Politics

Prostitution: regulation, exploitation and death

prostitution is literally killing women, by murder more than any other cause, and a whole heap of people simply don’t care.

No other industry with a comparable mortality rate is unregulated by the state, and in none of those industries would the workers be allowed to sign away their basic health and safety guarantees in order for more pay. Employers who try to coerce miners or firefighters to go into work without adequate safety measures are quite rightly prosecuted and socially condemned, yet the workplace death rate of those professions combined does not match just the homicide rate amongst prostitutes, let alone the death rate once drug overdoses are taken into account.

Hurrah for librarians

If you are restricting access to information, they will notice during the course of their normal duties, and they will let the world know, and then you will look like censoring buffoons. In February, in line with various other information-stifling… Read More ›

Too depressed to post

I did a lot of catching up on American feminist and political blogs today, and it’s looking more and more like the Democratic Party is allowing the factionalism between the Clinton and Obama camps to piss away electoral goodwill. Look… Read More ›

Misogyny hurting men

Here’s an example of misogyny hurting men — because the ultimate put-down of a man is to equate him to a woman. If we fight [for] the idea that being a woman is not something to be sneered at, we… Read More ›

Fetal presentations: an economist’s guide

Image Source: Dorland’s Medical Dictionary for Health Consumers. © 2007 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. Because at least one doesn’t seem prepared to acknowledge that foetal presentation makes any difference to birthing outcomes. Lauredhel has been astonishingly civil… Read More ›

Chunderama

Kathryn Jean Lopez at Townhall wishes the USA could have John Howard for their next President. In the final paragraphs she gets to her real point, which is that John McCain just isn’t conservative enough, and by damn he ought… Read More ›