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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • memfree@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you approve sex work? Why or why not?
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    1 month ago

    I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:

    After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”

    OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”

    While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.

    “The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”

    A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.




  • Why can’t the U.S. buy decent sauerkraut at the store? Why must we make it ourselves or get awful kraut? Germany has a unique and delightful kraut for seemingly every town and village, but the U.S. has exactly one type from a handful of companies that all make it the same. Well, maybe two types if you count ‘canned’ but I don’t reckon that to be actual sauerkraut. What was the topic? Sandwiches? Well, if I could find a good kraut, I would spend my days trying to recreate a reuben-like masterpiece.



  • Find an individual reviewer you agree with and follow them.

    Exactly! You can also find more than one to follow, and take note of which never match your tastes. For me, I will avoid any movie recommended by PBS’s Patrick Stoner until/unless someone I trust tells me otherwise. I used to have two critics I particularly followed. One had the same taste in foreign film as I, and the other was ready to enjoy a stupid Hollywood rollick. Alas, I’ve lost track of the former and the latter is now at Slate doing a variety of stuff. The result is I pretty much stopped going to the theater.





  • Cory Doctorow has been calling out this enshittification for years. The whole read is good, but here is a sample chunk:

    Amazon’s monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.

    Amazon is no longer a place where a scrappy independent seller can find an audience for its products. In order to navigate the minefield Amazon lays for its sellers (who have no choice but to sell there), these indie companies are forced to sell out to gators (aggregators), which are now multi-billion-dollar businesses in their own right:

    See also his piece Amazon is a ripoff.

    A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon’s own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and “junk ads” (that don’t match your search) turn Amazon’s search-ordering into a rigged casino game.



  • It would be more useful if Biden did the Court thing rather than waiting for Harris to maybe do it if she wins. What if she doesn’t win? What is she wins, but the existing Court does yet more damage between now and then?

    I do agree with you that Biden was a good President. I’ve never seen a President that did all the stuff we wanted, but they’ve always faced opposition and had to make comprises to get anything at all pushed through. I really wanted nationalized health care, but the best Obama could do was Obamacare – which isn’t great, but is sooo much better than the whole ‘pre-existing conditions’ denial system we had before. I really want the U.S. to stop backing Israel because of the Gaza crisis, but I don’t want to see all the surrounding nations to wipe Israel off the map if the U.S. isn’t there. I thought Biden gave a fantastic State of the Union speech. We know it was on a teleprompter, but he delivered with energy and style. I suspect his decline (as with so many other aging people) has been uneven/sporadic, so I can’t even blame anyone for ‘hiding’ his decline because I bet everyone was seeing lots of good days in there, too – at least until the last month or so.

    Off topic: I have a relative going through a sudden decline. She’s been old for a long time, but the last couple months have been a dramatic change for the worse despite no particular health issue. She’s just suddenly much, much older and even her neighbors are commenting to us family. Seeing it in her, I imagine Biden might be going through the same thing.


  • Washington state and New Jersey specifically allow certain types of euthanasia, but I’m not sure how illegal it is – or any ‘suicide’ is – in different places. Is euthanasia a crime in your state? Is (attempted) suicide?

    Murdering someone **else ** is a crime, so it is nice to have laws specifying how a person can legally help someone without being charged with murder.

    The U.S. has historically not ‘punished’ suicide as much more than a misdemeanor, if at all. From PDF paper from 1962:

    As stated by a leading authority on criminal law30

    When a man is in the act of taking his own life there seems to be little advantage in having the law say to him: “You will be punished if you fail.” … What is done to him will not tend to deter others because those bent on self- destruction do not expect to be unsuccessful. It is doubtful whether anything is gained by treating such conduct as a crime

    England, on the other hand, was very hostile to suicide until it was decriminalized in 1961 (paper is too old to mention current status):

    A person who committed suicide was punished at common law by burial in the public highway with a stake driven through his body and by forfeiture of his goods and chattels to the king.’ Attempted suicide was apparently punished like any other misdemeanor.


  • Read the lines before that – or at least read the “also” to notice stabbing is a secondary injury.

    Mostly: just put the avocado down! ERs feel the need to warn about how common an accident this is, so why tempt fate?

    People lose their grip on the avocado and accidentally slice their palms or fingers, doctors have warned. When this happens, there’s a high likelihood of people accidentally severing their nerves or tendons. However, people also tend to stab themselves in the hand as they attempt to use the knife tip to remove the avocado pit.

    From the Sun:

    Wolfe recommended holding an avocado down on a cutting board and slicing into it with the dominant hand, cutting around the fruit at the equator, then rolling it halfway over and cutting again, according to CBS New York.