The Honest Courtesan

[San Jose’s] approach…is to treat unhoused people as blight consistent with trash or graffiti.  –  Tristia Bauman

Negative Secondary Effects

I held off on sharing the news about Washington’s passing a “strippers’ bill of rights” until the governor signed it last week; I still haven’t seen any proper articles about what it actually contains, though the most important part is the clubs will no longer be bound by puritanical “sin density” laws which allow clubs to either serve alcohol or have fully-nude strippers, but not both (thus severely curtailing the money Washington strippers could make).  I’ll link an update when some publishes an article about everything the new law does & doesn’t do.

Permanent Record

In the US she’d have no recourse, but prohibitionists want you to believe decriminalization is a “failure”:

Chelsea Sirolli was two days into a new job…at a real estate agency in regional Victoria…[when] she was…sacked, after a new colleague complained…after learning she’d worked in the sex industry…10 years ago…[because] “pornographic images of [Sirolli] existed online”…it was the third time she had been fired after an employer had found out about her past.  But this time, the law was on her side…[Thanks to decriminalization] it’s now illegal to discriminate against individuals in Victoria based on their current or prior involvement in the sex industry…Ms Sirroli has lodged a case in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal…and said while she was risking exposing herself further by doing so, she wanted to help others in a similar position stand up for themselves…the company directors [had the colossal gall to pretend]…she was being fired for her “welfare”…

The Vultures Descend (#1333)

As empires age, they rot from the inside out and from the top down:

…the Texas [judge] James Ho [of] the fifth circuit court of appeals…served on the three-judge panel last summer that ruled to restrict access to mifepristone.  The legal group behind the mifepristone case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made at least six payments from 2018 through 2022 to his wife, Allyson, a powerhouse federal appellate lawyer who has argued in front of the supreme court and has deep connections to the conservative legal movement that has led the attack on the right to abortion in the US.  The payments don’t [technically] violate the court’s code of conduct…but…Ho’s failure to recuse himself from the case illustrates why public trust in the judiciary is eroding…

I Spy (#1341)

Twitter has always claimed that this surveillance isn’t surveillance:

Ten years ago…Twitter…filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users…Elon Musk…continued the litigation, until its defeat in January.  The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of [demands]…that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages…However, [Twitter]…is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court…Although Dataminr defends…its governmental surveillance platform…as a public safety tool that helps first responders react quickly to sudden crises…[in reality it is] used by police to monitor…online political speech and real-world protests…Dataminr pays for privileged access to…the [Twitter] “firehose”: a direct, unfiltered feed of every single piece of user content ever shared publicly to the platform…While it was unclear whether, under Musk, [Twitter] would continue…[selling] its users [out] to Dataminr — and by extension, the government…emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business…

The Punitive Mindset (#1401) 

This fascist evil needs to be eradicated, root and branch:

Two lawsuits [have been] filed [against]…Michigan sheriff’s offices [because they are] colluding with large prison telecom companies to end face-to-face jail visitations and then price gouge families who are forced to rely on expensive phone calls and video chats, in return for major kickbacks.  Civil Rights Corps…filed the two class-actions…one in Genesee County and the other in St. Clair County, on behalf of multiple residents…[after] Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link (GTL)—dangled significant financial incentives in front of [corrupt] officials to install video chat kiosks in jails…In addition to damages, the lawsuit is seeking immediate injunctions ending the bans on in-person jail visits…jails and prison systems across the country started curtailing things like in-person visits, book donations, and physical mail over the last decade, replacing them with [costly, substandard] video services and electronic tablets.  These changes were [usually] made [under the pretext] of security and reducing contraband, a…problem [defined into existence by the mindlessly-punitive policies of] American prisons and jails…

Panopticon (#1408)

Homeless people are another group new evils are tested on:

For the last several months, [San Jose, California] has been training [machine learning algorithms] to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in…the first experiment of its kind in the United States…the areas…targeted…are places where unhoused people congregate, sometimes with the city’s encouragement…the goal of the pilot…[is] to build algorithmic models that c[an] detect…lived-in RVs [and cars] with between 70 and 75% accuracy…City [bureaucrats predictably pretend]…that “the data is intended for [the city’s housing and parks departments] to provide services”…[yet cops]  may [demand] access to…footage….[and] the…system include[s] optical character recognition of…vehicles’ license plate numbers…

The Puritan Recrudescence (#1409)

Censorious politicians aren’t just copying each other; they’re vying to see who can make their new laws the most unconstitutional:

The Kansas state legislature has passed a law that will require age-verification on websites that host content deemed “harmful to minors”…defined in part as “acts of masturbation, homosexuality, or sexual intercourse”…This means that the state can “require age verification to access LGBTQ content,” according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo…This could theoretically apply to [mainstream] media with queer characters, LGBTQ+ charities and community resources, or even medical websites that include information on gender and sexuality…

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