- Janice Raymond’s 10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution. I tend to favor legalization myself, and furthermore Raymond has a well-earned reputation as a bigot (towards transsexuals). Nonetheless, she makes some good arguments against legalization here.
- The Rhubarb Patch presents a good same-sex-marriage debate, although in my opinion the pro-gay-marriage side of the argument wins. There are other entertaining debates available in the patch, too. I’m not sure where I saw this link – Diotima, maybe?
- CicerosGhost was momentarily falsely accused of rape, and so experienced “conflicting views on what it means to actually rape someone.” What happened to him was wrong, but why is only rape written about this way? I mean, I know people who have been falsely accused of stealing cars they had legitimately borrowed. People are falsely accused of using drugs, of child abuse, of all sorts of things. Yet only false accusations of rape seem to move people to rethinking the validity of the crime.
- Excellent post from Easily Distracted: Please Touch. The writer brings his daughter to two museums – one public and mobbed by those rude lower-class kids, one private and relatively free of rudeness (one bullying kid aside). Private/public conflicts, middle-class guilt complexes, and everything else that makes the world spin round.
- Hey, right now a google search for “reclining cucumbers” doesn’t lead to any entries. But maybe soon it’ll point to this blog. Then I’ll be able to corner the blog market in readers interested in reclining cucumbers. And after that, the universe itself.
- Good “Findlaw” article on the new partial-birth abortion ban.
- Robot Jenny describes her top ten childhood frights.
- Nathan Newman argues that the democratic primary race is all over but the shouting. With his fundraising advantage and now the major union endorsements, Dean (Nathan argues) is unbeatable. If he’s right, Emma will be in beer a year from now.
- Speaking of Howard Dean, Mark Kleiman dissects the “guys with confederate flags” controversy and finds it wanting.
- I’ll probably still vote for Kucinich, though. Here’s why, in a nutshell.
- CNN reports on the stupidest lawsuit of the year: Merriam-Webster is being sued by McDonalds for copyright violation for including the word “McJob” in their dictionary. Via Boing Boing.
- New additions to the blogroll: MidEastWeb blog, an excellent lefty blog on Israeli news. And also Curmudgeonly Clerk, a good right-wing law blog. And also Easily Distracted, a good lefty academic blog. And Dan Drezner, another good righty blog.
- Making Light has a great post discussing pro-woman, pro-gun, and the NRA.
I’d also like to see them get into some earnest discussions of what firearm strategies are best suited to the kind of violence women most frequently encounter: up close and personal, involving someone who isn’t a stranger. If they’re serious about self-defense for women, they have to consider which guns are best for prostitutes to carry, and what kind of muzzle velocity it takes to stop a berserk ex-husband.
- PETA’s usually flat-footed publicity department scores a hit with this animated piece, The Meatrix. Via Crooked Timber.
- Dan Drezner and Robert Reich agree: manufacturing jobs are disappearing the world over, not just in the USA. Extremely interesting, if true. (Via Prometheus 6)
As an aside, Peter Parker is a superhero. So is Scott Summers. So are Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, Matt Murdock, and Billy Batson. Does this tell us anything about Dan Drezner and Robert Reich?
- Has Lovecraft taken up gardening, or is it Lemon Porn? Then again, maybe you’d rather read a story summed up by the quote “Lucy had a great sense of humor and I’m sure she would appreciate being my coffee table.” Be sure to visit these and other results of the Boing Boing Link Fu contest.
When capitalized, "Sie" is the formal way to address adults of either gender in polite German. I majored in the…
People are falsely accused of using drugs, of child abuse, of all sorts of things. Yet only false accusations of rape seem to move people to rethinking the validity of the crime.
Not precisely true. . .I know plenty of people who think our child-molestation paranoia has gone over the top, and it was the child-molestation “equivalent” of CicerosGhost’s experience that triggered it. Between the McMartin Preschool Witchhunt and the stories of parents being investigated on “kiddie porn” charges based on pictures of their two-year olds in the bath, I do find myself rethinking the validity of how certain “child protection” laws are applied, and I think plenty of others do too.
Hell, while we’re at it, we can easily get into the rediculous (and racist) extremes our drug laws have reached in recent years with the broad abuse of federal forfeiture laws meaning that a citizen not personally accused of any wrongdoing whatsoever may well lose their home, buisness, car, etc. . . Well, that certainly makes me rethink the validity of that crime as well.
I don’t really have an opinion on whether our rape laws have crossed the boundry between reasonable and unreasonable that many of our other laws crossed long ago (I’m not nearly as well educated on this topic as many of the regular posters and commentors here), but the two categories of crime you specifically mentioned as examples have regularly been treated, to my thinking, to criticism that’s at least as harsh as anything the Rape laws have faced.
—JRC
I’m all about Kucinich. Definitely worth the primary vote.
Re “Please Touch” – good characterization of public vs. private, but judging from children in public, even “middle-class white” parents are loath to control their children when they start screaming or otherwise misbehaving, like the mother in the Please Touch Museum.
What the author doesn’t say is that the mother often acts like privileged people in the private sphere – he writes that Big Gummint, especially those nasty big-city Democrats, are the sole rule-breakers.
What rot. George W. Bush and his WASP cadre set the standard for corruption and cronyism – witness his admission to Yale because of family connections.
The difference between ethnic big-city corruption and “good government” is that Big Bidness is much more subtle in their corruption – instead of bribing and bid-rigging, they form organizations like the Portland Business Alliance that lobby the government into cracking down on protesters and the homeless, then employ the people busted when they do slaver, er, “community service” for protesting, committing “obstruction as nuisance” or otherwise befouling the city’s reputation as a place to “buy something or get out”.
I’d been looking for reclining cucumbers.
On gun control, I just saw “Runaway Jury”, full of actors you know: Hofmann, Hackman, John Cusack, Rachel Weisz, and an array of character actors. It starts off a little producty and becomes a great, cathartic courtroom drama, like Twelve Angry Men or The Verdict and better than The Firm. All about justice, corruption and brute force, with lots of twists. Odd to have this just after Boeling for Columbine: the case is a multiple shooting, and the gun lobby is running the defense.
Just pointing out an error: it’s Robot Johnny/he, not Robot Jenny/she.
i strongly disagree with Janice Raymond.
what is criminal is not prostitution but the crimes commited against sex workers.
legalization of prostitution is the only way to ensure safety and protection of sex workers.
Dragon, I tend to agree with you. On the other hand, just saying that legalization is the best way to protect sex workers doesn’t make it so. Raymond presents actual real-world evidence that she reads to the contrary; people who favor legalization as a boon to sex-workers have to be able to respond to that evidence, not just say “this disagrees with my beliefs, so it must be false”.
I see two things to take exception to in Raymond’s evidence: one is that she’s showing that legalization doesn’t do various things that I at least don’t care whether or not it does (like reducing the amount of prostitution, the number of brothels, the number of people voluntarily crossing national borders to be prostitutes, etc).
The other is that she’s saying essentially “where decriminalization or legalization has been tried, it hasn’t immediately improved the lives of all sex workers”, and she gives pretty hard-looking numbers that support that. When you legalize, some people really are worse off, at least in the short run. If those numbers aren’t just made up, legalization advocates have to acknowledge them, and be sure that they really are just short-term effects.
In my ideal world, sex workers would be respected and well protected by the laws. There would be no stigma attached to sex work, sex workers would be unionized (where they wanted to be), police would not be corrupt, foreigners would not be exploited against their will. But since this isn’t the ideal world, and all too many people are nasty and evil, there are lots of bad side effects that we wouldn’t have to worry about in utopia.
I believe that legalizing sex work would ultimately reduce the stigma associated with it, empower the workers, bring the nasty rights violations that are all too common today into the light and thereby drastically reduce them, etc. But that doesn’t mean I can ignore the worries about short-term bad effects. Legalization and decriminalization programs should be carefully designed, with this kind of real-world evidence in mind, to minimize the short-term negative effects that might otherwise occur due to corruption, abuse, leftover power asymetries, and so on.
Does Raymond have any evidence to back up her assertions? NGO types are usually short on data and doubt if there are any real data on half her points.
Kucinich—he was a lousy mayor and hasn’t been much of an effective legislator. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior and voting for a childish loudmouth usually doesn’t accomplish much (although it did make Nader a spoiler).
Spam deleted. – PDP