Oh thank god – at last women can eat cashews and walnuts. They’re more expensive than the men’s, of course, but at least we can have them.

… Read the rest

The empowerment of sex work:

Lauren Darlington looked every bit the sweet 16-year-old with a mouth full of braces when her mum forged her birth certificate so she could work as a prostitute. Seven years later she is real, raw about her demons, blogging to touch others.

Her mother got half her earnings – in other words her mother was her pimp. That’s nice.

Lauren agreed to having sex for money – she wanted to get her mum out of financial trouble. But now, aged 23, she realises she was a vulnerable child and she is still paying the price and trying to make sense of the memories.

Looking back she can see she was being groomed, heavily influenced

Guest post by James Garnett, a followup to his post yesterday.

We all know this, but it’s worth stating again: being able to build equity over time is a very important way that most of us are able to get ahead in the world. Working hard matters, too, but it’s not enough.

My father worked hard. On his return from naval service in the Korean War, he used the GI Bill to earn a degree in engineering. That got him a good job, with which he and my mother were able to buy a small home on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Over the years, they saved money and built home equity, and by the time the 1980’s … Read the rest

And here we have Maine governor Paul LePage being “colorful.”

Paul R. LePage, the ever-combative Republican governor of Maine, refused on Friday to apologize to a Democratic state lawmaker for leaving a threatening and expletive-studded voicemail message that was criticized by some state Republicans and left top Democrats suggesting that Mr. LePage should resign.

You’ll be wanting to know what the expletives were. The Times doesn’t want to tell you, but I listened to a recording at Salon. The epithets were:

• You cocksucher.
• You little socialist son of a bitch cocksucker.

Not very gubernatorial, I think you’ll agree.

Mr. LePage did apologize in a statement Friday to the state for his choice of words in the voicemail message, but

There are a lot of ways to enforce orthodoxy. A very popular one right now is to accuse heretics of “denying my/our lived experience,” at which point the heretic had damn well better apologize and swear to do better, or else prepare to be shunned.

But lived experience isn’t a conversation-ender. People can claim to have experienced anything, including absurdities, so why should it be treated as ungainsayable? People have claimed to be victims of  Satanic rituals, alien abductions, the Freemasons, reverse racism, hauntings, The Jews, misandry – you name it. They’re not always right, and they’re not always telling the truth. We’re not required to believe everyone’s stories about “lived experience,” so the accusation of failing to do … Read the rest

So there was a book launch today in Townsville, Queensland in Australia of Prostitution Narratives, a compilation of sex trade survivor testimonies. The launch was disrupted by pro sex trade advocates.

Members of the public were invited to the book launch at a Townsville domestic violence service over three weeks ago, through advertising on social media.

The domestic violence service that offered the use of their conference room, as they do for many groups,  was contacted by a representative of local sex industry group RESPECT, a couple of weeks ago. They said they disagreed with the event and asked to leave their flyers at the venue.  The host service agreed to accept the flyers.

On Friday last week

Maajid Nawaz had an excellent piece on the “burkini” issue at the Daily Beast yesterday. He says the ban is absurd and petty, and also playing into the hands of the Islamists, who want to see a religious war cleaving the world into two factions. But he also says that the whole “modesty” thing is terrible.

There is no better way to kickstart dividing people along exclusively religious lines than by committing atrocities in the name of Islam. Their hope is that everyone else also begins to identify Sunni Muslims primarily by their religious identities, in reaction to the atrocities. In this way, religious identity has won and citizenship becomes redundant.

But the backward trajectory of contemporary liberalism is

Mahnaz Nadeem has an excellent piece on the burkini ban at Sedaa.

She looks back to a time when Muslims weren’t under relentless pressure to demonstrate their religiosity.

Before then Islam was cultural and spiritual and no-one was publicly over-preoccupied with proving how puritanical they were; they were more concerned about the day-to-day and making the most of their arrival to this land of opportunity. Iranian Fatwas, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine issue, 9/11 and Wahhabi funding changed our psyche so that we came to adopt religious positions by default on absolutely everything under the sun.

Which is a bad trend, because the religious position isn’t always the best one, to put it mildly.

Muslim women who wear the costume are

Breaking news: France’s highest administrative court has ruled the burkini ban illegal.

The State Council upheld a challenge by human rights groups which argued that the ban in the Riviera resort of Villeneuve-sur-Loubet infringed personal freedoms in a ruling that is likely to set a legal precedent for 29 other towns that have banned the garment.

The ban “constituted a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of fundamental liberties, ” the State Council said in its judgement.

Patrice Spinosi, a lawyer for the Human Rights League, said the decision to “suspend” the ban would also apply to the other 29 French towns.

I’m sure you’re all well familiar with this incident in Nice:

There’s no denying it’s beyond bizarre … Read the rest

In more news from the Moral Squalor Files – the ACLU is suing an Arkansas county for setting up a debtors’ prison.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the City of Sherwood, its district court judge, and Pulaski County. The suit claims they’re violating a person’s due process rights, and preying on the poor, by creating a never-ending spiral in hot check cases.

This lawsuit claims that the Sherwood courts are trapping people into a never-ending spiral of repetitive court proceedings and ever-increasing debt, adding it’s been happening for the past 25 years or so.

Squalid though we are, we don’t allow debtors’ prisons.

“In this country, you cannot be jailed if you