I bet petty crime is the least of EU’s problems.
I bet EU has the same level of problems US does with elite deviance, the white-collar guys who want all the marbles, and will start wars, hook eveyone on toxic drugs and wreck the habitat just to own it all and swim in their vault like Scrooge McDuck.
Oh yeah. It’s horrible, and puts way too much power in the hands of DAs and AGs. Also it lets our legislators create lazy law on the assumption the right people will be spared, and the wrong people (e.g. poor and minorities) will become prison fodder.
I’d rather we had iron-clad difficult to re-interpret laws for which enforcement was obligatory. Then every miscarriage of justice (e.g. tweens in juvie for violating social media TOS) would be a call to fix the problem with aggressive legislative revision.
Notes for the next iteration of the United States, I suppose.
No one wants to tell the government they’re watching porn, especially in a Catholic country like Spain.
It’s intended to reduce porn use, often to fuel conservative hate-driven ideology movements. Sexually frustrated people are more eager to endorse violence against marginalized groups.
It’s pure sociological manipulation.
This brings me hope Ubi might rot from within and collapse. And some nice Lemming will buy all their IP for a song and release it with a copyleft license.
This reminds me when I went to first responder class, and they cracked these out, and I realized in horror that some day some baby is going to be dying and my stupid ass will be responsible for make sure they don’t.
Okay, this belies my self-image as a fuck-up but I do have a knack for breaking things.
You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.
This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.
This is not uncommon, that laws are written not considering all nuances, so a generally innocent thing is made illegal.
The primary protection for this is prosecutorial discretion which is to say the DA can choose not to take such cases. Also the police have to be willing to enforce and book instances (they’re usually happy to) and gubernatorial positions like the mayor or governor can command law enforcement not to enforce a specific law (which sometimes they’ll obey).
This often comes up in undocumented immigrant cases in which there are communities with a lot of overstayed visas, or while cannibis was in a grey zone of being locally accepted while nationally scheduled.
It’s also why tweens weren’t gathered up for making a Facebook account while under thirteen years, even though that violated the CFAA, a federal crime punishable by up to 25 years. We don’t really want to put little girls in federal prison.
This is a problem when some official would like you to disappear into the penal system, say because he covets your land or your livestock or your spouse. Then your chastity cage may become a liability.
So during the Great Depression (about a century ago) the industrialists were totally happy, and Hoover was on board with them. The people were seriously thinking about doing that thing Lenin was trying over in the Soviet Union, because really anything was better than eating flour paste and living in cardboard and stacked paint cans.
According to Behind the Bastards in their two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity, FDR’s New Deal was in order to give capitalism another chance since it really was doing the people wrong, and Hoover and his industrialist pals really hated it.
(Christianity at the time was also on team-pinko, except they believed it was the responsibility of wealth and industry to just be relentlessly charitable, so at the time the industrialists had no allies in the Church. The current right wing guns-and-money Christian Nationalism is the product of a decades long propaganda campaign to turn the faith into a pro-wealth, pro-capitalism ideology. And the Catholic Church and Protestant ministries alike bought into it.)
It’s easier to restore our planet than to find a new one.
It’s easier to sequester our emissions than to collect them back from the polluted atmosphere.
Yeah the art community hated desktop publishing too. People who spent decades working with moveable type were made obsolete.
The problem is not that creativity is easier, the problem is our industrialist masters are all too eager to replace us from the artist to the driver to the lawyer to the task laborer to the engineer.
This isn’t a new problem. The reason Disney only does CGI and live action movies now is because the cell animators unionized.
It’s not the technology. It’s the system that lets you die for the grace of profit-minded industrialists.
With the US on the brink of autocratic rule, it’s really time to take seriously the notion of communist revolution.
All the war boys are Trump voters. He’s much more Immorten Joe than Biden.
No, we couldn’t. The Democratic Party is nowhere near as bad as the Republican party, but it is still interested more in power over governance and is still pretty far right wing (in contrast to much of the industrialized world.
Since Carter, the DNC has added obstructions to the people choosing a candidate out from under them (curiously, what Trump did to the GOP in 2015-2016) because the people only operate as part of the primary vote. About 2000 principle party members (politicians and plutocrats) have votes with extra weight, so you’ll never get an AOC or a Bernie Sanders or anyone else that is progressive and likes pushing hard on Green New Deal type policies.
In fact, when Occasio-Cortez primaried an establishment Democrat, the DCCC changed its rules to prevent future young progressives from taking seats from old establishment. (The DCCC undid their changes later, but only due to pressure from within the party.)
Progressives are the red-haired stepchildren of the Democratic coalition. They get to dine at their own table while the big boys sit at the grown-up table. Not because they have bad ideas, but because the rich campaign contributors don’t like them much, and don’t want to promote people who will push to install social security nets and election reform restoring power back to the public.
Curiously, it’s these kinds of policies, social security nets that pull US families away from precarity (job precarity, food precarity, housing precarity, health precarity, etc.) that would pull us from the brink of autocracy, since the lumpen voters (those who can’t deduce who serves their best interests) wouldn’t be so desperate for change so as to elect a strongman Mussolini wannabe. If everyone weren’t one paycheck away from hunger and homelessness, and working dead-end jobs, then Trump and Project 2025 would be getting far less traction.
So in this case, the Democratic party and the neoliberal ideology that directs them enables the rise of the transnational white power movement and the Christian nationalist movement. They are the Neville Chamberlain party and are going to feed us right into the hands of the GOP.
(That said, let us see if Biden finally takes up his newfound unlimited powers, say to assure that GOP anti-voter shenanigans in battleground states – gerrymandering, voter suppression, misdirection, neighborhood disenfranchisement, intimidation, election tampering, etc. – are watched for via our surveillance state and neutered in time, as well as any attempts of coups d’etat. Biden says he’s counting on voters to exile Trump, but we know how critical voters have been hobbled. OR if Biden wants to be bold, he can use the US anti-terror machine to target, capture and detain critical participants in the capture and coup movement behind project 2025, say all the folks in the Heritage Foundation. We know who they are, and we know they’ve declared their intention to capture the federal government and repurpose it away from principle US values.)
Sadly, no. The entire Common Era (that is, the one defined by Christianity) has made sexual hang-ups the social norm throughout all of western society (and eastern, once we started trading there). Combined with the industrial revolution (which moved us away from livestock getting it on, which helped normalize sex), we don’t know how to speak plainly without automatically painting ourselves as sluts and perverts.
It gets worse with the rise of far-right cultural identity movements like the transnational white power movement / Christian nationalist movement in the US, which intrinsically gatekeep and seek to prosecute anyone outside the mainstream norm, and tend to walk back sexual equality, including sexual liberty, suffrage and personhood.
That said, some places we’re actually teaching consent to kids, starting outside sexual context (e.g. can I hug you? You can play with my toys if you like) and including these lessons all the way through adolescence, which might not only inform intimacy, but contracts and terms of service with commercial interests. In contrast those of us without consent training just learned to tolerate transgressions of our privacy and our rights because the serving companies held the power.
With the SCOTUS ruling of Trump v. United States (2024) fresh on our minds, and awareness of the nearness of tyranny, we expect autocracy and hard times ahead, but may emerge from it a more enlightened, more cooperative society who is able to speak more openly about our needs without being judged.
But it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.
Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)
So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.
Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.
And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.
But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.
Sexy times are not for everyone, I admit.
Queer is forever.
But I do like this:
Based on dress, I’d say:
Alpha: Private Equity Trader, Financier Beta: Athlete, Footballer Delta: Mechanic, Plumber Gamma: Poet. Musician Omega: Technician, coder Sigma: Hitman, Organized Crime
As is the style of the time.