Category Archives: topographical

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Sex for Sale

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Oh dear; oh dear! They just do not understand do they! Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, has decided to boil the ocean. According to various news items yesterday (including on BBC News) she has said she wants to make it illegal in the UK to buy sex. This seems to be on the grounds that it is (a) abuse of women and (b) it’s been done successfully in Sweden. At the very least Mistress Harman (and it seems safe to assume she speaks for the disreputable control freaks we have for a government) wants a major open debate on the subject.

The very idea of making payment for sex illegal I find totally abhorrent. And no that’s not because I use (or ever have used) prostitutes. It is a purely open-minded and pragmatic approach.

So here is my (first?) contribution to the debate:

  1. Objection the first is that the whole thing will be unworkable. So it will be illegal to pay for sex. Bystander, over at the Magistrates Blog makes a good point: how is it possible to prevent the oldest profession. He observes: “As a lawyer you [Harriet Harman] will be aware that you belong to the world’s second-oldest profession. What chance have you got of outlawing the oldest?”
  2. No-one doubts that abuse happens within the prostitution trade. Equally everyone will agree it shouldn’t happen. But criminalising payment for sex isn’t going to make it go away; it’s going to make it worse: the protagonists will feel that as they’re already the wrong side of the law they have nothing to lose and that will just make the abuse and violence go underground. So everyone is actually worse off.
  3. Similarly with the drugs problem which many prostitutes are feeding, especially at the lower end of the market. If they’re engaging in a criminal activity already then they become even more vulnerable and potential prey for drug dealers. And there will be less funding etc. for those organisations who try to help the girls by providing needle exchange, condoms and sanity.
  4. There is also a major logic problem with the thinking. Apparently the idea is not to make it illegal to sell sex but illegal to buy for sex. What? How can you sell something legally when it is illegal for someone to buy it? Currently it is legal to sell and to buy sex; prostitution in the UK is not of itself illegal. But many activities associated with prostitution (kerb-crawling, soliciting, pimping, etc.) are illegal.
  5. Moreover there are ways round the “payment” restriction. As we know many “hostess clubs” already take large payments for bottles of champagne (or other food or drink) for which one gets the attentions of your chosen handmaiden. Said handmaiden is paid a wage by the club as a member of staff. How are the lawyers going to prevent such scams. John says he didn’t pay Kat for sex, he just bought an expensive bottle of champagne and some sandwiches; the fact that they had sex was because he came onto her ’cos she was gagging for it and so was he. Kat says she received no money from John, she had sex with him ’cos she fancied him and he seemed like a decent bloke. Case dismissed, M’Lud.
  6. In another BBC News article (from February 2007) they look at how the Swedish system – on which Mistress Harman proposes ours should be based – has actually worked. Answer: patchily at best. While it does appear to have reduced abuse and trafficking, it has also reduced the level of support for those prostitutes still working who have drugs habits; and the supply of condoms has also dried up.
  7. A third BBC News item (this one from December 2006) looked at the more liberal approach of the Netherlands, where they openly allow prostitution and protect their working girls. This works. Prostitution is legal (as long as the girls are registered), they can advertise their services, most work from rooms and few need to work the street. Those who do work the streets are looked after in safe zones. As one Dutch interviewee comments: “Prostitution is a reality … and in order to protect those women and men who engage in it, it should be given equal status to other occupations”. Incidentally for even further enlightenment read the readers’ comments to this article.
  8. “Equal status” is an interesting point. What is the human rights position on (the illegality of) prostitution? Is it not a basic human right to be able to sell ones body if one chooses to. And if that means a woman chooses to sell her vagina, mouth or hand in return of cash, or a pig, or loaves of bread, then why should she not be allowed to? I can sell my brain to the company I work for; I don’t get abused because the law says it’s illegal. If prostitution were legal then it would be easier for working girls to turn in those who abuse them, because that is already illegal. At the end of the day all work is prostitution of one form or another!
  9. Finally, something governments always seem to forget. If you make something legal, you can regulate it and tax it. In the case of prostitution this means that the girls would be paying tax and National Insurance, which is ultimately good for them and for the Treasury. It also means that if they’re regulated (as in Holland) then they can be licensed only if they have regular health checks, which should be good for the girls and ultimately save stress on the health service.

As usual it seems to me that the pragmatic Dutch – who incidentally also have the lowest teenage pregnancy rate in the West; a quarter of the UK rate and 10% of the USA’s rate! – have got it right. Legalise prostitution, don’t drive it further underground. Openness and trust does actually work!

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, memes, science, thoughts, topographical

Creationists Plan British Theme Park

There’s an article in today’s Observer which, at a personal level, I find more than somewhat disturbing. It begins

A business trust is looking at sites for a Christian showplace to challenge the theory of evolution.

Apparently there are plans being laid to build an intelligent design (ID) theme park (my phrase) in NW England.

At a personal level I find this deeply disturbing. Christianity, indeed all religion and politics, is about belief. But those who believe in ID claim it as science. Science is about knowledge. Thus belief does not (and by definition cannot) equal knowledge. ID is not science, or knowledge, but belief.

What’s more I find this Christian proselytising of their (to me misguided) beliefs objectionable. For me it is a basic human right that everyone is allowed to believe (or not) whatever they choose without having someone else’s beliefs rammed down their throats, as is the Christian way. Don’t get me wrong. I find all proselytising just as objectionable; it’s just that Christians seem to have a particularly well developed, self-righteous and nauseating form of it.

But this does give me a moral dilemma: freedom of thought and speech. Everyone is entitled to their opinion/belief, however misguided. And they are entitled to be allowed to express that belief. So morally I have to allow these people that freedom. I just find their beliefs, their methods, their self-righteousness and their closed minds deeply obscene.

books, history, quotes, thoughts, topographical

Not really so unlike today …

… England’s burgeoning prosperity, carried on a tide of coal and woollens and overseas ventures, and London’s unassailable claim to be England’s only city worth a fart, … with a boom that drew thousands of new dwellers to the capital each year, from across the land and from across the seas. And so the monasteries had at last been cleared, or their better halls kept and taken over for use by the city’s wealthy … grand town houses of the nobility now stretched along the Strand, each with its private stairs down to the Thames, for boats were the fastest and least troublesome way to travel about the crowded city, … and Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, with its great open piazza and arcaded colonnade and hundred shops for goldsmiths and armourers and financiers, had opened on the east end of Cheapside, heralding London’s arrival as the great centre of European trade and finance it had become.

And with the grandeur of prosperity came the squalor of prosperity, for each year the city burst a bit more to accommodate the destitute and the adventurers and the ambitious and the refugees drawn by hope or impelled by need. Within the city, hovels and tenements jostled with grand houses and merchants’ stalls; just beyond the gates, beyond the reach of the law of the good bourgeois aldermen, the filthy cottages of the poor crowded along the main roads to the north and the east, colonizing the fields where cattle had grazed but a few years before. Farther out, the brick kilns of Islington attracted the more desperate, the homeless unemployed looking for a warm place to sleep while they scrounged for work. And across the river, to the south, the suburb of Southwark teemed with shipwrights and sailors and semi-skilled craftsmen and foreigners and prostitutes, and with the crowds who frequented prostitutes and the bull-baitings and bear-baitings nearby.

The watermen who jammed the Thames calling “Westward ho!” and “Eastward ho!” for fares, and the carriers who carted in water to all who could afford to save themselves from the sickness and death of drinking right from the foul river; and the speculators who divided up some of the old decaying palaces of the wealthy into rude tenements, and the prostitutes, and the bull-baiters, and the butchers, and the tavern keepers, and the prison wardens, all saw little to choose between grandeur and squalor: demand was demand, and prosperity was prosperity.

It was not democracy; but London’s hugger-mugger jumbling together of rich and poor, merchants and seamen, aristocrats and tradesmen, cosmopolitans and vagabonds, foreigners and yokels, meant that all kinds of men crossed paths in London’s streets and alleys and churches. The parish register … lists them all in their succinct catalogue of baptisms, marriages, and burials: knight, parson, stranger; baker, cobbler, carpenter; gentleman, silkweaver, scrivener; merchant, blackamoor, vintner, broker, sugarmaker, porter. And so they all lived upon and walked upon the same streets, and rubbed elbows in the same taverns, and occasionally even the same prisons; and they heard things, and knew things, well outside the conventional stations that Elizabethan society assigned to men.

From: Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Franis Walsingham and the Birth of Modern Espionage; Plume/Penguin; 2006; ISBN 0452287472

amusements, current affairs, history, science, thoughts, topographical

Zen Mischievous Moments #132

From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007

Calendar chaos

[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.

Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.

Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …

Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.

One is left with just one question: Why?