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In the News (#683)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Between the Lines, California, Canada, clowns, cops, Droit du Seigneur, FBI, Hollywood, hysteria, Louisiana, Missouri, No Escape, No Moss, O Canada!, Oklahoma, Pearls Firmly Clutched, pimps, prisons, Pyrrhic Victory, rape, Russia, Send In the Clowns, Spotlight, surveillance, Tennessee, To Molest and Rape, Torture Chamber, United Kingdom, violence vs. sex workers, yellow journalism on October 22, 2016| 9 Comments »

All that criminalization of prostitution does is make people afraid.
– Tara Burns

Droit du Seigneur

Though pimps are pretty rare, a disproportionate number of the ones who do exist are cops: “[An] Oklahoma City [cop]…was arrested…on multiple complaints, including aiding in prostitution. Lt. Alex Edwards…was [also charged with a bunch of vague ‘crimes’ used by prosecutors to stack penalties]…”

Pyrrhic Victory

When they smash down your door in the middle of the night, murder your dogs, terrorize your family and embroil you in a decade-long court battle which will utterly bankrupt you because some computer decided you look like somebody who supposedly broke some law, don’t say I didn’t warn you:

Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study…”The Perpetual Line-up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America” shows that one-fourth of the nation’s law enforcement agencies have access to face-recognition databases, and their use…is virtually unregulated…Alvaro Bedoya…co-author of the study [said] “By [scanning]…the faces on 26 states’ driver’s license and ID photos, police and the FBI have basically enrolled half of all adults in a massive virtual line-up. This has never been done for fingerprints or DNA”…researchers obtained documents stating that at least five “major police departments,” including those in Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles, “either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology that can do so, or expressed an interest in buying it”…

Spotlight (#47)

I wonder if Asstoon will ever get professional help for his delusions of grandeur?

Ashton Kutcher [made grandiose and unsubstantiated claims]…about how Thorn, an organization founded by himself and ex-wife Demi Moore, has been working to combat human trafficking…Kutcher [fantasized] that his organization had saved more than 6,000 victims from human trafficking in 2016, identifying more 2,000 trafficker in the process…An additional online menace that Thorn intends to combat…was online pornography…“I’m going to eliminate child pornography from the internet.”

Imagine a reporter neither expressing skepticism of nor demanding proof from a person who claimed to have saved 6000 rape victims and vowed that his next super-deed would be to eliminate every opium poppy in Asia.

Pearls Firmly Clutched

Using Suzy Favor Hamilton’s story without her input is pretty sleazy even for an anti-whore sleazefest like Law and Order:

…an…episode on Law & Order SVU…revolved around a female Olympic Pole Vaulter who had been sexually assaulted while secretly escorting…They flash in the intro, “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person, entity or event.” Well that’s kinda laughable because with the exception of the sexual assault and a couple minor modifications, it’s pretty much me out there. Olympian? Check. Track & Field athlete? Check. Married? Check. Mom? Check. Secretly escorting? Check. Bipolar? Check…It’s strange to me that a show like this…can rip off a story so blatantly. I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of how all this works, but what I do know it that as I watched, it felt a little icky and sneaky. Like someone had broken into my life uninvited…

Torture Chamber

Americans keep pretending to be shocked by this, then support sending more people to prison:

A former inmate of a Louisiana private prison is suing the company that runs the prison after two guards [orally raped] him [on several occasions]…Aaron Franklin…was abused by Derrick Deshotel and Tyler Strothers…at the Allen Correctional Center…An investigation by the prison substantiated his allegations…The guards were fired…and criminally charged…[but] received only probation…

O, Canada! (All Traffick, All the Time)

Canadian cops are trying to intimidate sex workers again:

Holed up in a hotel room close to Calgary’s airport, a handful of [pigs]…dig through piles of online escort ads as they prep for Day Two of Operation Northern Spotlight…they make calls to unsuspecting sex workers and [lie to them to] set up “dates”…they hope to [intimidate them] to leave the world’s oldest profession…The women all react differently to the initial contact with the detective. Some are hostile, as they realize the [cops have robbed them of hundreds of dollars of their time]…

Between the Lines

Sex workers, our clients, our associates and our families were once again subjected to the FBI’s periodic anti-sex worker pogrom, “Operation Cross-Country”:

This year’s Operation Cross Country—the largest to date—involved 55 FBI field offices and 74 FBI-led Child Exploitation Task Forces throughout the country composed of more than 400 law enforcement agencies. Hundreds of law enforcement officials took part in sting operations in hotels, casinos, truck stops, and other areas frequented by pimps, prostitutes, and their customers…

The FBI learned years ago not to give any clear figures on the number of peaceful adults whose lives are destroyed in these fanatical jihads, preferring instead to represent any underage sex workers they arrest as “rescued victims” and pretty much any male unlucky enough to fall into their hands as a “pimp” (though the conviction rate is only 4%). So it may take a week or two to get a picture of the extent of the carnage; right now the coverage is dominated by nauseating fluff like this in which cops and politicians engage in a vast circle-jerk to fantasies of enslaved teen girls:

Calling child sex trafficking a “scourge,” FBI Director James Comey announced Monday that 82 minors had been rescued…through an international effort held this month to locate victims and arrest the perpetrators…”These children trapped in this hell need a hero,” he said. “And the men and women who work for us, federal agents, state agents, local police officers and partners around the world are those heroes.” Comey’s comments came during the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention in San Diego…

But the tide has turned, and this time the usual cacophony of cop-fellation which accompanies these pogroms is interrupted by a few voices speaking the truth:

…sex-worker advocates [explain that]…better results could be achieved by decriminalizing prostitution. They argue that eliminating the fear of arrest would sharply increase the reporting of abuse and exploitation from both sex workers and their customers. Tara Burns…said people involved in the sex trade can’t rely on the hope that [a cop]…they encounter will use their arrest discretion to zero in on abuses, and could just as easily wield it to commit them, as seen in the ongoing East Bay police sex scandal…

To Molest and Rape

It’s unusual for reporters to actually use the word “rape” in reference to rapist cops: “A Festus [Missouri cop] charged with rape and domestic assault…has been [given a desk job]…Andrew J. Hirth…was charged Sept. 15…”

No Moss

Let’s hope Rolling Stone‘s fortunes follow its credibility down the anti-sex toilet:

[Nicole Eramo] the University of Virginia dean [of students is] suing Rolling Stone for defamation over how she was portrayed in an article about a campus rape report…Sabrina Rubin Erdely [falsely] described a woman named “Jackie” being gang-raped by seven men…and portrayed the administration as not doing enough to help…“I don’t think anyone at Rolling Stone thought of me as a real person,” Eramo said…“You can’t just do drive-by journalism”…Rolling Stone made her “look like the devil”…[even though]…Jackie [had written]…”Dean Eramo has truly saved my life….[she] was helpful and understanding and, above all, compassionate”…Eramo disputed that she ever said any of the [quotes attributed to her in the article and]…no one at Rolling Stone contacted…[her] during the fact-checking process…Jackie forwarded an email to the reporter showing that the dean had set up two meetings with police so Jackie could report the alleged rape to authorities. A reference to these meetings…was included in a draft of the article but was later edited out…

In other words, Erdely & Rolling Stone knew that the dean had supported “Jackie” in her claim, but willfully chose to depict her as a villain to make it a better story.

Send In the Clowns

As clown hysteria continues to mount, institutional responses to it grow increasingly more stupid:

The Russian government warned citizens traveling to Britain to beware of clowns…San Francisco schools went into lockdown during a clown fear wave, and have now claimed the FBI is looking into things…in Concord…a mother [claimed] a “creepy clown” tried to kidnap her 1-year-old child…The woman [supposedly] kicked the clown in the shin and the person fled…Sonoma State University has responded to clown sightings as well as an unrelated person in a gorilla suit…That’s the second…clown-gorilla connection…

Meanwhile, elsewhere in California:

Police arrested a juvenile Tuesday following a social media post that suggested “armed” clowns would visit three Hanford schools…police began receiving calls about the post…from [idiots] fearing for their own safety or for the safety of their children…Capt. Karl Anderson attributed the fast resolution to citizens who [snitched]…The Spooky Halloween Super Store…and…Halloween City…said the recent clown scares around the country haven’t hurt sales of creepy clown masks, costumes and decorations…

But while these entrepreneurs are sensibly making money from people’s herd behavior, Target decided to “send a message” that it’s part of the Establishment: “Halloween costume shoppers won’t be finding any ‘creepy clown’ masks on Target store shelves or online. The decision was made late last week to pull all clown masks from stores…” And Snopes is fielding some manifestations of the hysteria:

On 17 October 2016, the Empire Herald web site published a gruesome article about the arrest of a clown after police found eleven human bodies stuffed in a freezer at his Memphis residence…this story…was…a…fabrication intended to exploit…clown hysteria…The Empire Herald is a fake news site that does not publish any factual stories…

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In the News (#681)

Posted in Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged adolescence, agency denial, Arizona, Australia, Bogeymen, Challenge, Checklist, clowns, cops, drugs, end demand, fascism, Gullible's Travels, holidays, hysteria, Illinois, Ireland, Kentucky, law, Madonna/whore, Making It Up As They Go, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, Never Call the Cops, New Mexico, Ohio, One Born Every Minute, Pennsylvania, prisons, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, Rough Trade, Saving Them from Themselves, Send In the Clowns, sex offender registry, sexting, Stop faking!, Swedish model, The End of the Beginning, The Lesser of Two Evils, Torture Chamber, underage, Vendetta, violence vs. sex workers, Washington (state), Whore Madonnas on October 15, 2016| 8 Comments »

We see no constitutionally adequate basis to criminalize sex solely because one consenting adult pays another. – Hayley Gorenberg and Richard Saenz of Lambda Legal

Rough Trade

Be careful out there, my sisters in Philadelphia:

Philadelphia police say a predator who’s attacked female prostitutes earlier this year may be responsible for two more recent attacks…the most recent incident occurred Oct. 1 when a man on a bike propositioned [a street worker] for sex…the man choked her until she lost consciousness…Police believe the same man also accosted another prostitute at gunpoint Sept. 19. He took her to an alley and [raped] her while holding a knife to her face. Police believe the same man attacked a prostitute with a brick then stabbed [to death]…on July 16. She died. The same man, often arriving on a bike, is believed to have attacked at least one other prostitute, slashing her throat April 19.

Finley Fawn’s case has been resolved!

The Lesser of Two Evils

As I’ve pointed out before, most laws governing sex work prior to the late 19th century were aimed at drawing lines between harlots and “good” women, rather than at advancing a quixotic crusade to “eradicate” the ineradicable. Here’s a list of garments prostitutes were required to wear in various medieval European cities:

Beaucaire: a mark on the left arm…
Berne: red cap.
Bristol: striped hoods.
Castres: a man’s hat and a scarlet belt.
Florence: gloves and bells on the head…and high-heeled slippers.
Languedoc: a cord belt.
Leipzig: yellow cloak trimmed with blue.
London: striped hoods.
Mantua: white cloak and badge on chest…
Marseilles: striped tunic.
Milan: black cloak.
Nimes: a sleeve of a special colour.
Pisa: a yellow headband.
Strasbourg: black and white sugarloaf hat.
Toulouse: a mark on their sleeve.
Venice: yellow scarf.
Vienna: yellow scarf.
Zurich: red cap.

Saving Them From Themselves

Never call the cops for any reason whatsoever:

A man [in Australia] who found out that his 15-year-old stepdaughter was sexting her boyfriend proceeded to download the evidence to bring it to the school and the police to ask them to intervene…Now [Ashan Ortell] has been convicted on child pornography charges and placed on the sex offender registry…for eight years…

Frankly, I’m glad this idiot got what he deserved. If anything, anyone who would report his own daughter to the pigs for the “crime” of having a sexual relationship deserves much worse than 8 years on the registry.

Gullible’s Travels

Even if this were true (which it isn’t), it’s a testament to the entrenched stupidity of authoritarians that they refuse to see that binge drinking on US university campuses only became common after the drinking age was raised to 21:

A growing number of college are banning hard liquor on campus in a move to curb extreme drinking — but students are still getting their party on, and some are adding an extra element of risk to their binges…the phenomenon dubbed “drunkorexia”…University of Houston Professor Dipali Rinker said in a study of 1,200 students, he found up to 80 percent were restricting calories, overexercising, purging or using laxatives in combination with binge drinking…

Bogeymen

No, the sex trade in Ireland is no more “controlled” by “gangs” than it is in the US. This is little more than a cop wanking fantasy of there being “bad guys” to target, aided and abetted by the pathological liars at Ruhama:

Five major vice gang members are behind three-quarters of the sex-for-sale business in Ireland, according to data taken from the most popular website used to advertise prostitution. One gang this week has links to 80 advertised women and more than 10 transgender prostitutes, who can each make €1,000 a day. Ireland’s multi-million euro vice trade is set for a massive blow as a new law to make it illegal to buy sex is due before the Dáil this week…

But just for fun, ask yourself: If there really were mobsters behind all the sex work in Ireland, would they want decriminalization or increased criminalization? Did the Mafia like the end of Prohibition? And what happened to Mexican drug cartels’ profits when Washington & Colorado legalized cannabis?

The End of the Beginning

This is what happens when you don’t fight tyrannical laws from the beginning:

A federal class action…challenges a Mississippi statute that requires people convicted of having anal sex to register as sex offenders. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of five Mississippi residents who say they were convicted under various sodomy prohibitions, including the “unnatural intercourse” law, and Louisiana’s “crime against nature by solicitation” law…the [registration requirement] is discriminatory and unenforceable in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas invalidating all state laws against gay sex as unconstitutional…

You know why they can get away with this despite Lawrence? Because the Great Unwashed said nothing when federal courts established the precedent that the horrific persecution and ostracism inflicted on “sex offenders” are not punishments, but merely side effects of a record-keeping process.

Torture Chamber

Stop faking!

[In 1993] Anthony Gay…pled out to violating probation because of a “strong arm robbery.” Gay was convicted of the robbery and hence the violation after nicking a hat and $1, resulting in a sentence of 7 years in prison…he was warehoused at the notorious…Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois [where]…”his actions…driven by his mental illness, resulted in years of solitary confinement and additional criminal convictions, chiefly due to a series of assaults on guards, including throwing feces and urine out of the food slot in his cell door. By 2013, his sentence had been increased to 97 years and his release date pushed back to around 2091…he practiced self-mutilation, even to the point of cutting out one of his testicles and hanging it on a cell door in 2010“…He was literally crying out for help, and no one listened, save for his lawyers who managed to…convince…the court that the sentences Gay racked up while at Tamms had been improperly stacked…his new release date is set for August of 2018…Tamms has closed shop because its blatant incompetence and overindulgence in costly solitary confinement of people like Gay…

Making It Up As They Go

Seattle pretends to be “liberal”, but it’s home to vile bullshit like this:

Escape to Peace launched…a…center for survivors of sex trafficking in Bellevue on Oct. 6….Carol Loya was inspired to create the non-profit after a 2012 mission to Thailand, during which she was shocked to see and talk to young…sex work[ers]…At any given time in King County, 300-500 underage girls are being trafficked. The average age of entry is 12-14 years old, with some as young as 8 or 9…

Yes, they’re actually claiming that Greater Seattle has 20% of all coerced underage prostitutes in the entire US.

Checklist (#612)

More “beauty salon sex trafficking” idiocy from Ohio:

…100,000…cosmetologists throughout the state of Ohio…are now the latest allies in the fight against human trafficking…In Ohio alone, it is estimated that more than 1,000 girls and boys, between the ages of 12 and 17, are involved in the sex trade. Last year, Ohio’s state cosmetology board approved a requirement that human-trafficking awareness training become a mandatory part of obtaining a cosmetology license…[fetishists fantasize that] traffickers or so-called pimps may take a victim to a hair salon in order to change their appearance to avoid detection…If stylists see anything suspicious, there are things they can do like get a license plate number and call police…

In a police state, even your hairdresser may be spying on you.

One Born Every Minute (#645)

I’m pleased for the very small part I played in helping to expose this rapist:

Matt Hickey…has been charged by the King County Prosecuting Attorney with three counts of rape in the second degree. The charges…contain allegations from three women, including two women The Stranger wrote about earlier this year…who said Hickey told them he was working with a female porn recruiter, and asked them to audition for them…Not long after the first piece came out, three more women came forward to accuse Matt Hickey of rape. These women told The Stranger that Hickey got them blackout drunk and raped them while they were unable to consent. Hickey denied all of the allegations…

Vendetta (#664)

A look at the aftermath of one of the private pogroms bankrolled by billionaire sociopath Swanee Hunt:

Cory Walcott, was chair of the Military Science Department at the University of Nebraska Kearney until he was busted in a highly-publicized national sting…Prosecutors have now announced they are dropping the charge against Walcott and another man, Maurice Briggs…Their arrests were both part of the “National John Suppression Initiative”…[in which] police departments across the country pose undercover as either sex workers or their clients, arrest a lot of adult men and women for things like prostitution and solicitation, then put out splashy press releases about all the “sex trafficking arrests” they’ve made…the ultimate arrest/rescue breakdown for Lincoln?

no underage or adult sex-trafficking victims discovered

no force, fraud, or coercion discovered

four women, ages 23 to 36, charged with misdemeanor prostitution

five men charged with misdemeanor solicitation of prostitution

one man charged with felony solicitation of prostitution

one man charged with marijuana possession…

Send In the Clowns

The most interesting part of the clown panic isn’t the hysteria itself (which is kind of a yawn to anyone who’s studied such panics before), nor the copycats trying to get attention by mimicking the imaginary bogeys (ditto), but the bizarre things one finds in news stories about clown incidents. One story says “Three ‘juvenile clowns’ were taken into custody in Albuquerque, New Mexico, under the influence of marijuana“; Holy Reefer Madness, Batman! One wonders what the Kentucky man who “fired a semi-automatic rifle at a woman walking her dog because he thought she was a clown” was under the influence of; like some others, this story tries to blame the clown hysteria on Stephen King, specifically a new production of It which I doubt has anything to do with the panic. Then there’s this Massachusetts Halloween haunted house which features “scary clowns” among its attractions, reassuring the public that “they would know if there was a clown impersonator among them.” Self-important Australian “experts” pronounced the hysteria “dangerous” and “sinister” after it spread to Perth and to cities in Victoria (one wonders why they haven’t opined on the far-more-serious “sex trafficking” hysteria). But those all pale beside the horrifying statements made by cops in (wait for it) Arizona:

The Phoenix Police Department reports five juveniles ages 14 and 15 were charged with scary clown threats. Mesa police [arrested] two juveniles…[one maniac said] “I would call it a hate crime.” To prevent copycats, [pigs] and county prosecutors are taking a zero tolerance approach. “Every image, every text, every mention will be investigated,” said [Commissar] Nik Rasheta…prosecutors plan to prosecute anyone else making scary clown threats to the full extent…[propaganda operatives] say don’t think social media will be a shield to make scary clown threats. Authorities have the technology to see who’s posting and spreading them…

Challenge (#679)

Lambda Legal has honored the commitment it made to sex worker rights last year by filing an amicus brief in the ESPLERP case:

…At the heart of Lambda Legal’s most groundbreaking victories and continuing mission is self-determination, including bodily autonomy. When the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing same-sex relationships and gay identity in Lawrence v. Texas, it rightly rejected assertions against us that “public health” justified sodomy laws. The movement for reproductive justice, from which we draw key legal precedents, similarly fights for facts over fiction when government tries to limit the right to contraception, abortion, or other similar personal decision-making. Lawrence explained that the constitutional right to liberty protects all of us when we make our own decisions about adult, consensual sexual intimacy…sometimes relationships are transactional…consider prenuptial agreements, surrogacy, and hook-up websites; the fact that money is involved does not obliterate constitutional protections for marriage, parenting or sexual intimacy. All of these truths animate Lambda Legal’s position that the government may not constitutionally criminalize consensual adult sex solely because it is bought and sold.

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Links #326

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged Alaska, animals, California, cops, drugs, Florida, Georgia, imaginative fiction, lawheads, Never Call the Cops, prisons, Stop faking!, video, Virginia on October 2, 2016| Leave a Comment »

I spent my life playing in pee. – David Wartinger

I must admit to having a soft spot for trivia geekery such as that displayed in this week’s video, provided by Kevin Wilson. The links above it were contributed by Scott Greenfield (“faking”), Tim Cushing (“sorry” and “ever”), Nun Ya (“protect” and “love”), Tushy Galore (“instead”), and Jason Kuznicki (“stones”).

From the Archives

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In the News (#675)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged activism, agency denial, Allied for Change, Broken Record, California, Canada, Catholicism, cell phones, cops, fantasy, guest columnist updates, hysteria, Ireland, Kentucky, law, Maryland, Monsters, New Mexico, Oregon, Original Sin, Paint By Numbers, pathologization of males, Pimps Ahoy, prisons, prohibitionist myths, rescue industry, Sales Pitch, Served Cold, streetwalkers, Swedish model, SWOP Behind Bars, The Last Shall Be First, Traffic Circle, transgender, underage, violence vs. sex workers on September 24, 2016| 5 Comments »

I am an adult, and how I choose to spend my time and money is MY FUCKING BUSINESS. – Rick Pettit

Broken Record

Sex workers on Twitter agreed we couldn’t think of a venue less conducive to selling sex than a state fair:

The New Mexico State Fair draws a huge crowd each year, but Street Safe New Mexico knows it’s not all about fun and games. “You notice during the state fair, there’s new girls out here, right?” Executive Director Christine Barber said. “They’re being brought in by the gangs and being forced to work…(The victims are) 15, 16 years old to anything older…I met a lady yesterday who was 47.” The group says the victims’ pimps like to use the state fair as a hunting ground for willing johns…”Forty-two percent of them are beaten every single day by their pimps or their sex traffickers”…

Coincidentally, 42% of all “sex trafficking” statistics are made up on the spot, and 100% of them are bullshit.

Original Sin

I could also have filed this one under “Paint By Numbers”, since they “fight trafficking” by just standing around silently:

Since last December, activists have gathered monthly in front of St. André Bessette Parish in Northwest Portland in silent witness to the horror of human trafficking…Called modern slavery, it’s just one of the present attacks on the dignity of human life…Among them are abortion, euthanasia, cloning, the destruction of human embryos, genocide, torture, and the direct and intentional targeting of noncombatants in war or terrorist attacks…

I’m not sure it’s proper to use the term ACTIVist for someone who literally stands around, doing and saying nothing.

Monsters

The body count continues to rise:

Just five days ago I wrote about a Black trans woman named T.T. who was viciously murdered in Chicago…Now, a…Black trans woman [named] Crystal Edmonds has been shot in the back of the head and murdered in Baltimore. She’s the 21st trans person that we know of who has been murdered in the United States this year…Police say…they have no suspects and very few leads…[but] reports are saying that people in the neighborhood are complaining about sex workers in their area, which makes me even more worried that this case will not be given the attention it deserves…

Paint By Numbers

“Dumb ‘awareness-raising’ stunts” is going to be the funniest appendix in my history of “sex trafficking” hysteria:

Fifty people in teams of five…[followed] clues through various historic landmarks [in Lexington, Kentucky]…to raise money to help women..caught up in the human trafficking industry. Participants raised money to support “Un-Shackled By Love Ministries”…the first group of women to join the program will stay for four months where they will receive counseling. Eventually they will move on to a facility in Lexington the ministry [has not actually opened yet]…

Traffic Circle

Debunking of prohibitionist lies is spreading:

Denise Charlton of the Turn Off the Red Light Campaign…claimed the [new Swedish model] legislation [in Ireland] would protect sex workers by decriminalising them. Does the bill really do that? A group called Ugly Mugs, which facilitates information-sharing between sex workers, argues that the claim is false, and brought it to our attention on Twitter. Claim: The new Sexual Offences Bill would decriminalise sex workers Verdict: Mostly FALSE

The new bill would decriminalise public solicitation by sex workers, but…

It would retain the criminalisation of loitering by sex workers, and increase the penalties for it

It would retain the effective criminalisation of sex workers, under a provision on brothels, and increase the penalties for it.

Served Cold

For a change, it only took the mainstream media two years to catch up with me:

…Operation Underground Railroad…was founded by self-proclaimed “Man of God,” former CIA and Homeland Security official Tim Bollard…The organization receives allocated funding…and makes contact with local law enforcement. An elaborate sting follows…All this is filmed so the [backer]…can watch, in real time and from the comfort of his or her office or home…From the perspective of a victim’s right to privacy, such actions are reprehensible…from a criminal justice perspective, there are even more pressing concerns…Why are police in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Colombia not arresting child sex traffickers if they are so easy to find?…Why is OUR not…raiding the brothels of Amsterdam or London?…Bollard and his rag-tag team would be arrested on the spot. And any court in any [developed nation] would not hesitate to throw out a case that rests on the evidence of an OUR-type raid because of the failure to meet even the most basic standards of supervision and accountability. It’s no surprise that the organization and its fellow travellers limit their activities to countries burdened by dysfunctional criminal justice systems that…in response to pressure from the U.S. government…agree to cooperate…Bollard’s operations say much about the man: they are arrogant, unethical and illegal.

The Last Shall Be First (#624)

Expect a lot more cases like this before potty hysteria is over:

Security attempted to escort a lesbian woman…out of toilets at a music venue after because they thought she was a man. Mary Looper was at a Carrie Underwood concert with her aunt when security attempted to escort her out of the women’s restroom. A female security officer stood outside Looper’s stall demanding…proof she was a woman…She took to Facebook to share her dismay…

SWOP Behind Bars

My friend Mistress Matisse has been applying her indomitable (see what I did there?) efforts to support SWOP Behind Bars, most recently by talking about them on Dan Savage’s Savage Love podcast. Go have a listen! And if you haven’t yet sent a book to one of the incarcerated sex workers in the program, hie thee thither and do so posthaste!

Sales Pitch (#642)

Remember the creepy Swedish cop who collects used tampons? He’s teaming up with a German neofeminist to spread the Gospel of Violent Busybodiness to Canada:

…Ingeborg Kraus, a [prohibitionist who pretends that]…Germany decriminalized the sex industry…[claims that legalization there has] fuelled human trafficking [and lies that literally]…”No German woman will work in those conditions anymore”…[pervert cop Simon Haggstrom pretends that] Sweden…decriminalize[d] the sale of sex…[fantasizes about a] connection between prostitution and organized crime…[and lies that sex workers who demand our rights] are a small minority within the sex industry…

Allied for Change

I truly hope many more clients are inspired to speak out like this:

My name is Rick Pettit, and I am a client of sex workers. I am in my 60s, divorced, and unattached. I run my own moderately-unsuccessful service business in a small town in New England. I’m just an ordinary person…not particularly well-off financially, and certainly not a hub of criminal activity. I am well-liked by my customers and in my town. I am NOT a “pervert”…I do NOT abuse the women I spend time with. Most importantly, I DO NOT “BUY” ANYONE’S BODY. (There’s not enough room in my closet)…

Pimps Ahoy

You can’t keep a bad organization down:

Courage Worldwide said today that after the appeal process…the organization is in good standing with state regulators and plans to rehire and train new staff to reopen Courage House immediately…“We are gratified that the state has…agreed cell phones pose a real danger to the girls in our care since they link these vulnerable children back to the people who trafficked them. The cell phone is the preferred mechanism of the trafficker to market and sell under-age girls on the internet”…

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Links #323

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Tyranny, tagged Arizona, clowns, comics, cops, drugs, fascism, hysteria, imaginative fiction, New Mexico, prisons, South Carolina, video, Washington DC on September 11, 2016| 3 Comments »

It’s illegal. It’s dangerous. It’s inappropriate, and it’s creating community concern so it needs to stop. – Ken Miller

Today’s video is a sequence from a British TV show in which comedians have to improvise routines on the spot; it was provided by Jesse Walker, who also gave us “Prisoner”. The other links are from Mike Riggs (“fascism”), Tim Cushing (“protect” and “bureaucracy”), Tushy Galore (“waste”), and Mike Siegel (“help”).

From the Archives

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In the News (#670)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged abortion, advertising, agency denial, asset seizure, cops, Dirty Amateurs, disease, Do As I Say, drivers, fantasy, First They Came for the Hookers, hysteria, Imagination Pinned Down, law, Madonna/whore, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, porn, prisons, prohibitionist myths, rape, sex education, South Carolina, stripping, teachers, Tennessee, Texas, The Pro-Rape Coalition, The Widening Gyre, Think of the Children!, To Molest and Rape, Traffic in Nonsense, United Kingdom, Utah, Welcome to Our Updates, Worse Than I Thought on September 7, 2016| 2 Comments »

Prostitutes are far more honest, sincere, humane, compassionate and better bang-for-buck than [a politician] will ever be able to deliver. – Jacqui Lambie

The Biggest Whores

Only in Australia would a politician follow this insult with this apology:

…Senator [Jacqui] Lambie compared [Cory] Bernardi’s outrage to a “prostitute lecturing us about the benefits of celibacy…Before I receive unfair criticism from the sex workers, I apologise to them profusely for comparing them to Senator Bernardi – I know that is a really terrible low-down thing to do”…

Think of the Children!

Yes, this article actually equates sex workers with child molesters and murderers. Because THE CHILDREN!!!

A total of 3450 brazen individuals with 9960 convictions applied to become teachers in the past year, with the criminals, many of whom would have served jail-time for their crimes, weeded out through extensive background checks….27 [had] convictions for indecent assault…one…with a manslaughter conviction…17 [had] counts of prostitution…[and] three convictions for possessing obscene material…

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Remember, cops, you’re allowed to RAPE us, but not to obtain consent: “A [New Jersey cop] has been charged with soliciting a prostitute while on duty…William H. Dick III….[also tried to subvert a witness]…”

Dirty Amateurs

Amateurs are a menace to public health; they should be licensed and heavily regulated:

…Since 2011, the gonorrhea rate in [Utah] “has increased substantially,” according to the CDC. We’re talking a fivefold increase to 49 cases per 100,000 people…To put this in perspective, though, the national rate is 110.7 cases per 100,000 people…At the same time, gonorrhea rates among men who report having sex with men has consistently gone down since 2009…Utah’s sex education stresses abstinence and does not require teachers to provide information about…condoms…

Welcome To Our World (#15)

Another rape victim caged to force her participation in the state’s morality play:

A former guard at Oregon’s only women’s prison is awaiting trial on accusations that he [raped] an inmate – but it’s the…victim in the case who’s in jail. Washington County Circuit Judge Charles Bailey this week ordered that the 41-year-old woman remain in custody on a material witness hold because of the state’s fear that she won’t show up to testify at the Oct. 4 trial…she’s been held since Aug. 16. Brian Balzer, the [rapist jailer]…who faces two felony charges, was arrested last December, posted bail and has been free since…

First They Came for the Hookers…

Buried lede: the pigs stole $26,000 from citizens & spent it on strippers:

Greenville County [South Carolina] paid a private law firm nearly $80,000 to assist the Solicitor’s Office in litigation against a strip club accused…as part of [a] settlement in which the sides agreed to the six-month shutdown…[politicians pretended] the nightclub would no longer operate as a sexually-oriented business when it reopened. However, Platinum Plus dancers almost immediately started to [do their jobs when the club re-opened]…Judge Charles Simmons [of course] ruled in favor of the [state] and imposed another six-month shutdown of the strip club…In 2014, undercover deputies started a yearlong investigation into Platinum Plus. Deputies spent $26,000 in drug seizure money at the strip club during the investigation…

Imagination Pinned Down

“Unbelievably” is a good adverb for nearly every sentence in this fantasy:

Sex trafficking is a terrible reality in Middle Tennessee…As she clutched a teddy bear, the woman said she is afraid to be identified “because he’s still out there, because I didn’t have the courage to press charges when this all happened”…She met her trafficker when she was just 15 years old…He served prison time but came back into her life when she was 27, now divorced with a young daughter. She thought he had changed. “It took me a while to put together that he was drugging my drinks…The type of people that would purchase me… It would be the most sadistic of the sadistic…The ones where the more you cried and the more you screamed, the more they enjoyed it”…One time she tried to resist by slamming a door in her husband’s face. “The next thing I remember, after that I remember waking up and my daughter was screaming…there were a lot of people in my house I didn’t know.” She then realized she had been out two entire weeks…“I had 14 wounds stitched up with fishing wire.” She believes those cuts, all over her chest, were most likely the result of blood-letting ritual…“When we got married, he was holding a knife to my back in the courthouse…As a reward for being pregnant, he sold me to a man who tied me to a tree for three days”…She survived that, and unbelievably gave birth to a healthy baby…

Traffic in Nonsense (#508)

Quickly becoming one of the stupidest tropes of the whole panic:

…Attorney General Ken Paxton came to San Antonio to announce a coalition to encourage truckers to become the eyes and ears that identify and catch human trafficking on the state’s roadways…truck stops and roadside motels can be hotspots for…modern day slavery. And truckers are often the first people to notice it…Texas ranks second worst in the country for reports of human trafficking…“It could be an RV or a van pulled up outside the truck stops,” said Kylla Lanier…[of] Truckers Against Trafficking. “They might also see branding tattoos. We’ve had a lot of victims that have had their pimp’s name tattooed on them, or a dollar sign, ‘daddy’s money maker,’ things of that nature”…

The Widening Gyre (#632)

Nothing happened; film at 11!

[While shopping in a grocery store] “I noticed a couple that seemed rather close to me. Wherever I went they followed in the same pattern”…Fearing that they were being stalked, [Amy] McCloud purposely started wandered [sic] to different aisles, watching their behavior. “My mommy instincts were alerted and so I kept an eye on this couple…And I just kept going through the store. And when I went to the checkout they were right there.” McCloud and her daughter headed for the coffee shop inside the store, sat down and waited until the man and woman left…

Her “mommy instincts”? More like “herd instinct”, going along with the hysteria du jour.

Worse Than I Thought (#638)

Watch for escorts to be prosecuted for “trafficking” themselves under this law:

Missouri is adding new measures to its sex trafficking crime bill…[which] will now include the advertising of a human trafficking victim for sex or pornography production…Emily van Schenkhof…of Missouri KidsFirst task force, hopes this will lead to more prosecutions in the state…“there have only been seven state prosecutions of trafficking offenses in the history of Missouri,” she says…

Yes folks, that’s a rescue industry profiteer complaining that there isn’t enough coercion to suit her.

To Molest and Rape

Just protecting and serving, you know?

A North Carolina cop impregnated a 14-year-old girl while mentoring her in an attempt to prove that “policemen are good”…James Paul Blair…is…in jail on a charge of statutory rape…The girl’s mother said she was reluctant to allow Blair to become friendly with her daughter after she had run away, but allowed it because she had trust in police. Besides, her daughter wanted to be a cop when she got older…After learning her daughter was pregnant, the mother confronted the cop who admitted everything. He also told her he wanted the girl to have an abortion to save his own skin. But the girl’s mother said she does not believe in abortion…

The Pro-Rape Coalition (#656)

You know you’re in a moral panic when…

It’s weird enough trying to shoehorn Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal into a parable about online pornography. But what makes this Wall Street Journal op-ed truly bizarre is its co-author: icon of ’80s fantasy Pamela Anderson…there’s no evidence Weiner’s problems were related to online pornography, or that he even consumed it regularly…while people have cheated on their spouses, sent ill-advised erotic communications, and gotten-off on exhibitionism for centuries, folks for some reason want to believe that online porn is the culprit for Weiner and his kinky contemporaries…Anderson [and her pearl-clutching ghostwriter Schmuley] Boteach [bloviate]…”we are a guinea-pig generation for an experiment in mass debasement that few of us would have ever consented to, and whose full nefarious impact may not be known for years…the incidence of porn addiction will only spiral as the children now being raised in an environment of wall-to-wall, digitized sexual images become adults inured to intimacy and in need of even greater graphic stimulation. They are the crack babies of porn.” The crack babies of porn! (So… a media-hyped panic that turned out to be way overblown?)…

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Of Course It Is

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged California, cops, drugs, Florida, Of Course It Is, prisons, To Molest and Rape, underage, universal criminality, violence vs. sex workers on September 2, 2016| 6 Comments »

I don’t want to believe it’s a setup. – Monica Cedillo

Oh, sweetheart, surely you can’t be that naive after the way your daughter was exploited by cops from multiple departments; of course it’s a fucking setup:

The young woman at the center of a sprawling sexual-exploitation scandal — encompassing dozens of police officers from agencies around the Bay Area — is in a Florida jail facing aggravated battery charges. Guap, 19, flew to Florida [on August 26^th] to begin a drug-rehabilitation program at the Treasure Coast Recovery Center…[and] was arrested [on August 29^th] after a [so-called] incident at the center by Martin County sheriff deputies. She is being held on $300,000 bail…Because Guap is now in custody and facing a felony charge, she will probably not be allowed to leave Florida until her case is resolved. This could be a potential setback to any plans by district attorneys in California, if they intend to file charges against officers in the Guap case. Guap’s mother, Monica Cedillo, said…her daughter telephoned home on both Sunday and Monday, asking to be let out of the facility. “She called me early on Monday afternoon. She was very upset, and telling me ‘I’m gonna leave here, I have to get out, you’ll never see me again’,” Cedillo said…she questioned why a drug treatment center would call the police on someone going through [heroin] withdrawal…“Why did they let that happen, so they could call the police on her?” Cedillo said. “I don’t want to believe it’s a setup.” However, [Celeste] was unnerved by remarks made to her by [jailers]…“She said they were calling her a ‘piece of shit’,” Cedillo said, adding that her daughter feared the deputies knew who she was from national media coverage… David Lustgarten, an assistant state’s attorney from the 19th Judicial Circuit, [pretended] he…had no previous knowledge of Guap…Pamela Price, an Oakland attorney…called into question why Guap was sent across the country to Florida for rehab, instead of to a California facility…Guap and her mother…told [reporters] the funding is coming through the Richmond Police Department….[at least three of whose] cops are under investigation…for [exploiting] Guap…“From a legal perspective, it looks like witness tampering,” [Price] said…

This is how police states work: when the cops want to destroy someone, universal criminality allows them to easily find some sort of trumped-up charge to hold her on (after a cooperative judge sets a ridiculously-high bail like $300,000), and once she’s in their hands she can be abused, raped (under the guise of “searching for contraband” which can then be “found” to produce a further charge), or meet with a fatal “accident” as they prefer. Even if they’re being watched too closely to simply murder her as they do so many others in police “custody”, accusations are now viewed as “evidence” that the victim is “no angel” and thus not a credible witness against all those fine, upstanding cops who could potentially lose their jobs or even freedom if she’s allowed to testify. I think you get the picture, and I certainly hope the ACLU does. And if you don’t, you need to read this blog more regularly and carefully.

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In the News (#668)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged acting, asset seizure, Cambodia, crypto-moralism, cult of the child, drugs, France, Georgia, Gullible's Travels, Harm Magnification, harm reduction, hotels, Islam, Michigan, Monsters, Philippines, prisons, psychology, racism, rescue industry, Romania, Rooted in Racism, Schadenfreude, See No Evil, sex offender registry, Sweden, Texas, The Crumbling Dam, The End of the Beginning, The Enlightenment Police, The Swedish Pimpocracy, transgender, United Kingdom, Washington (state), Whatever They Need To Say on August 31, 2016| 2 Comments »

Pedophiles are not…using the internet like it was an L.L.Bean catalogue to find unknown children. – David Finkelhor

The Swedish Pimpocracy

Sweden, the feminist paradise:

A police investigator has dropped a case against an ice hockey player accused of molesting a woman at a night club in northern Sweden – because she had “gigantic breasts”…investigator Mikael Lundberg said…“[the two women] were standing at a bar table and then he comes along drunk and drapes his arms around both of them from behind, and then he happens to touch one of their breasts. And it should be noted that they had gigantic breasts. It wasn’t hard to brush up against them”…

Hello, Dolly!

Most whores love Dolly as much as she loves us:

…Dolly Parton confirmed that she will play a prostitute in her second made-for-TV biopic, Christmas of Many Colors: Circle of Love…a sequel to Parton’s 2015 film, Coat of Many Colors. “When I was little, I patterned my look after the town trollop…I thought she was the most beautiful thing, because she had all this makeup, hair, tight clothes and everything I wanted”…

Harm Magnification

The Philippines’ new president is carrying the “War on Drugs” to its logical conclusion:

Rodrigo Duterte, the new President of the Philippines…promised to cleanse the country of drug users and dealers by extrajudicial means. Since his inauguration, on June 30^th, he has been following through with a vengeance. In that time, more than eighteen hundred people have been killed—drug dealers, drug users, and in several cases people who happened to be nearby. The youngest was five years old…Duterte has warned drug peddlers to surrender themselves or face summary execution. “My order is shoot to kill you,” he said on August 6^th. “I don’t care about human rights, you’d better believe me”…seven hundred and twelve people allegedly involved with drugs have been killed by police, and another thousand and sixty-seven by presumed vigilantes. Some six hundred thousand…[have] turned themselves in…drug users [are] being dragged out of their homes and shot at close range. The two-year-old daughter of one suspected user was stripped and subjected to an anal exam to see if she was being used to conceal drugs…

The Enlightenment Police

The latest battle in France’s ongoing war on Muslim women’s personal autonomy:

The French burkini scandal exploded into further controversy…when a young Muslim mother was ordered off the beach at Cannes and fined for simply wearing a headscarf. Three armed [cops] pointed a pepper spray canister in the 34-year-old’s face and told her she was in breach of a new rule outlawing swimming costumes that cover the entire body…is a former air-hostess from Toulouse whose family members have been French citizens for at least three generations. “I wasn’t even planning to swim, just to dip my feet”, said Siam, who was wearing leggings, a top, and a headscarf…

And though this isn’t the major issue here, can we please stop referring to any hijab as a “burka”?

The Crumbling Dam

Alas, Seattle “officials” think harm reduction principles only apply to drug use:

Seattle may open America’s first safe heroin injection site…the city’s Heroin Task Force, formed by Mayor Ed Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine, endorsed the plan to open a homeless shelter that would offer a safe place to inject heroin. The proposal comes at a time when Seattle is dealing with a record-breaking overdose rate—in 2014, it was the highest in 20 years—and a 19% increase in homelessness since 2015…Seattle has already adopted a safe-consumption site for alcohol with great success…

Gullible’s Travels

Holy idosing, Batman!

…Many parents intuitively understand that ubiquitous glowing screens are having a negative effect on kids. We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children that become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in. But it’s even worse than we think. We now know that those iPads, smart phones and Xboxes are a form of digital drug. Recent brain imaging research is showing that they affect the brain’s frontal cortex—which controls executive functioning, including impulse control—in exactly the same way that cocaine does. Technology is so hyper-arousing that it raises dopamine levels—the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic—as much as sex…Dr. Peter Whybrow…at UCLA calls screens “electronic cocaine” and Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin”…

The End of the Beginning

“Punitive and stupid” is a good description of all “sex offender” registration laws:

…a federal appeals court ruled that retroactive application of Michigan’s Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA) violates the Constitution’s ban on ex post facto laws. In doing so, the court offered a scathing assessment that suggests such laws make little sense even when they’re constitutional…the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit concludes that the…provisions, although framed as civil regulations, are mainly punitive in their effects. That distinction between regulation and punishment is crucial because the Supreme Court has long read the Ex Post Facto Clause as applying only to the latter…

Monsters

Though most of the items appearing under this heading describe violence against transwomen, transmen are also the subject of violence and discrimination:

On October 28, 2011, the life that Ky Peterson knew came to an end…[when] he…was [raped] by a man who [had previously] made sexual advances toward him…Ky fought back in self-defense, which ultimately led to his attacker’s death…police arrested [Ky and his brothers], charging them with armed robbery and first-degree murder, and threatened to charge the teens as adults. When it became apparent that Ky was injured, the police took him to a local medical center where he was tested with a rape kit. The nurse who performed the examination confirmed that Ky had been brutally raped; yet she felt the need to point out [the obvious fact] that Ky “didn’t act like a woman who had been raped”…[he was eventually forced into] a plea “bargain” of 20 years — a sentence 10 years longer than Georgia law mandates…

Please consider signing the petition against this travesty.

See No Evil (#421)

Because obviously, these “pedophiles” can shoot dangerous “male gaze” radiation through the internet to harm the child:

K. is a cherubic 18-month-old with wispy blonde hair, very pinch-able cheeks, a toothy smile, and delightfully pudgy legs…her Instagram has well over 300,000 followers. The account, which bears her name and is run by her 24-year-old mom, T., features more than 4,000 photos of the toddler dressed up in fashionable outfits, many of which are provided by sponsors…These images…receive hundreds, even thousands, of comments from people all over the world. Largely, they consist of strings of emojis…In a number, the toddler is referred to as “sexy”. This has sparked outrage among many…it reached a fever pitch…after T. posted a series of photos, all of which were [later] removed…showing K. without clothes on the beach…“You are a disgrace…How dare you serve up your child to what is obviously a fanbase of pedophiles? I seriously hope you get a visit from CPS [Child Protective Services] at any moment and they separate you from that innocent child,” wrote one woman, who suggested that K. was being followed by an “international pedo ring.” Wrote another, “She’s a child pornography peddler. She’s not a mother”…

Schadenfreude (#606)

Just another reminder of what “rescue” actually means:

…Prey Speu [is] the notorious detention centre on the outskirts of Phnom Penh designated for “re-educating” the homeless, the mentally ill and those who sell sex…prisoners [are locked]…in a room with 50 people…[and denied baths]…police often solicit money from sex workers [to not arrest them]…the asking price [varies] from $20 to $200 [Cambodian street workers charge $5 a trick]…“If there’s no money to give to the police, they will send us to the centre,” says…a 36-year-old sex worker…

Rooted in Racism (#635)

Remember, this is pretended to be about sex work:

Sixteen people have been detained in Romania, following a joint agency operation [with UK police]…Thirteen men…and three woman…were detained [and cops stole] cars; more than £9,000 sterling; more than 5500 Euros…The Zephyr operation began in the UK, when investigations were launched into a serious crime group suspected to be involved in…“pop-up” brothels across the south west…DI Tony Hubbard…said: “We hope to dissuade…Romanian [whores from coming to England]…will then seek to [steal] their [assets] through the Proceeds of Crime Act. We [will also go after] landlords…[if] their accommodation is…being used as a brothel”…

Whatever They Need To Say (#648)

Houston, TX judge orders hotel to pay off cops & discriminate vs sex workers:

Judge Alexandra Smoots-Hogan…ordered the owners of…the Plainfield Inn…to install surveillance cameras and a security gate, prohibit cash payments without proper identification, eliminate hourly rates for rooms, restrict access only to registered guests and visitors with valid identification and [hire a pig] to provide security…

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In the News (#666)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged Above the Law, Across the Pond, activism, agency denial, Agony Aunt, Another Fine Mess, Banishment, BDSM, California, cell phones, Central Asia, China, cops, disease, escort review sites, Illinois, It Looks Good On Paper, language, law, Legal Is as Legal Does, Louisiana, Madonna/whore, male prostitutes, Now They Notice, Oregon, Pennsylvania, politicians, prisons, prohibitionist myths, rape, Rubbing Elbows, sex education, sex offender registry, So Close and Yet So Far, streetwalkers, The Immunity Syndrome, To Molest and Rape, Ukraine, Under Every Bed, underage, United Kingdom, video on August 24, 2016| 2 Comments »

Just Say No started with drugs, then spread to sex education. It didn’t work effectively in either setting. – David Ley

It Looks Good On Paper

As I’ve explained many times, “safe harbor” laws are nothing but Potemkin villages, empty legal husks designed to please the ignorant while actually sparing nobody from the injustice system: “Lawmakers [pretending] to help children escape prostitution are advancing a bill to decriminalize the act for minors…SB1322…would…allow them to be taken into temporary custody…to keep [them] away from pimps…” Translations: “Children” = young adults. “Temporary custody” = indefinite imprisonment; all prison sentences other than death or life without parole are “temporary”.

Legal Is as Legal Does

This is not decriminalization & isn’t “similar” to it; this is legalization & protectionism, and they’re not going to like it if they get it:

Sex workers in Kazakhstan want to make the world’s oldest profession a legal trade…an open letter signed by 597…sex workers…called for the legalization of prostitution and its regulation by the state…the sex workers argued that legalization would better protect them from potential harassment and harm done by customers and pimps…state regulation would better protect Kazakhstani prostitutes from competition on the part of migrant sex workers from…Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine…taxation of the commercial sex trade could contribute a tidy sum to…government coffers at a time when state revenue streams in other areas…are declining. The positions…are similar to those advocated by…Amnesty International…

Above the Law

It always pleases me to see a political name I know in front of the verb “sentenced” or “convicted”:

Harry Morel Jr., the former St. Charles Parish district attorney who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice during a sex investigation, was sentenced…to three years in prison — the most allowed by law. The…judge…also fined Morel $20,000, well short of the maximum of $250,000, and ordered him to serve a year of probation after his release from prison. Morel was St. Charles’ top prosecutor for 33 years. He admitted his guilt in April after a three-year federal inquiry into whether he solicited sexual favors from women in exchange for help on cases pending in Louisiana’s 29th Judicial District Court. Authorities labeled Morel a “sexual predator” and said his pattern of misconduct in office spanned 20 years and included at least 20 women. Although not charged with trading sex for official help, Morel admitted [it] as part of his plea bargain agreement…in May, the Louisiana Supreme Court stripped Morel of his law license, barring him from practice for life…

The Immunity Syndrome (#21)

For decades, the majority of sex education provided to adolescents in the US has focused on encouraging young people to refrain from sex. Our country has taken the approach that it is young people’s moral obligation to not engage in sex until they are adults…Even programs that aren’t “abstinence-only” typically promote abstinence as the best strategy…In July 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended to its nationwide membership, that they must educate children and teens about sex. They joined countless other groups of experts, physicians, and educators, all of whom oppose abstinence-based education…[which] puts these teens at great risk for sexual problems, and increased chances of unsafe sex…

Under Every Bed

This woman is so puffed up, I think she’d pop if one stuck her with a pin:

Nita Belles, who founded…In Our Backyard…[bloviated] “It has long been known that Central Oregon is a recruiting ground. Traffickers…find this a good place to find and groom trusting young people — and then after they have been “turned out” they are usually taken out of the area to be trafficked in what is called the circuit…Central Oregon is a place where traffickers can get more money for their victims because we are a small town…Additionally, we have a lot of conventions, vacations and other gatherings here…victims become traumatically bonded to the trafficker, something like the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’…traffickers take pictures while stalking their victim’s family and when a victim indicates she is unhappy, her trafficker responds ‘Here is a picture I took of your little sister last week, she gets out of school at 2:40 p.m. and I will be there to pick her up tomorrow if you don’t do what I tell you’…I have known of cases where traffickers have burnt down their victim’s family’s home just to prove to their victims that they will do anything to keep them under their control”…

Do sane people actually, genuinely believe this ridiculous, completely unsubstantiated nonsense? This is literally pure fantasy.

Agony Aunt

“Dear Prudence” calls a reader on her whorephobia:

I am trying to imagine why, if you had a suspicion that your sister was molesting your son, you did not ask more questions of her immediately. Her past work as a dominatrix has nothing to do with your current situation, although it sounds like at least part of you believes that if she was willing to tie up adult, consenting men for a living she’d be equally willing to abuse a prepubescent child, which is a horrific false equivalence. Set aside your assumptions about her former employment…

Banishment (#434)

Ignoring for a moment the moronic modifier “very”, this situation is not even close to “unique”:

It as “a very unique” situation, Union County [Pennsylvania] District Attorney D. Peter Johnson says about a…man who has been [held illegally in]…jail because he can’t get an approved housing plan…a Commonwealth Court panel [has now] vacated his most recent sentence. Since 2002 [Samuel] Grove has been in jail for all but two days serving a sentence of four to eight years followed by 12 years of probation…He completed his prison sentence in 2011 but has been charged three times since with violating his probation by not having an approved home plan…The third time…expired on May 29, 2015. The prosecution immediately again accused Grove of violating his probation by not having an approved home plan…[but when that was proven untrue the prosecutor immediately] accused [Grove] of violating his supervision [by] not obtaining sex offender treatment [and a judge played along by sentencing him]…to…86 months in jail…The state court panel vacated that sentence, saying…none of the sentencing orders required Grove to undergo sex offender treatment during imprisonment…

Follow the title link for earlier examples of “sex offenders” being imprisoned indefinitely by similar state shenanigans.

Another Fine Mess

OMG, WHORES KNOW HOW TO USE PHONES!!!!!!!

…many…fresh-faced high school girls in Hong Kong…[use] online forums to run [their] own [businesses] as…“compensated daters”…without the help of a middleman…it’s common for one girl to find an ad she likes, and then copy it—with just minor adjustments…there are some 2,500 compensated daters in the city…police have been slow to catch on to these girls now that they’ve taken refuge online…So long as they’re not soliciting clients in public spaces, they’re not breaking the law in Hong Kong…

Now They Notice

I really wish this were going to trial, but because the government stole all of the company’s money it had nothing to pay for a legal defense with:

The former chief executive of…Rentboy.com is finalizing a plea agreement after his indictment for promoting prostitution…lawyers for Jeffrey Hurant…asked that a plea hearing be scheduled for the week of Aug. 29…The case prompted criticism from some gay rights activists and sex worker rights groups, who questioned why prosecutors were targeting the service after it had operated transparently for nearly two decades…Following the criticism, federal prosecutors in February dropped charges against the six Rentboy employees. But they continued to prosecute Hurant and the company itself…

To Molest and Rape

A shining example of the ethics of “law enforcement officers”:

An Illinois [cop] who raped a…girl…to testify in court in order to torment her one last time before he entered a guilty plea…David Wright…pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping the unnamed girl for 10 years, beginning when she was only 7 years old. Wright was arrested in 2015, but continued to collect paychecks…right up until he entered his…plea. He was charged with 33 felonies that carried a combined minimum prison sentence of 143 years and a maximum of 648 years…[but] was allowed to enter into a plea deal where he will have the chance for parole in less than 20 years…Wright first raped the girl in the bathroom at a children’s party, telling her, “This is gonna hurt” before the assault…in November of 2005…in April of 2015…the victim finally overcame her fear and reported the abuse. Up to that point, she told prosecutors, she’d been afraid she would cost Wright his livelihood…

Across the Pond (#653)

How prohibitionists want to “help” sex workers:

An editorial in the British Medical Journal, published this week, warned of “avoidable harms and disastrous long-term costs” of ongoing funding cuts to services available to sex workers…[which] have so far controlled outbreaks of HIV, syphilis and tuberculosis…outreach programmes have halved the risk of them contracting sexually transmitted infections…An estimated 10,000 sex workers use such services , according to National Ugly Mugs…Georgina Perry, a former manager at Open Doors…resigned last week over the cuts…after Open Doors was asked to share confidential client information…[with] police and immigration officers…

Rubbing Elbows (#653)

An ally uses the Desiree Alliance conference as a springboard to discuss larger issues:

Sex workers and their allies gathered in New Orleans recently for the 6th…Desiree Alliance Conference…This year’s conference was about 50 percent bigger than the one held in Las Vegas three years ago. There were about 300 attendees, about three-quarters of whom were current or former workers. The rest were allies, like myself…the sex worker’s rights movement…is shaping up to be the next great civil rights effort in the United States and elsewhere…Fears over human trafficking have been used to create a massive anti-prostitution moral crusade. Falsehoods about the nature of the industry are widely repeated, with sex workers seldom allowed access to media to rebut them. Broad-based laws that attack all sorts of harmless people have been passed and justified in the hysteria over trafficking…A…self-serving rescue industry, funding for which is contingent on there being lots of trafficking victims to save, has grown around the country…

So Close and Yet So Far (#661)

Gary Johnson’s position on sex work wasn’t quite so muddled in 1991:

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In the News (#664)

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny, tagged A Broker in Pillage, Above the Law, agency denial, asset seizure, Business As Usual, California, censorship, Check Your Premises, China, cops, dirty, drivers, end demand, fantasy, Feminists and Other Puritans, hysteria, Illinois, imaginative fiction, Iowa, Israel, law, Louisiana, Monsters, Neither Addiction nor Epidemic, neofeminism, Ohio, prisons, prohibitionist myths, psychology, rape, statistics, Subtle Pimping, Swedish model, tabula rasa, Things We Choose To Do Together, To Molest and Rape, Too Close To Home, transgender, underage, United Kingdom, Vendetta, violence vs. sex workers, Washington (state), Welcome to Our Updates, welcome to our world, yin and yang on August 17, 2016| 5 Comments »

A treatment becomes an industry…when its scope creeps to include anyone who is having the kind of sex that someone…deems to be a problem. – Michael Aaron

Welcome To Our World

Profiting from donations gathered to fight an imaginary child-abducting conspiracy…hmm, where have I heard that before?

Three Jerusalem residents who allegedly swindled donors into giving money to combat a nonexistent Christian cult they claimed was kidnapping, sexually abusing and forcibly converting hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jewish children to Christianity have been arrested…investigators launched an investigation into the supposed cult two years ago…the…investigation…soon determined that no such cult ever existed…

Check Your Premises

In the warped minds of US “authorities”, driving a friend to work is “child sex trafficking”:

An Oregon woman has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison in connection to an alleged commercial child sex trafficking operation…Veronica Britt…was identified as the driver for an underage girl who was meeting up with someone at a hotel for sexual purposes…

Surplus Women

One of the rare times you’ll ever see me actually assist the cops:

Investigators with the York Regional Police Homicide Unit continue to appeal to the public for assistance in locating Jiarui (Jerry) TANG, wanted on a Canada-wide warrant for Manslaughter in connection with disappearance of 36-year-old Annie LI. Investigators believe that Mr. TANG has recently attempted to seek the services of women working in the sex trade. Police believe that he poses a significant threat to these women and we are warning anyone who encounters him in person or online to use caution and contact police immediately. Ying Chun (Annie) LI was last seen by her family on Sunday, June 12, 2016, in the area of Denison Street and Markham Road…police have reason to believe that Annie Li is deceased…Investigators believe that Mr. TANG frequents the Chinatown area of Toronto and he is believed to be still within the area…

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic

This interesting article traces the origin of the myth of “sex addiction” to another myth beloved by sex-haters: “social construction of gender”:

…David Reimer…committed suicide in 2004, never having recovered from the trauma suffered under the hands of Dr. Money…in…early 1970s Los Angeles…UCLA researchers George Rekers and Ivar Lovaas pioneered an experimental new type of treatment to literally “knock out” the effeminate behavior of young “sissy boys” through the use of severe corporal punishment. Like Money before them, they triumphantly published their…findings in 1974…under the title “The Behavioral Treatment of a ‘Transsexual’ Preadolescent Boy“…This “successfully” treated boy, now a grown man of 38 named Kirk Murphy, committed suicide in 2003 due to feeling “broken” by his participation in the research. These are just two examples of the horrors of…social constructionist ideology. Despite all this, social constructionism is still alive and well, influencing both the social sciences and public policy. Take a look at this this article for example about an elementary school teacher who pushes her female students to play with Legos, while forbidding her male students to do the same, all in the name of “gender equity”…the rise of the social construction of desire [occurred in] the same 1970s period in which all of these other troubling experiments were conducted…sex addiction [is the] offspring…of the cultural belief that sexuality is a social construct…that can be controlled, modified, and neatly packaged according to the social norms and mores of the time. Indeed, the very first sex addiction 12-step group, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLA) met in Boston in 1977…[the] sex addiction [model is the attempt]…to fit sexual behavior into a socially constructed paradigm of monogamy, pair bonding, and…even intimacy…

A Broker in Pillage

Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together:

Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people…[as] narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases. Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash. DEA agents have profiled passengers on Amtrak trains and nearly every major U.S. airline, drawing on reports from a network of travel-industry informants…Agents…singled out passengers for questioning or searches for reasons as seemingly benign as traveling one-way to California or having paid for a ticket in cash…DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade [by pretending] the money was linked to drug trafficking…most of the money was passed on to local police departments that lend [cops] to [act as DEA goons]…

Monsters

Rae’Lynn Thomas…was shot and then beaten by her mother’s ex-boyfriend in their Columbus [Ohio] home…Thomas is the 19^th trans person known to have been murdered in the U.S. this year. While Thomas’s family was accepting of her…an ex-boyfriend of her mother’s who still lived with the women, James Allen Byrd, made no secret of his transphobic attitudes. He reportedly often referred to the transgender woman as “the devil”…Renee Thomas…described the attack to police and media. ” He was in the bedroom and he just came around the corner and shot [Rae’Lynn],” she said. After firing at her twice, Byrd — who was nearly a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than the petite Thomas — proceeded to beat her with any heavy object handy…

Business As Usual

Prohibitionists want everyone to believe that clients inflict the most violence on sex workers, and that the police are welcome “rescuers” from it:

According to surveys conducted periodically by Zi Teng…an organization promoting the rights of sex workers…Hong Kong police sexually abuse workers…in the first four months of 2016 the organization received 206 complaints of violence…Nineteen cases related to abuse by clients while 187 related to the police. NGOs told Amnesty International that police are legally allowed to [rape]…sex workers…[while pretending] to be clients [in order to arrest]…them…

In case you missed it, that said over 90% of violence against Hong Kong sex workers comes from the police, an number not-dissimilar to figures from other places where cops are allowed to “regulate” us.

Feminists and Other Puritans

Yet “leftists” are still surprised that “feminists” are anti-sex:

[Sex workers] face…a strange alliance of opponents including Labour councillors, feminist activists, trade unionists and…religious groups…their hostility to [sex workers contrasts] oddly with their stated desire to “rescue” them…these activists were armed with feminist battle-cries, and were more likely to be seen reading the liberal Guardian than the right-wing Daily Mail…Object, a “feminist human rights” organisation…[is] part of a far broader alliance of feminist and left groups with a wide range of anti-sex and pro-censorship objectives…similar feminist organisations such as UK Feminista, rolled out a series of anti-sex campaigns…each…loyally supported by the Guardian, by voices from the Labour and Green parties, by trade unionists, and others that I had previously considered part of my progressive tribe…the old anti-prostitution movement was reinvigorated by a flood of new, feminist and left-wing campaigners under the End Demand banner…apparently, the right to middle-class feminist outrage trumped the more fundamental right to work…

Vendetta (#570)

Roughly 0.02% of all US men who purchased sex in that period. Wow, that’s some MIGHTY “suppression” there!

Yet another nationwide “sex trafficking sting” where the main targets of police attention are men who solicit sex from consenting, adult women. The sting, part of a bi-annual “National Johns Suppression Initiative,” ran from July 1 to August 7 and netted 1,358 arrests for solicitation of prostitution, in 18 states…thirty-eight agencies participated, issuing more than $1 million in fines during the operation and [stealing]…421 vehicles. New York City and Philadelphia…joined…for the first time…Oakland, California…arrested 42 people…Seattle had the second-highest number of arrests, 204, followed by Columbus, Ohio (167), Harris County, Texas (143), Houston (82), the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (74), Portland, Oregon (63), Boston (57), and McLennan County, Texas (55). Agencies not listed in these top-tier sex thwarters—including those in or around Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, New York City, Las Vegas, Reno, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia—arrested a combined total of around 250 sex solicitors…no word on how many sex workers were arrested, though that’s usually part and parcel for these john stings…

Above the Law (#599)

Another blameless hero is given power over vulnerable women:

A Shreveport police detective who was fired after [raping] a woman…is back on the job. James Greene…was…arrested and charged with abuse of office…he…was [given two weeks of paid vacation, then]…terminated…In January, Greene was found not guilty [after prosecutors stalled and fumbled for almost a year]…a civil suit has been filed against him by his [victim]…

Subtle Pimping (#603)

If there are so many “sex trafficking victims”, why do they need to keep making up stories about it?

Rena Olsen is a licensed therapist in Des Moines who…works with children. But she hadn’t heard much about human trafficking…until she watched a documentary about it…Olsen [then wrote a novel called]…The Girl Before…She makes it clear that the fictional characters are not based on any story she has heard with clients…In Olsen’s book, a 6-year-old girl is taken from a park and told by her captors that her parents don’t want her anymore. Through years of “training” for sale to clients who desire young virgins, her past is wiped out…Eventually, she becomes a perpetrator herself, training young girls snatched off the streets…

IOW, an ignoramus representing herself as an “expert” wrote a novel based on her own twisted BDSM fantasies, and morons are pretending this has something to do with reality.

Too Close To Home (#618)

Actually, this isn’t the “Nordic model” at all, and neither King County nor any part of the US has that because sex workers are definitely still criminalized here. But the yellow little liar Val Richey (who’s afraid to look me in the eye when he’s in the same room as I am) is only too happy to use that known brand to sell his masters’ brand of snake oil:

Skagit County Coalition Against Trafficking…is hosting a…meeting on Aug. 23 to share [propaganda] about a model of addressing human trafficking — going after the traffickers and customers while [infantilizing sex workers and denying their agency]…Val Richey, King County prosecutor, will present the blueprint that is helping King County reduce human trafficking…The Nordic model is a three-pronged program…the Nordic model’s first prong goes after the pimp and treats prostitutes as victims who…need…mental health treatment…the second prong is arresting the buyer and instituting a financial penalty, half going to law enforcement and half to programs that [incarcerate & brainwash] prostitutes. The third prong is education…[Gayle] Kersten [pretended] the Nordic model has worked in other countries and King County has had great success…

To Molest and Rape

Just a typical case in a typical American prison:

DeEtta Williams…has filed a federal lawsuit against…Michael Ewell, who has since been fired, and the California department of corrections and rehabilitation. She wants…the world to know what happens behind bars…there is a pattern of sexual assault at…women’s prison and…officials “know and just don’t bother” to do anything about it…“Ewell had a history of sexually assaulting women, a history well known to CDC,” according to the suit…In September of 2013, Ewell was accused of sexually assaulting “a fellow CDC officer, [and] was inexplicably transferred to a women’s prison. He was assigned his own unit to supervise, giving him unfettered access and power over the female prisoners in his unit”…Ewell engineered her transfer to a unit where he worked and had her assigned to a job cleaning the guards’ office and small bathroom…He would “pop” her out of her cell at 5.30am, when no other officers were on shift, and have her clean the secluded area…He groped her…forced her to kiss him…slap her, rape her, choke her. He threatened her children. He…[orally raped] her…She lost weight. Her hair fell out. She tried to kill herself. And she told warden Kimberly Hughes that she had been raped over and over again…Hughes was sympathetic…And…transferred Williams to a single cell…Two months later…[Ewell] was “terminated”…

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