Life, Love, and Liberty

“No one who supports putting a drug user in jail has any right to shed crocodile tears over the death of someone whose life they have proved willing to throw away. The middle class moralist prides emself for saving their victims from the shadows’ imagined atrocoties. Yet it is such a moralist who supports the real, unimagined atrocity of destroying other peoples’ lives because the moralist feels threatened by their existence as a creeping social plague. It would not matter if the prohibition laws could not be shown to have caused this young woman’s death. Every arrogant bourgeois who supported a law to jail her for her regulation alread pronounced their intention to regard her life, choices, and dreams as worthless.

I wish I had any hope of overcoming this dualised, fear-ridden and bigoted consciousness. But I think most Americans (and people throughout the world) are wedded to this kind of life, psychically and socially, which demands the forcible suppression of alternatives for its persistence. And I fear that this kind of life, while horrid, is ineradicable and dominant for socially functional reasons.

But that aside- I have no patience for those who talk of the ‘good intentions’ of those ‘concerned’ about drug use. Anyone who doubts that should remember that the same people who mourn that ‘drugs’ killed this woman would, if a miracle had granted her resuscitation, greeted her return to the world with courts, manacles, and jail.

For words constitute the distinct chime of the leper’s bell of social conservatism:

“FOR YOUR OWN GOOD”.

~ Lady Aster

“When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to “understand” and be “tolerant,” that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to “understand” me or to be “tolerant” of me. I don’t want you to “study” me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.

It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.

But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re “just like you” in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really “just the same” — and then to read or hear about “how easy” you think it is to “make fun” of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have “civil unions.” Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.”

~ Arthur Silber

“Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the total fusion of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed universe. Its intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of change - everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world. Our emotionally-dead survival cries out for multidimensional passions. Lovemaking sums up and distils both the desire for, and the reality of, such a way of life. The universe lovers build of dreams and one another’s bodies is a transparent universe: lovers want to be at home everywhere.”

~ Raoul Vaneigem

You might be getting tired of just quotes of the day by now, so I’ll be sure to diversify a bit.

Anyhow, I lost the desire to be on the PC last night, before I posted a quote of the day. I was trying to fall asleep and didn’t want to get any extra stimulation. I ask for your forgiveness by offering two quotes today.

Enjoy!

“Writing is like making love. Don’t worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
- Isabel Allende

I found the delightful quote above on the Erotica Readers & Writer’s Association
website.

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I used to be really interested in viewing the forums at Erotica Readers & Writers Association, and I stumbled upon the following quote one day. As a pre-op transgendered woman, I very much look forward to being able to play with my future breasts. It strikes me, as an advantage to being a woman!

I could never be a woman. If I were, I would do nothing but sit at home all day playing with my breasts. — Steve Martin

I am starting up a quote of the day feature, so that my blog readers can get a taste of my blogging, even when I don’t have a lengthy post ready to go. This quote is from a work by Raoul Vaneigem. I put the parts I find the most interesting in bold letters.

“Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it gets fucked up and miscarries. Its songs are crippled by fear of always returning to the same single note: whether there are two of us, or even ten, we will finish up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our own unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its own emptiness. The insatiable desire to fall in love with so many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other’s arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot confront the effect of general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world.

The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life.

Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they wreck your desires? Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more poetry. A story tells how Price Shekour captured a town and offered it to his favourite for a smile. Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve — passionately enough to offer our love to the magnificent bed of a revolution.”

- The Revolution of Everyday Life

Scratch your heads over that one! Philosophy nerds. I am eager to see what thoughts people come up with about it.

Venus Cassandra aka Nick Manley

Creative Writing 1

Mary Grantham

6 December 2007

Three of your strongest poems #1.

Five Sense Poem

Aphrodisa

It sounds like a lustful moan.

It feels like pleasurable encouragement.

It smells like fresh blooming roses.

It tastes like a moist nipple.

It looks like the exotic twirl of a dancer.

“I remain a bisexual or pansexual or multisexual, or whatever word you like to use person. I’d love to dance with the boys, but I have no objection to being led away by the ladies.”

Hehe. This is a line from an upcoming post of mine. I really love the imagery of the last part of it!

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.

As a prelude to a pro-prostitute post, I am posting a wonderful piece that details the horrific treatment of prostitutes. You can click on the word piece, and go to the page that I got it from.

Copyright 2001. American Revolutionary Vanguard. All rights reserved.

The Last Minority

Like chattel slavery and religious persecution, the mistreatment of prostitutes’ is an age-old practice rooted in the social structure of very ancient times. In earlier civilizations, women were literally bought and sold as property. Prostitutes were considered “used goods” in the same way as used cars and hand-me-down clothes in our own culture. The social position of prostitute women was further diminished by the membership of many of them in the slave classes. Women who entered prostitution voluntarily were considered an affront and a danger to male authority. Historically, prostitutes have been flogged, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, exiled and executed.

Contemporary American anti-prostitute laws are rooted in the “eugenics” beliefs and practices adopted by many physicians in the late nineteenth century. The goal of the eugenics movement was to eliminate birth defects, venereal diseases and persons regarded as sexual deviates by means of castration, clitoridectomy, sterilization, electric shock, criminalization and imprisonment. Targets included homosexuals, orphaned children, the mentally handicapped and prostitutes. Many of the laws enacted during this time remain on the books today.

Nearly a thousand arrests are made in the Richmond area each year for solicitation, prostitution and sodomy. Richmond’s prostitute population includes both males and females. Most of them come from the poorer classes. The majority are African-American. Many are single parents. Many are addicted to drugs. All of them practice prostitution as a means of supporting their habits, feeding their kids, paying the rent and surviving.

Hostility to prostitutes comes primarily from elite “civic” organizations, such as the Fan District Association, who view the presence of prostitutes on city streets as a threat to their own class position, property values, lifestyle interests and status of artificial superiority. Persecution of prostitutes is also a lucrative business for the police and the city administration. So-called “vice enforcement” is a source of employment for police. Cops are sometimes paid a bounty for every prostitute they drag in off the streets. Arrests for prostitution are a way for police to inflate arrest statistics in order to demand a larger budget. In many urban areas, prostitution enforcement is the single largest item in the police budget. Many cops use vice-related work as a means of career advancement. Former Richmond vice lieutenant Walter Allman was recently promoted to police captain. Prostitution cases also provide business for prosecutors and the city of Richmond generates nearly half a million dollars a year in revenue from fines collected from prostitutes.

Richmond prostitutes are frequently subjected to physical and sexual assault by vice cops. one member of the Richmond vice squad, Mark Williams, is a known sexual sadist. He once inflicted a brutal beating on a 43-year-old African American female prostitute who was subsequently hospitalized for four days. Williams has inflicted beatins on other prostitutes as well. Vice cops sometimes engage in sexual acts such as fellatio, fondling, disrobing and even vaginal penetration with prostitutes before arresting them. Other vice cops have engaged in drug use with prostitutes whom they subsequently arrested. Some Richmond vice cops and uniformed policemen alike accept bribes and sexual favors as a payment for looking the other way. Some cops have used prostitutes as a means of blackmailing rival members of the police force.

Vice enforcement often involves the sleaziest tactics imaginable. Vice agents use intrusive and degrading surveillance methods hoping to catch prostitutes “in the act” with their clients. Vice agents pretending to be “cruising” johns often take prostitutes to private locations and expose themselves and arrest the prostitute when she/he responds. Vice cops sit in local bars, drink and attempt to approach and entrap women known to be prostitutes. Surveillance cameras are sometimes hidden in the rooms of Richmond hotels known to be “hot spots” for prostitution.

Vice officials deliberately present fraudulent information to the media regarding HIV/AIDS rates among Richmond prostitutes. The vice squad has at times claimed that ninety-nine percent of Richmond prostitutes are HIV-positive and that the average prostitute in Richmond carries four or five venereal diseases. A check with the Department of Health will disprove these claims. Prostitutes are publicly scapegoated for AID by the Fan District Association. Privately, the association claims prostitutes are a threat to their property values.

The vice cops usually attempt to have prostitution cases heard under Judge Ralph B. Robertson who typically hands out jail terms five times greater than the Richmond norm. Robertson has at times denounced prostitutes from the bench as depraved AIDS carriers as a means of degrading and humiliating them. At the same time, Robertson looks the other way for prostitutes who are clients of attorneys who are friends of his. Robertson also covers up for vice cops who assault prostitutes by refusing to allow them to tell their side of the story in court.

Vice agents often solicit oral rather than vaginal sex from prostitutes. This way, the prostitute can be charged with sodomy, a felony. The felony charge is then used by prosecutors to gain legal leverage in plea bargain egotitations and to obtain parole and probation violations. Police refuse to investigate crimes committed against prositutes. One Richmond female prostitute was detained and interrogated after being harassed and threatened by a car load of aggressive young men. Signs throughout Richmond neighborhoods declare “Prostitute-Free Zones” just as signs proclaiming “Jew-Free Zones” were place in German neighborhoods sixty years ago.

Many prominent Richmond officials are involved in the persecution of prostitutes. Mayor Kaine provides the names of johns arrested for solicitation to the Fan District Association who then informs the family of the arrested person. This creates the potential for violent domestic conflict. Police Chief Jerry Oliver has publicly blamed prostitutes for the drug trade. Councilwoman Reva Trammell began her career by waging a bigoted harassment against prostitutes on Richmond’s south side. The Phillip Morris corporation provides fake employee identification cards to undercover vice agents. The Martin Agency and the Fan District Association have pressured the state government to raise prostitution from a misdemeanor to a felony.

The mistreatment of prostitutes is a crime against humanity. It is a crime every bit as heinous as racial and religious persecution or the abuse of children, the elderly or the handicapped. It should be recognized as such.

My last digest hinted at some new awe inspiring blogs by writers on sexuality; so I kindly point my readers to the Lusty Lady blog of Rachel Kramer Bussel of the big apple. She has become the most recent recipient of the “added to Nick Manley’s blogroll” award.

*Applause *Applause*

Once I alert her to my website’s existence by means of a congratulatory email on her eccentric and sex-positive writing/personality — what I can glean of it from the web, at least — ; perhaps she will give an acceptance speech

Now; I am sifting through her favorite posts on the sidebar to see if there are any I can put in my sexuality category when I redo the insightful reads listing on the sidebar. During this, I came across a post where she mentioned this:

whether that meant going off to play chess at age 15 in Brazil

Wow! Now; I am in complete envy of the friendly variety. I’ve only worked the chessboard in the U.S. in my lifetime. This person has caught my eye now.

Anyhow, I wish I could “stop” discovering awesome blogs maintained by people who are 3 billion miles away. Or snap my fingers to make everybody I adore in some fashion or another be instantly transported with me to some really cool urban environment in short distance from a more rural area; for variety’s sake.

Or I could just apparate — provided that J.K. Rowling hasn’t patented the technique yet — and visit people like that; don’t want to uproot anyone involuntarily

On a final note; check out her very very lusty photographs while you’re browsing through her blog archives. If I am ever living in the NYC area, then I will seek to woo her into a passionate romance.

A combination of intellectual acumen and wonderfully delicious looking breasts is more than enough to make Nick swoon with a starry eyed look on his face.

Off to the big apple! To see Chris Sciabarra. He’s quite possibly the coolest guy to ever feed the ducks of Brooklyn, and I will also court him.

Bisexual polyamory: the best of both worlds.

Note: I am not actually off to visit NYC this very moment or tomorrow, yet I will most definitely meet Chris Sciabarra someday; for all of the reasons detailed here . As for why this post would be of interest to left-libertarians; I thought they might like to know of a new blog listed on my sidebar. This post smacks of my personality and was quite spontaneously written. I had a great time writing it too. Such a nice diversion from the genocidal actions of the U.S. military in Iraq.

Additional Info

The net is a lot like a game of blackjack you never know what cards you’re gonna get. The web is full of good reading, good tools and even good satellite tv. Of course, the quality and quantity of what you find has a lot to do with your internet speed.  There’s nothing worse than waiting around for the information to flow.

Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the total fusion of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed universe. Its intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of change - everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world. Our emotionally-dead survival cries out for multidimensional passions. Lovemaking sums up and distils both the desire for, and the reality of, such a way of life. The universe lovers build of dreams and one another’s bodies is a transparent universe: lovers want to be at home everywhere.

-Raoul Vaneigem