If you can talk, you can breathe. – unidentified murderer cop
Not a bad selection of links for the post-holiday weekend, really; the first video was one of several Jae showed me on New Year’s Eve, while the selection of the second was based on a Twitter conversation between several sex workers (I will leave you to guess the subject yourselves). All the links above the first video were provided by Tushy Galore, and those between the videos by Popehat, Grace, Rick Horowitz, Radley Balko, Clarkhat, Elizabeth N. Brown, and Dave Krueger (in that order).
- The crime: loitering. The penalty: death by suffocation.
- Headline of the week. Too bad it was fake.
- Another isolated incident.
- RIP Donna Douglas.
- To protect and serve.
- An inevitable development.
- Why is this reported as bad news?
- Only cops can be trusted with guns.
- Cops murder man for “anti-government views”.
- Never call the cops for any reason whatsoever.
From the Archives
- Surveillance, bureaucracy, Seattle, lawheads, cops, time travel, dogs, overcriminalization, propaganda & The Thing.
- If prohibitionists really want to “rescue” sex workers, why do they keep trying to stop us from getting other jobs?
- With Friends Like Radio Netherlands, sex workers don’t need enemies.
- New York video helpfully explains that a law doesn’t say what it says.
- Prohibitionist French politician pronounces free speech “dangerous”.
- Members of the mainstream media are slowly beginning to wake up.
- How dare libertarians not privilege gay sex above other non-crimes!
- Prosecutors never hesitate when there’s political coin to be made.
- The Red Umbrella Fund, a grant source governed by sex workers.
- “Rescuers” give arrested sex workers crayons & coloring books.
- Michael Roth shows just how easily false memories are formed.
- It’s been quite a while since we’ve seen a creepy rapist doctor.
- Burmese journalists are much freer than their US counterparts.
- Cops trash escort’s home after she reports an abusive stalker.
- Melissa Gira Grant picks the best sex work writing of the year.
- An attempt to partly re-criminalize sex work in New Zealand.
- Take especial note of the un-ironic use of the word “rescue”.
- What a classic horror movie can tell us about human nature.
- Cops & vigilantes use “pedophilia” as an excuse to run wild.
- Prostitution-related charges in Toronto have dropped 90%.
- Another long, horrifying article on the Magdalene laundries.
- Feminists never think of the implications of laws they push.
- Cop lets man die to keep his Pot Noodle from getting cold.
- Previous columns for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
- The highly dishonorable Prime Liar of Japan is at it again.
- An excerpt from Mindy Chateauvert’s Sex Workers Unite.
- Spain accuses 17 people of “trafficking” via black magic.
- This woman takes the term “cougar” much too literally.
- New Jersey works to instill moral panic in schoolkids.
- A retrospective of my columns from December 2010.
- More totalitarian prudery from Everett, Washington.
- More examples of “porn” blocked by the UK’s filters.
- Adults without lives demand a “plus-size” Barbie.
- A rare Irish denunciation of the Swedish Model.
- Miranda Kane on selling comedy vs. selling sex.
- Another Brazilian woman auctions her virginity.
- In which prosecutors literally pimp an escort.
- Politician accuses rape victim of prostitution.
- Another casualty of the War on Whores.
- The Cartoon History of the Modern World.
- Flute of Sand & Crisis and Leviathan.
- Go ahead, please cringe with me.
- Laura Lee at Harlot’s Parlour.
- Marc Antony’s first mistress.
- Previously asked questions.
- Rapist cop of the week.
- R.I.P. Andrew Hunter.
You know you skipped a day in this timezone Maggie?
A previously perfect record too.
I know, and I’m very annoyed about it. Somehow the scheduled time was ignored, so the column didn’t post at 10:01 UTC as it should have. I didn’t notice until 5 hours later, because I get up around 14:00 UTC.
Thought you might be a bit annoyed.
You can’t be an easy woman to live with Maggie McNeill.
That, my dear, is an understatement. The difficulty of living with me is undoubtedly the chief reason for the failure of all my previous serious relationships with people of both sexes, since I’m actually very easy to love. My friends tend to be loyal to the death, unless they try to live with me; after a bit of that they often feel differently. If I had my life to live over again, I’d probably never try to cohabitate with anyone who wasn’t a submissive lesbian.
Funny thing about submissive lesbians is that they often don’t remain submissive or lesbians.
There’s a couple of examples of that among my former friends and acquaintances but the two fictional examples that come to mind are March in the D.H. Lawrence story The Fox and Childy in the Robert Aldrich movie The Killing of Sister George.
In Ireland, the seventh son of a seventh son is recognised as a healer. Must be consecutive boys, no girls in between.
The Guardian is in a glass house here.
This week they had a headline and editorial claiming researchers had found most cancers have no cause other than bad luck. Of course it showed no such thing. Exposure to known carcinogens (chemical, bio-mechanical, radioactive, viral …) still accounts for the majority of diagnosed cancers with genetic susceptibility also shouldering a big chunk of the blame.
The only thing the research showed was that stem-cells that replicate often are more likely to produce cancers than those that don’t. Hardly earthshaking, though it always pays to check such widely held assumptions.
Science journalism is shit, even in most pop-science publications (including the ones I’ve written for, sigh).
Well, most ionizing radiation exposure is cosmic (unavoidable, unless you want to live under a lot of water) and radon (hard to avoid). That will account for quite a bit of the “bad luck” cancers. Of course, you can always drive the probability up with things like smoking or alcohol or living in a large city with a lot of air pollution.
But I agree. Whenever I read something about CS, I usually cringe. Even things like proper CS news publications have a pretty high BS factor these days. It seems that it is now regarded acceptable to describe the fantasies people have and call that “science”, something which also happens in other fields. The real problem is that most people do not notice that they are fed BS and hence that quality level of reporting gets rewarded.
Actually cosmic rays are a minor component of normal human radiation exposure and you can keep it below 10% by staying close to sea level.
When it comes to skin cancers the important one is high frequency UV. You can’t avoid it completely (unless you take vitamin D supplements and either stay indoors during the day or wear a burqa) but you can sure limit exposure enough to keep your melanoma risk low.
I reckon it’s bad and getting worse. Especially in the fields of medicine, mental health, genetics and neurology. The researchers themselves are increasingly complicit.
I put a lot of it down to the ‘publish or perish’ approach among academia and the fact that most science is now funded by for-profit corporations that already have a big PR budget. For example, spending to promote new drugs exceeds spending to develop them by more than three to one.
Oh, I forgot to agree that radon is probably the single greatest source of exposure to ionising radiation for most people but that too can be reduced by having a home that is on raised foundations with a good airflow underneath, is well ventilated, has minimal stone or cement in its construction and is not sited close to mines or other rock crushing operations. If you have a basement ensure you run an exhaust fan from it.
In any case, radon is mostly implicated in lung cancer and exposure to cigarette smoke is still by far the greatest risk factor there.
Other than for skin cancers it’s not the whole body radiation dose that causes the most risk but rather the ingestion of radioactive particles – especially long lived nucleotides in elements that can’t be easily eliminated from the body. That’s why exposure to fallout from nuclear bombs, reactor accidents and uranium mining is so much worse than its mere becquerel count would indicate. The (not fully) depleted uranium in modern weapons is probably also very bad for the same reason, at least once it’s been fired and vaporised. Radon is bad because it irradiates dust particles which are then inhaled.
Love the videos– I’m a big fan of Garfunkel and Oates. Though I will admit my favorite is The Loophole… http://youtu.be/ygam6uXgI-w
From the birthplace of zero-tolerance policing, yet.
You know, given the number of people who die as a result of police activities – whether directly or indirectly due to imprisonment, etc – it’s starting to look like regular random cop killings might be morally supportable from a utilitarian perspective. Better check with Peter Singer on that.
Re: Go Kart Masturbating.
😀 Best conversation i ever had on Twitter.