Life, Love, and Liberty

I have been very pleased by the increase in comments recently. Its been especially gratifying to see people leave comments that question the validity of information in my posts. One of my next steps is going to be deciding how I can turn this site into more of a money maker. I’ll be striving to provide more original content in the hopes of enticing people to donate on the basis of being able to read things here that they may not find so easily elsewhere. It helps to know that people are reading and commenting.

Anyhow, I did want to use this post to respond to a commenter who recently had the following to say:

I have to disagree with the author of the original piece. Of course any rational person is going to oppose violence, abuse, or mistreatment of any human regardless of their chosen profession. The accusations against the police and the justice system are pretty damaging, yet they provide no evidence. I think most people would require some sort of proof of these allegations before believing them or acting on them. Personally, I feel they are exaggerated and potentially false and slanderous statements. But, if you can prove me wrong by publishing some facts, reports, eyewitness accounts, or any other evidence your case will be much stronger and you will get much more support from the community.

However, their comparison of prostitutes to Jews, homosexuals and orphans is a stretch, considering prostitution is a choice and the others are something people are born into through no choice of their own.

I have an internet and phone correspondence with the author of that piece, so I was able to ask him about what his sources were. His response in a Yahoo Group called attackthesystem has been copied and pasted below:

Re: [attackthesystem] Send Me Your Stories of Police Abuse

Thanks for sending me this, Nick. The sources for this information were interviews conducted by myself and others of approximately fifty street-level prostitutes in the Richmond, Virginia area between 1994 and 1999. Additional sources include statements made by several dozen other people concerning their own observations of police activity and court procedures during this time.

There are no “documented sources” of the kind found in a scholarly work for the simple reason that this research (except for some very general background material like the comments about eugenics) did not come from books, newspapers, etc. This material is based on a hands-on experiential method of gathering information. For obvious reasons, the identities of the prostitutes who were interviewed personally cannot be revealed. For one thing, they spoke to us in confidence. Second, some of them were fugitives at the time. Third, they had reason to fear legal if not directly violent retaliation if they publicly implicated powerful persons. Some of them are now deceased.

I would say that someone who is looking for endnotes and footnotes of the kind found in an academic paper simply doesn’t know much about the realities of the situation we were dealing with. Would one expect that kind of documentation of information gathered from refugees in a war zone? Of course not. As for questions of credibility, no information was included in that essay that had not been confirmed by at least two independent sources. Most of it was confirmed by many more sources than that.

As for the specific individuals named, much of what was said about them is relatively common knowledge in this area. In fact, you can do a google search on some of these people and find some rather interesting facts about them.

As for the specific analogy to German Jews, the actual comparison given was between the “Prostitute-Free Zone” signs that appeared in this area in the late 1990s and the “Judenfrei” signs that appeared in Germany in the Nazi era. The argument that prostitution is a choice while ethnicity is a fact of birth, therefore persecution of the former is less heinous than the latter, is a shallow one. Political affiliation, religious belief and practice, interracial marriages or romantic relationships, homosexual activity (as opposed to preference or orientation), extramarital affairs, premarital sex, consumption of alcohol, and many different kinds of economic activities are also volitional in nature. If Lutherans, Socialists, adulterers, alcoholics, gays, feminists, race car drivers or bartenders were treated by the state in the same manner as prostitutes and a few other comparable groups, then professions of outrage by the entire array of do-gooder groups and much of public opinion would certainly be forthcoming. Prostitutes are a class of persons that are considered subhuman by the state and much of the public at large, subject to criminalization and persecution for their very existence. This is precisely the status that many religious or ethnic minorites have historically been relegated to. The analogy is an appropriate one.

Keith

—–Original Message—–
From: Venus Cassandra
Sent: Dec 2, 2007 1:10 PM
To: Attack the System Yahoo Group
Subject: [attackthesystem] Send Me Your Stories of Police Abuse

Keith,

I received this comment in response to an article of yours that I posted on my blog. I already know what I am going to say in response, but I thought you might want to respond yourself too.

http://www.lifeloveandliberty.com/2007/11/30/predule-to-a-defense-of-prostitutes-post/

“I have to disagree with the author of the original piece. Of course any rational person is going to oppose violence, abuse, or mistreatment of any human regardless of their chosen profession. The accusations against the police and the justice system are pretty damaging, yet they provide no evidence. I think most people would require some sort of proof of these allegations before believing them or acting on them. Personally, I feel they are exaggerated and potentially false and slanderous statements. But, if you can prove me wrong by publishing some facts, reports, eyewitness accounts, or any other evidence your case will be much stronger and you will get much more support from the community.

However, their comparison of prostitutes to Jews, homosexuals and orphans is a stretch, considering prostitution is a choice and the others are something people are born into through no choice of their own.”
Actually, I think they make a good point about the lack of sources. I trust you from having read many of the books that you cite for your anti-drug war piece, and discovering the facts in them, yet I can see why someone who is less skeptical of the benevolence of the American system would be more likely to disbelieve.

I’ve read about police tasering, raiding, and killing for quite some time now, so I was going to cite a lot of those stories. You can’t visit Charles Johnson’s blog without reading about horrific taser incidents.

Anyhow, they miss the point of your comparison of prostitutes to Jewish individuals in Nazi Germany. I read it as arguing that both were scapegoats who were blamed for “problems” in the community and then persecuted.

In both cases, people who are committing no genuine crime were made victims.

–
Venus Cassandra
http://www.lifeloveandliberty.com/
Philosophical Anarchism, Free Market Economics, and Cultural Bohemianism
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Anarcho_Nick/
Alliance of the Libertarian Left
http://all-left.net/

If you don’t notice where I’ve made a word into a link to the post that the comment was left in response to, then just click on the following: Predule to a Defense of Prostitutes Post.

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