1. Super Bowl sex trafficking is back in the spotlight. Bill Price covers the Indiana Attorney General’s recruitment of cab drivers to serve as the “eyes and ears” to fight the so-called scourge, one which seems more like a myth. HuffPo reports on nuns working to fight prostitution – which is conveniently juxtaposed with trafficking for the sake of sensationalism. Links to my coverage of the hysteria last year: Change.org’s petition; Traffick911′s distortion; Texas Attorney General’s misinformation; the process by which the government shacks up with activists in a fiscal feedback loop; the mathematical improbability of “10,000″ prostitutes descending on the Super Bowl.
2. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo on the “pajama craze“:
As you might expect, a whole lot of silly and just-plain-mean people aren’t happy about this nascent pajama craze. A number of school districts have banned sleeping clothes on the theory that they somehow inhibit students’ motivation. The idea, I guess, is that taking the time to dress up for school makes you ready to learn—which sounds plausible until you think about it for five seconds. Isn’t spending time worrying about what you’ll wear an even bigger distraction from academics?
Manjoo favors pajamas, though I think everyone will form an opinion based upon their subjective valuation of pajama wearing. Myself: I feel lazy and unmotivated when I walk around the house in my underwear or whatever else I wore to bed the night before. Putting on “outside pants” and a decent pair of shoes goes a long way towards switching my mind into “do something” mode. An extension of this is ironing. I wear a dress shirt and tie to work for my waiter job. How many times I’ve thought about how much better and more prepared I feel when my shirt is ironed with crisp sleeve creases versus when I just grab it from the drier and throw it on.
3. Commenter Cannon’s Cannon linked to an interesting piece written back in the 1990s by Roger Kimball which reflects on the social upheaval of the 1960s which began as campus revolution.
4. The U.S. tax system is pretty fucking progressive.
5. More research that we already knew was true: mens’ approach time of women decreases when women wear more suggestive clothing. SlutWalkers….well, let’s start calling them SlutRunners. They must run really fast to escape the fact that men are drawn to displays of sexual suggestion, and some guys will grossly misinterpret this suggestion and/or devalue the woman making the suggestion which can lead to a number of unfortunate things, including rape.
6. Michael Moore walking around with earbuds like your typical poorly-adjusted teenage idiot. He also thinks the highest marginal tax rate should be about 50%. So we went from a 0% marginal income tax rate about 100 years ago to, if Moore got his way, one that takes half of income (not including property tax, sales tax, and state tax). Do they ignore that tax rates are arbitrary and relative?
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Putting on “outside pants” and a decent pair of shoes goes a long way towards switching my mind into “do something” mode.
Exactly. On the rare occasions that I wear basketball shorts (my version of PJs) around the house, I’m always a lazy, unproductive piece of shit until I get dressed. I refuse to leave the house in sleeping attire, but I can’t imagine that wearing PJs around all day does wonders for your productivity.
Cab drivers work for tips. Some idiot govt official really thinks a cabbie is going to cockblock an out-of-town guy from finding a hooker?
nick:
especially without any sort of compensation for his effort. fucking idiots. that’s what cops are for; beef up the police force commensurate with the threat, but don’t go roping private citizens into your witch hunt.
Jesus, is it time for the superbowl (plus trafficking scare-talk) already?
Swear the last go around seems like it happened just yesterday.
1. The pajama thing is silly. Chicks often wore pajama-like clothes to class even in middle school, but in high school, college, and beyond, especially during high-stress times like finals. It was their way of showing how frazzled they were—”look, i juts rolled out of bed because I studied so much! And this is my comfort technique, staying in comfy clothes!” The only difference is that some faggy fashion designer—-PA?—-made this into a line of clothing, increasing the popularity.
2. People should be allowed to buy and sell their bodies of their own free will. This “crackdown” is just a bunch of feminazis trying to stop guys from having consensual fun with fresh Indiana farm girls, because feminazis hate men liking their penises.
I live in Indianapolis and this issue of Super Bowl sex trafficking has been much discussed here. It’s been pointed out that predictions of lots of sex trafficking were made before the Dallas Super Bowl last year but very few arrests actually ended up being made. A lot of money was spent on extra police there and it was mostly wasted money because they had trouble finding anyone to arrest.
P.S. the whole “sex trafficking” lie always comes up when male-centered events come around—i.e. most of the people who attend and watch the superbowl will be guys, and guys who travel away from home are more likely to get hookers to “have a fun time.”
In January, there’s a big porn expo, biggest of the year, in Las Vegas, followed by awards ceremonies for “best cum swallowing” (PA always wins) . It’s the Oscars for Vegas combined with a trade show.
Coincidentally, at the exact same time every year, there’s a big high tech convention in Vegas. I wonder why.
Funny that feminists haven’t jumped on that time to complain about “sex trafficking.” Probably because the porn stars there also engage in “sex positive” defenses of their sluttitude and then go sell their bodies to the geeks.
Nuns crusading against prostitution? For each nun who willingly, and with malice aforethought, removes herself from the sex pool, there is a corresponding man who needs to find somplace else to get laid. Just like the government, they create a problem, then at all costs prevent a solution. I wonder if they could work hand-in-hand with vice cops on hooker stings? Get the john back to the motel room, have him whip it out, and just as the door kicks in, she smacks his crank with a ruler.
Nick, your vision of nuns is about 60 years removed from today’s world.
There was a big whoop-de-doo at the last World Cup in Germany, where a shitload of temporary housing was built to accomodate the influx of foreign hookers, who were to accomodate the influx of horny, foreign soccer fans. It all went largely unused. The FIFA planners, quite wrongly, projected their own proclivities onto the masses.
whorefinder, do the nuns no longer use rulers?
Nick:
1. That’s surprising, given that prostitution is legal in Germany.
2. Don’t you know? Habits and rulers and rules are out; “hugging it out” and “world-weariness” and “accepting homosexuality” and “left wing movements” and “blaming men” are in. Which, of course, has nothing to do with the rapid decline in church attendance.
I’m in Indy and saw 2 hookers on the street today. Kind of nice to see someone on the street worth checking out.
I heard a lot of visitors to the last world cup got in, got out and didnt use the services because of 1. AIDS/HIV fears and 2. South Africa is a crime riddled hell hole.
I recall listening to Mississippi Jim Giles’ internet radio show just prior to the Dallas Super Bowl. He called up the Dallas PD and asked the spokeswoman if she didn’t think that the Super Bowl should be cancelled in light of all these reports of an impending sex trafficking tsunami.
She didn’t agree.
Giles, when he was able to control himself, was the greatest radio talent in history.
Of course there will be hookers upticking in their business due to the super bowl. But the smart hookers are pretty much invisible anyway, rather than being streetwalkers. The upscale prostitution that exists in the US (and which travels as well, and will travel to Indy no doubt) is basically hiding in plain sight but is not enforced against unless it is run as a ring (thereby generating enough untaxed income to get the state excited about it). There are literally tens of thousands of women who quite obviously advertise as hookers on the internet who are not enforced against at all, and they won’t be enforced against at the Super Bowl, either, because these things are just not the “kind of prostitution” they are interested in enforcing against (i.e., streetwalkers and prostitution rings). High-end internet call girls working out of hotel rooms are hiding in plain sight, but because they are out of public view, and because they individually don’t make enough money for the state to dedicate resources against them to recover that, their trade goes almost entirely unenforced.
The US loves hookers — it’s full of hookers. It just doesn’t like streetwalkers and it doesn’t like prostitution rings. Indpendent girls working it on the internet? No problem.
How are we supposed to function at full steam if we’re wearing what we wear to sleep? If we culturally listened to a particular type of music only when we slept and then tried to listen to it while we were studying, it would work. Same goes for clothes.
And the study thing aside, how am I supposed to take an adult seriously who’s wearing flannel pants, a hoodie and slippers out in public at 1:30 in the afternoon?