FOSTA/SESTA…proved that the government can successfully confuse the public by using scary but vapid words like “sex trafficking” and enact a law to wreak havoc with the internet. – Scott Greenfield
This guy’s too pathetic to make it as a sex worker; he should’ve stayed a cop:
A [cop] from Sussex, England has been sacked after being caught…Using his sick days to moonlight as a male prostitute…Chief Constable Giles York…said it wasn’t the actual prostituting that got [Richard] Holder fired, but rather how it affected his performance as a detective. York accused Holder of a “pattern of disruptive behavior that has been on the verge of criminal at times” and says he struggled with “under performance”…Holder is the second Sussex Police officer to have been discovered moonlighting as a prostitute in less than two years. In 2016, constable Daniel Moss was let go for doing sex work while he was on sick leave. And in in 2015, Inspector Lee Lyons was fired after admitting he contacted prostitutes he met while on duty…
The more people see “mommy whores” like this, the more they’ll realize harlotry is mundane:
…Jordyn Smith…has held a variety of jobs — from serving as a cocktail waitress to being an exotic dancer — to offset the costs of raising her teenage daughter. Currently…the Las Vegas, Nev. resident is…employed…Through a website called WhatsYourPrice, Smith is being paid to go on dates and maintain [what she absurdly claims are] platonic relationships with men…It’s…fairly similar to Seeking Arrangement…or…being a prostitute, [but like most halfway whores] Smith insists that this process is different because of…legality…
I really wish these dumbasses would stop trying to pretend there’s no sex involved in their sex work, though; nobody believes them so it just makes them look stupid and dishonest.
Where Are the Protests? (#415)
It’s not “trafficking” when that would be inconvenient for a government:
Two Vietnamese men who were smuggled into Ireland to work in a cannabis grow house containing nearly €1.8m of [plants] have been jailed for two-and-a-half years. One of the men travelled to Ireland in a shipping container and thought he would be working on a farm, while the other thought he would be working as a chef…Ngog Toan Vu…and Thang Nguen Van…each pleaded guilty to one count of cultivating cannabis without a licence…[after an “investigation”] had concluded that neither man was a victim of human trafficking…
Choice Bank Ltd. told accountholders…that it has been forced into a “liquidity-constrained position” and has suspended all withdrawals from deposit accounts, as well as other outbound payment activities. Choice Bank, the card issuer for several adult payment solutions, said that as it progresses through its current position, “the bank is confident that all its depositors, cardholders and creditors will be kept whole”…the Belize City financial institution maintains a strong balance sheet with total equity including paid up capital and accumulated retained earnings in excess of $26 million…and statutory liquidity ratio of 74.59 percent…
A rare victory for sex workers over pigs:
Nearly five years after the first of a series of police raids on San Diego strip clubs, a federal judge…ruled that a Municipal Code section allowing such “inspections” is illegal…Still to be decided: Whether the city broke Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures…The court didn’t rule on damages — how much money the dancers get…A trial on damages is expected, though…
From the same “authorities” who claim they want to “protect women” from consensual sex:
A woman held at an immigration detention center in Washington state…was raped by a medical worker…Another woman…[was] maced…at an immigration detention center in Florida. Then…[a pig] sat on her…[with] his “erect penis on her butt”…[and his cronies] filmed her as she showered to wash off the mace…a man…[was] threatened…with deportation after he refused to [suck an agent’s cock]…Many other women and men held in immigration detention across the country reported routine searches that turned into groping and fondling…and threatened with retaliation if they spoke up…These…are just a sample of hundreds of complaints of sexual…abuse in immigration detention obtained by The Intercept in response to a public records request…The reports…include 1,224 complaints filed between 2010 and September 2017…But in earlier responses, officials…indicated that the office received some 33,000 complaints between 2010 and 2016 alleging a wide range of abuses in immigration detention…sexual assault and harassment in immigration detention are not only widespread but systemic, and enabled by an agency that regularly fails to hold itself accountable…
Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs (#656)
Liz Hilton of Empower on “rescue raids” in Thailand:
…Entrapment operations have increased and sometimes the operations can go on for up to three months, while they try to collect evidence. These are followed by raids, and this raid was 50 armed soldiers at least to catch 22 little women. They must feel very brave…It’s one stop shopping. They can raid for trafficking but then use a prostitution law, immigration law, migrant worker act – you can even do some drug testing if you like, or claim money laundering. We once were in a raid they even got them for playing music that has a copyright…
The End of the Beginning (#718)
Another setback in getting rid of these tyrannical and unconstitutional laws:
…the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a state law banning sex offenders from public parks, overturning a 2017 appeals court ruling that deemed the statute “unconstitutional on its face because it bears no reasonable relationship to protecting the public.” The seven members of the higher court unanimously disagreed…In reaching that conclusion, the justices relied on alarming claims about recidivism among sex offenders, even while acknowledging that the claims have been discredited. The decision, written by Justice Mary Jane Theis, shows how fear overrides logic in dealing with sex offenders and how toothless “rational basis” review can be, allowing legislators not only to draw their own judgments but to invent their own facts…
Since judges have become the handmaidens of prosecutors, this is no surprise:
A King County Superior Court judge has ruled that the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office did not have a conflict of interest with a national anti-prostitution group when prosecutors pursued charges against men arrested in the shutdown of a popular sex work reviewing website, The Review Board (TRB)…lawyers for one of these men, Charles Peters, asked that the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office be disqualified from pursuing his case…because of a conflict of interest…But…Judge John Chun found that Peters’ lawyers did not prove…that the Prosecuting Attorney’s relationship with Demand Abolition “materially limit[ed] the prosecutor’s ability to make judgments free from improper influences”…Impartiality is not required for prosecutors under Washington State law…
Fascism allows for an indirect form of censorship just as effective as direct suppression:
The idea of the government swooping in with rules, limitation, potential prosecutions, isn’t good for business. Even if they can be eventually thwarted by courts protecting their rights, they will be tied up in litigation for years, at great expense, and party to misinformation campaigns to make them look like the bad guys…What we did to Backpage…we can do to you, Zuck. Nice platform you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. And every government wants its own piece of control. California believes it should be in charge of the internet, while Germany…”requires companies to remove hate speech from their platforms within 24 hours or face potentially crippling fines“…much of what constitutes hate speech in Germany is speech critical of its government and officials…every SJW…will be sucked into supporting it, much as their fellow emotionalists found SESTA acceptable because it used the terrifying “sex trafficking” sales pitch to confuse the useful idiots and obscure its greater significance…Can the government get away with…pressuring platforms to self-censor upon threat of intervention? They already have, with the public’s blessing.
The US thinks it has the right to war on all sex workers, even those in other countries like Canada:
When the U.S. government shut down Backpage…sex workers in Toronto — who used the site to advertise — started calling a local advocacy group in a panic. “People are frantic,” said Monica Forrester, who works for Maggie’s Toronto…“Because they have mortgages…and now their main source of income is gone, so they’re really scrambling”…sex workers who were used to finding clients through Backpage ads may feel pushed into working the streets of Toronto…
New Zealand sex workers are already feeling the impact of an online sex work forum being shut down…Many sex workers have spoken out against the shutdown, saying it will make the industry more dangerous for those who rely on these forums for support and safety…Backpage was used quite widely in New Zealand by those who couldn’t afford to list ads on escort directory New Zealand Girls…
This law is bullshit, and of course having consequences that were forseen by sex workers- pimps ramping up on harassing girls with attempted recruitment, lost income and all that entails, predatory men coming out due to less ability to screen or not being able to afford blowing them off, shitty offers/haggling, women going out to the street (one I overheard talking to a convenience store clerk ended up telling me she didn’t have the patience to mess with the websites I suggested), women gone missing, attempted and successful kidnappings, and murder.
It also has results that I didn’t think of at all. I wasn’t too affected for a little while, maybe things were a little bit slower with TER gone, but it did catch up. Last Saturday, with rent due, I needed a site where I could both answer ads and post, but it was gone- despite being up mere days before. I didn’t end up putting up anything somewhere else, because I started getting inquiries that night. Unfortunately, it consisted of a half-price offer and the other flaked on me. Responses ramped up this week. It seems that the site with my most reviews on it has now become the most-suggested site I’ve seen amongst the sex worker community. In turn, word of mouth comes around and men started looking there, this site having taken up the slack for several others. It brings some benefits and a number of detriments. I’d noticed that at least in my city, Craigslist had a lot of timewasters and hagglers, so now those men are looking on this site. I hadn’t had shitty offers like this in quite some time, or at least not very often. As well as guys just wanting pictures or to chat, etc. I’ve noticed that there are *tons* of fake phone numbers. I enjoyed operating kind of under the radar before- just repeat clients/regulars, men coming to me off of reviews or male referrals, and infrequent ads on low-traffic sites. So, when someone inquired with me, I knew that they particularly wanted to see *me* and liked what they saw and read, vs just being a number of many sex workers they have replied to. So, these new ones, out of what’s even worth looking into (last night’s wasn’t- he wanted to use some specific pay app I don’t have, and I don’t think it’s hard to get my fee out of an ATM ! That seemed fishy.) many don’t have the patience to work with my schedule of odd hours, other work and other clients. It’s really obnoxious and I’d really like to find a different easy site with lower volume, even mid-volume sounds marvellous to me right now!
*oh, also I would respond to men’s ads off of 2 sites before, when things were slow, but both are no longer an option.
I’m sure those Vietnamese guys knew exactly what they would be doing in Ireland. While I’m sure shady means were used to sneak into the country, you don’t recruit Ned Flanders and Family to be drug farmers, prostitutes, etc. They would make terrible workers and probably run off. It’s simply people already doing this at a high level who want to move into a more lucrative market overseas.
At work there is a guy I feel sorry for, his face is plastered all over the local “sex offender” boards, forbidden from public parks in perpetuity, has to turn off porch lights on Halloween, etc. Totally unconstitutional “unusual” punishment for a crime committed long ago and already punished for. He’s a comic book nerd whose not all there. Back when he hit puberty he started molesting his little brother and did it throughout high school, the shit was still going on when he hit 18 and then his brother told and everything hit the fan. He got 15 years for this with a public defender. (Something tells me if this happened in the Kennedy family it would all be kept under raps with the offender going off to some therapy center for a few months.) Even the streetwise black guys at work feel sorry for him and consider it something F*d up he did as a kid and not really an actual pedophile. They took a few high profile child killings in the 90s that laws of statistics made bound to happen in a country of 300 million and used them to put in these life long unconstitutional “scarlet letter” type punishments for any sort of infraction involving sex. I hear about adult men who got violent with their adult ex-lovers being banned from parks, their kids school activities, etc. when the crime they were already punished for had absolutely nothing to do with kids!