Last week was a short but busy one. It was short because I didn’t come back from Sunset until Tuesday (to avoid the nightmarish traffic from all the squares coming back from the coast on “Labor Day” to be back in their cubicles by Tuesday morning), and it was busy because nearly every night involved a multi-hour engagement of one kind or another. On Thursday Daedalus took me to a concert by a Beatles cover band to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of Abbey Road; I enjoyed it immensely and it didn’t even make me feel old (not older than I already feel, anyhow). On Saturday Lorelei held a combination birthday party and long-delayed housewarming, then on Sunday some of us held an end-of-summer barbecue. As regular readers know, the return of shorter days and cooler weather is definitely a cause for celebration for me; I’m already feeling a lot less anxious, and I’m getting better at using edibles to manage my stress. So that’s all I have to say right now, except to remind everyone in the Washington DC area that I’ll be back on September 26th for a reception for The War on Whores at the Reason magazine offices! The event is free but you need to register, and if you’d like to see me professionally while I’m there we can arrange it as long as you let me know by the beginning of that week at the very latest (preferably sooner).
Archive for September, 2019
Diary #480
Posted in Diary, tagged activism, drugs, psychology, The War on Whores on September 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »
The Disability and Sexuality Access Network
Posted in Guest Columns, Perception, tagged activism, disability on September 9, 2019| 3 Comments »
I’ve known Amber DiPietra for five years now, and when I saw her at the recent Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit she talked to me about her new project to educate people about sex and disability. Regular readers know this is a subject which has always been important to me, so naturally I invited her to write an essay about it. So here’s an introduction to the Disability and Sexuality Access Network (DASAN) by Amber and her colleague Cassandra J. Perry. .
More and more, society is awakening to the idea that sexuality is a fundamental human right and can exist in various forms and orientations. But does it go without saying that we imagine people with disabilities in this paradigm of evolving sexual freedom, and that sexuality for disabled people is a fundamental right with infinitely varied possibilities for expression? Or does our perceived spectrum of sex stop just shy of people with disabilites, who have been called the largest minority group (considering that disability is an identity that cuts through every gender identity, sexual orientation, race, class and creed)?
The Disability and Sexuality Access Network (DASANetwork) seeks to ensure that the perspective of people with disabilities informs every area of sexual study and culture, including but not limited to social services and social justice, political policy, health and wellness, relationship expertise, and the arts. To be clear, this does not mean a perspective on people with disabilities as it relates to sexuality; instead, we seek to empower disabled folks to collaboratively network and build upon our/their own skills, study, and advocacy in the field of sexual freedom. Membership is free and provides outward-facing profiles that make the disabled expert more visible to the larger world of sexuality studies and advancement. Meanwhile, the extra benefits of being registered in the network is that you become privy to members-only resources and opportunities such as jobs, speaking engagements, and a database of over 250 sexuality events internationally. This does not mean you have to have a disability to register — we welcome all allies — it just means we center disabled voices. DASANetwork wants to make it very clear that we welcome sex workers to become registered in our network. Due to social isolation or beauty oppression, sometimes disabled folks’ first access to sexuality is via a sex worker. Furthermore, a large portion of sex workers identify as having various types of disabilities which would make it hard for them to hold down a “normal” job. Sex work becomes an empowering career for them.
In a time of great body-positivity and body-autonomy awareness, the topic of disability is often segregated from the pervasive cultural dialogue around sexuality. This is unacceptable. DASANetwork was conceived as a response to issues within the fields of disability and sexuality. The aim of DASANetwork is to bring disability-specific issues to the fore of sexology, sexual health services, and sex-positive communities/conversations. Find us at dasanetwork.org and on Twitter @dasanetwork, and please consider giving to our Patreon, which sustains our work.
Links #479
Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged advertising, cops, hysteria, imaginative fiction, Never Call the Cops, North Carolina, racism, restaurants, South Carolina, teachers, Texas, Things We Choose To Do Together, Turkey, video on September 8, 2019| 1 Comment »
We serve a high-quality hamburger with no additives or fillers.
– Dairy Queen
I’ve been fascinated by recursion and surrealism ever since I was child, so it’s no surprise I love this video, suggested by Clarissa. The links above it were provided by Jesse Walker, Kevin Wilson, Tim Cushing, Popehat, Radley Balko, and Jesse Walker again, in that order.
- Why are people so stupid?
- The United States of Horror.
- BMW rips off the late Douglas Adams.
- Don’t let a machine call them for you, either.
- Teacher threatens student with deportation for saying “yeah”.
- Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together.
From the Archives
- Isn’t it obvious that when pigs are actively engaged in stings, arrests rise?
- Despite genuflecting to ugly myths, this seems a step in a good direction.
- New sleazy government trick: use civil suits rather than criminal charges.
- Amateurs: a public health menace who should be licensed and regulated.
- Stick to ladies with established reputations & you’ll be safe from this evil.
- How many abductions does it take to make a furniture store a “hot spot”?
- We were warned Israeli whore-censorship was only “part of a wider plan”.
- Despite exaggerated numbers to make it more lurid, this is a huge yawn.
- “Sex trafficking” hysteria is employed to mask the stench of xenophobia.
- Put your daughter in a gang-recruitment program! What could go wrong?
- Exactly what prohibitionists wanted, despite their claims to the contrary.
- Those uncomfortable with their own sexuality want nobody to have sex.
- I’ve never seen anything galvanize support for sex workers like FOSTA.
- More on the rapist cop who murdered a sex worker in Columbus, Ohio.
- The BBC opines pragmatic dating is bad because it’s “driven by vanity”.
- What an actual attempt at abduction into forced prostitution looks like.
- US prohibitionists refer to this kind of lying as “reframing experiences”.
- No, I won’t “debate” you, nor will I tolerate filth in my online presence.
- Cops, fraud, Florida, ghosts, amateurs, obvious signs and much more.
- Debunking absurd numbers behind “campus rape crisis” propaganda.
- Don’t teach kids about sex; fill their heads with anti-sex propaganda.
- “Human trafficking” has become merely a dysphemism for sex work.
- If this is a “brothel”, then a room with a foosball table is a “stadium”.
- Buried lede: cops sexually assaulted women in order to arrest them.
- Another entry in the “sex trafficking” scare story invasion of Twitter.
- Do I have to add, “Not because a 30-year-friend touched your butt”?
- Beware of male “feminists” who try to stop women from organizing.
- Prudes freak over a common arrangement as old as human culture.
- What was the point of talking to Annie if she wasn’t going to listen?
- The word for a place people are kept against their will isn’t “home”.
- Cops, bootlickers, Seattle, “Those Were the Days” and much more.
- A fairly typical abomination, but with an extra racist component.
- I’m aghast at everyone involved in the creation of this shitshow.
- Liz Brown on this year’s Swanee Hunt psychodrama pogroms.
- The State covering up for rapist cops isn’t confined to the US.
- We’re witnessing the end of the beginning of these evil laws.
- “Abatement”. A term used for things, especially nuisances.
- A rare moment of calm in this stormy, difficult incarnation.
- A good example of why “legalized” sex work is a bad idea.
- Why governments are more dangerous than corporations.
- The man behind much of Swanee Hunt’s propaganda.
- Imagine this article in an American parenting column.
- They were “safeguarded”, no doubt at a “safe house”.
- “Criminals using massage as a front for sex crimes”.
- The ugliest part of a peak moral panic: lynch mobs.
- How can an anonymous blogger accept donations?
- It’s nice to see at least a few reporters waking up.
- Judge slaps down two out-of-control politicians.
- More on child abuse by nuns at US orphanages.
- The real result of “sex trafficking” laws.
- It’s not a good time to begin sex work.
- A whirlwind trip to San Francisco.
- Instant karma’s gonna get you…
- “Correcting” people to death.
- Rapist cop of the week.
In the News (#969)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged censorship, Choke Point, dirty, drugs, Elephant in the Parlor, fascism, Feminine Pragmatism, hysteria, India, Laos, lawheads, Massachusetts, Micromanagement, Panopticon, politicians, pragmatism, prisons, Pyrrhic Victory, racism, sex rays, surveillance, Thailand, The Clueless Leading the Hysterical, The Monsters Are Due, The New Victorianism, West Virginia on September 7, 2019| 1 Comment »
We’re not trying to argue the morality of this. We’re trying to argue the reality of this. – Nicole Emma
One day, reporters will get that “People Work To Make Money” is not news:
Lao workers, many of them young and some still in their teens, have poured in growing numbers this year into neighboring Thailand, braving exploitation and unsafe work conditions in search of employment to help support families back home…nine Lao migrants [were] killed on Aug. 18 in a head-on collision while traveling to a border town to renew the tourist visas on which they had entered Thailand…an official…said…“They won’t [tell us their personal business [so]…we can’t stop them”…Many of those looking for work in Thailand voice concerns over family poverty as their reason for leaving home…Many young Laotians [are forced by arbitrary laws to] enter Thailand with the help of middle-men to work illegally…the…head of the anti-trafficking unit of the Thai-based Labor Rights Promotion Network…[said] “This is one of the loopholes in Thailand’s laws, and this is a problem [because we would rather force them to stay in Laos and die in poverty]”…
What kind of authoritarian mind thinks that “people killed in tragic accident while trying to comply with arbitrary government rules” is a less important point than where they were from or what they did for a living?
It’s about time Playboy started covering this topic more aggressively:
…Moral panic…and purity politics…interfere with our right to sexual safety, pleasure and free expression…civil policy-making has been supplanted by partisan uproar and triggered panic. Sex is at the center of every one of these…sex…has become the enemy…Panic rejects nuance, debate and disagreement in favor of party lines and swift action. Panic has resulted in the rise of cancel culture and the dismissal of due process…rational thinking has…been cast aside…In a sex panic, it becomes imprudent to question the extent to which sex-based discrimination exists. It becomes dangerous to suggest that all sexual violations, and all experiences of sexual violence, are not equivalent. As a consequence, we learn to shut up and sit down lest we face public condemnation and risk being attacked…moral panic is more about social control than ethical guidelines for how we should get along with one another…attempts to regulate morality only heighten panic by promoting, for example, sex-trafficking laws that ignore racist immigration policies and degrade sex workers as second-class citizens…Awkward sexual encounters continue to be conflated with the worst of accusations. And then: If he’s accused, he must have done it…
Too bad more politicians don’t hire the marginalized women cops are most likely to persecute:
West Virginia [politician] Mike Maroney has been charged with soliciting a prostitute…Maroney exchanged text messages to discuss prices and set up meetings with a woman who [was arrested]…Police [then snooped in her phone and started charging people for texting her]…
The Trump administration wants [the border Gestapo]…to collect DNA samples from undocumented immigrants in its [cages]…according to a draft policy…CBP officials would spend more than 20,000 additional work hours on such a policy in its first year of implementation. Hundreds of thousands of individuals could have their DNA collected each year if the draft regulation, proposed by the Department of Justice, is fully implemented…
While sex-related businesses…have long faced draconian restrictions from banks, we’re living in a time when their position is more precarious than ever…If this continues, it will disproportionately impact small sex-focused businesses…further marginalize sex workers, and decrease access to positive information about sexual health…“To see [this] spreading to educators and activists is alarming,” said Lorrae Jo Bradbury, founder of Slutty Girl Problems, a sex-positive blog…these incidents have ramped up dramatically since…FOSTA…passed in the Senate…[creating] a more repressive era of the internet, one in which websites such as Tumblr have banned adult content, Patreon is kicking off adult performers, and financial institutions are clamping down on businesses even remotely connected to sex…
When this is happenening in Utah, you know we’re past the watershed:
The best way of protecting sex workers is to decriminalize their industry and allow them to come out of the shadows, a Salt Lake City nonprofit told Utah [politicians]…Nicole Emma…of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP)…told members of the state’s Criminal Code Evaluation Task Force…[that] if these penalties were removed, sex workers could communicate more openly about their industry, check client backgrounds more easily and blacklist bad actors…
The ugliest part of a peak moral panic: lynch mobs:
The recent spate of mob attacks in Uttar Pradesh has caught the state police on the back foot. Incidents of hapless people…being brutally beaten up on suspicion of being child lifters are surfacing with alarming frequency…UP director general of police…OP Singh said…“A total of 46 incidents were reported in which one person was killed and 29 injured”…In…Ghaziabad, a middle-aged woman was…thrashed by a mob…[when] she went with her grandson for shopping…people have been attacked simply for being seen with a child…two siblings — Ramautar and Raju — were thrashed mercilessly…when…taking their nephew Ravi to a hospital for treatment…Ramautar [died and]…Raju [is] still battling for his life in the hospital…
The Clueless Leading the Hysterical (#886) 
The pigs are starting their annual fearmongering early this year:
[Cops] in Massachusetts want to [spread yet another stupid panic]…about…ecstasy [pills]…in the shape of “SpongeBob SquarePants” cartoon characters…The National Institute on Drug Abuse…warns that MDMA use can “promote trust and closeness,” potentially encouraging unsafe sexual behavior…“Parents, guardians, and caretakers should be on the lookout for these as school starts and Halloween is fast approaching,” [pigs oinked]…
Yeah, because people are going to hand free samples of a drug that costs $100 a gram to anonymous brats. And you’ve gotta love that the only “warning” these drug warriors can come up with is that stupid amateurs taking MDMA might do the same kind of stupid shit they do when sober.
The more we discover about Amazon’s fascist collaboration with cops, the worse it sounds:
[Amazon’s] doorbell-camera company Ring has quietly forged [fascist] partnerships with more than 400 police forces across the United States, granting them access to homeowners’ camera footage…The number of police deals, which has not previously been reported, will likely fuel [belated] questions about privacy, surveillance and the expanding reach of [fascist surveillance]…The rapid growth of the program, which launched last spring, surprised [insufficiently-cynical] civil-liberties advocates…
Assume a Sphere
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Words, tagged bogus studies, language, prohibitionist myths, STEM, yellow journalism on September 6, 2019| 6 Comments »
Good grief, reporters, please learn the difference between “size” and “length”.
Asteroid 2000 QW7 is set to pass Earth on September 14 according to research from Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). Asteroid 2000 QW7 is rather large, estimated to be 290 and 650 meters…making it the size of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world…Luckily, Asteroid 2000 QW7 is keeping its distance, only coming within 0.03564 astronomical units of Earth, which is approximately 3.3 million miles…
Burj Khalifa is very narrow in comparison to its height; an asteroid is not. And while Burj Khalifa is mostly empty space, an asteroid is solid rock and/or metal. Burj Khalifa masses a mere half a million tons; the asteroid mentioned in this story has a (very approximate) mass of 340 million tons. In other words, O deeply scientifically-illiterate reporter, 2000 QW7 is not “the size of Burj Khalifa”; it is in fact well over 600 times its size. For those who need a more concrete visualization: The statement “2000 QW7 is the size of Burj Khalifa” is not-dissimilar in accuracy to the statement “A 2019 Honda Accord is the size of the bag of sugar in my cupboard.”
And yet I wonder how these same people can believe in 100,000 “sex trafficked children” being raped dozens of times a day.
Addendum, for those who care about such things: I approximated the asteroid as a chondrite spheroid 600 m in diameter, small enough to be solid (unlike some small chondrite moons, which appear to have sizeable internal cavities); I approximated its density as 3 grams/cc. I asked my astronomer friend Mike Siegel to check my numbers, and he came up with very similar ones (though he felt the official estimate of Burj Khalifa’s mass to be a bit high).
My Own Favorites
Posted in Biography, Fiction, Perception, Philosophy, tagged Aphrodite, imaginative fiction, Ladies of the Night, The Forms of Things Unknown on September 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
It’s been three years since I stopped publishing “fictional interludes” on a monthly basis, and more than six years since I stopped doing “My Favorite __________” columns. And yet last week I started deeply missing that feature, and wishing that I could produce them as often as I used to. That mood inspired me to pull out my own copies of Ladies of the Night and The Forms of Things Unknown, browse through them, and reread a few of them, and that in turn inspired me to make a list of my own favorites from both collections (and a couple which will be included in my next collection, Lost Angels, which I’ll probably compile in another year or so). So without further ado (except to encourage you to support my work by buying them if you don’t already own them, and reviewing them if you like them), I hereby present my own personal top 10, in order of publication, with a short comment on each.
Perceptive readers have certainly noticed my love of mythology in general and Greek mythology in particular; a number of my stories have themes, titles, settings or characters borrowed from it. This one has only the last, and yet its title is scriptural and its themes eternal. And its Southern Gothic setting is, in many ways, one that fits the character almost as well as the one she’s usually associated with.
2) Bad News 
While it’s not uncommon for my stories to feature dry humor, I have difficulty performing this one at book readings without giggling. Even if I were restricted to five selections, I think this one would still make the cut.
As befits a Christmas story, this is certainly the lightest, most sentimental, and most optimistic tale on this list. And the protagonist is one of my favorite characters I’ve ever (literally) dreamed up, partly because rather than being a goddess, witch, villainess or femme fatale, she’s just an escort of rather nervous temperament who finds herself in well over her head.
4) Rose 
This isn’t my only story which treats seriously a topic I usually make fun of in my non-fiction, nor my only story based on a poem, nor the only one featuring very dark humor. And did I ever tell you that the unreliable narrator is one of my favorite literary devices? Because it is. Read this one
and maybe you’ll understand why.
5) Millennium
A tale of First Contact seen through an extremely cynical lens. You’ve probably never seen aliens portrayed quite like this before, and the fact that you probably haven’t may tell you just how cynical.
I’m not really very good with pastiche; the only author whose style I can reasonably approximate is Maggie McNeill. And that’s probably why I like this one so much; it reads very much like a pulp tale from the 1930s, and the characters and dialogue are, in my own admittedly-biased opinion, some of the best I ever wrote.
I’ve written scarier things than this, and more personal things than this, but none both scarier and more personal. And I still don’t like thinking about it when I’m alone late at night.
8) Lost Angel
This is not a tale of horror, at least not the usual kind of horror;
it is, in fact, pretty squarely in the genre generally known as “science fiction”. Nobody dies violently or suffers some other awful fate…so why do I always experience a pronounced frisson when thinking about the ending?
Many of the stories in The Forms of Things Unknown are, in a way, autobiographical, but none more so than this one. It’s about love, trust and other scary things, but it can’t possibly scare you as much
as it scares me because I know what it all means. I still think you’ll enjoy it.
10) Wheels
While “Trust Exercise” is a scary story about love, it’s not the love that’s scary; that is definitely not true in “Wheels”, the distillation of some themes that have haunted me for almost four decades and finally demanded I explore them in a more traditional narrative form.
In the News (#968)
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged agency denial, Backpage, Bad Girls, Canada, censorship, cops, Crying for Nanny, Dangerous Speech, drugs, fantasy, fascism, Guinea Pigs, Haiti, harm reduction, hotels, hysteria, imaginative fiction, lawyers, Madonna/whore, Netherlands, New York, Pennsylvania, porn, prohibitionist myths, propaganda, psychology, Repeat Offenders, robots, Signs, surveillance, The Crumbling Dam, The Proper Study, The Pygmalion Fallacy, Unsafe for Human Consumption, Worse Than I Thought on September 4, 2019| 4 Comments »
Any drug can be used responsibly. – Andre Picard
Prohibitionists hate harm reduction because prohibition is based in harm magnification:
The Alberta government has appointed a panel to study supervised drug-consumption sites. Panel members have been told to not to consider the merits of the facilities, only how they affect neighbouring residents and businesses…this political exercise…is about vilifying one type of drug user…Because the reality is there are already a lot of supervised consumption sites in Alberta and every province and territory – places where clients can be served their poison of choice unadulterated, in relatively safe quantities and not be judged or jailed. We call these places bars. What they really are are supervised alcohol-consumption sites: a place people can consume a safe supply of a drug in social surroundings and where if they overdose (i.e. get too drunk), there are friends and bar staff around to help…The assumptions we have that injected drugs are dangerous and bad, while liquid drugs ingested in clean glasses are innocuous and safe, are false. The best way to minimize the harm caused by drugs is to legalize them, to ensure the supply is safe…
Every proper study of any kind of sex work shoots prohibitionist lies down in flames:
…[prohibitionists claim] that porn fuels misogynistic attitudes and sexual violence. If this were the case, you would think that people who consumed a lot of porn would hold particularly negative views towards women. So we decided to study a group of men whom we’ve dubbed “porn superfans” – those who are so enthusiastic about porn that they’ll attend the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas…The 294 expo attendees we surveyed…actually expressed more progressive attitudes towards gender equality on two of the questions. For two others, they indicated just as progressive – or, said another way, just as sexist – attitudes as the general population…
In case you had forgotten that banks are actively looking for whores to rat out to the pigs:
The first episode of Forensic Finance discusses human trafficking, with more than 40 million people [pretended by prohibitionists] to be victims…It’s up to [the fascist establishment to feed this hysteria by destroying the lives of sex workers]…and one solution is to analyze bank data…
The rest is mostly a lot of misogynistic, agency-negating bullshit such as “many people who are trafficked might not know they’re victims”.
Return of the Killer Sex Robots:
Sex robots plagued with coding errors could be prone to violent behaviours including strangling, a [doll collector] has [fantasized. A person who expects to be taken seriously despite calling himself] Brick Dollbanger fears violent repercussions if robotics are not regulated properly. He believes a simple “coding error” could turn AI girlfriends against their owners [and magically give them souls]…”It scares me to death, it’s a machine and it’s always going to be a machine…If you’ve watched [The Terminator]…I honestly believe synthetics are going to look very similar…It’s not going to be something you can hit with a pipe and it’s going to fall apart…it’s going to be very strong, and it won’t get tired, it won’t stop unless it runs out of an energy supply…
This is good news; hysteria never stops until it starts harming the wealthy & well-connected:
[Ambulance-chasing shysters are using “sex trafficking” hysteria as a weapon in an attempt to rob] four Atlanta-area hotels [based on the pretense that they] knew sex trafficking was taking place [because they did not actively persecute sex workers and others who might fit the absurdly-broad]…indicator of sex trafficking [propaganda pushed by prohibitionists]…Jonathan Tonge and Pat McDonough…represent four [women who now claim to be]…trafficking victims…
The hotel industry is really going to regret having collaborated with fanatics rather than fighting “sex trafficking” hysteria.
Note how an accomplished adult man is portrayed as a passive victim when sex & drugs are involved:
A prostitute linked to the suspected overdose deaths of three men…including [Andrea Zamperoni] an Italian chef at a popular restaurant…has been arrested on drug charges…Angelina Barini [admitted to providing the chef drugs and later claimed that her pimp gave the chef some kind of fentanyl-based concoction she called “liquid ecstasy”. After Zamperoni predictably ODed]…her pimp, who hasn’t been identified, would not let her call the police and discussed whether to cut up the body…
Obviously, trying to cover up an overdose by CHOPPING UP A FUCKING BODY is an act of epic stupidity, and if this “pimp” exists, why has he neither been arrested nor named? Ask yourself: if drugs were not illegal, would successful men buy unidentifiable and possibly toxic swill from people they don’t know? And if drug-taking companions weren’t charged under monstrous “felony murder” statutes, wouldn’t people be much more likely to summon help in case of overdose?
…76…former sex workers [in Haiti]…have just completed a two (2) year training based on disciplines such as cosmetology, sewing, baking and cooking…This program of social reintegration…was initiated…by Fanm Kore Fanmi Professional Center, Fanm Kore Fanm Association in partnership with Operation Underground Railroad…
The inevitable religious connection is at the very end there; “Operation Underground Railroad” has strong ties to the Mormon Church.
Why let facts get in the way of a witch hunt?
[Prohibitionists’] claims [against Backpage] have always been bogus. Now, thanks to memos obtained by Reason, we have proof that prosecutors understood this all along…six years before Backpage leaders were indicted on federal criminal charges, prosecutors had already begun building a “child sex trafficking” case against the company. But this case was hampered by the fact that Backpage kept trying to help stop sex trafficking…”Unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution…Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations,” wrote…assistant U.S. attorneys for the Western District of Washington, in the April 3 memo to Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle and then head federal prosecutor for the district. [The FBI] told prosecutors that “on many occasions,” Backpage staff proactively sent him “advertisements that appear to contain pictures of juveniles” and that the company was “very cooperative at removing these advertisements at law enforcement’s request”…[the memos] would wind up being accidently sent by federal prosecutors to Backpage defense lawyers last year. But both would be ruled off-limits for defense use, placed under seal, and only subject to public courtroom discussion…after prosecutors tried to sanction defendants for a few paragraphs from the memos appearing in a June Wired article…
Unsafe for Human Consumption (#954)
Clownish cops continue to pratfall over fentanyl hysteria; clownish reporters swallow it whole:
…[a hysterical] Harrisburg [Pennsylvania cop suffered a panic attack due to cop disinformation about fentanyl after picking up]…a package [discarded by a fleeing vehicle. A spokespig claimed]…he was stricken with the classic overdose symptoms [and then described the classic symptoms of a panic attack, not an opioid overdose]…the first [backup pig] to arrive on the scene immediately administered a dose of the opioid antidote Narcan [which of course had no effect because he wasn’t overdosing, but]…EMTs [were able to calm him down with] a second dose, which [acted as a placebo to calm his hysteria]…
Buried lede: “…merely touching fentanyl is…not enough exposure to produce a life-threatening overdose”, but the reporter is so afraid of debunking pig dogma he had to insert qualifiers.
Diary #479
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, blogging, psychology, Sunset on September 3, 2019| 1 Comment »
Grace wasn’t quite finished with redoing the plumbing yet (largely because whoever installed it the first time made some mighty strange decisions), but these days I find myself much less anxious than I’d usually be at this time of year, probably because I’ve just increased my cannabis intake to bring my anxiety levels down to more autumnal levels. Because Sunset is near the edge of a rain forest it rarely gets more than warm out there, and generally it’s chilly enough to need another layer even in summer, as in this picture (with a small visitor who came to see what Snake Mama was up to). But it won’t be much longer before we’re finally done with floor-leveling and can move on to bookcases, and by spring we should be ready to start on the bathhouse. There are some other improvements Grace and Chekhov want to do, and naturally other things will pop up and will need to be maintained. But all in all, I’m really looking forward to having a place that’s basically the way I want it, rather than a work in progress as I have for the past 17 years. And that’s a big improvement.
Inspiring Work
Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged A Procrustean Bed, agency denial, cops, diversion programs, drugs, politicians, propaganda, racism, rape, Washington (state), yellow journalism on September 2, 2019| 2 Comments »
I don’t know Miriam Krinsky; judging by her Twitter feed, she’s probably a very decent person who is, like most decent people in the US, so absurdly clueless about sex work that she believes in the “sex trafficking” mythology and therefore thinks everyone who wraps himself in that filthy banner is a great guy. Otherwise I can’t fathom why she’d send out a tweet praising two utterly loathsome, racist, misogynistic, wastes of human flesh:
"Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with hard drugs and more on the public health toolbox." Great read by @NickKristoff on inspiring work of @DanSatterberg https://t.co/Aj9CMfGQCd
— Miriam Krinsky (@miriamkrinsky) August 23, 2019
The “inspiring work of Dan Satterberg” includes criminalization of consensual adult sex & racist pogroms against Asian-owned businesses, not to mention wantonly destroying lives of hundreds of men in return for money from a sociopathic billionaire. No surprise the vile Nick Kristof likes him. Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown on some of Satterbergs’s “inspiring work”, and Sydney Brownstone on more of it; SO INSPIRATIONAL! There are plenty of other examples of Dan Satterberg being an “inspiration” to those who dream of a universal police state controlling and “regulating” all private human behavior; just search his name on this blog. It appears dozens of times in connection with oppression & lies. But there’s a bigger issue here than a pompous, self-serving politician who knows how to get votes in a city which likes to pretend it’s “progressive”, and a smarmy white-savior hack journalist who thinks brown people are props for his various self-aggrandizing publicity stunts. The problem is nice middle-class white ladies who hear about horrific ideas like “Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion” (which basically consists of giving violent thugs the ability to label someone “sick” and force them into conversion therapy instead of labeling them “criminal” and locking them in a cage) and think the politicians who push them – thereby increasing cops’ power and doing nothing to shrink the government’s power to interfere in people’s lives – are some kind of heroes. You know how Satterberg’s crony Pete Holmes reacted when he found out very few people are interested in Seattle’s patronizing cop-controlled “program”? He started threatening women with increased police violence (including, as we know, rape) in order to intimidate them into “accepting” the “diversion”. All this should make any reasonable person ask, “If LEAD is so great, why are so few people interested in enduring it?” But Kristof doesn’t ask that question; he just lies to enable yet another monster who destroys women’s lives for power and profit, as he enabled Somaly Mam for years. And the same nice middle-class white ladies who funded Mam’s horror show, and who fund every other prohibitionist group working to inflict violence on human beings for the “crime” of consensual sex, continue to fawn on Kristof and vote for people who enable them to disguise their racism and their hatred of other women behind a mask of “concern”. No wonder they find Satterberg’s duplicity, racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism “inspiring”; he’s everything they want to be.
Links #478
Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged California, censorship, cops, drugs, Michigan, politicians, propaganda, psychology, restaurants, Shazam!, surveillance, Texas, video on September 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Is everyone insane?
Here’s a new video from the only presidential candidate any moral person can really support, courtesy of Brooke Magnanti. The links above it were provided by Tushy Galore (“time” and “Shazam”), Radley Balko (“serving”), Mike Siegel (“shocked” and “algorithms”), and Carol Fenton (“crises”).
- About goddamned time.
- Just protecting and serving.
- Top cops pretend to be shocked.
- How the US deals with mental health crises.
- The algorithms you want to drive cars & finger people for the pigs.
- The prosecutorial Shazam finger magically turns children into adults.
From the Archives
- When migration control disguised as “sex trafficking” law is very apparent.
- They make these cases sound like the rapist was doing his victims a favor.
- Cops, naivety, politicians, crypto-moralism, marble music and much more.
- Europeans wank to thoughts of Nigerian women enslaved by black magic.
- Another “Uber for escorts” app developed without consulting sex workers.
- Scheme to cut sex workers off from healthcare system spreads to the UK.
- Victim can’t get civil damages because rapist worked for the government.
- There is no “debate”; this is supported only by politicians and developers.
- Even when the reason is clear, “authorities” prefer to blame sex workers.
- ESPLERP vs. Gascon reaches a court which could possibly do something.
- Persecution of sex workers is part of lack of rights for women in general.
- The long US tradition of harmful policies that fly in the face of evidence.
- The public will believe anything on billboards, no matter how ridiculous.
- Glenn Kessler located the bogus numbers behind this truly-dumb claim.
- The State calls torture “correction” and torturers “correctional officers”.
- Massage parlors are popular pogrom targets; they’re low-hanging fruit.
- Woman regrets shunning her father for getting caught in a client sting.
- Lots of reporters still masturbate to this thoroughly-debunked fantasy.
- “Expert sex therapists” have never labelled “sex addiction” a disorder.
- Lawheads’ capacity for denying reality is nothing short of astonishing.
- It’s never called “trafficking” when the government or a crony does it.
- Reporter helps cops add insult to injury by infantilizing a rape victim.
- Did you ever wonder why the government stopped harassing bitcoin?
- It may already be far too late to put this evil djinni back in its bottle.
- Another entry in the “sex trafficking” scare story invasion of Twitter.
- In the modern US & countries it occupies, evil doesn’t have to lurk.
- US victims would’ve been arrested when they reported the attacks.
- Y’all didn’t stand up for pros; now they’re coming for you dabblers.
- Cops, busybodies, nutritionists, early animation and much more.
- A UN official finally admits what I’ve been pointing out for years.
- I hope you amateurs enjoy the world your silence helped create.
- “Erroneous” implies an honest mistake; this is willful conflation.
- Why do so many sex workers not want to fight criminalization?
- Syphilis outbreak among filthy amateurs is blamed on whores.
- At last, a very small measure of justice for Fran & Dan Keller.
- Cop murders sex worker for resisting his attempt to rape her.
- Bindel is increasingly becoming a transparent laughing stock.
- A retrospective of my blogging from August 2014 and 2015.
- Only one major victim of the Satanic panic is still in prison.
- I’m really enjoying “grocery store sex trafficking” hysteria.
- The State wants us to call this a “correctional institution”.
- Melissa Petro on her post-sex work dating experiences.
- What kind of sex work should an 18-year-old virgin do?
- He probably just thought he was in a “sex doll brothel”.
- The point of interrogation is not to collect information.
- Another trans sex worker murdered, this time in Paris.
- I hope they never catch her; this is admirably badass.
- The leading edge of a wedge is often extremely thin.
- A predictable outgrowth of “sex trafficking” hysteria.
- “Criminals using massage as a front for sex crimes”.
- The ugliest part of a peak moral panic: lynch mobs.
- “Youth pastors” are nearly as bad as cops.
- Yet another example of the McNeill Rule.
- I wonder how many hand jobs this took?
- I’m not sure which is more ludicrous.
- The Dog Days go and a pony arrives.
- Problems in the move to Sunset.
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