"We already have laws against rape and assault in this country. I don’t need a law against the purchase of sex to help me. What I need is to feel like the same laws that protect everyone else also protect me. If I am assaulted at work, I want to be able to go to the police and report the crime. Treating the purchase of sex as the problem undermines my experiences as a victim of sexual assault.
Criminalizing the purchase of sex frames all clients as abusers, when the reality is that they are not. Characterizing all of my clients as people who have exploited me completely discounts all of my experiences of actually being sexually assaulted at work." National Post
>>><<<
Most common languages in different US states, excluding English (and Spanish). Slate
>>><<<
"“So” at the start of a question often marks the beginning of a new topic that one of the parties wants to discuss, often called an “interactional agenda,” according to Bolden.
“When I ask—‘So how did your interview go?’—I indicate that I’ve been meaning to ask this question for a while, that it’s been on my mind, or incipient,” she explained." Slate
>>><<<
Two anecdotes from the same article, just because it's so good...
"Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?
Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either."
...
"But how can a Nigerian scammer tell who is gullible and who isn't? He can't. Gullibility is, in this case, an unobservable trait. But the scammer could invite the gullible people to reveal themselves.
How? By sending out such a ridiculous letter—including prominent mentions of Nigeria—that only a gullible person would take it seriously. Anyone with an ounce of sense or experience would immediately trash theemail. "The scammer wants to find the guy who hasn't heard of it," Dr. Herley says. "Anybody who doesn't fall off their chair laughing is exactly who he wants to talk to." Here's how Dr. Herley put it in a research paper: "The goal of the e-mail is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the nonviable ones, who greatly outnumber them.""
Wall Street Journal
>>><<<
"Information about the sex industry proliferates, but legislative and moralizing parties prefer to ignore those who provide it — the sex workers themselves — in favor of highly suspect accounts from arrested management figures, law enforcement, or figures of dubious credibility who create and inflate numbers with impunity.
What’s currently happening to sex workers across the world might best be described as willful erasure. At a time when sex worker voices are louder, more insistent, and more numerous than ever, many governments, pundits, and not-for-profits are determined to power ahead with their own agenda — ignoring the voices of those they claim to be concerned for." Jacobin
>>><<<
"During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, "new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups". The Pentagon was "keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database". The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who "have done something wrong" should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing." Guardian
>>><<<
"while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.
The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users." Guardian
>>><<<
"Journalism has the same problem. What you get—4,000 words summarizing some historical and epidemiological stuff most people already know—is totally out of proportion to what it costs to make it." Rotten in Denmark
>>><<<
"No one knew how severe the epidemic was among drug users until 1984, when the still-under-development antibody test found that 50 percent of drug users in New York City and Edinburgh and 30 percent in Amsterdam were already infected...
Here’s where the differences come in. Almost immediately after those first tests, Western European countries installed needle-exchange programs, gave out free syringes, and established opiate-substitution treatment. Germany even got needle vending machines. By 1997, England and Wales were giving out 25 million free syringes per year. Anything to keep the virus from spreading, even if it meant making it a little easier to be a heroin addict that day.
The United States, on the other hand, refused to provide federal funds for needle exchanges or even fund research into whether they were effective." New Republic
>>><<<
Most common languages in different US states, excluding English (and Spanish). Slate
>>><<<
"“So” at the start of a question often marks the beginning of a new topic that one of the parties wants to discuss, often called an “interactional agenda,” according to Bolden.
“When I ask—‘So how did your interview go?’—I indicate that I’ve been meaning to ask this question for a while, that it’s been on my mind, or incipient,” she explained." Slate
>>><<<
Two anecdotes from the same article, just because it's so good...
"Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?
Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either."
...
"But how can a Nigerian scammer tell who is gullible and who isn't? He can't. Gullibility is, in this case, an unobservable trait. But the scammer could invite the gullible people to reveal themselves.
How? By sending out such a ridiculous letter—including prominent mentions of Nigeria—that only a gullible person would take it seriously. Anyone with an ounce of sense or experience would immediately trash theemail. "The scammer wants to find the guy who hasn't heard of it," Dr. Herley says. "Anybody who doesn't fall off their chair laughing is exactly who he wants to talk to." Here's how Dr. Herley put it in a research paper: "The goal of the e-mail is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the nonviable ones, who greatly outnumber them.""
Wall Street Journal
>>><<<
"Information about the sex industry proliferates, but legislative and moralizing parties prefer to ignore those who provide it — the sex workers themselves — in favor of highly suspect accounts from arrested management figures, law enforcement, or figures of dubious credibility who create and inflate numbers with impunity.
What’s currently happening to sex workers across the world might best be described as willful erasure. At a time when sex worker voices are louder, more insistent, and more numerous than ever, many governments, pundits, and not-for-profits are determined to power ahead with their own agenda — ignoring the voices of those they claim to be concerned for." Jacobin
>>><<<
"During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, "new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups". The Pentagon was "keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database". The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who "have done something wrong" should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing." Guardian
>>><<<
"while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.
The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users." Guardian
>>><<<
"Journalism has the same problem. What you get—4,000 words summarizing some historical and epidemiological stuff most people already know—is totally out of proportion to what it costs to make it." Rotten in Denmark
>>><<<
"No one knew how severe the epidemic was among drug users until 1984, when the still-under-development antibody test found that 50 percent of drug users in New York City and Edinburgh and 30 percent in Amsterdam were already infected...
Here’s where the differences come in. Almost immediately after those first tests, Western European countries installed needle-exchange programs, gave out free syringes, and established opiate-substitution treatment. Germany even got needle vending machines. By 1997, England and Wales were giving out 25 million free syringes per year. Anything to keep the virus from spreading, even if it meant making it a little easier to be a heroin addict that day.
The United States, on the other hand, refused to provide federal funds for needle exchanges or even fund research into whether they were effective." New Republic
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