Oompa Loompas go bad.
- Government steals grocer’s bank account for “crime” of small deposits.
- Never call the cops for any reason whatsoever, especially not if Alzheimer’s disease or a puppy is involved. (Warning: graphic photo)
- Let’s make dresses from American cheese slices & pose with classic cars.
- Woman gets husband to shoot neighbor for telepathically raping her.
- Perhaps they’re trying to awaken one of the Great Old Ones.
- Pittsburg tickets people for parking in their own driveways.
- Boy suspended from school for playing in his front yard.
- Fascism in action.
- A prohibitionist’s nightmare.
- Why women want to eat babies.
- Cops attack yet another random bystander.
- Obama beats a horse dead since the US Civil War.
- Parent faces ten years in prison for speaking at PTA meeting.
- A map of all world countries where people can be sentenced to die in prison for crimes committed before they’re 18.
From the Archives
- I have such a good regular relationship with a professional that I no longer feel the need for a conventional relationship. Have I gone nuts?
- Corpses, Congress, cops, prohibitionism, Paul Bunyan, the future, the mess, politicians, gayness, the Amish, authority, art and ice cream.
- How would one let a prospective husband know that he should only cheat with a professional?
- Yet another poor fool dies from allowing filth to be injected into her arse.
- As long as government actors have power over people, this will happen.
- Canadian courts slap down another attempt to deny sex workers rights.
- Phoenix only “treats prostitutes as trafficking victims” when convenient.
- The nuns who ran the Magdalene laundries are still exploiting whores.
- Cambodian cops have learned to parrot their American masters well.
- The CASE Act is so awful even trafficking victim advocates oppose it.
- An excellent New York Times op-ed against “end demand” rhetoric.
- The Backpage-Village Voice split and Michael Wolff’s opinion of it.
- Korean sex workers demand revision of anti-sex trafficking laws.
- Sons of two Indian whores picked for champion soccer team.
- What if we were closely related to the other kind of chimp?
- Anna Gristina pleads guilty to promoting prostitution.
- A prohibitionist harpy interviews the Fokkens twins.
- A dangerously unbalanced buyer’s market in Japan.
- French hookers work to circumvent busybody laws.
- Unambitious gypsy whores in Washington, D.C.
- Dehumanization, sex workers and serial killers.
- A feminist guide to silencing sex workers.
- I make a brief appearance in this video.
- I despise misuse of the word “vagina”.
- Women’s views of male sex workers.
- The neuroscience of a dead salmon.
- My last two columns for Mabon.
- The fallacy of “empowerment”.
- Dominatrices in the news.
- My favorite short films.
- Banned Books Week.
• That map of all the countries where “Children Are Sentenced To Die In Prison” strikes me as overstating the case. We know that some (Regressing) Islamic States hand out death sentences for crimes like adultery (at least for the woman). Are we to believe that they don’t apply those to teenage girls? Or is a death sentence not “sentenced to die in prison”.
Further; if a ‘child’ has committed a crime serious enough that an adult would have been sentenced to life without parole, I’m not sure I want him/her on the street. But A) I’m a Crank and B) I’m not sure that I don’t think rehabilitation, in the sense of something that happens because of anything that prison officials do, isn’t a myth.
And C) if somebody does something to justify life without parole I would think that the only reliable way to tell if they has come to some sense of their responsibility would be their successful suicide.
Now, what crimes are justification for life without parole, that’s another issue.
I know it’s an unpopular position these days, but I consider the slow destruction of a person’s personality over decades in a cage to be far more inhumane and evil than simple execution.
I used to be pro-death penalty (or, more precisely, anti-anti-death penalty), and I will be again, after the law has been changed so that a prosecutor who cheats to get a death sentence routinely gets prosecuted (in turn) for conspiracy to commit murder.
That map’s a fucking joke – pap for the ignorant masses who would destroy the US because it’s not perfect. God let them get what they want and live under Islam – to which I may convert just to see that the sad sacks get what’s coming to them. Really the only people I detest more than Mohammedans are the people who enable them,
Meanwhile in Evan Prison in Tehran 15 year old girls are sentenced to death – and RAPED prior to execution because “virgins” enter paradise and that just can’t be allowed.
How ’bout a fucking map where little girls are not allowed to go to school or gain an equal education without being harassed by religious fanatics?
GOD DAMN THE UNITED STATES!
Riiiiiiiiight.
NO. We have had this argument before. If a former athletic champion starts losing contests, coming in second or third, etc, I’m not going to say, “well, there are worse athletes.” I’m going to say “what the fuck happened to Sam? It’s pathetic the way he’s let himself go.”
It’s kind of a tribute to how casually you view our survival that you compare it to sports.
That is apples and oranges. When your heavyweight champ loses his title you get to pop another bag of popcorn and muse about the state of the sport.
When Western Civilization falls to the Mohammedans – it’ll be a bit different from that. What people forget – I think including you – is that Western Civilization is an “umbrella” that is, no doubt – full of holes … but when it’s gone you have NOTHING over your head to protect you.
Schofield is right – the map is an OVER statement of American problems.
If I eat at a guy’s house for every meal for a week – and all he serves up are vegetables – it’s pretty safe for me to say that this guy doesn’t like meat.
When outfits like the Huffington Post want to gripe about relatively minor problems with the U.S. system – while IGNORING the gross violations of even the most basic civil rights in Islamic nations – I think I’m on fairly safe ground in assuming they have an agenda – one that is “enabling” Mohammedans.
Journalists are supposed to be balanced. Huffington Puffington post is anything but.
I don’t mean to be a dick, Maggie – but we need to be careful about sacrificing the good on the altar of the perfect.
The fact is … and I know this pisses a lot of people off – but it’s true …
If Libertarian principles are to EVER take root and prosper – it will be within the boundaries of Western Civilization – currently led by the United States.
If someone thinks I’m wrong about that – NAME ME WHERE IT WILL HAPPEN BABY!!
Those principles will NEVER be allowed within any society dominated by the Islamofascists … the Chinese … or the Russian’s current iteration of government.
I open up the Internet every morning and all I see are condemnations of the U.S. and Western Civilization from petty journalists and bloggers. If you people are going to be led by these “sad sacks” as I call them – “misfits” because they’ve been scarred by a life as outcasts (which they would be in any alternate universe anyway because they consistently blame their problems on others – instead of looking inward at the real culprit of their “victimhood”) … if you allow yourselves to be led by these idiots – you will find yourself down a very dark road. And they’re only doing it because they’re miserable – and misery loves company.
Let’s face it – we are NOT going to solve all the problems. What kind of hubris would that be – to assume that this generation could solve all of the problems that thousands of generations before us were unable to? So the responsible “activist” approaches this from a standpoint that perfection cannot be achieved and therefore PRIORITIES must be stricken.
In the universe of problems – I’m not too awefully concerned about a 15 year old kid who kills his parents, or walks into a school and murders his classmates being thrown under the jail for life. I’m sorry – I’m just not.
So I’m NOT spending any time fretting over that.
The bigger issue – is the survival of Western Civilization and how we do that without having to enslave every single member of our “tribe”. That’s the problem – it’s a serious one – and we need to solve it or we will perish – either from outside invasion – or by destroying everything that makes us “exceptional” and therefore even worthy of survival.
If you honestly think I give two beans about HuffPo, you’ve got your head up your arse. In case you hadn’t noticed, I link stuff from all over. The story is true, whether you like it or not, no matter what rag it appeared in. And if the US becomes as bad a police state as any Islamic theocracy, it won’t fucking matter who “won”.
Actually – we are NOT as bad as any Islamic Theocracy – nor any predominantly Muslim state … not anywhere near it – even with our drones and our NSA surveillance. So we have a long way to “fall” to get to that point.
Sure … the story may be “true” – so what? How many times have libertarians argued that the “arbitrary” age of 18 for “adulthood” is non-sensical? And now we’re arguing the opposite?
It’s also “true” that Muslim “scholars” in Saudi Arabia did a scientific “study” and found that women driving cars causes them to turn to homosexuality and porn useage. That’s a lot more ridiculous (and funnier) than HuffPo’s map – which is just one more “dig” at the U.S.
Correct me if I’m wrong here – but a proceedure has to be followed normally where the state has to prove that a teen was mature enough to understand what he was doing when he committed the crime – and whether or not he can be tried as an adult. His defense attorney has an input into that process. Sometimes the state LOSES the arguement.
That’s due process.
And by the way – are you buying into HuffPo’s meme here? That, in fact, being the “only” country that does this is “proof positive” that we’re in the wrong?
Being from the South – I’m sure your Dad used the colloquial retort … “If everyone jumped off a bridge – would you jump too?”
So the HuffPo’s logic here is just childish – and wrongheaded from the beginning. How many times have we said that “right and wrong” aren’t subject to popular opinion? So why are you buying it hear. Let’s make another map of nations that allow their citizens to buy semi-automatic firearms … we might be the ONLY one on that map too – DOES THAT MAKE US WRONG?!
Locking people in cages is evil, period. It can sometimes be a necessary evil, but shutting off all hope of release turns it into death by torture, which is so evil there can never be even the slightest justification for it.
Our Lords and Masters won’t be happy until all of us are felons, deprived of our rights, and damn it, if we won’t cooperate by committing crimes, they will simply have to make them up for us!
Then, we can all be prison labor, non-voting, no right to carry weapons. Basically slaves, which is exactly what the capitalists want.
Capitalist are contributing to disarming Americans? News to me.
Is Obama a capitalist? He’s the one buying ammo for the … Social Security Administration.
Comixchik uses the word “capitalist” to mean fascist plutocrats, what libertarians call “crony capitalists”. Not businesspeople participating in a free market.
Again I ask – is Obama one? He’s the one trying to disarm Americans. He’s the one forcing ObamaCare down my throat. He’s the one that seems to want to keep me as a slave.
So … is HE one then?
It’s a rhetorical question – of course he IS one of “them” – but he’s no “Capitalist” … the guy is as socialist as they come and yet … “he is one of those” … which is why I object to the word “capitalist” being in CC’s original statement.
If you think Obama is a socialist, you know nothing about socialism. Obama is a fascist’s fascist.
Too wordy for a comment, but I would like to see you expound on why you think this to be the case, in a future column.
So far as I can see “Socialist”, “Fascist”, “Communist”, and “Progressive” are all interchangeable labels for people who like to push others around. A pox on the whole boiling lot of ’em.
“Fascism” is that form of tyranny characterized by an unholy union of bureaucracy and big business.
So in Fascism Big Business absorbs Government and in Communism Government absorbs Big Business. Either way one ends up with the regulators and the regulated belonging to the same club, with no interest in actually pleasing the public.
I’m not at all sure that I see a practical difference.
1) No, in fascism government and big business are symbiotes, like the algae and fungi which exist in symbiosis to form a lichen.
2) I didn’t say communism, I said socialism.
A guy who is primarily funded by the labor unions? LOL – Okay!
Labor unions are powerful for-profit businesses who wield political influence by buying off politicians. That is fascism, not socialism. Your mistake is believing in left-right nonsense; ignore groups’ claimed motivations and look at what they actually DO, and you’ll have no trouble understanding.
Actual Capitalists don’t want slaves. You can’t sell much to slaves. But there are plenty of would-be aristocrats calling themselves Capitalists, Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Environmentalists, and so forth. And they, of course are ready to embrace any idiocy that’s likely to help keep the peasants in line.
I may have to re-think my position on personal gun ownership. I support the broadest possible interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, but have hitherto failed to purchase a gun because there were other things I’d rather own.
Totally agreed until you said the word “capitalists”, which shows you’re still buying the enemy’s kool-aid.
No, no. I don’t think it’s comixchik’s fault that the vast majority of people who pose as “Capitalists” are would-be aristocrats.
Agreed. It’s important to distinguish true capitalists from cronyists (those whose business models depend on special favors from government).
The biggest cause of rot in western countries’ governments is their ability to sell favors to any lobbyist with a big enough bag of bribe money. Making the deals is human nature and can’t be avoided — so we need to take the power to grant the favors away from legislators at all levels. (Term limits, contribution limits, and campaign disclosure laws can’t possibly help — they are only used to protect incumbents, as the recent IRS scandal shows.)
The solution to the problem of government corruption has almost always been to make the government sufficiently powerless that its corruption or purity din’t matter all that much.
Also; if cronyists were the only ones hiding behind the banner of Capitalism, I wouldn’t be worked up about it. The ones that raise MY blood pressure are the ones whose program amounts to “We’re going to take as much of YOUR capital away from you as we can, and spend it on what WE think it should be spent on, because after all WE are SOOOOOOOO much better at deciding these things than you are.” You know; socialists, communists, progressives, environmentalists, the Roman Curia ….. would be aristocrats. They existed in the 19th century too; social darwinists, the ante-bellum Planters. There is no shortage of them in any age.
David Crystal is my idea of a real academic; knowledgeable, informative, but in no way stuffy; someone who can get his ideas across in a way that is informative, academically correct and yet understandable and accessible. And as a linguist he has no truck with the stuffier members of the grammatical tradition who insist that no infinitive can be spilt, no sentence can be ended with a preposition nor started with an ‘and’; he recognises that language changes, the use of words changes, but doesn’t, like Cnut was wrongly supposed to, attempt to hold back the changes. And he does it all with a twinkle; but it’s not that surprising really, for though you don’t hear it in his accent, he was born in N Ireland.
I hadn’t seen this piece about Shakespeare’s pronunciation before; yet it’s no surprise to find that there are even more >i>double entrendres and bawdy jokes in it than even Bowdler could have imagined.
The good thing about the Chinese story is that many people were willing to call out this silliness regarding sexually inexperienced women. Even the state-controlled media are allowing a greater diversity of opinion than before.
I am opposed to the concept of power over others, or of others having power over me. Thus I oppose capitalists and owners as much as I oppose government bureaucrats. It makes little difference if your power comes from being elected, or having enough money to control things, it’s still power.
We pretend to expect rights from our government, yet give up those rights 8 or more hours a day at work.
As Maggie says, we have an unholy alliance of government and corporate money.
I’m an ararcho-socialist, and make no apologies. Let the people be their own government. (Oddly enough, this puts me closer to the side of small capitalism than the current system)
As I’ve often pointed out, most small-l libertarians and most small-s socialists are actually pretty close together; it’s when those capital letters start coming out that the problems arise.
“Let the people be their own government” …
Can you point to a single instance of that notion – that’s existed (ever) in human history?
Or is this some theory of a great utopia as of yet to be “invented”?
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Nyan! Nyan!