But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn’t. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won’t get through the skittering heartbeat of “BUT IT FEELS BAD”

I wouldn’t sell logic, flow-charts, and diagrams short. But its worth considering how much sex-negativity pervades Abrahamic Western culture up front. It isn’t that we’re devoid of logic when it comes to sex and business, its that we’ve been sold a bill of goods at a very early age. It feels bad because its been drummed into us as bad.

I don’t really know how to fix this.

It’s difficult to balance, because the defensive social posture around sex is itself a social counterbalance to the aggressive instinctual impulse people can feel naturally. Leaving people to go full Lord of the Flies on their sexual urges leads to violence and fear and resentment. What we want is a more nuanced understanding of the sexual drive. But that’s harder to achieve than blanket permission or blanket sanction. You want some kind of bureaucratic convention to apply, which gets you to institutions like marriage, but that gets you to the commodification of virginity which is its own can of worms.

If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.

I would argue that sex work is ultimately a negative externality of the rent-system broadly speaking. If you constantly need to generate income for basic essentials - food, shelter, energy, etc - then the people cartelizing those services become your defacto pimps. By contrast, if your basic needs are guaranteed, sex as a profession becomes something you can choose as an entrepreneurial passion rather than a lifeline for your survival.

The fixation on the sex work itself is the problem. What people need is public housing and utilities, guaranteed sustenance, and a pathway to a career of their choosing. That plus decriminalization removes the network of pimps that make sex work truly morally abhorrent.

incidents of actual terrorism and not people forgetting something in their bag

You’re backing yourself into a corner, because you now seem to acknowledge TSA is doing something, you just think its a thing that only applies to “good” people rather than “bad” people.

And your rubric is contradictory. If the TSA stops you with a gun before you get on the plane, you get to say “My bad, please just let me off with warning” or they’ve failed at their jobs. But if you let someone with a gun onto a plane and then they hijack the plane, they’ve failed to stop a terrorist. How does a TSA agent stop a terrorist incident on these terms? Is the argument that the TSA is useless because terrorist attacks aren’t being thwarted at the moment the individual passes through the metal detector?

air Marshalls and other increased security in the actual plane like hard locked cockpits

Are additional measures that help screen for less-conventional weapons and strategies. But, again, we seem to be using “stopped a terrorist attack” as only happening after it has begun. TSA isn’t on board the planes, so there’s no way they can ever do the thing you’re giving Air Marshals and locked doors credit for.

That TSA as a first-stage screen reduces the number of incidents air marshals and door locks have to prevent as a last resort doesn’t seem to matter.

For example, a sex worker can’t work from home if they’re a renter because leases have provisions banning illegal activity on the premises, she said. A sex worker setting up a working space for other sex workers is also illegal, so they’re not allowed to set up co-working spaces or purchase hotel rooms for one another.

The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, or Bill C-36, says that in Canada you cannot buy sex, advertise sex, make money selling sex, procure a person selling sex or talk about selling sex in public. Sex workers get an exemption for making money from and advertising sex.

This also prevents sex workers from working with third parties to help with advertising, find clients or run a business, Clamen added.

So, the sticky legal morass is the issue of the pimp (or, as it is more colloquially referred to, the Employer) who seeks to tax some or all of the sex worker’s earnings as a condition of her doing business in the area. On the one hand, criminality affords the pimp more leverage by offering “protection” as a condition of rent-seeking the worker. On the other hand, a lot of what is being described above - acquiring working space, soliciting, contracting out sex workers, and extending credit to sex workers - is exactly what a pimp does, in practice.

What we’re really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you’re selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you’re selling involves sex worker’s services, we realize what we’re advocating is human trafficking.

The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform’s website notes how Indigenous women, racialized immigrants and trans people, especially trans women, face disproportionately higher levels of policing regardless of their participation in sex work. “The criminalization of the sale or exchange of sexual services gravely exacerbates their stigmatization and marginalization,” the website adds.

You can trace this down a bit further and discover how many of these officers are themselves involved in the protection racket, extorting sex workers for money or outright assaulting them under cover of law by using the threat of an arrest as leverage.

Border security agents are using facial recognition software to identify sex workers and tie their online profiles or ads to their legal identification, Rothschild said. When these programs are successful at matching people’s faces to their ads, they can get banned from travelling to the United States for 10 years, or will have to pay $10,000 to be allowed to re-enter the country, they added.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations prohibit anyone without Canadian citizenship or permanent residence from doing sex work and presumes migrant sex workers need rescuing rather than supports that enable them to make their own work decisions, according to the Alliance for Gender Justice in Migration.

This prohibition, combined with strict bylaws like the background checks required in Richmond, means sex workers in the most precarious positions are pushed further into the margins, Rothschild said.

The end result of these rules is to limit workers’ freedom to travel, to earn income, and to accumulate property. And the goal of these policies - whether it is admitted to or not - is ultimately to compel these workers into underpaid (or outright unpaid) servitude.

The purpose of the system is its results. And modern laws around sex work are designed to compel people into unpaid labor.

The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane.

Something something contract of adhesion something something. It is functionally a term of service to watch the whole body of content as a condition of watching any of it.

It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.

This effectively used to be how people would sell Time Share rentals. You would “win” a “free vacation” to a destination that hosted the time share. Then, in order to check in you needed to sit through a sales pitch that only ended when you agreed to purchase the unit you’d allegedly been awarded as a prize.

If you tried to leave the sales pitch prematurely, you were ejected from the venue.

The TSA part is equally effective as a metal detector is.

You’re confusing the workers for their tools. Like saying I don’t need a mechanic to fix my car, just a wrench and a jack.

It would mean several companies lose out on massive contracts for that fancy equipment, which is why it won’t happen.

The government kickbacks to hardware supplies isn’t the reason you think TSA are being rude to you. And this stuff doesn’t get meaningfully less expensive when businesses buy direct.

Two sides of the same coin. The distinction between the two is primarily whether you consider the information conveyed beneficial or nefarious.

Either way, Americans are already the most propagandized people on earth. You don’t need to send people to college to indoctrinate them. You’ve got consumer-grade mass media doing the job just fine.

It’s a bit like far-left or far-right, except it manages to get bipartisan approval.

the TSA consistently fails audits and has, last I heard, stopped an estimated 0 incidents of terrorism

My coworker just got done negotiating payment on a $7000 fine for carrying a gun through security. She was not the only one at the courthouse for this kind of infraction. The TSA certainly seems to be catch some number of potential incidents. But one more notable consequence of the TSA (and contemporary international organizations) has been a sharp plunge in the frequency of airplane hijackings, which I certainly appreciate.

US TSA is the rudest and slowest of the security teams

As someone who regularly travels through Europe, you could not possibly be more incorrect. Italy is far and away the rudest. And I’ve seen airports from Korea to Turkyie get jammed up for hours due to their comparatively primitive security screenings. Had a domestic Japanese flight that ended up taking me four hours just to board, because of security delays. Taking the Shinkansen from Sapporo to Tokyo would have been faster, despite going a third the speed of the plane.

“The Law” is a complex often contradictory abstract rubric that has to be applied to individual circumstances based on incomplete information by imperfect people. That’s the whole reason we have both a prosecutor and defense, plus an (ostensibly) impartial judge to adjudicate procedure and a jury to determine guilt/innocence and sentence.

If you could just put data into a computer and have it spit out perfect verdicts, the entire judicial system would be unnecessary.

Mandatory military service in exchange for free public education is already being floated.

Excited to see the biggest rug-pull in US history when that back half fails to materialize.

Canada should build a wall and make America pay for it

The Canadian far-right is such a fucking joke. They want to be American so badly. Far from building a wall, I suspect they’ll be the ones shoving open the gates if we ever get a President deranged enough to try an annexation.

Nobody says “Won’t someone think of their kids?” when celebrating a mass shooter or a drug kingpin or a foreign dictator being deposed.

I’ve heard it said unironically a few times about dictators we’re allied with who have a sudden fall from grace. The Shah of Iran, the Batista Regime in Cuba, and the brief failed Jeanine Áñez coup in Bolivia all leap to mind. I’m sure we’ll get some kind of “President Yoon was a cool dude with a family why is everyone in South Korea so mean to him?” Op-Ed sooner or later. We just stuck the head of Al Qaeda in Syria in charge of the country and I don’t doubt we’ll get a bunch of “Damn, what a cool guy I can’t believe he got got his family will be so sad” stories if he ever accidentally swallows a hand grenade in a power dispute.

And I can’t count the number of articles, TV Shows, and movies that try to lionize the CIA. They’re some of the biggest drug runners on the planet. Hell “Charlie Wilson’s War” might as well have been “Dr. Heroin the Child Rapist or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Mujaheddin”.

And then you’ve got the real heavy hitters like American Sniper and Rambo II. Talk about celebrating mass shooters.

This is just racism against rich people.

No, I will not be explaining my thoughts further. I will simply be collecting my check from the WSJ.

There’s no picket lines, because there’s no organizing and no threat of a strike. Reagan did his work and Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump/Biden made sure it stuck.

More likely what we’re going to see isn’t a single unified organized effort, but a bunch of individuals just walking off the job or phoning it in because they’re too demoralized to continue doing these thankless jobs. Then we may well still need to send in the military as scabs, just on a more permanent basis, since military scabs can’t legally quit.

“There’s a big secret that somebody knows that will totally sink Trump’s career at long last and if we can just find what it is and tell everyone else we’ll win” is a lie liberals have been feeding to one another for thirteen years running.

We have him glad-handing Jeffery Epstein and nobody seems to fucking care. We have him on record paying off prostitutes and taking bribes from the Saudis and implying he’d like to fuck his daughter. We have videos of him saying insane shit about having sex on a yacht during a speech to the fucking Boy Scouts. We have him rambling incoherently about “Eating the Dogs and the Cats” in the middle of a national debate.

But don’t worry, there’s something even deeper and weirder and crazier. And that’s going to make all the difference.

And that’s why he’s friends with Vladimir Putin. It’s certainly not just that they’re both white nationalists who agree with each others’ politics.

what would happen if Putin and Musk disagree at some point

Nothing significant. Musk is running on a purely American strain of right-wing revanchism. Trying to deflect all our problems onto Evil Foreign Man is a big part of why the country is as fucked as it is today. We simply cannot let ourselves believe that the fascist strain gripping our country by the taint is American born and bred. So every four years, Republicans accuse the Democrats of being Chinese and Democrats accuse the Republicans of being Russian, and then the parties do old fashioned American Protestant Capitalism to the country while we all writhe in torment, looking for someone else to blame.

He’s legally a US citizen by way of his mother.

Nevermind how much “god damn those evil foreigners are at it again” rhetoric makes me gag. Peter Thiel and Marc Andressen are fully American and they suck just as hard. If anything, the problem isn’t Elon, its Stanford University and the endless line of factory produced insane far-right techbro degenerates that it rolls out which gave us our modern hellscape.

If we want to abolish the TSA and move the money into a dramatically expanded AmTrak, I’m here for it.

But if you think the modern era of school shootings and abortion clinic bombings and J6 riots is going to give us a de-securitized airport system, I’d kindly ask you to pass me what you’re smoking.

fuck everyone who works for the TSA, bunch of useless dickheads

Federal government creates a giant CYA department to account for their massive intelligence failure 23 years ago and now I’m going to be angry at the now-currently-unpaid 23 year old directing me through a metal detector so I don’t try and bring a gun onto a high speed high occupancy mid-air aluminum tube because she isn’t doing the REAL WORK of playing candy crush in a squad car like a proper police officer.

FFS, I’d argue that TSA is the most useful form of police officer currently on duty. I’ve been through my local airport a hundred times and I consistently find them to be polite, patient, and stoic in a way street cops never are.

Damn. Imagine just showing up to work knowing you won’t be paid, with a bunch of other coworkers who are in the exact same socio-economic hostage crisis.

Gotta wonder if there’s some kind of organizational remedy. Like… a collection of workers who could all respond together as a single labor unit to demand a different set of policies on pain of withholding their labor until their demands are met.

There is no objective measure of criminal conduct. It’s all malleable. Prosecutors and judges and juries ultimately make these decisions case-by-case. And the results can be heavily weighted by wealthy, socially influential private interests who want to see an example made of a particularly offensive or terrifying individual.