Check your facts. Stalin killed more, but we’re way ahead on incarceration.
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I wouldn’t go that far! Arguments for “self-interest” fall apart quickly when one applies the simple set-theory of individuals being a subset of a society, which is a subset of an ecology. So it has primacy how? The elephant isn’t merely “in the room”, the room is merely a scaffold applied directly to the elephant, with no room for anything else inside.
I did. From what I can find, the US jails about 2.5% of it’s population (a little over 7 million as of 2003). Stats on Stalin’s USSR show that between 2.5 and 3 million known people (Russian and non-Russian Soviet State citizens) were in some sort of Soviet prison in 1938. The main difference is that the Soviets seemed less concerned with keeping prisoners alive to bilk the prison-industrial complex American private prisons feed on, so I suppose that’s one factor in why a lot more Soviet prisoners died. Regardless, both countries incarcerated/incarcerate in the millions of of their own citizens, and keep vast punitive surveillance on millions more. No other industrialized country comes close (China surveils more, but imprisons less, and North Korea is a prison). I stand by my point.
I’m happy to debate numbers/stats with you, but it seems like we’re agreeing violently 
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Next thing you know, all our taxes will be going up to pay for Eroticare for the freeloading.47%.
Not as far-fetched as you might think, BTW.
I used to work in the intellectual disability / traumatic brain injury field. Taking your clients to the brothel for their monthly visit is a normal part of the job. There are sex workers who specialise in looking after people with disabilities.
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I didn’t say it was a bad thing.
I volunteer with disabled people, many wheelchair bound. Once or twice I’ve been in the background when they start discussing their problems in finding sexual pleasure. It can be eye-opening.
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The fact that people here can take this idea seriously makes me feel so at home.
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You think that “we” have anything to do with it?
This term amuses me. Those facts… not so much.
…NOBODY TOLD ME THIS WAS A THING! WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED THAT THIS WAS A THING THAT WAS A THING?! I GOT ROBBED OF VALUABLE NEED TO KNOW INFORMATION HERE!
Oh, right… wrong disability. I’m (legally) blind, not mobility impaired.
In all seriousness if this were a thing discussed do you have any idea how fast that agency even jokingly entertaining the notion would be de-funded?
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I don’t think it’s simple. I don’t think it’s easy. But the only reason rich people have more power than the rest of us, is because we agree to take their money. Once we stop, they lose their power. So yes, absolutely, “we” have everything to do with it.
I think you’re both incorrect, but you less so (I’ve heard the “we incarcerate more than Stalin did” line several times and it bothers me more than a litte).
Correctional Populations in the United States, 2014 is the most recent I can find. There were 6,851,000 people under “correctional supervision” of any kind in that year, which includes probation, parole, jail and prison (that’s 2.14% of the 318.9 million population at the time). There were 2,224,400 persons incarcerated (i.e. in jail or prison) for .7% and 4,708,100 on probation and parole for 1.4%.
Gulag stats are mega-unsound, but Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence is pretty thorough and seems to show that Soviet gulag & camp population peaked in 1950 at 2.5 million, which is more than were incarcerated in the US in 2014.
Judging simply by raw numbers (more incarcerated = worse governance) the Stalinist USSR was “worse” than contemporary America. Judging by percentage of the total population it appears they were also “worse”. There wasn’t a census in the USSR between 39 and 59 but the Wikipedia article on the demographics of the USSR cites this document suggesting that 182,321,000 people lived in the USSR in 1951, and 2.5 million is 1.4% of that (the same proportion we had on parole and probation in 2014).
Considering also the executions and starvation and other deaths related to the gulags and encampments, and factoring in all the cop-killings and legal executions in 21st-century America, the Soviet Union under Stalin still stands out as a far more horrible sort of state.
I mean, I get it: it’s rhetoric. It’s just inaccurate rhetoric that undermines itself and, to my mind, cheapens the lives and plight involved. Highlighting the grotesque injustices of the contemporary American penal and legal systems seems a better way to appeal to peoples’ consciences than hamfistedly comparing our current circumstances to questionable statistics about the horrors of the USSR.
(also, to be clear, I’m not attacking you personally, I’m just clearing these things up as best I can because the heinous wrongness of the situations should force us to seek the truth)
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Rich people have literally more speech and influence than us. They outnumber us in this context.
“Refusing their money” will make us poor and suffer, not free.
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“I don’t know about free beer, but I think that for many of us, sex is usually free”
Well, you know, tanstaaff. There’s always, one way or another a . . . cost.
I hardly consider any happy interactions with a partner a “cost”.
It’s transactional like all of my friendships have effort in, but that doesn’t mean that I’m “paying” for friends either.
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And that’s the thing about the quote. When “Dan” says, “free sex” he it revealing his view of relationships as basically transactional.
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I mean, as a social science bent person in my non-work life, I’m fine with cultivating relationships by making choices that will improve and extend my bond with persons. And if that’s one-sided so be it, I value my relationships more than expecting all social capital be “repaid”.
That is not the same as “ha ha all dating is out money in get sex out AMIRITE” as they imply, of course.
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The main point I was driving at is that I think most Americans - especially Americans who present like me, a straight white male - assume living under an oppressive system always means everyday life is some sort of perpetually overcast black-and-white nightmare. Whereas non-SWM’s are far more aware of how easily they could be killed or locked up for petty crimes or on false or spurious charges or simply because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time or out of money to pay for fines and legal costs.
The American penal system keeps it’s vast prison population virtually invisible, out of sight so they’re out of mind of the majority of people who could mobilize for real political change. It’s kind of amazing to me that millions of Americans can simply disappear into the penal system and very few people seem conscious of it. I don’t doubt that living in 1950 USSR was horrible for a lot more people. Perhaps that’s the problem. In the USSR anyone from the lowest peasant farmer to the most ardently Marxist politburo official lived in fear of imprison or death or both. In today’s America, if your poor or black or brown, you live with the sword over your head, but the rest only encounter the prison-industrial complex as an inconvenience, not an active threat to their freedom or existence.
In short, for the supposedly most free country on Earth, freedom is a privilege, not the right it should be; and not all Americans are living in the free world, even though they’re our neighbors and fellow citizens. There’s a dissonance between the American ideals we cherish and the America we actually live in, and only when enough people face and accept that will we move towards the beautiful ideals of our national optimism.
I concede I did a poor job of making that point in my initial pithy comment.
Fair enough. I appreciate the more recent statistics.
Thank you for saying so, but the tone of your reply didn’t sound like an attack anyway. It was thoughtful and appreciated.
There is indeed, and we really ought to fix it.
Decriminalizing drugs, just as one example, would prevent a lot of the cyclic arrests & incarcerations that permanently ruin so many minority lives. Going a step further and legalizing drugs would drastically defund both foreign and domestic traffickers & the extensive militias they’ve developed and would (presumably) lead to stable employment of producers rather than the quasi-legal hell in which they currently operate. It would also allow us to spend more money treating addiction & helping the dependent into productive, healthy lives.
Interestingly, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (http://leap.cc) is trying to make inroads into that project by (among other things) directly addressing enforcement employees themselves.
You’re welcome. This is a bit off-topic I guess, but this issue and the free availability of laws and standards both concern justice and systematic abuse of power and the daunting task of working against cultural momentum…
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Before we ‘normalise and destigmatise selling sex as legitimate work’ we need a society in which it’s not difficult for everyone to easily achieve a reasonable minimum standard of living by other means. Once that is in place, if people freely choose to rent their bodies by the hour for others’ sexual pleasure (because they also gain job satisfaction it, more than the mere cash involved), then would be the time to normalise it.
At the moment there are those who are coerced into sex work and those who do it out of economic necessity. They are dug deeper into their plight by ‘normalising’. Why would anyone need or want to assist someone who is just doing a “normal” job?
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