Since I’ve been less preocupied with construction this year, my summer anxiety is back to its typical levels; I find it difficult to focus and find myself worrying about things that there’s little if any cause to worry about. Today I’ll be headed back to Seattle, and early tomorrow morning I’ll be flying to South Dakota for Freedom Fest, and I’ve been stressing about it for weeks. Not about the actual speaking and all that, because that stuff comes naturally to me and never makes me nervous. No, it’s all the stuff around the trip, such as the actual flying (which regular readers know always stresses me out), making sure my books arrive on time for the conference, getting back in time for my appointment in Seattle on Sunday evening, worrying about how Grace will get along while I’m gone, and probably a dozen other things I can’t even enumerate. Fortunately, over the weekend I seem to have mostly come out of it, and by a week from today I should be finishing up in Seattle and getting ready to return home to my roses, my animals, my friends, my projects, and the routine which will help me make it through the Dog Days to the time of year when the sun sets at a more reasonable hour and stops getting in the way of my ability to think clearly.
Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Diary #577
Posted in Diary, tagged activism, psychology, South Dakota, Sunset on July 20, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Links #576
Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged blogging, censorship, cops, imaginative fiction, left-right myth, Missouri, New York, nostalgia, psychology, serial killers, surveillance, universal criminality, Utah, video on July 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »
You’re about to die, my friend. – Tyler Longman
Here’s another Doctor Who novelty song, recorded as a publicity tie-in for the 1965 Doctor Who and the Daleks movie starring Peter Cushing; the singer, Roberta Tovey, played Susan in the film. The links above it were provided by Mike Siegel, Cop Crisis (x3), Walter Olson, and Mistress Matisse, in that order.
- R.I.P. Doug Mataconis.
- Cops murder man for sleeping while black.
- Some serial killers operate right out in the open.
- Still think “hate crime” sentencing is a good idea?
- When lawheads try to cram reality into their dumb paradigm.
- This couldn’t be more obvious if “FREE CANDY” were scrawled on it.
From the Archives
- It’s sad that we’re still debunking claims that pictures have magic powers.
- This looks like a huge victory against the powerful Indian rescue industry.
- Is there any non-prohibitionist who fails to recognize FOSTA is a disaster?
- In case you thought screws restricted their petty sadism to the prisoners.
- The answer to “Why don’t you do x?” is usually “Because I don’t want to”.
- “Enlightened” Europe has treated sex workers shamefully during COVID.
- The incidents we hear about are only a fraction of the ones that happen.
- The State keeps contradicting itself to crucify the founders of Backpage.
- Having their lives destroyed so bourgeois Englishwomen can feel good.
- The term “pimp” is hopelessly contaminated and cannot be “reclaimed”.
- Sex workers gave their views before this tyranny was inflicted on them.
- Apply a label like “prostitute” or “gang member” and civil rights vanish.
- Picture what you’d think of as “sex trafficking”, then compare it to this.
- Israel’s plan to force sex workers into low-paid menial “women’s work”.
- Federal appeals court agrees “women who dress like sluts cause rape”.
- I’m glad Gloria “Body Invasion” Steinem lived long enough to see this.
- Cops, Rome, Atlantis, Antarctica, Simpsoni, Denise Nickerson & more.
- Canada pretends to care about privacy, but can snoop in other ways.
- Cato & ACLU try to stop deranged prohibitionists from killing people.
- Stories about hooker jails are crammed with appalling euphemisms.
- Cops don’t test rape kits because it doesn’t advance their purpose.
- Everybody knows cops are stupid, but this is a new level of idiocy.
- Twitter joins the fascists who claim surveillance isn’t surveillance.
- The Indian rescue industry is being undone by its own pretenses.
- The “Good Shepherd Sisters” = Magdalene laundries = Ruhama.
- West African “penis stealing” hysteria has spread to East Africa.
- This abomination started as a means of spying on sex workers.
- Observation: overpriced furniture. Conclusion: “sex trafficking”!
- Manufacturing data to “prove” a problem exists is not science.
- As I keep saying, it’s already far too late to stop this tyranny.
- No one person can undo an entire system of fascist tyranny.
- Cops, feminism, Polynesia, singing clowns, and much more.
- “Sex trafficking” fetishists are absolutely losing their shit.
- Sunset was built with the help of generous gentlemen.
- Why, how could anyone have predicted this outcome?
- This stopped being a “fringe position” two years ago.
- Spooge-based sexual assaults are growing worse.
- I wonder what biological sex the victims were?
- A productive week despite seasonal anxiety.
- How China tries to keep the genocide quiet.
- Why am I slowly losing Twitter followers?
- The second cottage kit is delivered.
- Yet another sociopath with a title.
- Building a ramp up to the deck.
- An update on my fundraiser.
- Rapist cop of the week.
Ward Against Evil
Posted in Perception, Q & A, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged Advice for Clients, cops, Magic Formulae, psychology, screening on July 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Some escorts in my area insist I pay with an Ebay gift card instead of cash because they believe that this will protect them from prosecution if I am a cop. Is that true?
Nothing protects anyone from prosecution; prosecutors can basically do anything they like, and pretending otherwise is just whistling past the graveyard. As the expression goes, “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride”. A competent lawyer might be able to use various things as part of a defense to win a dismissal or “not guilty” verdict, but cops can arrest anyone they like without any valid reason, and since the invention of plea bargaining, prosecutors have no reason not to file charges against anyone (except violent cops, of course). The only relatively-sure way to avoid prosecution is not to end up in a room with a fantasy role-playing cop in the first place; from the escort’s side that means good screening practices, and from the client’s side that means sticking to established providers with good reputations. There are no magic words, practices or talismans that will ward off the evil of state violence any better than carrying a rabbit’s foot or making the sign of the cross.
(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.)
Diary #576
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, psychology, STEM on July 13, 2021| 5 Comments »
Our sapphire gem hens have started laying, but on Sunday I found something I’ve never seen before. Usually, pullet eggs are small, and sometimes they lack yolks. But I’ve never before seen one whose shell wouldn’t harden at all. For those unfamiliar with poultry, eggs are very soft (something like gelatin) when laid, but within about a minute after contact with air the shells harden. But this little one did not do so; I gently scooped it up and put it in a ramekin in the kitchen, but it still hadn’t hardened after hours; I think it must lack the enzyme or whatever causes the shell to harden. I’ve got two other eggs in this picture for size comparison; the one at top is what would be called a “large” egg in the US, in other words a pretty typical egg one would buy at the grocery. The one at left is a typical pullet egg from one of the other young hens, and the one at lower right is the softie; if you zoom in you will be able to see that the texture of the soft shell is visibly different from the more typical pullet egg beside it. This is one of the things I like about keeping animals; one gets to see fascinating little things about the world that are invisible to the average city-dweller. It’s kind of like Mr. Wizard Goes to the Country (for you youngsters, Mr. Wizard was like Bill Nye the Science Guy from the ’50s-’80s). And that’s fine with me, because as I’ve mentioned before, what I wanted to do for a living at the time I entered university was science popularization. And though that’s not where life led me, I still love talking about that sort of thing as an amateur.
Eleventh Anniversary
Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, blogging, internet, psychology on July 10, 2021| 3 Comments »
Ten years is a long time for one human to do anything without a break, much less publish a blog post without missing a single day.
– “Tenth Anniversary”
I’ve always been an outsider, even among outsiders. I’m an atypical intellectual, an atypical writer, an atypical sex worker, an atypical bisexual, an atypical nerd, and even an atypical blogger; I came to the internet later than most of the bright kids, started blogging sometime after the peak of the medium had passed, maintained an atypical level of consistency, formality and sheer volume, and have continued blogging long after most of the sort of people who would have blogged in the Oughts have now moved on to vlogs and/or podcasts. And though I’ve aged and tired, I haven’t stopped posting content every single day for eleven whole years. Oh, I’ve gone from a full-length essay every day to less time-intensive features, and in the coming year I’m going to try to limit myself to one high-effort feature per week. There are four main reasons for the change: First, because I’m doing a lot of other things (both personal and professional) which take up increasing amounts of my time; second, because in the time I’ve been publishing The Honest Courtesan I’ve aged from “still able to see 40 in the rear-view mirror” to “just able to make out 60 on the horizon”; third, because censorship keeps increasing with no end in sight, and I’d rather not be going full speed when the Establishment drops a wall in front of me; and finally, because I’ve already published over 4000 posts and I feel as though I’m starting to repeat myself a little too often. Furthermore, I’m no longer one of a very few voices crying out in the wilderness; there are now lots of sex workers publishing a lot of powerful content in more mainstream venues than I ever had the patience and humility to approach, and our message finally appears to be penetrating the thick skulls of politicians, the soft ones of reporters, and even the empty ones of the American public. In short, my work is no longer as vital as it once was, and since I was one of the loudmouthed harlots who helped create the social climate which made all this possible, I think I’ve earned at least a little rest.
Holographic Harlots
Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Perception, Words, tagged dehumanization, fantasy, hysteria, language, left-right myth, politicians, propaganda, psychology, Twitter on July 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Partisans are so hampered by the blinders they’ve voluntarily allowed their “leaders” to strap to their heads that they often come up with truly bizarre interpretations of anything involving members of the enemy tribe. At the moment, the reigning emperor’s troubled son is one of those:
My response to this on Twitter was, “‘Buying a person’? This looks to me like he’s trying to hire a sex worker.” As it turned out I was wrong; the pictured exchange was apparently with a cousin who was trying to set up an amateur or semi-pro date for him. But there were apparently a large number of fetishists and nitwits who looked at this and fantasized about “sex trafficking”. And as is usual for True Believers, the idea that someone with actual experience in the topic at hand might know more than someone without such experience was like some kind of abstruse and esoteric branch of mathematics; a number of these butt-scratchers hastened to tell me that sex work really is the literal buying of a human being. Now, I’ve taken a flamethrower to this absurd canard more times than I can count, and even speculated on the sexuality of anyone who could believe anything so deeply stupid. But a new metaphor leapt to mind, so I mocked the imbeciles thus:
So you truly believe that everyone who pays a sex worker has that sex worker to keep, presumably in a hatbox in the closet? How do you think that works when the average sees about a client per day? Are they split up into increasingly-smaller fragments that yet retain the appearance of the original, like holograms? Do you really believe that I am a godlike being, existing in 6 or 7 thousand places all over the planet simultaneously? It’s a fascinating fantasy; you ought to write it up as a Doctor Who story. I’m also trying to figure out where “hobbyist” clients, who might see a couple of dozen different workers a year, hide all the women they “buy”. It must get to be a real strain on storage space; presumably they rent storage facilities in which to store all these holographic harlots. Or maybe they just flush them down the loo like unwanted goldfish? Seems like it might be an awful strain on the plumbing.
Twitter is an inherently volatile medium, though, so I thought it best to preserve in a place I can find it again the next time I want to mock the ludicrous beliefs of some prohibitionist chucklefuck.
Links #574
Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged animals, censorship, cops, Florida, internet, Never Call the Cops, New York, Ohio, prisons, psychology, Spain, teachers, Texas, universal criminality, video on July 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Holy shit. This guy is going to kill me now. – Tristin Goods
Last weekend a heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest; on Sunday it reached 43o C at Sunset, and hotter than that in Seattle. So naturally this song came to mind. The links above it were provided by Scott Greenfield, Jesse Walker, Radley Balko, Mark Bennett, Elizabeth N. Brown, and Cop Crisis (x2), in that order.
- The thought police.
- R.I.P. John McAfee.
- Headline of the week.
- “Smart” appliances aren’t.
- What could possibly go wrong?
- Cops repeatedly demonstrate exactly what they are.
- Why is “not for any reason whatsoever” so hard to understand?
From the Archives
- To the state, false face scanning positives aren’t a bug; they’re a feature.
- Most porn performers have to supplement film income with outside work.
- Pigs squeal gleefully about their creepy entrapment & surveillance game.
- Liz Brown’s scathing indictment of the government’s horrific child abuse.
- Removing excuses cops use to persecute people is always a good thing.
- FOSTA just keeps splashing egg all over the feds’ stupid, violent faces.
- The hotel industry is going to regret having collaborated with fanatics.
- The result of European “humanitarianism” to “fight human trafficking”.
- It’s good to see Cambodia shutting down these propaganda factories.
- If only there were a concise word for smuggling humans to sell them.
- Some conservatives are starting to see the danger of police violence.
- Oink oink, we HAVE TO destroy his life because of an imaginary line!
- They’ve discovered their moral compasses at least 20 years too late.
- Another study proves what sex workers have been saying all along.
- The US government is now claiming sex workers are actually spies.
- Bird-brains can think of nothing worse than realistic porn cartoons.
- The “sex trafficking” myth is now being used to attack gay people.
- I’m afraid it’s far too late to put this evil djinni back into its bottle.
- Cops, politicians, wasps, Oreos, mystery sodas and much more.
- Prohibitionists just keep trying the same stupid publicity stunts.
- These charges followed the accusations by almost three years.
- A resurgence of the 20th-century “whore as criminal” myth.
- Japan attempts to please gaijin “sex trafficking” profiteers.
- It wasn’t just sex workers who thrived in the “Wild West”.
- A few statistics to further dispel the myth of heroic cops.
- Stupid people believe a dog can smell electronic images.
- An ambulance-chaser recruiting professional “victims”.
- Marijuana prohibition will soon be a thing of the past.
- How copyright has been warped into a fascist scam.
- The ugliest part of a peak moral panic: lynch mobs.
- In a good headspace despite far too much sunlight.
- A wannabe sex worker ally is lost in her own navel.
- A politician claims that spying isn’t actually spying.
- My two previous columns for Independence Day.
- A retrospective of my blogging from June 2017.
- Queer bigots are the most revolting bigots.
- The construction of my first guest cottage.
- Yet another abomination from Alabama.
- It’s always a “gang”, even when it isn’t.
- A tiny visitor to the construction site.
- The rise and fall of Backpage.
- Cops, jazz, and much more.
- Rapist cop of the week.
Mechanocracy
Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged artificial stupidity, censorship, imaginative fiction, internet, Mechanocracy, psychology, robots, Twitter on June 24, 2021| 4 Comments »
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. – Frank Herbert, Dune
On Saturday, my Twitter account was locked for twelve hours because a mindless censorship algorithm could not tell the difference between mocking an idea and professing that idea; said algorithm was given power to judge human thought for “acceptability” because Twitter (at the insistence of legions of nitwits) has decided that it’s a good idea to silence wrongthink in the first place. I’ve already pointed out the deep foolishness and simian stupidity of censorship in many other essays, and I’ll be doing so again this year on the last Monday in September, as usual; today I’d like you to think about just how incredibly dumb it is to give machines that kind of power without human supervision or a functional appeals process. Now, I’m not a Luddite; I certainly recognize that there are certain circumstances in which computers can be trusted with limited power (such as controlling an aircraft in flight) provided there is a human around to supervise. Computers are, as Isaac Asimov once expressed it, high-speed morons; they do whatever they’re told to do, exactly as they’re told to do it and for as long as they’re told to do it, very very quickly. The problem, of course, is that they are completely incapable of anything even approximating actual thought, which means that they will follow the most mind-bogglingly stupid (or even self-destructive) orders with the same degree of speed and efficiency as they would obey more sensible directives. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to have their computer infected with a virus should know this, yet people keep happily entrusting more and more of their lives to hopped-up pocket calculators they insist on pretending are “smart”; many of them even think it’s a good idea to let these overcomplicated abaci drive their cars at highway speed or tell them how to write. Computers are useful tools and (usually) dependable servants, but apparently generations of science-fiction writers have failed to pound into the heads of the intellectually lazy what a colossally bad idea it is to accept them in positions of authority.
Diary #573
Posted in Diary, tagged disease, imaginative fiction, psychology on June 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Lorelei was very cautious during the pandemic, so the only time we’ve seen each other since March of last year was when I went over to borrow her Doctor Who collection a few months ago, and that was just a masked chat at the door. But once she was fully vaccinated, she helped me arrange mine (because she’s a lot better at stuff like that than I am) and, despite a few side-effects, I’m all done now. So we arranged a Who night (also for general catching-up) for the night I got back into town last week, and it was so good to see her again! The best thing about really close friends is, even when it’s been a while since one has seen them, things just fall right back into place as though no more than a week had passed. The next night I went to see Matisse, and same thing; the bond of such relationships does not really weaken with time. But all the same, I hope there are no further obstacles to in-person visits in the near future.
Obfuscation and Demonization
Posted in Current Events, Tyranny, Words, tagged cops, language, politicians, propaganda, psychology on June 17, 2021| Leave a Comment »
To a writer, words are tools intended to convey meaning and express beauty; to governments, words are tools intended to obscure meaning and oppress nonconformity. To writers, language is the means by which we attempt to convey our thoughts to others; when we succeed, we introduce others to new ideas and possibly give them a new way of looking at a particular topic they may not have considered before. But to authoritarians, language is a means of constraining thought and smothering new ideas. Proper use of language opens minds; improper use closes them down.
The obfuscatory language government uses to obscure violence is a prime example. There are a host of special words by which governments cloak their barbarities: abduction is euphemized as “arrest”, robbery as “confiscation” or “asset forfeiture”, sexual assault as “searching”, and murder as “execution”. But those traditional terms are quaint and relatively clear in comparison to the obfuscatory language invented by modern propagandists to conceal evils in sterile, bloodless, technical-sounding terminology. Intentionally ramming another car at freeway speeds with the specific intention of causing someone to crash is cloaked under the boring-sounding phrase “performed a PIT maneuver”. Firing barbed probes carrying 50,000 volts into another human being is desribed by the apparently-mundane “deploying a taser”. An armed government thug intentionally murdering someone in the street is called an “officer-involved shooting”. A sadistic thug paid to torture and rape human beings held in cages against their will is a “correctional officer”, and so on.
The longer and more clinical a phrase, the less emotional weight it carries; Orwell would’ve well understood why the government wants to replace the word “ram” (short, direct, terse, active, hits like a punch) with the phrase “perform a PIT maneuver” (long, indirect, mushy, passive, hits like a nerf ball). But it’s even more instructive to compare these phrases government operatives use to whitwash their own behavior with those used to demonize “enemies of the state”. How do cops describe a legally-innocent person they choose to accuse of some crime? “Perp”. What about a person who refuses to allow puritanical busybodies to control their consensual, private behavior? “Criminal” (There are a number of even shorter, punchier words for “sex criminals”). And those who refuse to comply with what they believe to be tyranny? “Traitors”. Government actors aren’t incapable of using direct, easy-to-understand language; they’re perfectly capable when they want to represent an ethically-complex situation as a black-and-white one. But disguising their own abominations requires exactly the opposite approach: confusing simple minds with complex phrases so as to create ambiguity where little exists.
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