
The Short-Sighted Campaign against Craigslist - slapshot
http://blogs.forbes.com/harveysilverglate/2010/09/14/the-short-sighted-campaign-against-craigslist/
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kgermino
Serious Question: Why does prostitution need to be illegal?

    
    
      In the U.S. it is *legal* to:
      Have random, unprotected sex with anyone you want
      Have sex with someone only if they take you out to dinner or give you a nice gift, as long as it's not a direct cash payment
      Pay someone to have sex as long as its videotaped and records are kept (pornography)
      Etc.
      

But it is _illegal_ for one consenting adult to pay another consenting adult
directly for sex?

Why is this illegal? Especially since as the "services" get more expensive
there is less and less actual sex happening. Multiple studies have shown that
prostitution is less about the sex than about the john paying to have a
responsibility and stress free relationship.

I may be missing something and be completely wrong but thats my $.02.

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bbuffone
One reason for making it illegal - it's one of those things that no one wants
in their town. No one wants coal burning power plants in their town but that
is easily to regulate. In today's internet area having the transaction be
online and the transgression to take place in private would be fine. The
question i how do you ensure that.

~~~
kgermino
One option is to regulate it. You could make it illegal to pick up someone on
the street and regulate it so that most if not all meetups would occur either
online or by someone calling a number they found in a phone book. I would
think that it could be set up so that finding a prostitute goes similarly to
finding a contractor, or anyone else in the home service industry. Other than
hiring someone from the parking lot of Home Depot you don't generally see
contractors soliciting. Additionally advertising could be regulated so that
you don't see it happening unless you look for it. That won't appease the
religious extremists but it will help prevent parents from having to deal with
kids asking "Mommy, what's an escort?"

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tomjen3
What is shortsighted about this is anybody who believes this has anything to
do with sex. Thats about as ridiculous as to think the war on terror has
anything to do with terror or that any politician really cares about the
mosque in Manhattan.

You are being played.

~~~
hugh3
And you're playing the "anyone who disagrees with my excessive cynicism is
naive" card.

I'll skip the seriously-trolly war-on-terror thing, and go straight to the
other one... really? No politician really cares about the Ground Zero Mosque?
Millions of _non_ -politicians care about it, but the political class is all
too sophisticated and is only _pretending_ to care? I think you overestimate
the sophistication of the political class.

(Not wanting to discuss the mosque itself, merely the question of whether any
politician really cares about it.)

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slapshot
For the record, I disagree with some parts of the analysis. In this case,
Craigslist was more than a common carrier: it created a special section just
for adult advertisements and charged money only for those advertisements. You
could post a couch for sale for free, but you had to pay Craigslist if you
wanted to post in the "Adult Services" section. The decision to charge for ads
for that category intertwined Craigslist into profiting directly and
intentionally from those ads.

~~~
VladRussian
Craigslist started to charge for the adult ads as result of the previous
settlement with AGs. Learn the facts.

~~~
hugh3
Was the additional sentence "Learn the facts" really necessary?

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chopsueyar
Only in America.

Nevada's listings are gone, too. Amsterdam still has the listings, though.
Didn't check any other European cities, though.

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petervandijck
It's a witch hunt, simple.

~~~
hugh3
I'm always bothered by the term "witch hunt". It doesn't seem like a great
metaphor.

If witches existed, hunting them would be rational and sensible (let us
assume, for the moment, all witches are evil).

It's only if witches don't exist that witch hunting is silly, so by calling it
a witch hunt you're implying that the things of which craigslist is accused
are analogous to witchcraft and don't really exist? Except they really _do_
exist, so I'm really not sure what the point of the metaphor is.

~~~
sophacles
You are assuming that it is a term that can be understood strictly from first
principles. With an idiom, such an assumption is silly, as idioms come to
their meaning based on a series of historical events, accidental mis-uses,
literary uses (and therefore references) and certain assumed shared views.

So to understand why witch hunt actually makes sense as a term, you must first
look at the real witch hunts that happened. These happened at a time and place
where witchcraft was "known" to be real. Of course there weren't witches, but
everyone then thought there were, so effectively hunting for witches was a
valid thing to do.

At the time, they also didn't know lots of other things, so if a person falls
sick, or a cow dies, or a house burns down, scientific evidence based
explanations were not so easy to come by. However witches were "known" to
curse people, and a curse causes misfortune.

So what would happen is a random person would decide to pay back a grudge, or
look good to his fellow citizens or whatever, and accuse some 3rd party of
witchcraft, for something like giving the evil eye, or dancing, or whatever.
This would lead to a burning, and everyone would be happy again. Most of the
time anyway. Sometimes, a series of unfortunate events would be construed as a
major witch, or a whole coven of witches. Then everyone would go crazy, true
beleivers would be terrified, ambitious social climbers would be accusing all
their enemies of witchcraft, and so on. There would be attempts by authorities
to get to the bottom of it, and many witches would be found. Mass burnings
ensued, and eventually everyone would calm down and be happy again.

So, looking back, this whole course of events is ridiculous, the root
assumption of witchcraft is just plain silly. The mass panic/hysteria over it
downright dangerous, and those taking advantage of the situation were
repugnant.

So, now, looking at the above situations, and refactoring a bit, so we can get
a more generic algorithm, we see these key components:

1\. A label that classifies someone as bad

2\. A deep underlying fear of what the bad label stands for, but the fear must
be non-specific.

3\. A set of actions and vaguely sort-of correlated events (if you squint just
right), that looks like: "bad things from #2 are happening to us!".

4\. A set of people willing to manipulate the many for their own gain.

If those conditions are met, you have a prime candidate for a "witch hunt"
(keeping the name because it describes the original stuff well, and everyone
knows what happened in those cases). Just start sending authorities after
anyone labeled as the bad thing.

There are of course some variations, and deeper nuances, but that is the gist
of it.

~~~
DougBTX
This is a case where I want more than one upvote.

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smallblacksun
The argument boils down to "we should let them break the law because then all
the criminals are in one place". Which is absurd. Craigslist was profiting
from prostitution, which is both illegal and morally repugnant.

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chopsueyar
Legality depends on your location.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada>

Here is some moral ambiguity... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate>

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smallblacksun
You're right, I should have mentioned Nevada as an exception to the legality.

The "sex surrogate" stuff is pseudo-scientific nonsense, and has no relation
to what was being offered on craigslist anyway.

