August 9, 2014

It's time to decriminalize the buying and selling of sex

as the victimless crime that it is.

There are of course "invisible" victims of such business relationships, as there are other of the now legal and illegal kind. Take those victims the bartender never sees, or the local drug dealer for example. The former is no longer a crime, and the latters "victimless crime" designation applies ONLY to the participants in the deal, because it's mutually beneficial.

It's really as simple as doing a pro/con list on the matter. This of course requires objectivity that moral purists http://legalize-prostitution.com/benefits-of-legalizing-prostitution lack, who should be excluded from the discussion or debate if that's all they can bring to the table.

Imo the benefits of legalization outweigh the drawbacks of maintaining its illegality. Feel free to argue with the authors here http://www.liberator.net/articles/prostitution.html#effects http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalized-prostitution-safer/legalizing-prostitution-brings-protection-and-better-care http://www.liberator.net/articles/prostitution.html#effects for starters, and concluding with

The researchers warn that due to the clandestine nature of both trafficking and prostitution markets, their analysis had to rely on the best available existing data on reported human trafficking inflows. That legalised prostitution increases human trafficking inflows is likely, but cannot be proven with available evidence. The researchers also note that other reasons might speak against prohibiting prostitution despite its impact on human trafficking.

The article concludes: “The likely negative consequences of legalised prostitution on a country’s inflows of human trafficking might be seen to support those who argue in favour of banning prostitution, thereby reducing the flows of trafficking. However, such a line of argumentation overlooks potential benefits that the legalisation of prostitution might have on those employed in the industry. Working conditions could be substantially improved for prostitutes—at least those legally employed—if prostitution is legalised. Prohibiting prostitution also raises tricky “freedom of choice” issues concerning both the potential suppliers and clients of prostitution services.”

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2012/12/Legalised-prostitution-increases-human-trafficking.aspx

given that the increase in trafficking appears to be what seems to be of most concern to those not the simple moral purist who has trouble with sex outside of marriage period, whether paid for or not. Legalizing prostitution doesn't legalize human trafficking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking much as legalizing alcohol as an intoxicant didn't legalize a host of other intoxicants or spare them from criminalization. It became legal again because the pro-list outgrew the con-list where the HT consideration resides in this controversy. HT and prostitution similarities begin and end with the sex that they share, other than the similar conditions that a pimp might subject his "victims" to that legalization would go a long way towards eliminating.

Just don't mention the facts about teenage, etc, prostitution, http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/08/02/teen-prostitution-in-america/ because one of them might mistake you for a participant in such, because as we know, to the dishonest and desperate merely noting the facts in this particular matter, as it has been in others, is tantamount to support, advocacy, if not being guilty of the crime of being involved in such. But quite frankly, I think all the issues involved are too many and complicated for that type to wrap their little minds around, so they too should be excluded from this "debate". What many of would consider common knowledge , like this

In some ways, it's simply part of a kid's natural journey toward independence. But child development experts say that physical and behavioral changes that would have been typical of teenagers decades ago are now common among "tweens" — kids ages 8 to 12.http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15905527/ns/health-childrens_health/t/new-kids-grow-faster/

they remain ignorant of. Once upon a time I had a particularly stupid person charge me with pedophilia advocacy for merely suggesting that this might lead to some confusion on the part of the non-pedophile as age limits define pedophilia legally, and who mighta thought they were merely soliciting an underage teenage girl. Both of these things are of course unacceptable, and are two slightly different things as well. How keeping prostitution of the "Pretty Woman" kind illegal is gonna end or deter pedophiles or human trafficking remains a mystery to me. It seems to me that freeing the police from the time consuming affair of chasing pimps and their prostitutes would give them more time to pursue the other separate and distinct crimes of pedophilia and human trafficking.

As far as I am concerned, the increased potential for catching and punishing those things alone is sufficient justification for leaving Ed AND Vivian alone.

August 9, 2014

Question submitted by stupidicus

August 5, 2014

I can't help but think about the many in our prisons

far less deserving of living a life in one.

Sure, let's not be resentful or sanctimonious about who gets the get outta jail free card, or the related and equally damaging "the rule of law for thee, but no for me" speech. All the "under presssure" garbage may have some mitigating value in the sentencing phase, but serves as no defense for their guilt of the crime.

And given the "lawlessness" BHO is currently being sued for, one can't but wonder what kinda tune the repubs would be singing if this was his "crime" as well. Is it only notta "crime" when a white pres is in responsible charge of it, like real or imaginary excessive EO use?

From everything I've read I'm not sure that the depths of the dumbasshood to which he's sunk has been adequately plumbed, but please be on the ready for the next time he speaks out on the inequalities in our criminal justice system. He's decided for many reasons no doubt, that the lid on this Pandora's Box can be kept off and the evils unleashed tamed, and that Justice can be served in this case alone without the closure only prosecutions can bring.

It's a big butterfly with many a deleterious effect that time will inevitably reveal. I'd ask whether the failure to criminally prosecute Nixon made the madness of rightwingnuttery better or worse in this country, and what good we can expect outta decisions and rhetoric like this that only serve as far as I can tell, to embolden that enemy.

Mr "Nth dimensional chess player" in this case either has the foresight of an earthworm, or is in the service of that enemy. He's certainly no friend of the "rule of law" and the justice it provides. Obviously all that is just for us "little people".

August 4, 2014

indeed George

What Israel does is similar to but not to be confused with those that gleefully take advantage of the "stand your ground" laws. It of course deosn't work for everyone/all scenarios, which is why all the war crimes talk now. And so what the ensuing "murder" likely wasn't necessary or warranted, and perhaps more all about the joy some derive from killing, no?

As I understand it, many of them get their vicarious thrills from the surrounding hills too.

July 25, 2014

Hiding War Crimes Behind a Question

Like with all conflicts, it seems to me that a satisfactory resolution to it can only come from a fact-based and just assignment and apportionment of blame accepted and acknowledged by the parties involved, which in turn leads to acceptable and agreed upon solutions.

The impediments to this are many in this case, but few stick out like the proverbial sore thumb like this one imo.

Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself? Though it is hard for a question to be wrong, this is a dead wrong question even though it is the heart and soul of Israel’s defense of its attack on little Gaza.

It is also the basis of the U.S. assessment of the ongoing moral disaster. The Senate voted unanimously to answer the question in the affirmative while ignoring all other piercingly relevant circumstances. Never has a misplaced question had such prestige and high-level cachet.

Israeli Prime Minister and U.S. President Barack Obama during an Oval Office meeting on May 18, 2009. (Photo credit: White House)
The contorted question sins by deviousness and legerdemain. With verbal wizardry, offense suddenly becomes defense with all the legitimacy that defense imports. It is akin to asking “Does a rapist during a rape have a right to defend himself if the victim resists?”

With collective amnesia, Israel and the United States brush aside basic realities of warfare. Siege (or blockade) is an act of offensive warfare. Indeed it is among the most devastating of weapons, condemned by both “Just War” theory and — very much to the point — by Jewish and Christian ethics of war. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/07/24/hiding-war-crimes-behind-a-question/

The question and the answer many an individual come up with lead to many a blind spot, like a disregard for such fixtures in international law and laws of war like proportionality, collective punishment, etc. These things are imo, a direct consequence of those individuals casting both parties under the same moral equivalence umbrella in an effort to justify the far more damaging actions/war crimes of Israel http://prospect.org/article/moral-responsibility-and-israel-palestinian-conflict without any consideration whatsoever to the actual damage respectively suffered, like it's really nothing to consider.

I also read and hear time and again about how it is that Hamas -- a Frankenstein Monster not unlike AQ or SH in terms of construction and motive for it http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2002/06/18/Analysis-Hamas-history-tied-to-Israel/UPI-82721024445587/ -- intends to not be satisfied until every jew on the planet is killed. That reads eaxctly like the rational our current pres and crew have used to justify the extra-judicial killing of American citizens. "Intends" is morphed into the definitional equivalent of "imminent/immediate" justifying both the means and end of their removal -- the constitution in that case be damned. Israel appears to be using the same rationale the 9/11 criminals used to justify their punishment of innocents -- criminalization of us all, and this conflict provided a good measure of that criminality in their minds.

There's also that old "Well, they shouldn't have elected Hamas as their reps" line, which in my mind is not unlike the justification I use to read and hear from rightwingnuts regarding Bush's collective punishment of the Iraqis -- "Well, if they didn't want what they got, they shoulda deposed him".

And just to be clear here, I'm a "just war" proponent, always have been and always will be, so I'm not trying to justify the war crimes, etc, that Palestinians or their leadership are guilty of in the course of explaining things. I do however have no difficulty whatsoever assigning and apportioning most of the blame for current conditions on the Israelis. In the final analysis, what we have here is a case of one party taking, the other wanting to take back, and there's no mystery as to who is who, no, and who the resolution to the conflict should favor in terms of turning back the clock?

The question for the American people is, how high a price are we willing to pay for the same guilt by association we shamelessly continue? They, like us, continue to be #1 at all the wrong things http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/study-israel-leads-in-ignoring-security-council-resolutions-1.31971 so I can't help but wonder based upon what they lay claim to having the "moral authority" in the matter other than in "never again" lessons they have long been on the dispensing end of in this instance, while harboring a wholly unreasonable expectation that their victims go quietly into night so that they can live rightly without fear of reprisals from the parties they willfully, disproportionally, and excessively harm because they can as the far superior force.

Just because the spoils go to the victors doesn't make the right of might, right.

July 4, 2014

Gore won, and Nader lost

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html leaving us all to pay the cost.

Why Gore, the yellow-bellied sapsucker who folded like a wet earth-toned suit gets most of the sympathy while Nader is designated by so many as the real "peckerhead" as the term is commonly used, while understandable, remains unjustified to me. As a Gore voter myself, I think he'd deserve my malice as a quitter if I were to have any, not Nader.

Why Nader had less of a right to run on a platform that nobody criticized then or more recently http://votenader.org/issues/ -- but be my guest if you must -- than Gore did to fold and disappoint all those that voted for him, does not compute. Imagine a Bernie Sanders doing a similar independent/under another banner run http://www.change.org/petitions/bernie-sanders-run-for-president-in-2016-as-a-green-party-candidate against the ACA loving but single-payer hating Hillary Clinton in 2016. Must any and all wouldbe candidates on the left with desires of giving a voice to what's left of the real left do so at the cost of a villian branding because of the potential consequences as so many proudly make clear awaits them with the Nader example?

It does appear so. And who or what is to blame for the SCOTUS selecting or the Gore dereliction in duty to his supporters but Gore for failing to sell himself sufficiently well to avoid both scenarios? It seems to me that to detest Nader so for his real or imaginary role in the Gore loss borders on if not crosses the anti-democratic line, and resembles in many respects the way many rightwingers think ANY dem, regardless of religion, color, creed, etc, etc, etc, has no right to be president. It differs only insomuch in the Nader case, to extending that to the right to run for office, win or lose, and regardless of the motivation for doing so. He's no more ignoble politically than his platform linked to above is. He's more a scapegoat than anything else used to ease or explain the pain of the Gore loss that never occurred in terms of votes if the linked to analysis is correct,

As we saw and learned from the Howard Dean experience, our so-called "liberal media" will certainly assist in the destruction of anyone leaning too far to the left running under the dem banner, as well as those not. Just look at the work of Dowd and others in regards to Gore. As a supporter I resigned myself to his failure as soon as he announced that that one of his highest priorities was to bust up the media conglomerates -- a thing that "Big Dog" gave us as a corporate friendly "centrist" with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. You'd think a genius like him would be able to foresee the ramifications of his actions, no, and particularly over something his pecker had no role or presence in to override his better judgement with.

The resurrection of the Nader bogeyman, or the continued whining about him -- however you wanna look at it -- diminishes the role of the selectors on the highest court in our land in the Gore loss, as well as the prospect of anyone speaking for what's left of the real left in the way and manner that he has. He's an endangered species many wanna assist down the road to extinction. It is of course something that can be confused with and related to the ongoing attempts at silencing lefty critics of the dems, and BHO especially and in particular. Nader personifies and exemplifies what can happen when support for dem candidates is sufficiently eroded, and it's far far better to blame it on the better salesmen that takes those votes away than the failure of their candidate to hold them. Since when did so many members of the democratic party start hating democracy in action, or people largely if not solely for participating in that process as Nader did? It's almost like a lefty posing a challenge to dem candidates should be criminalized or something, no? Given all the "lefty extremists" talk and writing I've consumed, it seems we ain't far from that. Let's start with ALL these guys. http://www.cagreens.org/alameda/city/0803myth/myth.html ANd of course, history had lessons available to Nader, like this http://www.leinsdorf.com/perot.htm. Gee, Ralphy musta been real mad over Perot's numbers, which were what, over six times his own in 2000. It's almost like he knew that Florida and the circumstances and happenstances there would lead to to his infamy, which he subsequently sought because he's never been anything but a self-serving jack-ass, which is something no other pol could justifiably be described as, and especially dem ones who all enter politics with noble goals in mind, like wouldbe priest entering the seminary for example.

What slays me most of all, and particularly in the wake of the recent Hobby Lobby decision, is that the guy who has historically been the biggest thorn in their side and who has spent the most time trying to restore the view and legal status of them that our founding fathers held, and to hold them to account, has been CONverted into a villian by the very same people likely whining the loudest about that decision. It's almost like he was supposed to know that Bush would turn into an unindicted war criminal whose only real success would be setting the bar for being spectacularly successful at failure or something. SHeesh, why not blame OBL, without which much of the Bush damage would likely never have occurred? Hell, without the "changing horses" scenario/mentality that the Iraq War posed, can it not be reasonably argued given his record otherwise to that point, that his reelection and last four years of potential damage would never have been as his father was prevented from doing?

I think there's something very inCONgruent/inCONsistent about all of that, but that's just me.

Maybe Gore simply lost his you know whats between here http://ri.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrBT4cM.LVTuEQAispXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEzOTJ0bWZ2BHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMgRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkA1ZJUDQ2MV8x/RV=2/RE=1404463245/RO=10/RU=http%3a%2f%2fwww.tvclip.biz%2fvideo%2foAUcyfKESts%2fal-gore-tries-to-intimidate-fight-george-bush-at-debates-nod.html/RK=0/RS=If3xqFOBTWJWrEEFoTgA_F_IZMM- and when he cried mommy and gave up.

Has anyone consulted the shadow about this?

If "we" collectively want the most "liberal" candidate possible, being taken for granted as we are every four years ain't the way to get it. The way to get it is to compel our candidates to fear the loss of doing/being otherwise, which would require more Naders, not less. It's a call for the promotion and maintenance of the status quo, even though for example, the last two dem presidents signed Glass-Steagall and the other let most of the crooks it produced off the hook.

WHat I'd really like to know is how anyone can expect leftism/liberalism to prevail on policy matters when the party that allegedly represents both fail to put those animals in the biggest fighting cage, or can deny the role that the "they're both the same enough to ignore the differences" mentality that results in and explains in no small part the apathy/disenchantment that keeps voter participation as low as it is in this country. How many Nader voters would have even voted period without his candidacy for example?

"In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all."[18]

and Nader ain't to blame for that. Corporatist/third way/DLC dems that couldn't get their interest and votes then are. While the Nader haters are all concerned about who got/gets the votes, they lose sight of those who don't vote and why, and the same applies to those who voted for him instead of Gore -- because both are due to what the dems either fail to provide or injustices they are instrumental in perpetuating, like income inequality, etc, etc, etc.

Nader represents the failures they support or fail to criticize, while criticizing and/or condemning those that do. The "bizness" he gets/has gotten differs little in substance or form from that recieved by any/all of us alleged racist BHO-haters around here have recieved. The reason/motivation are the same in both cases, given the prominence and prevalence of the "you're trying to cost us the election" charge found in their assaults.

I'm surprised that "Nader Jr" hasn't found its way into common usage around here by now.

July 1, 2014

Dems are struggling mightily for a solution to the hobbling of the Hobby Lobby decision

why get all complicated when single-payer will do, won't it?

Why not let the law of unintended CONsequences prevail before Mr. Murphy enters again from stage right with more religion based bondage in mind?

Oh that's right, they are hobbled by that "politically possible" thing. That's why, unlike with the unrealistic goals of rightwingers --like a Ryan budget -- they generally start from a less demanding position, you know, the way it was ignored in the last health care reform battle.

And as we can see, the country is now barely hanging on in the wake of that economy, etc, destroying Obamacare being implemented, and the rightwing swamis are feeling bold, authoritative, and even more uncompromising in the wake of their succesful predictions as the loving and empathetic stewards of the general welfare of we citizens that they've always been.

never mind

January 27, 2014

any so-called lib/lefty not familiar or that disagrees with

the good cop/bad cop situation this country is afflicted with is either ignorant or has succumbed to the fear of rightwingnuttery in the form of the bad cop. All the good cop has to do is "feel your pain" and express some supportive thoughts of the empathy kind and the goods are sold.

Thinking about it objectively, what was the expected result of the rise of the "Third Way/DLC" triangulation and therefore dependence on the same corporate/plutarchy/oligarchy/fascist -- whatever/however you wanna label it -- dollars, but the watering down of their championhood of the causes many of us still hold dear and that are all the things the modern "liberal" in DC is criticized for? It's easy to blame this on the voters, but with money playing such a huge role in our elections, their choices are basically limited to those who can raise it http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/22/barack-obama/obama-campaign-financed-large-donors-too/ and that always involves some kinda "payback".

That's your explanation for the continuing rise in inequality, and the chained cpi advocate and now champion of ending inequality has no intentions of actually ending it, just maybe scaling it back to acceptable levels now that it is having a measurable and undeniable negative impact on the capitalism engine in the form of a lack of fuel known as demand. And I'm sure, much as was the case back before the New Deal, that his corporate/etc pals will likely inevitably go along with it before the spectre of social disorder crystallizes into a hard reality. I see the recent efforts of the CoC, the repub changes to their electioneering, to oppose/sideline the Pee Partiers as much as possible as a sign that this round of wealth accumulation on the scale it has been is about over. Whether they are gonna be successful in killing the monster they created is a horse of a different color. The only certainty is that they can't attack BHO or any other dems for their role in that inequality as he/they can theirs, lest they reveal the role their money and influence has played in it with both parties as a matter of gov policies, for all the country to see. There is no "good cop" in that scenario, but the need for one to keep the left placated as much as possible is surely needed, which is why the repugs almost never attack the dems over such -- because the tag-teaming would then be plainly evident. The most recent example http://www.thenation.com/blog/178072/who-backs-tpp-and-nafta-steroids-alec# Stange bedfellows and all that, no?

The rise in rightwingnut extremism in recent years has been a deliberate effort on their part to stoke the fears and to lessen the tears of those on the left when they have to settle for rightwing-lite BS. Unfortunately for them and their good cop pals, the country is trending leftward in their political povs, and waking up to the fact that the ideological dividing line for our leaders in DC has been moved rightward, and is therefore in defiance of the majority will of the people.

BHO and HC have enjoyed their success as part of the Third Way charade. As to whether they'd have enjoyed a similar level of success as a real liberal, well, I'd bet that they'd never have done better than say, a Dennis Kucinich.