A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. – Leonard Nimoy
Sometimes it’s easy to find two videos for these columns, and sometimes it’s difficult; this week was the latter, and since I’m finding that happening much more often of late I’m going to stop fighting it. If there are two, well and fine; if there’s only one, though, that will be fine, too. This week’s sole specimen was contributed by Mistress Matisse; the links above it were provided by Eddie Cunningham (“Sweden”), Grace (“police state”), Wendy Lyon (“message”), Rick Horowitz (“fear”), and Radley Balko (“together”).
- Because Sweden.
- Life in a police state.
- To protect and serve.
- R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy.
- It’s all about sending a message.
- Cop in “fear for his life” from man chained to wall.
- Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together.
From the Archives
- Cats, combustion, crayons, Christians, Kipling, Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, adventure, Sweden, endometriosis and the police state.
- Government, cops, jazz, Harold Ramis, storytelling, ghosts, bananas, video, surveillance, lice and Bill Watterson.
- Interestingly, the phrase “sex trafficking” appears nowhere in this story.
- Indian sex workers saved a 14-year-old girl from being sold to a brothel.
- How can one educate irrational people about “sex trafficking” hysteria?
- Redefine prostitution as “sex trafficking”; get a grant for street stings.
- Western Australia politicians keep playing with this diseased carcass.
- Russians use “sex trafficking” hysteria as Anti-American propaganda.
- Hong Kong reporter tries out for job in Beijing’s propaganda ministry.
- “Trafficked children” are a bogus reason to oppose decriminalization.
- Big masked heroes prove their manhood by attacking Asian women.
- Should I stop seeing escorts & focus on rekindling marital intimacy?
- Nuns and SOAP fanatics harass hoteliers in the American Midwest.
- Drone-enabled universal surveillance is about to become a reality.
- Louisiana’s lesser interest in “Super Bowl sex trafficking” hysteria.
- Indian sex workers triumph over attempt at covert criminalization.
- Washington state puritans’ bizarre persecution of coffee stands.
- Hawaii expands asset forfeiture to include petty misdemeanors.
- Everything is magically right and moral when state actors do it.
- “Survivor” admits others convinced her she was “trafficked”.
- Indian feminists serve “vinegar pie” to Harvard do-gooders.
- The problems with attempts to medicalize female sexuality.
- A collection of vile, psychopathic, literally genocidal hatred.
- “You don’t change the world with a Hitachi Magic Wand“.
- Alas, it’s the sex workers who suffered from this idiocy.
- The fantasy of porn prohibition via internet censorship.
- A test of a screening method some readers doubted.
- The logical end result of “human trafficking” rhetoric.
- Liane de Pougy, one of the last grandes horizontales.
- Why do women tend to be more talkative than men?
- The view on the Swedish model from inside Norway.
- Peter Schafer on his project Whores and Madonnas.
- Harry Reid is on his anti-whore hobby horse again.
- Man dies of heart attack while visiting sex worker.
- A retrospective of my blogging for February 2011.
- Has any futurist ever been right about anything?
- Obligatory Olympic “sex trafficking” scare story.
- Butt-injection killer sentenced in Mississippi.
- Two sex workers’ flats re-opened in Soho.
- “Rescue” cop sends dick pics to whores.
- How Chester Brown changed the world.
- My appearance on The Bob Zadek Show.
- Turkey’s slow-motion war on sex work.
- Why Anne Hathaway should go-away.
- How not to be an ally to sex workers.
- A guideline to the C36 consultation.
- In which I attend a law symposium.
- The rise of porn-actress escorting.
- When prostitution wasn’t a crime.
- It’s sad that we’ve come to this.
- Attacking anti-Barbie claptrap.
- Laura Lee vs. Mary Honeyball.
- She’s no Maggie McNeill, but…
- The trial of Monica Jones.
- My favorite games.
- Belle Knox speaks.
In most of the UK, gay men who haven’t had sex for a year can, from 2011, now donate blood. Following the AIDS scare/crisis, a complete ban began in 1981. In the UK, donors are screened for diseases which might be exacerbated by their donation; and all donated blood is screened for HIV, Hep B, syphilis etc. No cases of viral transmission have been recorded in the UK since 2005.
Unsurprisingly, this relaxation doesn’t apply to N Ireland. Despite two recent court rulings, the ministers of health still won’t accept the UK position; there is an ongoing court case. (The health ministers were held to have had a position based on their religious beliefs.) As the late Rev Dr Ian Paisley was wont to say, “Keep Ulster free from Sodomy!”.
The title of the article about Sweden is inaccurate. It is not Sweden rejecting the statue, but the council of one city, while many other cities are willing to host it.
I like the statue, but I can understand why it would pose a conundrum to city officials. I checked some background and it was the Nordic Reich Party, an official political party legally parading in the street. It is harmless enough to have a little old woman hit a big man with her handbag in understandable anger, but it is still not something that most law-and-order authorities would celebrate with an official statue.
I can’t *stand* that “things we choose to do together” slogan. The things we choose to do together are called voluntary association, and/or the marketplace. Government is the word for the things thugs want to make us do.
I hate it with a passion as well, which is why I mock it by using it for horrible monstrosities no sane, decent group of people would ever agree were appropriate and proportionate.
Re “Life in a Police State”
“To be treated like the both of us were, I mean, at gunpoint and then handcuffed and then humiliated by making you take your shirt.off and get on your knees on the side of the freeway. I mean, why should that have to happen to anybody?”
The very *idea* that this nice couple should have been treated like black people! The outrage! See, this is what happens – law enforcement overreach.
On a different tack, this is not just what happens in a police state – it’s what happens in a police state where every man and his dog has a goddamn gun. Dude was very luck not to be shot when he reached for his waistband.
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