Sophianotloren

BREAKING

Contact: Margie Diddams, 480-553-3777,
swop.phx@gmail.com

Guilty Verdict for Monica Jones Reveals Broken Legal System: Urgent Need For Action

PHOENIX— Over 50 supporters rallied in front of the Phoenix Court house this morning in support of ASU student and anti-1062 activist Monica Jones. Ms. Jones was facing unjust charges of “manifestation of intent to prostitute,” a vague and discriminatory law that criminalizes activities like waving at cars, talking to passersbys, and inquiring if someone is a police officer. The ACLU of Arizona joined Jones’ lawyer in contesting the constitutionality of the manifestation statute. Dan Pochoda of the ACLU explained in his arguments, “The statute eviscerates first amendment rights.” In a packed courtroom filled with supporters wearing “I Stand With Monica Jones: Stop Profiling Trans Women of Color” t-shirts, the judge found Ms. Jones guilty based solely on the statements of the police officer who targeted for her race and gender. Supporters across AZ and the nation are in an uproar about the injustice of this ruling.

In Arizona and across the country, trans women of color like Ms. Jones are routinely profiled and swept up in the criminal justice system on prostitution-related charges, due to a phenomenon many call “Walking While Trans”—a widely held belief by law enforcement and others that all transgender women are criminals. Because of the injustice that leads people to take pleas against their best interest due to lack of community support, Ms. Jones decided she was going to fight the charges, so that no more trans women, sex workers, or people profiled as sex workers would have to face these injustices. Ms. Jones has remained adamant about her innocence, and that sex workers need rights, not arrests. Ms. Jones stated after the verdict, “As an African American and as a woman, the justice system has failed me.”

In light of this devastating ruling, SWOP Phoenix (Sex Worker Outreach Project) and Monica Jones will fight the case in an appeals process, while building national and international momentum against unjust policies that target trans women, people of color, and sex workers. SWOP Phoenix is calling on people from around the country to keep demanding justice for Ms. Jones. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders is monitoring the trial as an example of discriminatory policing and retaliation on activists organizing for human rights.

Ms. Jones states, “I am saddened by the injustice that took place at my trial this morning, but we are not giving up the fight. It’s time that we end the stigma and the criminalization of sex work, the profiling of trans women of color, and the racist policing system that harms so many of us.”

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I have to laugh when I hear people say: “Oh, I’ve never met a sex-worker before” and I have to say, chances are you have, you just don’t know it.  -  Valerie Scott

Bad Girls 

Men:  Pay your hookers!  Ladies:  Get the damned money up front!

A 19-year-old…prostitute choked a [Florida] man to death after he tried to stiff her out of money he owed her for sexual services…Andrea Alvira…[chased] Brandon Day, 22…into a yard, where she dropped him by hitting him in the neck. She got on top of Day’s chest and forced her knees into his throat, suffocating him…

Grow the Hell Up!

Politicians, cops and naïve, whiny women are a dangerous combination:

…Rebecca McHood of [Mesa, Arizona] said she belongs to “a community of women who have been affected by pornography and sex addiction of their spouses…”I have five close friends whose husbands or ex-husbands have frequented [massage] parlors…I have seen the effects [sic] this has on their families, including the effects of divorce”…Lynnette Greybull…said she has found a website that lists 36 Mesa sex shops masquerading as massage parlors.  “They have a page…of acronyms…[detailing] what they’re able to do to these women…it’s very disgusting and perverted…These establishments are fake businesses…that…sell women.”

A Tale That Grew in the Telling

You know the oft-repeated lie that a third of teen runaways are approached by a “pimp” within 48 hours (when in reality, 84% of teen sex workers literally never meet a pimp)?  Well, it’s down to 45 minutes now:

Last year, King County’s Committee to End Homelessness issued a fact sheet that [stated]…“76 percent of unaccompanied minors [are] approached by either a known gang member or pimp in less than 45 minutes”…“That study has been altered, revised and bastardized beyond recognition,” says…Captain Eric Sano…“The actual study was from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  They say that one in three teens will be recruited by an exploiter.  In 2009 we…put a very youthful female member of the department [in a park in disguise] and within 45 minutes she was approached by two members of the Westside Street Mobb”…

It’s a good sign when a claim is too ridiculous even for cops and reporters.

Forward and Backward (TW3 #4)

An unusually-sensible attitude for a politician:

…I have decided to implement [activists’] recommendations…by introducing a bill to repeal “prostitution free zones” in D.C…transgender women…[say cops] regularly view and treat them as criminals…The prostitution free zones reinforce this bias…it is also critical that police officers help someone who is assaulted or raped, even if they were involved in sex work.  MPD is responsible for the safety of everyone, including sex workers…

Above the Law  

“…Cleveland police officer Gregory Jones [was found] guilty of raping and kidnapping a woman…Prosecutor Jesse Canonico said…’He was a rapist masquerading as a police officer’…”  According to Canonico, cops and rapists are two mutually exclusive things!  Obviously he’s never been to New York:

Yonkers police officer Alex Della Donna…arrested…Sonia L. Gomez…[and] coerced her into having [sex] with him at least a half-dozen times…continually [reminding her] that drug charges…might be reinstated if she didn’t continue…[the rapes] ended only after Gomez’s husband threatened to tell departmental higher-ups…

Or California:  “…West Sacramento Police officer…Sergio Alvarez was convicted of…numerous counts of aggravated assault and rape…and…[given] a 205-years-to-life sentence…he raped women while on the job, sometimes even in his patrol car…”  Or even Utah:

…police officer Jeremy Rose has been charged with 15 offenses in the collection of thousands of photos of a teenage girl in various stages of undress…Rose convinced a then-15-year-old…to pose semi-nude for photos he said he would sell for her on the Internet…he also allegedly hid a camera in the girl’s bedroom to record video of her dressing and undressing…

Traffic Jam (TW3 #21)

Note the moronic “people can be sold repeatedly” canard:

[California] officials say gangs have become more involved in human trafficking because people can be repeatedly sold for profit, unlike drugs and guns…The legislature is considering a…bill…[to classify] human trafficking…as “gang activities”…Sentences for gang-related crimes are usually stiffer…

Feet of Clay (TW3 #22)

Following in the illustrious footsteps of Lauren Hersh:

An assistant district attorney was verbally berated and banished from a Bronx judge’s courtroom after failing to reveal evidence that would have freed a man held at Rikers Island on bogus rape charges…“This is an utter and complete disgrace — not just for you, but for your office in general”…Judge John Wilson told…Megan Teesdale before dismissing the case…The defendant, Segundo Marquez, had been held…for more than eight months awaiting trial…

Above the Law (TW3 #28) 

“A…Kansas City police officer who was accused of forcing two women to have sex with him was found guilty of acceding to corruption…and sentenced…to 15 days in jail…” When a non-cop does the same thing it’s called “rape” and gets more than 2 weeks in jail.

The Public Eye

In this interview with Valerie Scott (one of the plaintiffs in Bedford vs. Canada) she touches on the landmark case and the Swedish model; however, the more interesting part for me is her discussion of pre-internet sex work in Canada, sex work ethics, myths about sex work and “pimps” and the absurdity of trying to suppress the trade.

Where Are the Protests? (TW3 #48)

…The…son of a peasant farmer from…China has been in custody since being found in a…Dublin…grow house with an estimated €1 million worth of cannabis…Fergal Kavanagh…said his client…[was] imprisoned in the grow-house by traffickers…[and] should be released pending a full investigation into his case…

Caring Professionals

Another nursing home ignites controversy by hiring sex workers for residents:

The elderly residents of a Long Island nursing home…[attended a male] striptease in the facility’s rec room, a new lawsuit claims.  The son of one resident, 85-year-old Bernice Youngblood, was shocked when he…found a picture of his mom stuffing dollar bills — which are supposed to be locked away in her commissary account — into a dancer’s briefs…“Plaintiff Bernice Youngblood was placed in apprehension of imminent, offensive, physical harm, as she was confused and bewildered as to why a muscular, almost nude man, was approaching her and placing his body and limbs, over [her],” the suit states…Youngblood’s attorneys argue she “lacks the mental and physical capacity” to protect herself…

Unless Mrs. Youngblood is unquestionably suffering from dementia, it sounds more to me like her son is just revolted by the idea that his mother might enjoy male strippers and might actually exert a little control over her surroundings instead of existing as a passive, passionless vegetable under others’ “care”.

Traffic Jam (TW3 #321)

Government officials in Phoenix are violating the law by compelling [sex workers]…to participate in a program administered by religious groups, Americans United for Separation of Church and State says…the program, Project ROSE, clearly violates the First Amendment…those arrested…are forcibly taken to Bethany Bible Church…in handcuffs…[and] given the option to avoid criminal prosecution by participating in a sectarian program.  “Phoenix is essentially telling criminal suspects that they can go to church or go to jail,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn…

Shame, Shame (TW3 #348)

[Congresswoman] Jackie Speier…has apparently decided to introduce a federal “revenge porn” bill, which is being drafted, in part, by Prof. Mary Anne Franks, who has flat out admitted that her goal is to undermine Section 230 protections for websites…to make…third parties — like “Google, any website, Verizon… face liability”…[she claims] she’s not seeking to undermine Section 230 in any way…[because it] has never protected sites from liability of federal crimes – just civil infractions and state crimes.  So her goal is to make the amorphous concept of “revenge porn” a “federal crime” thereby suddenly making third-party websites liable…this effort is fraught with dangerous consequences and potential First Amendment problems…

Subtle Pimping (TW3 #403)

You’ve got to love the way she makes it sound as though it were her idea:

University of Colorado sociology professor Patti Adler has axed the prostitution skit…that led administrators to pull her from the classroom last semester…[she] cited difficulty with consent forms and worries among participants after the…skit drew national attention…In the end, Adler canceled the controversial skit and invited local sex workers to her class…Adler interviewed the sex workers…and then allowed the students to ask…questions…

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #405)

More on the German politicians who want to make life harder for whores:

…the Union [Party] wants to impose stricter controls on brothels and threaten clients with punishment.  The police and other authorities may also get the power to raid brothels without concrete suspicion, [sponsor] Thomas Strobl…said…clients should not be able to “make excuses” [if police declare that] a…prostitute has “obvious signs of ill-treatment”…the Union also wants [to reward] foreign prostitutes with…residence [if they agree to testify against]… “their tormentors” …presently, foreign forced prostitutes…do not report to the police because they…fear deportation…

Drawing Lines

Former porn actress Jennifer Ketcham incoherently argues that the best way for porn actors to fight for decriminalization is to draw an artificial line between themselves and other whores.  Or something.

…Porn…advocates…are quick to distinguish between pornography and prostitution, and…it is way more okay to be a porn star than it is to be a prostitute…porn stars…[should] drop the label of “sex worker” and adopt the title of “adult film actor”…[to sever] it from the morally-loaded concept and illegality of prostitution…by drawing imaginary lines between sex work performed on camera and sex work performed behind closed doors, porn (unintentionally) debases the majority of sex workers…

The Sky is Falling! (TW3 #413)

Regarding the last line: what the hell does she think prostitution is?

…Équipe d’Action…has…[filed] legal proceedings against a “sugar daddy” dating site, which they accuse of operating a disguised prostitution racket.  The existence of such sites in France…[was ignored until] the arrival of the US site Seeking Arrangement…If the complaint is upheld in court it could change the definition of prostitution in France…Angela Jacob Bermudo, a spokeswoman for the French Seeking Arrangement site…[said] “Seeking Arrangement is not prostitution…For many girls, this is a viable option to be able to concentrate on their studies without the financial burden”…

Deafening Silence (TW3 #413)

Chinese officials violently suppress a city’s major industry, then wonder why its economy dies:

Prostitution was once rife in Dongguan…Local analysts estimated there were more than 250,000 prostitutes at its peak, and that the business generated about 50 billion yuan (HK$63 billion) a year…But…in February…authorities started a campaign to wipe out prostitution…hotel managers estimate…up to 70 per cent of prostitutes had left the city.  “The crackdown may not kill us, but it will kill [the nearby town of] Changping and then the city itself.  Without our xiaojie [whores], Changping is going to be a ghost town”…Many people working in the city’s retail and service sectors – from taxi drivers to snack sellers, landlords to restaurant bosses – grumble that their business has suffered since the…raids began…At the New South China Mall, the largest shopping centre in the world when it opened in 2005 with more than 2,000 shops, at least half the stores are vacant…

Whither Canada? (TW3 #413) 

In Canada, articles like the ones below and at right appear in the mainstream media:

…more than 300 of our fellow Canadian and international academics and researchers expressed their profound concern that the federal government is blatantly ignoring a large body of scientific evidence…that criminalization of any aspect of sex work, including the purchasing of sex, has overwhelmingly negative [effects]…banning the purchasing of sex is not scientifically grounded and sorely misguided by moral judgment of sex workers as victims.  In fact, evidence strongly suggests that this approach would recreate the same social and health-related harms of current criminalization regime…there is no evidence that criminalizing the purchasing of sex reduces or eliminates prostitution…

Whither Canada? (TW3 #414) 

Boo fucking hoo:

The person who runs Saskatoon’s “john school” is disappointed because he hasn’t had any participants since the start of this year.  Albert Brown…said that since the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country’s anti-prostitution laws last year, his class has been empty…

Synopsis of the rest of the article: “Dirty, dirty, filthy, diseased whores!”

molly-ren:

wasiland:

so yeah… 

I thought it was protecting her for a minute and then I read the text

Yeah :(  Though lately I’ve discovered if you have really good friends, you can tell them what you’re scared about even if it’s about them, and they’ll help you tackle those monsters. :)

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on March 23^rd; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

The Vestal Virgins were among the most important people in classical Roman society; they were charged with keeping the sacred fires burning, and accorded numerous privileges in return.  One of the greatest of these was that their persons were sacrosanct; in other words, no person could touch them without their permission, upon penalty of death.  That meant no one at all, not even high state officials; a Vestal could not be touched even if she were convicted of the greatest crime of which she could be accused, that of breaking her vows by having sex or allowing the sacred fires to go out.  Because these offenses were believed to anger the gods and thus risk the safety of all Rome, the penalty for them was death; but since nobody could touch them to administer the sentence there was only one way carry it out:  the dishonored priestess was buried alive.  In order to avoid breaking another law against burial within the city, the tomb was provided with a candle and a small quantity of food and water in order to establish the legal fiction that it was a “habitable room” rather than a sepulcher, and the unlucky woman was thus left to a lingering death by slow suffocation to preserve the illusion of piety which would have been shattered by spilling her blood.

Whores are in many ways the diametric opposites of the Vestals:  we are as far from virgins as it’s possible to be, are stigmatized and rejected by our societies rather than being honored by them, and are responsible for banking men’s sexual fires rather than keeping actual ones burning.  But in the past few decades, there has arisen a legal doctrine which represents all women as helpless, pure and sacred; we are supposed to be delicate flowers who are irremediably damaged by the evil lusts of brutal men, from whom the Sacred State must “protect” us.  Harlots sin against that precept by being strong, self-willed beings who deal with men on equal ground and make a living from male lust rather than being “ruined” by it as the catechism claims we should be.  We must therefore be punished, but since Holy Writ has declared us blameless victims how can that be accomplished?  The answer, as it was for the Vestals, is slow suffocation…though in this case economic and social rather than literal.

The tomb disguised as a “habitable room” into which prohibitionists want sex workers sealed is called the “Swedish model”; just as the Vestals’ persons technically remained inviolate, so women under this abominable regime are not technically criminalized.  Our meager provisions consist of the fact that we can, on paper, carry out our work unhindered.  But just as the Vestal was prevented by the earth above her “room” from getting any more food, water or air, so Swedish prohibition attempts to starve and suffocate their victims by persecuting their clients, getting them evicted from their homes, hounding them with police surveillance, denying them social benefits and even stealing their children.  Swedish proponents even go so far as to proclaim that sex workers are “decriminalized”…just as the Romans could say that the condemned Vestals had not been directly executed.

In all of Roman history, only ten Vestals were ever condemned to this horrible fate.  But unfortunately for the mad totalitarian dreams of the prohibitionists, there are millions of whores in the world; it would be absolutely impossible for them to ever entomb all of us, no matter how fervently they might wish to do so.  In order to advance their scheme to extinguish as many of us as possible, they must find and close up every possible gap through which economic sustenance might flow, and that means eliminating our means of attracting and contacting clients.  Increased police surveillance could drive street workers into the dark, dangerous places where the Pure and Holy need not see them, but street work has always been a minority of all sex work and that’s even more true now thanks to the internet (which allows incredibly cheap advertising with greater reach than even the most expensive venues had twenty years ago).  Banning escort advertising has no effect whatsoever; there is no way to stop people from hiding commercial sex adverts within other, unbanned forms, and almost no way to stop buyers living under such a censorship regime from accessing websites hosted outside its jurisdiction.  This utterly infuriates the prohibitionists, who are well aware of sex workers and clients conducting our business right under their noses; they have therefore embarked upon an all-out effort to destroy its most visible manifestations, no matter what the costs in human rights.  Irish prohibitionists have proposed giving police the power to steal sex workers’ phone numbers in order to convert them into traps for clients.  Scottish prohibitionists, defeated in their attempt to impose the Swedish model, are trying to drum up support for advertising censorship by demonizing clients.  And American prohibitionists are willing to totally destroy the internet as we know it:

…members of Congress have asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Backpage.com for its role in prostitution and sex trafficking or to recommend legislation that would make prosecution possible…[they claim] that…tens of thousands of children are sold for sex…every year…Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects websites from liability for content posted by a third party. That means a website can’t be prosecuted when someone posts an illegal ad on their website…

Were websites to be held liable for third-party content, they would have no choice but to shut it down.  All of it.  Amazon reviews, YouTube videos, comments on websites, free hosting of sites like mine on larger entities like WordPress…all gone, wiped out overnight.  If you think this only applies to American websites, guess again; a large fraction of the internet’s backbone is on American soil, and the US government has given itself the power to shut down any website in any country which it decides has violated some US law, through the simple expedient of shutting down traffic to it at the point it passes through the US.  And while the article above restricts its language to “children”, others are more honest about the politicians’ intent:

…proposed legislation…would allow for federal felony charges to be brought against operators of web sites that fuel the illicit sex trade through commercial ads…Under the Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation Act, individuals would face felony charges for promoting an advertisement…that…facilitates any of numerous crimes against children and adults in the sex trade, including…pimping and prostitution.  The legislation would also allow federal authorities to shut down advertisements…

What these megalomaniacs seek is nothing less than the power to shut down any escort’s ad and to prosecute the website that carries it; even websites outside the US could be attacked as described above.  There is probably very little danger of the Roasting the Pig By Burning Down the House Act going through, or of it withstanding a challenge even if it did; US judges have repeatedly proven themselves wiser than politicians by striking such laws down every time they’ve been tried.  But the fact that they do keep trying is a measure of their hatred and disdain for the women they wish to suffocate in the name of “protecting” our sacred bodies from “violation” by consensual sex.

These people are content to possess information, but they don’t seek knowledge. Information is what you need to make money short term. Knowledge is the deeper understanding of how things work. It’s obtained only by long and inefficient study. It’s gained by those who set aside the profit motive and instead possess an intrinsic desire just to know.

You can’t tame the desire for money with sermons. You can only counteract greed with some superior love, like the love of knowledge.

Third, if market-rigging is defeated, it won’t be by government regulators. It will be through a market innovation.

So there you have it. According to Brooks, if people are stealing on Wall Street we shouldn't look to try to have regulations and punishment, we should go after them with love. It will be interesting to see if Brooks shows the same attitude towards people's whose greed leads them to steal cars or burglarize houses.

 In space, no one can hear you scam.

UPDATE:  Mr. Brooks' plodding, relentless ridiculousness and complete immunity from accountability has driven Moral Hazard to resign.

It should also be noted that, in fact, the Evil Federal Government proved quite capable of policing with worst excesses of the market and preventing the global economy even without a sophisticated armory of love weapons at it's command.

Then, one day, some Very Serious People who Mr. Brooks admires greatly thought it would be a real keen idea to do away with all of those pesky "regulations" which had kept the economy from going tits-up at the hands of marauders since the Great Depression.

The rest, as they say, is history.

History about which history-major David Brooks is scrupulously oblivious.

Our Party is a champion of civil rights. Founded by abolitionists & today leading the fight for educational access. #CivilRightsSummit
— Reince Priebus (@Reince) April 10, 2014

Yes, the champion of civil rights.

Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS), the tea party favored candidate to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Thad Cochran who seems to be in the habit of associating with white nationalists and neo-Confederates, vowed not to pay taxes if they go up because of reparations over slavery and mocked complaints of racism over an ad depicting a white woman holding down a black woman.

McDaniel, while riffing on a shock jock radio program in late 2006 or early 2007, compared rapper Vanilla Ice to a minstrel show performer and pondering when it's appropriate to refer to a woman as "Mamacita." The Wall Street Journal was able to obtain a clip of McDaniel making the remarks.

Yes, the party of abolitionists.

Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God.

And the party of voting rights, too.

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in “direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities.

“I was expecting them to say either yes we have or yes we will,” Dubin said.

Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county would close all restrooms at polling places “to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly,” a January email stated. “[T]he Department’s policy is not to permit access to restrooms at polling sites on election days,” Assistant County Attorney Shanika Graves said in a Feb. 14 email. Elections Department officials did not immediately respond to ThinkProgress inquiries.

They're the party of civil rights, alright.  Curtailing them at every opportunity to preserve the dwindling power of white voters as the majority in this country.

Question in e-mail today asks, of my book The Human Division: “What’s up with every one of the side characters being women?” 

My first thought was: Huh, a reader finally e-mailed about that.

My second thought was: Huh, it took a year and a half before a reader e-mailed about that.

My third thought is: In fact, not every side (or featured) character in The Human Division is a woman. If you were to take a pencil and write down the name of every named character, you’d probably discover that roughly half of the named characters are women.

I did consciously decide to include women characters roughly at parity to male characters, for two reasons. One, in the Old Man’s War universe, there’s no reason not to — thanks to genetic engineering and social attitudes (and other things), the OMW universe is one where there is no reason not to have parity between the sexes in the events related in the books. Since there’s not, introducing a disparity would be inauthentic to the universe I created.

Two, regardless of the world I created, we live in a world in which women are underrepresented in the media, relative to the numbers they exist in the real world. I also think that’s inauthentic, and I don’t see why I would want to be a part of that. So, unless there is a compelling reason not to (see: The God Engines, in which the lack of representation of women is there as a tell about the culture), I’ve decided in general to replicate the parity of the sexes that exists in the real world into my fiction.

I didn’t make a huge deal about it when I was writing THD; I just reminded myself to write women characters. I also didn’t generally talk about making an effort at that parity after the book was published, because I didn’t think something as simple as accurately representing male/female ratios in the real world (and how they would logically be in the universe I created) was a big deal.

I was curious if anyone would notice. I think there was one review that noted it (in passing, not as a central feature), I was asked about it in one interview, and now I’ve gotten this one e-mail about it from a reader. And pretty much that’s it.

What does that mean? Well, you tell me. I like to think that generally speaking it means that people who read my books don’t think it’s a big deal that women are at parity to men in terms of characters. I’m good with that.

To those who do notice and think it’s weird or indicative of some political agenda they feel suspicious about: Meh, get used to it. It’s not going away anytime soon.

I speak now to the minority:

I apologize for not posting more. I've had many interesting ideas swirling around my head, each of them the potential kernel of a good blog post.

…but I've strangely lost the urge, energy, or whatever to turn ideas into bytes-on-the-page.

I still hope to sit my ass down and generate some content at some point, but until then, feel free to watch this video of me before I was expelled from Japan and emigrated to America. My opinions have changed not a whit.

An Election is Simply a Festival for the Majority! © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Following up on Erik’s post about working hours in France, in 1939 John Maynard Keynes published what eventually became a famous essay, entitled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,” in which he tried to predict what “the progressive countries” (what would now be called the developed world) would look like in 2030.

The essay makes two big predictions:

(1) By 2030 the developed world would be in per capita terms four to eight times wealthier than it was a century earlier.

(2) This explosion of wealth would produce a tremendous reduction of hours worked, as people chose leisure over yet more income.

The first prediction was almost uncannily accurate, while the second has turned out to be completely wrong in regard to the United States, and largely wrong about Europe. (I’m not familiar enough with the relevant statistics in regard to the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America to comment on the salience of Keynes’ second prediction to them).

Regarding the first prediction, U.S. per capita GDP was about 6.2 times higher at the end of 2013 than it was at the end of 1929 (it increased from just over $8000 to just under $50,000 in chained 2009 dollars). Extrapolating out, Keynes high end prediction appears to have been if anything slightly conservative. Keynes thought that such a trajectory would result in something like a 15-hour work week for most people who worked for income:

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

At the time, this seemed like a reasonable projection, as work hours in the US and Europe had declined considerably over the previous half century, and Keynes assumed that the income effect — the declining marginal utility of income in relation to leisure — would cause this trend to continue. Since then, however, the decline in working hours has ceased almost completely in the US, and slowed down drastically in Europe (Europeans do work about 20% fewer hours than Americans however, which is not a trivial distinction).

Economics being a rather tautological discipline, there is of course a ready theoretical explanation for this as well: the substitution effect — i.e., to the extent that productivity increases are reflected in higher income per hour worked, each hour of forgone work in favor of leisure becomes more costly to the worker.

Of course this doesn’t explain why the substitution effect seems to have won out almost completely over the income effect in the US, and to a lesser extent in Europe. And here the biggest weakness of Keynes’ analysis in the essay — a surprising weakness given how relatively sensitive he was to sociological considerations — becomes obvious: there isn’t a word in the piece about distributional considerations.

Here are some numbers from the U.S. census bureau (all figures are in 2012 dollars):

Median household income in 1967: $42,323

Median household income in 2012: $51,017

Per capita GDP 1967: $21,893

Per capita GDP 2012: $49,231

In the late 1960s, median household income was nearly double per capita GDP, while today we have nearly a one to one relationship between the two metrics (Households are on average only slightly smaller today. I don’t have figures for 1967 handy, but in 1975 the average household included 2.89 people, while in 2012 it featured 2.54 persons). Or to put it another way, if over the past 45 years the nation’s increasing wealth as measured by output had ended up getting distributed equally across income groups as income, median household income in the US would be nearly $100,000 per year, rather than half that sum.

This helps explain, I think, why in the US in particular the substitution effect has been so much stronger than the income effect: it’s much harder to forgo additional income in favor of increased leisure when the relative wealth of those above you in the SES hierarchy is increasing faster than your own — especially in a culture obsessed with the conspicuous consumption of positional goods.

Hence:

Updated below

Over at The Faculty Lounge, Steve Freedman, assistant dean of admissions at the University of Kansas Law School, announced a couple of days ago that he was going to offer a series of posts about why right now is a great time to go to law school. (The first two are here and here. TL;DR: Less law students means more jobs for law graduates.)

Freedman predictably got some push back regarding his thesis, with Brian Tamanaha providing the most trenchant criticism:

Please address the apparent contradiction in advice like this. Assuming no substantial change in the legal market (for better or worse), the job outlook for graduates stands to improve precisely because fewer students are enrolling in law school these days. But of course, if significant numbers of people take your advice and “enroll today” (thinking three years hence the oversupply of law grads will be eliminated by falling enrollment), then the job outlook will worsen as a consequence because the oversupply will not go down as much. So your prediction will bear out only if most people thinking about law school do not take your advice.

It’s notable that Freedman has already closed comments to his second post, even though none of the comments were inappropriate in tone or substance, unless of course harsh criticism of one’s arguments is considered inappropriate per se.

I’m not picking on Freedman in particular in this regard, as I’ve noticed there’s a strong tendency among legal academic bloggers to either not allow comments at all, or to cut them off for no apparent reason other than that they’re highly critical. This fact says something, I think, about the level of deference that legal academics become accustomed to from their usual audiences. Apparently failure to provide that deference can easily get interpreted as “lack of civility,” or “insolence,” or some other form of lese majeste.

This in turn probably helps explain why it took so comparatively long for the legal academy to notice the disaster that was overtaking so many of our graduates. Under the circumstances, developing something other than a flypaper-thin skin in regard to criticism might be in order (especially given that we’re supposed to be training future lawyers).

Update: In regard to Prof. Lisa McElroy’s comments in the closed thread, comments at JD Underground are most definitely not closed.

But there's a more audacious option on the table, according to conservatives involved in the deliberations. They say between 40 and 50 members have already committed verbally to electing a new speaker. If those numbers hold, organizers say, they could force Boehner to step aside as speaker in late November, when the incoming GOP conference meets for the first time, by showing him that he won't have the votes to be reelected in January.

The masterminds of this mutiny are trying to stay in the shadows for as long as possible to avoid putting a target on their backs. But one Republican said the "nucleus"of the rebellion can be found inside the House Liberty Caucus, of which he and his comrades are members. This is not surprising, considering that some of the key players in that group—Justin Amash of Michigan, Raul Labrador of Idaho, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky—were among the 12 Republicans who refused to back Boehner's reelection in January 2013.

Amash, chairman of the Liberty Caucus, warned at the time that there would be a "larger rebellion" down the road if Boehner's leadership team did not bring conservatives into the fold. Such an insurrection never materialized, however, as Boehner deftly navigated a series of challenges last year and wound up winning over some of the malcontents.

But conservatives, increasingly irritated with what they see as a cautious approach taken by their leadership, are now adamant that Boehner's tenure should expire with this Congress.

"There are no big ideas coming out of the conference. Our leadership expects to coast through this election by banking on everyone's hatred for Obamacare," said one Republican lawmaker who is organizing the rebellion. "There's nothing big being done. We're reshuffling chairs on the Titanic."

It's clear these nutjobs not only expect to have full control of Congress, but full control of the agenda as well.  A lurch to the insane right from the hard right now would be a political gift to President Obama for sure, but a disaster for the country.

And yeah, if Boehner is replaced with someone even crazier than Eric Cantor, you can bet it'll be 1999 all over again, impeachment proceedings and all.

Ryan Cooper over at The Week says the Tea Party folks have no chance to unseat Boehner, because who would want his job?

This, of course, is Boehner's ace in the hole. Anyone credible and ambitious enough to become speaker also realizes that taking the job would be a horrible mistake. Why? Because House ultraconservatives are constantly making completely unreasonable demands, then blaming the leadership when they don't get the impossible.

We'll see, but I'm learning towards Cooper rather than Alberta on this.

David Neiwert created this meme on Facebook, and it seemed like a good way to waste time to me. :-)

1. City Of Lost Children (1995)
2. Duck Soup (1933)
3. Passion Fish (1992, an obscure gem)
4. Mulan (1998)
5. Sweeney Todd (the Angela Landsbury version, not the it-never-happened Depp version). (1982)
6. Arthur (It was rerun on HBO at least twice a day when I was 15. The entire cast is great, but Gielgud steals the movie.) (1981)
7. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
8. Ran (1985)
9. Midnight Run (Blistering hot NYC summer, nearby theater had this movie and air conditioning. Sarah and I saw it over and over, and enjoyed it every time.) (1988)
10. Cyrano de Bergerac (1990 version with Depardieu.)
11. The Purple Rose of Cairo. (1985) Actually, there are several Woody Allen films I’ve seen over a dozen times – Bullets Over Broadway, Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters – but I think I’ve seen PROC the most. (It wouldn’t surprise me if Allison Deutsch Andersen could do an entire list of ten films she’s seen ten times or more just from Woody Allen’s catalog.)
12. Supercop. (1992) Jackie Chan climbs everything in sight, and Michelle Yeoh jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train. What more could I want?
13. Much Ado About Nothing, the Kenneth Branagh version. (1993)
14. Groundhog Day (1993)

Comments:

1) It makes me kind of sad to realize that I haven’t seen most of these films in at least ten years. I don’t watch films as intensely anymore, and certainly don’t rewatch films as much as I used to. To some degree this is because I’m more likely to watch TV nowadays (nearly done with “True Detective”), but it’s mainly because I have so much less spare time than I used to.

1.5) Half the 14 came out in the 1990s. Another five came out in the 1980s.

2) Of the 14, 3 (Passion Fish, Mulan, Purple Rose) have female protagonists. 6 have male protagonists, and 5 have female and male co-protagonists. Only 5 – City of Lost Children, Passion Fish, Mulan, Sweeney Todd, and Crouching Tiger – pass the Bechdel test.

Five of the movies have non-white protagonists or co-protagonists, but that includes some movies that were made in Asian countries.

So what movies have you seen over ten times?

“The real voter fraud is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud,” Obama said, in a speech to Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in New York — an organization that he said should serve as a national model for organizing people around voting, led by a man who deserved “a big round of applause.”

The voting rights argument is a key element of the White House’s strategy to have the president focus on boosting base turnout for the midterms, especially among core Obama voters.

“There are well-organized and well-funded efforts to undo [the] gains” of the civil rights movement, Obama told the largely African-American crowd. “Just as inequality feeds on justice, opportunity requires justice, and justice requires the right to vote.”

Democrats face a different landscape than they did in 2012, when they had the benefits of running against new voting laws that were being challenged in court without having to worry as much about their voters actually being blocked.

The laws are on the books. Obama isn’t on the ballot. And the party needs an issue that can rile up the base, raise money from the grassroots, rally volunteers and form a rhetorical entry point to a larger argument about how Republican policies are hurting the constituencies most threatened by voting restrictions.

“The right to vote — what kind of political platform is that? Why would you make that a part of your agenda, preventing people from voting? How can you defend that?” Obama said. “This recent effort to restrict the vote has not been led by both parties. It’s being led by the Republican Party.”

That last paragraph there is the best case yet anyone in this administration has put forth as to what the true nature of the GOP voter ID effort really is:  voter suppression in order to lower turnout of traditionally Democratic voting groups.  For President Obama to publicly acknowledge this and then publicly rebuke the GOP for doing it (he later recounted the whole birther nonsense and had a good laugh along with the audience) was not only necessary but vital to our voting system.

Long-time readers will know that I harp on voting and voting rights weekly in this space.  There's a reason for that.  It's literally the last gasp of the current Republican party, the last weapon they have in order to stay in power.  They talk of "outreach" and "reconciliation" with minority groups, particularly black and Latino voters, and then make it harder for all voters to vote in a way that falls most on the shoulders of voters of color.

So to hear the President call the GOP out on this is nothing short of historic.  We need to make sure that we exercise that vote, so the people trying to take that right away do not gain more political power.

Here's the video of the speech:

macabrefascination:

featheredfriend:

charminglyantiquated:

silly silly little comic

Ladies, gentlemen, and other gentlepeople: my girlfriend’s ‘silly little comic’

Oh my fucking gods this is perfect

Yes!  All women should escape from their stories and get on the back of a flying dude and fly off together. :D

hexgoddess:

The phrases “I don’t like penis” and “I like women” are self contradicting together because some women have penises.

It isn’t necessarily transmisogynist to only like vagina. But no one ever says “I only like vagina. Vagina is the only aspect that determines my attraction. You see that trans dudebro over there with the full beard and the flat muscular chest crushing beer cans on his head and talking about how much he loves to fuck lesbians? I’m totally into him because he has a vagina.”

No one sticks with just “I don’t like dick.”

It’s always, “I don’t like dick, I’m a lesbian” (bzzzt wrong, liking women makes you a lesbian, women also have dicks), “I don’t like dick, I like women” (bzzzt wrong, women have penises too), “I don’t like dick, I’m a straight guy” (bzzzt wrong straight guys are into women, women also have dicks) 

It’s always accompanied by revulsion for trans women or treating us like we’re trying to trap you into liking us by existing as women without waving our genitals in the air every fifteen seconds (by both straight men and lesbian women, the reactions are scarily similar. Funny how that works)

It’s the extra shit you add on to your “I don’t like penis” that reveals, in the end, to you a woman only has a vagina. It reveals that you do not consider trans women to be women. It often reveals that you find us horrifying or revolting or an abomination and have a kneejerk reaction of disgust. These are all deeply transmisogynist things.

This means that you’re a disgusting bag of transmisogynist garbage, even moreso because you’re trying to hide it under weasel words and will probably claim that pointing it out is trying to get into your pants (yet more weasel words and yet more transmisogyny, painting trans women as hypersexual predators).

When in reality, no trans woman wants to fuck a bigot. We just want bigots to stop spouting bigotry and acting on their bigotry in other ways that harm us.

Because I guarantee if you’re showing your transmisogyny in your partner and sexual decisions you’re showing it everywhere else too.

P.S. It’s also grossly misogynist in a general sense because you’re reducing women to genitalia. :)

The whole thing where people claim that by trying to include trans women into the larger group of “women” it forces them to have sex with us is the most ridiculous thing ever.  That’s like saying that including your female relatives as women forces you to have sex with them, or even forces you to consider them as attractive.  It just means they’re the gender that you’re in general attracted to.  It doesn’t mean anything else.  The truth of the matter is that denying trans women our gender isn’t about you not finding us attractive, because you don’t have to deny the gender of other women you’d never want to sleep with (presumably, your relatives, for example), it’s about your own transphobia and refusal to respect our identities.  That’s all it is, everything else is an excuse towards that end.

Many people, here and elsewhere, have responded to Lisa McElroy’s first combination of strawman burning and blaming-the-victim. But I might be even more amazed by one of the follow-ups:

I don’t understand why it is deplorable. The students enrolling in law schools have the information about job placement, bar passage, etc. Presumably, they have decided that they will fall on the positive side of the statistics. They make the choice to accept the offer of admission. The law school makes a commitment to educate them to the best of its ability. If the law school is so terrible and lacks judgment in admitting students, why would a student then choose to go there? It’s all in the student’s control.

Even leaving aside how strenuously law schools have acted to hide or fudge things like job placement statistics…just wow. Shorter Lisa McElroy: “Why would anyone buy real estate at Glengarry Highlands if it wasn’t extremely valuable?”

I think we can see why the comments were closed…

We American proles are busily doing whatever our bosses ask us to do whenever they want it, even if we are at home, because we support the noblest thing in the world–creating wealth for the 1%. What are those savage French doing? I’ll bet their workers think they have the right to a life outside of work!

Just in case you weren’t jealous enough of the French already, what with their effortless style, lovely accents and collective will to calorie control, they have now just made it illegal to work after 6pm.

Well, sort of. Après noticing that the ability of bosses to invade their employees’ home lives via smartphone at any heure of the day or night was enabling real work hours to extend further and further beyond the 35-hour week the country famously introduced in 1999, workers’ unions have been fighting back. Now employers’ federations and unions have signed a new, legally binding labour agreement that will require staff to switch off their phones after 6pm.

Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, Deloitte and PwC), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones – or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. And companies must ensure that their employees come under no pressure to do so. Thus the spirit of the law – and of France – as well as the letter shall be observed.

My god! If that kind of craziness happened here, bosses might actually have to hire enough employees to get work done by 6:00. All those takers would have jobs. That’s simply not acceptable. Can’t we just automate more work to free us from the oppression of employment and food? Certainly that’d be better than the hellscape of France.

A couple of people have asked me to explain an odd corduroy reference I made on Twitter last night.

Yes, arguably corduroy references are inherently odd. But this one involved blood, and police officers, so it caused some inquiry.

The facts were these: one evening in the late 1980s I was at a friend's house in my home town. Were were on the low roof of his garage. Alcohol was present. We were singing. Neither of us had very good singing voices. That may be why I felt obligated to accompany us on my friend's mother's accordion. That is what we had back then, instead of autotune. If you want to be unpleasantly technical I am not familiar with how an accordion is operated, at least as narrowly defined by uncharitable social convention. However, I believe that unbridled enthusiasm can make up for lack of formal training in many pursuits. There is evidently a difference of popular opinion on this point as it pertains to playing the accordion on a roof at one in the morning.

Eventually a neighbor called the cops, and a police cruiser drove up the street. The officer directed his spotlight on us. We did not stop singing, and I did not stop playing the accordion. Wikipedia explains that intertia is the resistance of a physical object to a change in its state of motion; inertia applies to playing the accordion on a roof. I was committed to it is what I am trying to convey. I remember the officer stood there motionless for several moments, as if evaluating the course of his life that had brought him to this particular circumstance. Eventually he used his car-mounted loudspeaker to say, firmly and slowly,

PUT. THE ACCORDION. DOWN.

I did: not because I had lost inertia or enthusiasm, but because this struck me as so very funny at the time that I doubled over in laughter, dropped the accordion, and rolled off the low, sloped roof into a patch of cacti in my friend's yard. My friend's mother was well before her time with respect to sustainable, drought-resistant landscaping.

The police offer turned off his spotlight, climbed slowly into his car, and drove away. He had accomplished his mission — the neighbors were no longer bothered by someone on a roof playing the accordion — and no further exercise of law enforcement power was warranted.

It took a while for my friend to find me; he was somewhat confused when I abruptly vanished from view on the roof, and for a brief moment he was not certain whether I had fled or possibly been arrested. Eventually, though, he helped me into his kitchen. I was wearing corduroy pants. The cactus needles had driven many durable corduroy threads into my leg, and we sat in the dim light of the kitchen, me in my underwear, picking threads out of my leg, each leaving a disappointing trickle of blood and a puff of corduroy fuzz. This sounds more traumatic that it was; bear in mind that it was the 1980s.

In the years since, I have thought about the police officer. I'm pretty sure he's the same one who used to ticket my late mother occasionally as she veered down Descanso Drive, engine racing in second gear, bringing home take-out to an impatient family. These days, I would likely be arrested, or at least put in the back of the police car for a while. There are formalities to respect and care to be taken and safety to be enforced and there might be an inquiry or a lawsuit if a police officer doesn't fully investigate in such circumstances. But back then, the officer was content to stop the noise, and having stopped it, drive away into a cool evening scented of skunk and honeysuckle.

I have not played the accordion again, although I am not ruling it out.

A Story About Low-Key Policing and Corduroy © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Visine pitchman, former Comedy Central gameshow host, and ex-presidential speechwriter Ben Stein really wouldn’t hack me off, what, a couple times every five-six years or so? If he just wasn’t a pious hypocritical ivory tower word-weaseling douche canoe.

It isn’t the highest standard in the world. Many people have avoided being a hypocritical ivory tower word-weaseling douche canoe. He just isn’t living up to that standard, and I despair of his regular attempts at self-sabotage.

So, I point to an interview, which kind of turns on a thin dime so subtly that you might have to think a minute to realize that Stein is weaseling.

“Yes, the government designates many tens of millions as poor, but they almost always have indoor plumbing (which my mother did not have in her small town in the Catskills) and they are super nourished as opposed to mal-nourished,” he said. “They get food stamps. They get free medical care. They get vouchers for many of the needs of life.”

While he pities their plight, Stein pointed out that poverty was greatly reduced in scope and severity in the past century.

“In olden times, poverty was the common human condition,” Stein said. “In the USA, as recently as the Great Depression, poverty was commonplace. FDR might have exaggerated when he described one-third of the nation as ‘ill housed, ill fed and ill clad…’ But surely he was not far off.”

And his mother would be how old?  I bet nobody had color tv’s in her day either. And his solution is?

“Maybe, just maybe, if we let God back into the public forum it would help. I have seen spiritual solutions work miracles.”

And in his mother’s day, way back when, when the poor folks were really poor, and not the kind of fake-ass poor we have today—is he saying things were less religious then? Because, unless I’m really mistaken, most conservatives envision the past as being a little less secularized and hippieficated , and way more squared-away, God-fearing, and role-knowing. And yet the really poor folks were back in the day, he says. And his momma did not have indoor plumbing, he also adds.

Thinking about that: Are you saying your momma was godless and self-sabotaging, then, Ben? Because I do not think that proves your point, and you shouldn’t even be talking that smack about your momma. That isn’t decent.

(X-Posted at Strangely Blogged.)

Fucking magnets, how do they work?  -  Insane Clown Posse, “Miracles”

It’s not always easy being the Honest Courtesan; sometimes in the process of talking about human sexuality, I run into some aspect of my own sexuality which is somewhat embarrassing to admit to.  At that point I have to decide whether to walk around the subject, or say “I’d really rather not discuss that”, or just throw caution to the wind and forge ahead out of my comfort zone, trusting that Aphrodite will bless my courage.  Often it’s because a reader asks a question which can be answered in part by discussing my own feelings, but in this particular occasion it’s because a reader wrote an article in Psychology Today.  The reader is Dr. Robert King, and the article is subtitled “What Monster Porn Might Tell Us About Human Nature”.  It’s a critique of John Horgan’s “What ‘Monster Porn’ Says About Science and Sexuality” in Scientific American…an odd venue for it because, as King explains, Horgan “used a blatantly creationist strategy to attack an entire field of science of which he disapproves”, evolutionary psychology.  Horgan absurdly claims that because he personally can’t think of a reason for women to be turned on by the idea of sex with monsters, there must not be a scientific explanation, and that this is wonderful because Freud.  Or something.

Dr. King, on the other hand, displaying the superior insight one would expect from one who appreciates this blog, has a very good sense of what the biological connection is:

…monster porn is by no means novel…Ancient dildoes going back 20000 years are adorned with pictures of various potent animals.  And…just take a look at what the Centaurs are trying to do to the Lapith women on the metopes of the…Parthenon…raucous festivities involving symbolic sex with humans dressed as animals…go back as far as records begin.  Not far from where I work there is an annual festival at which the Queen of the May symbolically marries King Puck…an icon of animal potency and fertility.  In the UK symbolic animals grab innocent maidens off the streets with impunity during May festivities.  What do things like Bigfoot, Cthulhic monsters, magical beings, werewolves, vampires and centaurs have in common?  Well, to someone not wedded to a creationist psychology might I venture one or two themes of adaptationist relevance?  Power.  Potency.  Transgressiveness.  Loss of control.  Outbreeding.  The evocation of uncontrollable desire.  Dominance.  Submission.  Rescue.  Heroes.  Villains.  Large penises.  Do these sound like themes irrelevant to biology or reproduction?  If so, then it’s time to go back to school…it might easily turn out that the prevalence of these fantasies has no adaptive function—they might be by-products of other adaptations.  Not everything is an adaptation.  Every first year biologist knows this…

Horgan is apparently so content to view sexuality as an unfathomable chthonic mystery that he doesn’t even bother to ask a reasonably-intelligent woman who’s turned on by this sort of thing what she thinks about it.  And though I’ll never read Taken by the T-Rex or Moan for Bigfoot, that’s not because I’m disgusted by the subject matter; as it turns out, I myself am a reasonably-intelligent woman who’s turned on by this sort of thing.  See these illustrations?  I’ve got a bunch of ‘em in my art folders.  People who played Dungeons & Dragons with me could tell you about some memorable episodes.  And remember my mentioning how the movie Gargoyles inspired one of my favorite make-believe scenarios as a kid?  Yeah, that.  The thing is, anybody who’s read some of my other columns on my own kinks and paid attention to some of the fantasy iconography I’ve featured (dig the cover of my book at upper right) could’ve guessed as much; it’s no surprise when a woman who is turned on by rape, abduction and bondage scenarios is similarly affected when the abductor is some sort of non-human entity.  For the record, dinosaurs and the like do nothing for me; it has to be an intelligent monster, like a demon, an astropelagic alien (again, see my book) or a werewolf.  In a spoken sequence on Bat Out of Hell, a male character asks a female, “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”  My friend Philippa used to say that her answer to that was, “Every fucking time.”

When Horgan declares that evolutionary psychology can’t explain monster porn, he indulges in the same narcissism as prohibitionists do when they declare that no woman could choose sex work:  “I cannot understand this, therefore it is inexplicable.”  But actually, women being turned on by monsters is no odder (vampires, anyone?) than women indulging in transactional sex; however much either or both of them might upset and horrify prudes, they both have their origins in female behavioral scripts going back to the time when the behavior of human men wasn’t much different from that of the monsters in the fantasies.

Since former Supreme Court justice Joette Katz has taken over the beleaguered Department of Children and Families (DCF), some weird ass shit has been going on over there. The latest is this really outrageous transfer of a transgender 16-year old male who identifies as female to an adult correctional facility.

It’s not like she’s actually arrested for anything, though. The Courant reports:

In this case, the youth was arrested at a juvenile facility in Needham, Mass., in late January for an assault on a staff member — but the criminal charge was not pursued by prosecutors in Massachusetts. No criminal charges are pending against the youth.

The police report in Massachusetts said that the assault resulted in ”apparent minor injuries” to the staff member, said [Assistant Public Defender] Connolly, who reviewed the report.

However, the incident report prepared by staff at Meadowridge Academy in Needham, does describe a violent outburst by the youth, who was upset, insubordinate and attempting to walk off campus when confronted by two staff members.

So? 16 year olds act out. There are no charges. The most galling part is that this is the very child that Commissioner Katz used as an example in her pitch for a locked detention facility:

On Feb. 14, Katz, while lobbying to open a secure treatment facility for girls in Middletown, brought up this youth’s story in testimony before the legislature’s appropriations committee. Katz didn’t name the youth, but said that a staff member was blinded and had her jaw broken in the assault. Katz said this youth would be appropriate for the locked program, which was the subject of opposition from advocates and some lawmakers. The allocation of $2.5 million was approved and the unit is now open on the campus of the former Riverview Hospital in Middletown.

A state source said that the blindness to which Katz referred was temporary, and that the worker’s sight has returned.

Advocates for children are questioning Katz’s decision to use the youth’s story to make her case for DCF’s locked treatment program, while pushing for the youth to be transferred out of DCF care and into an adult prison. DCF’s request for the transfer was filed in court on Feb. 4.

So now this child goes to the adult female prison – the only female prison, pending an evaluation. At which point, they might decide to send her to a men’s prison. Because, you know, that’s even better for this troubled kid.

This should come as no surprise, though, to people who follow the state juvenile and adult prison system. They’re quick to shove the problem off to someone else and the last thing you get in our locked facilities – be it for juveniles or adults – is the mental health treatment that so many desperately need.

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Pat Robertson just wants this "crypto-Muslim" Obama nightmare to end, and he's hoping a little divine intervention will do the trick.

On Wednesday, the right-wing televangelist asked God to "deliver us" from Barack Obama's presidency.

"We need to do something to pray to be delivered from this president," he said on the 700 Club. "He is a disaster, an absolute disaster. I mean I don't know, Democrat, Republican or whatever, this country is into serious decline unless something dramatic is done about it."

Yeah, advocating for someone to somehow stop the Obama presidency isn't dangerous at all, folks.  "Won't someone rid me of this troublesome black president?"

Ceci n’est pas une livre… This is not a book. It is an algorithm. D. Harlan Wilson’s trilogy of Hitler: The Terminal Biography; Freud: The Penultimate Biography; and Douglass: The Lost Autobiography are Magrittesque artifacts. Certainly not biographies in the conventional sense of the genre, these titles may not be, strictly, books, whatever those are these days. They are experiments in deconstructing the supposedly cynical matrices of literature in the Internet age, where units are defined and shifted algorithmically, by guilty—sometimes arbitrary—associations with other books, and what Wilson calls Superior Authors. This last part, Wilson admits, is flawed: “Blurbs don’t sell books.” What does sell books is metadata. To wit: falsified metadata. Wilson establishes:

 …a parasitic connection with other biographies about Hitler, Freud, and whoever I’m going to write the final biography on (either Tom Cruise or Frederick Douglass) at Amazon.com, the only viable marketplace in the twenty-first century publishing world… If somebody buys, say, The Freud Reader, which currently sells quite well at Amazon, and the same person buys Freud: The Penultimate Biography, thinking it’s similar to The Freud Reader, Amazon pools the titles together on its Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought page and a snowball effect ensues. Because of this one sale, thousands of readers will mistake Freud: The Penultimate Biography as a book that might be similar to The Freud Reader, even though, for the sake of argument, they are only really linked by Freud’s name in the titles.

His gambit in the case of Freud is reminiscent of Nabokov’s Symbols and Signs, daring the reader to psychoanalyze the text for the Freud biography that is implied between the covers of the book. In the sense that the relation of the text to Sigmund Freud oscillates between historical and reasonably explicit ‘facts,’ to allusion, and to irrelevant and arbitrary symbols for what might have been a biography of Freud, Wilson’s assemblage stands in for the Freudian plexus of symbols. Freud was a dramatist of the unconscious. The Oedipus complex is an intertextual reference run amok.

If you’ve no stomach for this kind of irony, then you should rise up from the couch, flee the office, and demand a refund from the receptionist. This may be merely denial or disavowal on your part. Lie down, and relax, please. The penultimate truth is that, in a system of arbitrary symbols, signs and signifiers, any book can be a biography of Sigmund Freud. Besides, it declares itself to be so; therefore, what more evidence is required? Freud: The Penultimate Biography is also the “unofficial, unauthorized sequel” to Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life of Our Time, because it says so. Wilson’s series, dubbed the ‘Angry Black Author’ trilogy, is, of course, a challenge to authenticity and a technological satire. Sure, it’s postmodern, but it may also appeal to old-fashioned (hardcore?) humanists who desire another object to object to, an inverted defense of old-school humanities where categories were rational, strict and sacrosanct—you know, the straight white dreamtime lamented by Leslie Fiedler in The New Mutants, before “the jackknife, the catcher’s mitt and brass knuckles” were replaced by “the comb, the pocket mirror, and the bobby pin.” Wilson’s trilogy is another element in the fulfillment of what was, for Fiedler in 1965, a queer, deracinated dystopia: “…a post-humanist, post-male, post-white, post-heroic world,” in which “To become new men, these children of the future seem to feel, that they must not only become more Black than White but more female than male.”

Wilson occupies that world, comfortably, as a science fiction writer, a critic, and a savvy ironist and iconoclast. Implicit in Wilson’s impersonation and association is the question: What difference does it make if taste, if aesthetic decisions are mechanized, or computerized? Has it not always been so? Is the decision, made by a reader in the antebellum of the Internet, to read Ginsberg or Thomas Wolfe after reading Kerouac, and then Whitman, and Blake after Ginsberg any less algorithmic than the pattern recognition of Amazon? The humanist accusation is that Amazon is dictating our choices. But in the 1990s, say, if you found a Bukowski aficionado at your post office or your local bar, I would bet you a drink that he also owned a few Dan Fante books, and yeah, naturally he was into Henry Miller. Was the soft, human algorithm of influence, reference, and recommendation that made ‘secondary’ reading so predictable in the past any more organic than our contemporary software version? Was it unmediated? Is the algorithm of a machine so different from that of a dinner party guest insisting: “If you liked The Goldfinch you must read Still Life With Breadcrumbs!” Marcel Duchamp, no stranger to mechanization and irony, said that taste is a habit, the mere repetition of something already accepted. He was, as Andrei Codrescu points out, a posthumanist. It is a romantic humanist fallacy that some autonomous gesture of taste is being denied us by automation. Wilson’s gesture is a manipulation of materialist (Freudian) desire:

A unit of insufficiency and insolvency (viz., a writer) said, “There needs to be more literary rockstars. They don’t exist anymore. Where have all the Ernest Hemingways and Hunter S. Thompsons gone?”

            “Hemingway?”

            Long pause. Then:

            “Hemingway was a whiny bleep. Have you ever read one of his novels? … Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t all that different. He was just more sarcastic. And Thompson’s druglust? And gunlust? Guns are for boy scouts and drugs are for big whining bleeps. How many hours a day do you think these bozos worked out? The legacy of their fitness is deceptive.”

Reputation is manipulation, for better and for worse—see the character assassination of Edgar Allan Poe by the coward Rufus Griswold, the obituary signed as ‘Ludwig’. Griswold hijacked the estate and set himself to kicking Poe while he was down. Wilson’s persona in Freud… is Associate Professor of How to Tell the Truth at the Ludavico Campus. The Ludovico Technique you’ll recall as the dehumanizing aversion therapy in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Wilson’s biographies are as averse to their subjects as we should be to the hagiography of any other subject. He deconstructs the experience of reading a biography of a subject one already admires, whose myths have already purchased: the filler sold with commercially imperative shocks of new unpublished data “revealing a side of the man that has proven too disturbing and risqué for past biographers.” The schizo-analytic approach casts Benicio del Toro as The Wolfman in Freud’s From The History Of Infantile Neurosis, and sees Daniel Schreber of Psychological Notes Upon An Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia recast as ‘Danny’ who “learned how to dance by watching the American musical variety show Soul Train.” Biographies, Wilson suggests, are misinformation, half-understood lives, and the brainwash of publicity flowing back and forth between author and subject:

Adulthood can sting like a wasp. If only boys didn’t have to become men. This is not a joke. Sigmund Freud diagnosed Schreber as a latent homosexual with repressed feelings for his father. He never met Schreber. But he read his memoirs, and that seemed like enough information to go on.

            Stop.

Yes, we have to be able to imagine a world in which Freud did not read Sophocles, and in which biographical writing is not enthralled by Freud. The desires that are on trial in Freud: The Penultimate Biography are the tabloid desires surrounding biography as an exploitation genre. That “Stop” is a vital element of Wilson’s critique. The voice of the Penultimate Biography is both a ghost in the machine and a spanner in the works.

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So called conservatives should rejoice, I suppose.  My bitterness and ever more inarticulate rage is keeping me more silent all the time.  The sheer vicious stupidity of their “plan” — stomping anything Obama/Democratic Party in sight, like a arachnophobic doing a hat-dance atop a spider — is KILLING Americans.  But since anything that doesn’t make money and anyone who doesn’t have money has no value to these plutocratic asshats, they don’t care.

So a mother of three children in Florida is dead, thank you GOP.  All because you can’t see America joining the rest of the civilized fucking world in providing health care for citizens regardless of income.

And women have to endure more bloviating like THIS from men concerned with how they run their bodies.  And still, in the fucking 21st century, women are branded liars by sexual abusers — because hey, “public conveniences” shouldn’t talk back, right?

So women die, the poor die, and all this is “good” government?  I have to wonder what the fuck you asshats think bad government looks like!

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, Religious Nuts & Bolts, War on Women Tagged: abortion, death, economy, gop lies, health care, poverty, war on women

We may actually see completion of the kitchen project this week(end)!  The picture is a close up of a metal-work I have tacked up onto the newly finished stove hood.

Every project finished becomes my new “favorite” — yesterday we ended the base cabinets with a tall, narrow bit we call the “cookie sheet shed” — the butcher block countertop only goes twelve feet, and I had six more inches that used to be covered!  I really love that tiny little unorthodox bit (pictures later, I promise); but I love every bit of making-do and managing with less.  The recycled wall tiles are up above the stove to meet the new exhaust fan box, for instance — today they get grouted!

Today, I will be sanding paint from a pair of glass doors….onward, onward.

 

Tagged: householding, kitchen

"Atlas Shrugged: A Thousand Pages of Bad Science Fiction About Sock-Puppets Stabbing Strawmen with Tax Cuts."

-- driftglass

Oh lord:

Ayn Rand-Inspired Sci-Fi Musical The Anthem Sets World Premiere

Jason Gotay, Remy Zaken, and Randy Jones will lead the cast of the political piece.
By Hayley Levitt • Apr 8, 2014 • New York City

The Anthem, a sci-fi musical inspired by Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, will make its off-Broadway world premiere at Culture Project's Lynn Redgrave Theatre this May. Performances will begin May 20 in advance of an official May 29 opening...

On the one hand, Anthem is very bad, short science fiction (as opposed Atlas Shrugged, which is very bad, looong science-fiction).  So if very bad science fiction is like unto, say, shooting yourself in the foot, then turning very bad science fiction into a musical on purpose is like taking another, bigger bullet and sloooowly pounding it through your through your other foot with a ball peen hammer.

On the other hand, I want to write the lyrics for at least one of the tunes so much it hurts.

*Judges would have also accepted The Lyin' King and The Wealth Producers. What other musical parody names can you think of?  The ones that crack me up will be posted with attribution on the front page of this blog.

[Update below] What, really, is a fact? The word, which seemingly should have one simple definition, in fact does not.  For example, in science, a “fact” is an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as “true.” In law, on the other hand, a “fact” is what 6 people say it is. In other words, it’s not a validation of what actually happened, but what reasonably could have happened. A fact is also determined based on a rather narrow, limited universe: some things aren’t taken into account and conclusions are made by ignoring other, contradictory events.

One example of this is if you read any appellate court opinion by a Connecticut court written in the last decade or so, almost all of them will have a recitation of the “facts” that begins with the following sentence:

The jury could reasonably have found the following facts

Invariably, this recitation is skewed toward the interpretation of those “facts” that supports the court’s eventual decision. If you need to uphold a questionable stop of a car on the road, highlight the helpful police officer’s testimony while downplaying or even ignoring frame-by-frame video evidence.

Two days ago I wrote a post about a juror who demonstrated that she believed the defendant to be guilty even before the presentation of evidence and who was “bullied” into stating that she could be fair despite those prejudicial beliefs. At the time i wrote the post I didn’t read the opinion. A helpful commenter has provided a link to the opinion. It perfectly illustrates the point I’m making here. First, let’s remember from my post that the transcript revealed that the juror made several assertions that she would not be able to be fair:

The prosecutor then asked the juror: “You haven’t heard any evidence. How would you vote?”  Juror 112 responded, “I would have to vote guilty.”

…

The judge asked if she could return a verdict of not guilty if the government couldn’t prove it’s case beyond a reasonable doubt.

“I don’t think I would be able to,” the juror replied.

The prosecutor tried again: “Let me ask you this flat-out. Let’s say the victim takes the stand [and] you flat-out don’t believe her. In fact, you think she’s lying. You look at her [and conclude] ‘I don’t believe a word coming out of her mouth.’ Are you going to convict this man anyway?”

Juror 112 responded before the first witness in the case had been called, “That depends. I still feel he was at fault.”

So let’s go take a look at the opinion. Find the Control and F keys on your keyboard. You’re going to need them. In the opinion, the judge explains that the trial court, before the evidence, explained to the panel that the case involved allegations of a lewd act upon a child, a lewd act upon a child under age 14, and several counts of forcible rape involving two victims, plus an allegation that defendant committed the rape offenses against more than one victim. At the time jury selection occurred, both the prosecution and the defense questioned the jurors including Juror 112, who did not indicate any problem with judging the case fairly.

Then it starts getting messy:

The next morning, after opening statements but before the first witness took the stand, Juror No. 112 alerted the trial court she had worked with a teacher at a middle school “who is presently serving his sentence for the same thing that went on here. I did not remember until this morning.”

…

The prosecutor asked the juror how she would vote if asked to do so “right now,” and the juror responded, “Knowing your opening statements, I would have to say guilty[,]” but clarified she would have to hear all of the evidence before reaching her decision.

After several more questions that easily constitute “rehabilitation”, the juror was allowed to remain on the jury over the defendant’s objection.

Now here’s where you use Control+F. Go to the opinion again, click Control+F and search for this phrase: “I don’t think I would be able to,” You won’t find it.

Now search for the phrase “flat-out”. You won’t find that either. Finally, try “still feel he was at fault”. That will also return that pinging sound that indicates no matches.

How can this be? The opinion makes her seem intelligent and honest and impartial. The article reporting on it makes it seem as though she was clearly not impartial.

The commenters start calling it bogus. I agree. It is bogus on the part of the court. Let’s look at the source of the original article [this is from mid-way]:

Statements by lawyers are not evidence, and Hoffer followed up with the juror, according to court transcripts reviewed by the Weekly.

So it seems that the Weekly went and got copies of the transcripts, which record everything said in court and reviewed them. That’s where they found these quotes¹ that somehow didn’t make it into the judicial opinion.

Update: Scott Greenfield has obtained the magistrate’s opinion [PDF] which confirms the OC Weekly’s recitation of the facts. If you read that, you will find that the Weekly’s version is corroborated and the appellate opinion is dishonest. This you can do by repeating the Control+F exercise from above and you will see that the missing quotes magically appear.

So why did this happen? Probably because the quotes omitted from the opinion, but included in the Weekly article are devastating to the logic that permits denial of Velasco’s argument. If you don’t acknowledge the flaws in your position, then your position has no flaws.

You may think this is a preposterous proposition. It is not. You don’t realize it, however, unless you’re an appellate attorney whose appeals have been denied by courts in opinions that make no mention of the facts that are helpful to you, or blatantly misrepresent them.

Or, of course, you’re Mr. Velasco, who was there and heard the juror say these things only to have her remain on the jury to convict.

Because facts in the law aren’t the truth, they’re just what 6 people with immutable biases say they are.

—–

Americans seem more uncomfortable with aging and dying than any other people I’ve met.  In a nation that seems to worship youth, it would be more rational to have some idea of how aging, illness, injury and death could be acknowledged as part of the “big picture”, don’t you think?

I’ve worked for a hospice organization, many years ago.  I’ve been Kubler-Ross’d to within an inch of my own toleration and life.  And yet, time after time, I am told stories of Do Not Resuscitate orders over-ridden.  Hospitals and politicians go to court to stop a death—it seems more than a bit hubristic, since Johnny Depp movies aside, death still does come for us all.

So, yes, I think this doctor has the precisely correct idea.  Code Death, it is time to acknowledge, maybe we could all stop fearing the Reaper.

Tagged: death, life, medicine