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Humiliation

October 12, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

American cops seem to have become dissatisfied with merely brutalizing their victims; now, it seems, they feel they have to humiliate them as well.  A few years ago, Reason‘s Elizabeth N. Brown noticed that when cops hunt street workers, they often offer fast food so they can then make fun of these desperately-poor women by telling reporters (who obediently regurgitate whatever the pigs vomit into their mouths) that they requested to be paid in nachos or chicken McNuggets or whatever.  Or, they invent some ridiculous request so they can mock the sex worker trying to cater to it.  They also give their “stings” idiotic names so as to invite ridicule of those entrapped by them, and now they’re incorporating humiliation directly into their jailhouse torture:

Two [typical and representative screws] and their supervisor were charged…after an investigation found inmates at the Oklahoma County jail were [subjected] to the popular children’s song, “Baby Shark,” on a loop at loud volumes for extended periods of time.  At least four [prisoners] were subjected to the “inhuman” [torture] in an attorney visitation room of the jail last November and December…[while] forced to stand [for hours], hands cuffed behind them and secured to the wall…[the screws] were Gregory Cornell Butler Jr….[and] Christian Charles Miles…and [their supervisor was] Christopher Raymond Hendershott…District Attorney David Prater charged them with misdemeanor counts of cruelty to a prisoner and conspiracy…Miles confirmed that he and Butler…”used the…attorney booth as a means to…’teach [prisoners] a lesson’…the music was said to be a joke between Miles and Butler”…[but] put “undue emotional stress on the [prisoners] who were most likely already suffering from physical stressors”…Hendershott learned of the mistreatment on Nov. 23 but “took no immediate action to either aid the inmate victim or discipline the [screws]”…

Ha, ha, ha, so funny.  It has long been known that loud, repetitive noise is a kind of psychological torture; the US armed forces have used it in siege situations since the ’80s.  The fact that the weapon was in this case a ridiculous children’s song doesn’t change that fact that their victims were forced to endure the racket while restrained in a position that could cause serious physical damage, nor the reduction of human beings to playthings for the sadistic amusement of thugs whose moral development is on a similar level to their chosen song’s intended audience.  This year, Americans are finally beginning to notice the wanton savagery police inflict upon people unlucky enough to fall into their clutches; it won’t surprise me if the increased attention also reveals many, many more cases of brutal clowns trying to rob their victims of even the slightest shred of dignity.

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Links #536

October 11, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

This family…didn’t choose…to [allow] Jefferson Parish to look into their home and judge what happens there.  –  Chelsea Cusimano

The big news this week was the death of Eddie Van Halen; I wasn’t really a fan, but this song was recent enough when I was teaching that some of my students used to “innocently” sing it within earshot.  The links above it were provided by Nun Ya, Stephen Lemons, Tim Cushing, Popehat, Scott Greenfield, Cop Crisis, and Thaddeus Russell, in that order.

From the Archives

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In the News (#1080)

October 10, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

Pleasure can never be free.  –  Moroccan saying

Surplus Women

Your regular reminder: this isn’t confined to the US:

On 9 April, sex worker and activist Robyn Montsumi was arrested on a drug charge…in Cape Town.  A few days later she died in [what cops claim was]…suicide by hanging…artist Clinton Osbourn…created a life-size portrait of Montsumi…laminated it and put it up on a pole near the Mowbray police station…

Osbourn is hopelessly naive if he thinks cops will be “haunted” by a portrait of one of their victims; if they had consciences, they wouldn’t commit the crimes they regularly revel in committing.

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

Police closed off the Longport area of Canterbury for several hours…following a report of…a woman [o]n the property…armed [thugs] were s[ent in while]…a police helicopter hover[ed] overhead…a woman in her 50s [w]as [th]en arrested on suspicion of immigration offences…[cops claim] the address may have been used as a brothel…

Smoke and Mirrors

Another of those cases whose reported details don’t add up:

Raymond Rodio III…was [sentenced to 9.5 years for]…charges including sex trafficking and promoting prostitution.  After he completes his prison sentence, Rodio must register as a sex offender…“sex dungeon…sex slavery,” Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Sini [drooled, claiming that]…Rodio recruited women through social media, got them hooked on heroin or crack cocaine and forced them to have sex with men in the basement…Rodio operated the ring for about four years, victimized more than 20 women and forced some to use a bucket instead of a toilet…Rodio’s parents may have known “something untoward” was going on, but not necessarily that their son was running a prostitution ring…They were not charged with a crime…

A “ring” with only one member?  Were the 20 “victims” in one basement, or did he only have one “slave” at a time (and if they could quit, how were they “slaves”?)  And the parents somehow had no idea?  Reeeeeeeeeeally now.

Lower Education (#778)

California seems determined to completely eliminate due process in rape cases:

[California] Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed…[a law] to ensure California colleges and universities [deny due]…process [to] all students [accused of] sexual assault…in direct response to the Trump administrations’ attempts [to roll back the due-process-banning “guidelines” set forth in the infamous “Dear Collague” letter of 2011]…SB 493 will require state-funded colleges and universities to [refuse the protections enshrined in] common [law for centuries, despite the fact that minority students are disproportionately the subjects of rape allegations which lack the evidence to be supported in actual court]…On May 6…Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released new federal Title IX regulations that require schools to allow direct cross-examination of [accusers as in any other US criminal case], and would…raise the standard of evidence [back] from…preponderance of the evidence…to “clear and convincing” evidence, which is [still much lower than the burden of proof in other criminal cases.  Many]…lawsuits have already been filed challenging [expulsions and other punishments obtained under] the [Obama-era] Title IX regulations, including [75 in California alone and] a [class-action] lawsuit [against Michigan State University]…

Naked Truth (#956)

Despite attempts to infantilize them as “victims”, Moroccan women know better:

…one of th[e] things that girls learn in Moroccan society…is [to]…enforce [a cost] when establishing almost any love and/or sexual bond with boys, and something that…married and divorced women tend to hold…[arranged] marriages…coexist…with the criminalization of [any] sexual relations outside of marriage…Consequently, there is a market for intimacy in which enjoyment is negotiated…the French-Moroccan anthropologist Mériam Cheikh has dedicated a doctoral thesis…[to] “the girls who go out”…the elegant euphemism [used] to designate prostitution practices, both professional and [casual]…the audacity in Cheikh’s research…is to…conclude that, in reality, the negotiations of sexuality are nothing more than a scale in the continuum of the bond between men and women that also includes marriage…

Social Distancing (#1035)

Some of us have been saying this since March:

On 23 March, Boris Johnson locked down the [UK]…It would last for three weeks, he said, and it had one simple aim: to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed by Covid cases.  Six months on…A quarter of the population is still under lockdown.  The rest of us are living under the most stringent social rules in living memory…Riot police are violently shutting down anyone who protests against this new authoritarianism…And…we are heading for the largest recession on record, with millions of jobs on the line…arbitrary rules are introduced by government decree…people can be fined for visiting loved ones…ministers make statements about who we can hug…there is serious talk of Christmas being cancelled…why did we shift from temporarily protecting the NHS from a spike in Covid to protecting all people from ever catching the virus?…how come you can gather in groups larger than six at work but not in a pub?…those of us…who have taken a critical approach…are often caricatured as not taking Covid-19 seriously…but…one of the key problems with a society-wide lockdown was precisely that it distracted society’s focus from the more targeted policies required to protect…the elderly and the vulnerable…It increasingly seems that the…freezing of economic life, the tight control of social life, and the halting of certain health services…could prove more harmful than the disease itself…

Social Distancing (#1045)

Like its neighbor the Netherlands, Belgium only pretends to respect sex workers:

Brussels’ sex workers are angry that they were not consulted before the City…sprung a prostitution ban on them on [September 28th, using the excuse]…of the coronavirus…the ban not only concerns street prostitution…but also sex work in…rendez-vous hotels…Maxime Maes of sex worker union UTSOPI [said]…“The virus is just an excuse.  This is not about the coronavirus, but about longstanding issues with the people living in those districts”…referring to how neighbourhood committees have repeatedly attempted to have several hotels in the Alhambra district closed…

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Annex 21

October 9, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

For the last couple of weeks, developments on the bathhouse have been incremental; Chekhov stained the second cottage as you can see, and he also figured out how to fix the doors so they’d close properly. According to the company that builds the kits, we’re the first ones who have reported problems with getting the doors to line up, and since we had the same problem with both cottages it’s obviously something we did wrong rather than a defect in the kits.  My suspicion is that it was because, out of an abundance of caution, we only installed the door frames at the four-log level rather than the doors and frames as the instructions directed; we were concerned that in the process of building the walls, the glass doors might get broken.  If we had installed the doors early on, we could have adjusted the frames then and used the trim to cover the gaps.  Ah, well, live and learn.  Anyhow, things should be picking up again soon; I was in Seattle for much of this week, and on Wednesday I visited two used building material companies in search of cee purlins, because for some reason new ones are more than four times as expensive here as they are in Oklahoma (everything is more expensive here, but not usually by more than double at the outside).  I also got the pipe Grace needs for the main roof truss supports; with any luck and weather permitting, we should have those in place by next week, and then we can get started on actually building the trusses.

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Viral Marketing

October 8, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

Is there a realistic danger that I might get infected with the coronavirus if I went to see a reputable escort in a city that has never been a hot spot?  Obviously, a reputable professional wouldn’t see customers if she knew she was infected, but people don’t necessarily know.  Hey, I could be infected too, although I find this unlikely.  Have you heard of a single case of anyone getting the coronavirus from a reputable provider?

Given the long incubation period and the relative ease of respiratory transmission, I don’t think there’s any sure way most non-hermits could say who they got it from, despite hooha about “contact tracing”.  If you’re somewhat concerned (I say “somewhat” because if you were very concerned you wouldn’t be considering this), you could do the mask thing, although that seems like it would be rather awkward in the circumstances of a date.  Personally, I don’t think it’s really worthwhile for a healthy man below 50 like yourself to worry about contact with specific apparently-healthy individuals in an area of low case numbers, but that’s me.

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)  

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In the News (#1079)

October 7, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

What we really need are safe and legal ways for sex workers to do what millions of Americans depend on them for.  –  Kate Zen

Under Every Bed 

Population 23,639:

…Guardians of the Children hosted a walk and candlelight vigil to raise awareness about child exploitation…[and] human trafficking…[but because North] Platte [Nebraska has no actual “sex trafficking” the members conflated it with]…child abuse [so they could claim at least a few hundred]…cases…

The Widening Gyre (#786)

When a headline writer doesn’t actually read the article first:

…historians offer a…thesis for the purpose QAnon serves.  The “nocturnal ritual fantasy”—a term coined by the historian Norman Cohn in his landmark study of European witch trials, Europe’s Inner Demons—is a recurring trope in Western history.  And it is often a politically useful one.  Deployed by the Romans against early Christians, by Christians against Jews, by Christians against witches, by Catholics against “heretics,” it is a malleable set of accusations that posit that a social out-group is engaged in perverse, ritualistic behaviors that target innocents—and that the out-group and all its enablers must be crushed…

Apparently, New Republic editors are so fixated on the “left-right” fantasy, and the belief that all social evils proceed from “The Right”, that they’re willing to characterize the Romans, the Christians, and the great majority of 1980s and 1990s Americans as “The Right” in order to cram an article into that paradigm.

Guinea Pigs (#955)

Just a reminder that this privacy-destroying abomination started as a means of spying on sex workers:

Palantir…promises t[o]…create clarity and order.  But to deliver, its software needs data — lots of it.  Now, two never-before-seen documents, “Intermediate Course” and “Advanced Course” training manuals, reveal how the Los Angeles Police Department has taught its [thugs] to use Palantir Gotham…At great taxpayer expense, and without public oversight or regulation, Palantir helped the LAPD construct a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between.  LAPD’s Palantir database includes information from the DMV…[and] 1 billion pictures taken of license plates from traffic lights and toll booths in Los Angeles and neighboring areas.  If you’ve driven through Los Angeles since 2015, the police can see where your car was photographed, when it was photographed, and then click on your name to learn all about you…

Thou Shalt Not (#971)

Pregnant women are easy targets for crypto-moralists:

Women who are pregnant or planning a pregnancy should completely avoid caffeine, according to a study published in The British Medical Journal.  Its findings, though, were quickly picked apart by skeptics who are sick of women being warned that almost everything they do…is a risk to their kids.  “I don’t think we need to worry about coffee,” says Clare Murphy…[of] the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. “I think we need to worry about this relentless pursuit of pregnant women and regulating of pregnant women’s choices”…the paper…is…a meta-analysis of several earlier studies…conducted by James E. Jack, a professor of psychology at Reykjavik University whose life’s work seems to be excoriating caffeine…in a culture enamored of shame and blame, especially when it comes to moms, it is this kind of research that gets funding and attention…Murphy says that her country’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recently published guidelines “whereby they want a woman’s entire alcohol history through the entire pregnancy—from a glass of beer they had before they knew they were pregnant—to be all documented and transferred onto a child’s health record.”  The clear implication is that anything a mom does can and will be held against her if a child exhibits problems…

The Implosion Begins

Cops will embrace any belief, no matter how bizarre, which gives them more power:

…what if the cop patrolling your neighborhood held bizarre and unsubstantiated views?  What if…he…was watching videos…[claim]ing that a satanic cabal of high-profile…pedophiles is running the world’s most insidious sex ring?  Or was swiping through memes popularizing …[fantasies] about kidnapped children kept in underground tunnels so their blood can be harvested to help keep wealthy people alive?  And what if they sincerely believed it all?  In a small but growing number of places across the country…[cops] have endorsed QAnon, [just as they endosed “sex trafficking” hysteria from which it sprang]…

Working From Home (#1070)

We’re way past the watershed when a prominent sex worker activist gets a network news byline:

Sex workers are the majority of creators on [OnlyFans], and here was a celebrity coming in and making more in a day than they could in a year.  Many sex workers rely on [the site] as their sole source of income during the pandemic, as in-person encounters became unsafe.  But what especially angered workers was how [former Disney star Bella] Thorne caused a wave of chargebacks that “broke OnlyFans”…[by] promising a $200 pay-per-message nude photo that she then shied away from sending…Shortly thereafter, OnlyFans…limit[ed] max subscription and tip payments and extend[ed] payout time by 23 days in 14 countries where fraud risk is deemed highest…To rub salt in the wound, Thorne’s sister Kaili responded to the controversy by seeming to dismiss and shame sex worker concerns…while the scandal has mostly died down, the problems it revealed remain worthy of our attention, especially as we head into fall and winter without a clear end to the…pandemic in sight…

Tissue of Lies

As I predicted almost 9 years ago, these debunkings are becoming common:

…The myths spread about human trafficking are endless.  Every year viral headlines claim the Super Bowl (and other major sporting events) are hotbeds for human trafficking.  This has been debunked for years.  The vast majority of sex workers get into the industry through friends or social activities, not through coercion of pimps.  There are ads to fight human trafficking in airports all over the country, despite there never being a confirmed case in one (but many cases of interracial families are reported)…These myths will continue feeding conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon until there’s a cultural effort to share the truth.  Human trafficking has been marketed as a national problem for decades and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars both publicly and privately, yet still has no credible studies showing the numbers of victims, no proof there’s a nation-wide crisis, and scarce evidence that current solutions help the underlying problems at all…

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Diary #536

October 6, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

Last Wednesday I collected what I thought a good number of apples from my trees to test my new cider press; after coring them and running them through a food processor for pulping, I used the press (on the deck, because I wasn’t sure how messy it would be) and obtained about 6 liters of fresh cider.  I’m going to ferment a gallon of it and use the rest to make apple butter and apple jelly; toward the latter end, I boiled the pomace (the stuff left over after juicing) in water, strained out the solids, and then boiled down the pulp to extract the pectin.  I was kind of amazed how little pectin the process produced; in the future I may decide it’s a better use of my time to just buy it from a grocery store.  But it’s no waste of time to learn how to do something, even if you don’t do it regularly afterward.  Anyhow, the animals really enjoyed the pomace once I was done, or at least Orville and Shiloh did; Jonathan is a bit of a snob, and though he ate it he didn’t seem as enthusiastic as the others.  I’m off to Seattle today, but I’ll be back at the farm on Thursday to do the last of the season’s canning, get on with the bathhouse roof, and spend more lovely October nights watching horror movies while stoned.

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Noise and Nuisance

October 5, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

Seattle is the only large city I’ve ever lived in.  Oh, I spent an appreciable fraction of my adult life in New Orleans, but that hasn’t been a large city (by North American standards) since the Second World War.  New Orleans is also slow, quiet, friendly, and highly idiosyncratic – all of which Seattle is not.  But when I made the decision in December of ’14 to move there, I assumed I would adapt.  After all, I easily adapted to New Orleans after a childhood spent in a town of 6000 people; I just figured it would be a similar scale-up.  And I didn’t even realize that I was mistaken until a few weeks ago.  Oh, I have always known that I prefer rural living to urban, which is one of the reasons I bought Sunset rather than a house somewhere in Greater Seattle; I figured I’d retire there one of these days, and spend relaxing weekends there in the meantime.  But when everything shut down for the pandemic, I started spending most of my time there, only returning to Seattle for appointments or other practical reasons.  And as the summer waxed, I noticed something peculiar: I wasn’t nearly as agitated by the long, bright days as usual, despite spending a great deal of time outdoors and not keeping the interior of the house as dark as I keep my Seattle apartment.

I noticed in my first summer up here that the anxiety was much worse than it was in Oklahoma or Louisiana, but I put that down to the considerable stress I was under and the fact that at these latitudes, the contrast between the lengths of summer and winter days is much greater.  But though my stress levels decreased throughout ’18 and ’19, my summer anxiety did not.  And though the days were brighter at the farm, the anxiety did not climb to the levels I had come to expect over the past five years…except for the days when I was in the city.  Every time I was in town during July, August, and September, my anxiety increased, sometime to the point of needing a little chemical assistance to manage it; every time I headed back to Sunset it decreased again.  Finally I realized that the problem isn’t Seattle’s geographical location, but rather its size.  Those who have visited my incall have certainly noticed that it’s a kind of psychic oasis; its darkness and masses of sound-dampening fabric tend to shut out much of the noise and bother trying to force their way in from the street.  When I lived here full-time, I always felt better upon returning from work or shopping and deliberately closing and locking the door.  But that was only relative, and my brain was still tense and racing; out at Sunset the blaring sirens and glacial traffic flow are two hours away, and it makes all the difference in the world.  So it’s a good thing I’m semi-retiring before next summer; I can handle the stress and commotion a few days at a time, a few times a month.  But it’s better for my brain not to marinade in that for weeks or months on end.

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Links #535

October 4, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

I can’t breathe.  –  Vanessa Peoples

I thought “I Am Woman” was vapid and silly even when I was very young and it was very popular.  I do like “Angie Baby”, but I already featured that one in Links #373, so I decided to give the video to an intentionally silly song by Mac Davis.  The links above it were provided by Radley Balko, Lenore Skenazy, Elizabeth N. Brown, Matt Welch, Walter Olson, Popehat, and Radley again, in that order.

From the Archives

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In the News (#1078)

October 3, 2020 by Maggie McNeill

There is no provision under [Indian] law which makes prostitution per se a criminal offence.  –  Justice Prithviraj Chavan

Elephant in the Parlor

Americans keep pretending “politician hires whores” is something other than a yawn:

Hunter Biden allegedly sent “thousands of dollars” to people who appear to be involved in the sex industry, according to…a…report released by Senate Republicans.  The report claims unspecified records show that Biden “has [paid] non-resident alien women in the United States who are citizens of Russia and Ukraine…some of these transactions are linked to what ‘appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring’”…Last year…[it was] revealed that a woman who was suing Biden for paternity in Arkansas was a former stripper at a Washington, DC, club that he frequented…

The attempt to make this VEWWY IMPOWTINT by alluding to “sex trafficking” and RUSSIA!!!! just come across as pathetic.  As for the phrase “prostitution or human trafficking ring”, that “or” is doing some mighty heavy lifting; the phrase “Biden is either a human being or a tentacled monster from Tau Ceti” would be equally accurate.

Panopticon (#1001)

The “security” system that isn’t:

…the Ring Always Home Cam, set to be available sometime next year…is…a drone that flies autonomously throughout your home, to provide [anyone with access to your Ring account] the view [they] want of whatever room [they] want, without having to have video cameras installed in multiple locations throughout your house.  The Always Home Cam…can be scheduled to fly preset paths…and it begins recording only once its in flight (the camera lens is actually physically blocked while it’s docked) — both features the company [pretends] will help ensure it operates strictly with privacy in mind.  Always Home Cam is also designed intentionally to produce an audible hum while in use, to alert anyone present that it’s actually moving around and recording [unless it’s used when no human is home]…

Sure, give hackers and cops access to a device that can be activated when you aren’t home to fly around and snoop into your private business.  What could possibly go wrong?

Social Distancing (#1031)

Can you imagine this happening in the puritanical US?

A woman running a[n escort service]…sued the Japanese government [for]…its blanket exclusion of the sex industry from a cash handout programme to support small companies hit by the coronavirus pandemic[, which constitutes] discrimination banned under the country’s constitution…the woman…demanded the payment of the benefits as well as consolation money for having been discriminated against “without reasonable grounds”…When she and other sex business operators met with an official at the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency in June to ask for their companies to be included in the handout programme, the official rejected their request, saying such businesses “have previously been excluded from public support, such as ones following natural disasters”, and that the agency merely “followed the past responses” made by the state…

Against Their Will (#1056) 

The Indian high court’s ruling in action:

Observing that prostitution is no offence under the law, the Bombay high court…set free three sex workers, who were detained [against their will] at a [so-called] hostel in Uttar Pradesh.  The court said an adult woman has the right to choose her vocation and cannot be detained without her consent, and set young women, aged 20, 22 and 23 free.  Justice Prithviraj Chavan said the purpose and the object of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (PITA), 1956 is not to abolish prostitution…

The Last Shall Be First (#1059)

Politicians’ potty obsession has gone federal:

[Politician] Kelly Loeffler [has] introduced a bill…threatening federal funding to schools that support transgender students…The bill…explicitly state[s] that allowing transgender girls…to compete with [cis]gender [girls] in school sports violates Title IX’s ban on discrimination on the basis of sex in schools…Loeffler’s bill, which says nothing about transgender boys competing in boys’…sports, says that “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth”…Similar legislation passed in Idaho earlier this year, and it was criticized because it allowed anyone to challenge a student athlete’s gender, which would force [her] to undergo DNA tests and “genital exams”…With the bill’s wording vague and federal funding on the line, schools could opt to require genital exams for all female athletes to prove they aren’t transgender…

The Widening Gyre (#1074)

It’s good to see psychologists finally telling the truth about hysteria over “pedophilia”:

Around two years ago…Twitter amended its terms of service to make an explicit allowance for the discussion of sexual attractions towards children, provided that such discussion does not…encourage people to commit sexual offenses against children…I was a signatory of a letter, initiated by the child protection organization Prostasia Foundation, alongside other experts on the prevention of child sexual abuse…who called for such a change…as the current best thinking in the field is that having a place online to connect to other MAPs reduces…social isolation, and therefore reduces the temptation to use the internet to act out on such sexual attractions…The phrase “minor-attracted person” (or “MAP”)…[is intended to cover the full] range of attraction targets…[rather than labeling everything] “pedophilia” [a term which actually only refers to attraction to prepubescent children]…

The Widening Gyre (#1075)

Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the Blocked and Reported podcast, discussing “the online outrage surrounding the French film Cuties…[and] the broader American sex-trafficking panic that seems to partly explain the reaction…“

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