Links - 16th June 2019 (2)

Occupy Hypocrisy - Posts - "Chicago Cubs ban fan who made 'disgusting' hand gesture associated with white power on air"
"Well, this is awkward" *Picture of Colin Kaepernick flashing white power aka ok sign*"
In comments: pictures of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Linda Sarsour, Colin Kaepernick, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson flashing the white power sign

Stephen Fry accused of using alt-right gesture instead of OK symbol - "Stephen Fry has been accused of using an alt-right and White Power symbol while promoting Mental Health Awareness Week.Why? Because 2019, and also, Twitter."

Ukraine's Pig-Fat Chocolate - "Salo restaurant, in Ukraine's western city of Lviv, has carved out a reputation for serving the eponymous Slavic food of cured pork fat with just about everything: The restaurant serves sushi rolls wrapped in strips of salo, and even an evil-sounding salo ice cream (that this correspondent didn't have the fortitude to try). But it's their boxes of chocolate salo that have proved a porky triumph for the business."

NPC Wars Reserve Corps - Posts - "Trump supporters aren't real people they're just Russian bots"
"haha yes"
"Leftists aren't real people they're just NPC's"
"this is sick and dehumanizing! BAN!"

Check Out How This Volvo Ad Was Run in America vs Poland - "In the post on their main page, the ad showed two homosexual men holding hands in front of a little girl driving a Volvo toy truck... In the comments, Volvo posted a message saying they're deleting all negative comments which violate their "social media house rules."The ad on Volvo's Poland page featured a straight couple with a little boy in the Volvo toy truck"
Plus the main page has the couple be interracial

Former Freemason found naked inside pipe organ in Brisbane - "Glenn Langford was arrested on Wednesday after allegedly flooding the Brisbane Masonic Memorial Centre and setting off the fire alarms... The court was told he had been meaning to hand out cheeseburgers to the homeless... He was also discovered naked along with clothes, a remote controlled police car and toy gun"

I,Hypocrite - Posts - "My Secret Grief: Over 35, Single, and Childless"
"How Did I Become the Last Single Person in My Friend Group?"
"All my friends are getting married & I'm kinda freaking out about it"
"Men rarely catcall me any more. I hate that our culture makes me miss it"
"The most undervalued women in America are childless aunts"
"My friends and I are single, childless - and running out of time"
"Why women in their 20s and 30s are choosing pets over kids"
"All my friends are getting married and leaving me behind!"
"I miss the catcalls"
"Would you marry yourself? Sologamy ceremonies are taking over"
"The love I'll never know: with unsparing honesty, one woman lays bare her regret at never having children"
"Why I never wanted to write about singleness in my 30s"
"Why I'm tired of casual sex"
"Tinder for cuddling: This app will find you a random stranger to spoon"
"'Pretty privilege', aging as a woman and dating in your 30s and beyond"
"The Thirtysomethings: A Hotbed of Angst for Single Women"

New Laws Forced Sex Workers Back On SF Streets, Caused 170% Spike In Human Trafficking - "The huge spike appears to be connected to the federal shutdown of sex-for-sale websites. The goal of shutting them down was to curb human trafficking. Instead, it seems to have had the opposite effect... Until April of last year, sex workers said they had a much safer alternative: websites like Backpage.com, where they could find clients as easily as swiping right on a dating app. But after Backpage was linked to sex trafficking of underage girls, lawmakers in Washington voted almost unanimously to make it illegal to advertise sex work online... the new laws, named the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) are forcing sex workers back onto the street and into the hands of pimps... Long estimates the number of street-based sex workers has tripled.“If you are a street-based sex worker, it’s much harder to negotiate your rates, to negotiate safer sex condom use, to make sure that this person who is picking you up in a car doesn’t have a knife or a gun,” she said.It’s not just sex workers whose lives are in danger on Shotwell St. People who live and work there say the violence is out of control."

Associations between sex work laws and sex workers’ health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of quantitative and qualitative studies - "Repressive policing of sex workers was associated with increased risk of sexual/physical violence from clients or other parties (odds ratio [OR] 2.99, 95% CI 1.96–4.57), HIV/STI (OR 1.87, 95% CI 1.60–2.19), and condomless sex (OR 1.42, 95% CI 1.03–1.94). The qualitative synthesis identified diverse forms of police violence and abuses of power, including arbitrary arrest, bribery and extortion, physical and sexual violence, failure to provide access to justice, and forced HIV testing. It showed that in contexts of criminalisation, the threat and enactment of police harassment and arrest of sex workers or their clients displaced sex workers into isolated work locations, disrupting peer support networks and service access, and limiting risk reduction opportunities. It discouraged sex workers from carrying condoms and exacerbated existing inequalities experienced by transgender, migrant, and drug-using sex workers. Evidence from decriminalised settings suggests that sex workers in these settings have greater negotiating power with clients and better access to justice... Together, the qualitative and quantitative evidence demonstrate the extensive harms associated with criminalisation of sex work, including laws and enforcement targeting the sale and purchase of sex, and activities relating to sex work organisation. There is an urgent need to reform sex-work-related laws and institutional practices so as to reduce harms and barriers to the realisation of health."
Of course, since the laws are not meant to make things better but enact a moral agenda, this doesn't matter

Kansas judge shortens convicted sex abuser's sentence because teenage victims were “aggressors.” - "A Kansas judge has come under fire after arguing that two girls under the age of 16 had been the “aggressors” in a sexual abuse case involving a 67-year-old man, the Kansas City Star reported. In pointing to what he saw as their active role in the encounter and their apparent lack of trauma, the judge sentenced the man to less than half the prison time recommended by Kansas sentencing guidelines... The judge, however, made a point of noting that the girls, ages 13 and 14, had voluntarily gone to Soden’s house and taken money for sexual favors. “I do find that the victims in this case, in particular, were more an aggressor than a participant in the criminal conduct,” Gibbens said. “They were certainly selling things monetarily that it’s against the law for even an adult to sell.”"
This is why we have mandatory sentencing laws that result in 25 years in prison for shoplifting

WALSH: A Feminist Sexually Assaulted A Man On Camera At The Women's March And Nobody Cares - "While everyone was having a panic attack because a high school kid smiled at a Native American, a far more egregious act went entirely unnoticed. Owen Shroyer, a reporter with Infowars, was sexually assaulted by a demonstrator at the Women's March. The act occurred on camera and the woman openly admitted to it... A woman walked over to Shroyer and groped his genitals, announced that she had "grabbed [him] by the balls," and then proudly said "yes" when asked if she had committed sexual assault. Meanwhile a group of police officers stood literally feet from the incident and did not intervene or arrest the sex predator... If she experiences any consequences for her actions, they will most likely be positive. I imagine she's upped her feminist street cred considerably. Maybe she'll get a contributor gig on CNN.This is why the MeToo movement is largely fraudulent and the feminist handwringing over sexual assault cannot be taken entirely seriously. They don't really care about sexual assault per se. They care about the political and ideological advantage they can gain from highlighting certain examples of assault... Well, in any case, at least we spent this week harping on the real crime: a teenaged boy's smirk. Clearly that is where all of our anger should be focused. We need not spend any time condemning a grown woman who walked casually up to a man and groped him. In fact, we can keep pretending that such things never happen. It's easier to say they never happen if you studiously ignore them when they do."

ProJared, Male Feminist Files For Divorce While Salacious Details Of Sexual Misconduct Surface - "YouTuber Jared “ProJared” Knabenbauer announced that he was divorcing his wife. The announcement was followed by his wife, Heidi O’Ferrall, taking to Twitter to air the couple’s dirty laundry, which had a domino effect of getting other people to air their own grievances and encounters with the YouTuber, some of which alleged misconduct on ProJared’s behalf."

Apparently, clubs now need to hire consent guardians – clearly we've misunderstood human sexuality - "One of the clearest imaginable examples of cultural capitalism is surely the commodification of our intimate life. This is a permanent feature of a capitalist society, but in the last decades it’s reached a new level. Just think about how our search for sexual partners and for good sexual performance rely on dating agencies or websites, medical and psychological help, and so on.House of Yes, in Brooklyn, New York, adds a new twist to this game: the intricate problem of how to verify consent in a sexual interplay is resolved by the presence of a hired controlling agent. The club is a hedonistic playground where “anything goes”... One of its most popular features is the introduction of “consenticorns”, people whose job it is to monitor the goings on and ensure no one’s consent is being violated. In the House of Yes, customers can do anything from naked hot tubs to drag wrestling, but they have to adhere to a strict consent policy, which is ultimately enforced by “consenticorns,” the “consent guardians” who wear light-up unicorn horns... This seems to have gone down well in liberal circles. Arwa Mahdawi even wrote in The Guardian that: “House of Yes’s success is an important reminder that the stricter we are about consent, the more fun everyone can have.” I must confess that I don’t want even to imagine such a place. Remember we are talking about having (intimate, sexualised) fun, and the implication of Mahdawi’s claim is that, in today’s society, the consent required for pure fun can only be enforced through tight control – the stricter the control over us is, the more fun everyone can have... Perhaps the partisans of the House of Yes imagine a future state where consenticorns will no longer be needed since individuals will leave behind their egotist aggressivity. However, if we learned anything from psychoanalysis it is that masochism and sadism, pleasure and pain in all its diverse forms, is an irreducible ingredient of our sexual lives, not just a secondary effect of social domination perturbing pure consensual joy. We would thus need consenticorns able to distinguish consensual sadomasochism from the exploitative one – an impossible task... The idea of consenticorns is problematic for two interconnected reasons. First, it offers to resolve the problem of non-consensual sex by way of delegating the responsibility to an external hired controller: I can remain the way I am, the consenticorn will take care of me if I go too far. And if I do behave properly, it is because I fear of being caught by the controlling eye. Second, the idea of a consenticorn totally ignores the perverse implications of its practice, the unpredictable way the figure of consenticorn itself may get eroticised.But, maybe, this is our perverse future"