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Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

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Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#521

Post by deftnerd »

balls187 wrote: post #430
anigbrowl wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I'm quite annoyed about this, both because it affects numerous friends of mine who are sex workers and are now scrambling to find alternatives to working on the street, where they're far less safe, and on a more pedestrian level because I met my wife on a Craigslist date years ago. Life is too short to make excuses fo…

> Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior. Like meeting strangers on the internet and buying/selling sex for money? If it was legal, it could be better regulated, and they could operate with more safety...but it's not legal. While I'm in favor of decriminalizing adults engaging in adult behavior, I don't believe anyone goes into selling sex with a healthy attitude towards sex. They're typically victims…

You could use the same argument against anything that groups of people consider "immoral".

Alterations of the position:

"While I'm in favor of people engaging in worship, I don't think anybody worships Mohammad with a healthy attitude towards the lord. They're typically victims of religious indoctrination at a young age, which has warped their perception, leading them to believe in a false god"

"While I'm in favor of people having freedom, I don't think anybody uses narcotics with a healthy attitude towards their health. They're typically victims of immoral liberal households at a young age, which has warped their perception, leading them to believe that drugs are OK"

Basically, you're making a moral decision and saying that anybody that ends up making a contrary decision for themselves must be damaged due to their upbringing.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#522

Post by unabst »

anigbrowl wrote: post #131
SeeDave wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of the "scorched earth approach or nothing" folks: from my perspective... it's a completely and totally human response to faceless, blameless, unapproachable (from their perspective) perpetrators and facilitators of systematic abuse and exploitation of innocent and vulnerable people. If you've ever felt frustrated at an IVR system for routine tasks such as banking, restaurant reservations, canceling a gym…

Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I'm quite annoyed about this, both because it affects numerous friends of mine who are sex workers and are now scrambling to find alternatives to working on the street, where they're far less safe, and on a more pedestrian level because I met my wife on a Craigslist date years ago. Life is too short to make excuses fo…

Nothing should be demonized. Anything that hinders humanity should be regulated and monitored, proportional to the threat. That is all that is needed.

Out of sight and out of mind enables thriving dark markets. To eliminate dark markets, the open market must be all inclusive. There needs to be only one market.

For darker material, we need more aggressive inclusion tactics.

For example, pedophilia should be considered an extremely dangerous disease. Imagine if we treated Ebola or AIDS as a crime. No one would ever be protected or cured (or neutralized), and carriers would be hiding among us.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#523

Post by waterhouse »

balls187 wrote: post #513
balls187 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior. Like meeting strangers on the internet and buying/selling sex for money? If it was legal, it could be better regulated, and they could operate with more safety...but it's not legal. While I'm in favor of decriminalizing adults engaging in adult behavior, I don't believe anyone goes into selling sex with a healthy attitude towards sex. They're typically victims…

Let me provide a few questions on prostitution: Readers of HN 1. Would you move to Nevada to work in your spare time as a legal prostitute? It's all the benefits of being an Uber driver, but with much better per-hour pay, no vehicle lease, and relatively no upkeep costs. You get to chose the clients you service, but you have service. To offset the pain of moving, in addition to the money you make as a prostitute, you…

1. My day job (as a programmer in Silicon Valley) already pays a lot, and I expect the pay to increase over time, but if the ratio of [prostitution pay] to [day job pay] was as high as it is for most people, then, yes, I think it'd make sense to do that.

2. If a whole lot of them did that, then I expect the price would drop a great deal, so such a campaign might be dishonest—well, actually, in some respects that is like a stereotype of a STEM campaign, with some companies bemoaning how hard it is to find talent while not raising their low wages. Other than that concern, yeah, I'd be happy with such a campaign.

3. I don't have children of my own yet, but I have sisters and a niece and female friends, so I will imagine them in that situation. I would have two concerns: STDs and hard drug use. For the first, I would look up some statistics—e.g. flying on a plane feels a little viscerally unsafe, but in practice it is pretty safe—and the practices of the Nevada brothel in question, and let's say that I'd conclude the STD risk was negligible. For the second, I would make certain that my child (a) knew about the risks of various drugs, (b) was prepared to deal with pressure to take drugs, and (c) knew that she could leave at any time and come back home.

After those concerns were addressed, yes, I would consider it an interesting experience for my child to have. Lucrative, get to see a bunch of people in an unusual set of circumstances, probably get practice in negotiation and in reading people, etc.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#524

Post by balls187 »

deftnerd wrote: post #521
balls187 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior. Like meeting strangers on the internet and buying/selling sex for money? If it was legal, it could be better regulated, and they could operate with more safety...but it's not legal. While I'm in favor of decriminalizing adults engaging in adult behavior, I don't believe anyone goes into selling sex with a healthy attitude towards sex. They're typically victims…

You could use the same argument against anything that groups of people consider "immoral". Alterations of the position: "While I'm in favor of people engaging in worship, I don't think anybody worships Mohammad with a healthy attitude towards the lord. They're typically victims of religious indoctrination at a young age, which has warped their perception, leading them to believe in a false god" "While I'm in favor of…

What morale decision am I making?

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#525

Post by iamnothere »

balls187 wrote: post #504
lists wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I'm in favor of decriminalizing adults engaging in adult behavior, I don't believe anyone goes into selling sex with a healthy attitude towards sex. They're typically victims of sexual abuse at a young age, which has warped their perspective, leading them to believe that their biggest value is to sell their bodies for sex. Source? Also, healthy attitude? What's that and who exactly defined it?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20105147 https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/why-do-women-become-prostit... And, as to who exactly, psychologists.

Perhaps a certain kind of psychologist.

Psychologists are not a monolithic block, and many would say that an individual's choice to pursue sex work could be "healthy" as long as it isn't causing them emotional distress or preventing them from living a fulfilling life.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#527

Post by UrukParthian »

DannyBee wrote: post #44

This is not surprising, but sad. Years ago, i was dragged (i was the only engineer in the local office) into a whitehouse (or maybe it was state department, i can't remember) sponsored working group on online sex trafficking. The non-profits dedicated to fighting this, while seemingly well-intentioned, were completely and totally unwilling to see any other perspective or try to find shared ground. It was scorched ear…

"seemingly well-intentioned"

After dealing with a few non-profits, I'm utterly convinced about this maxim.

"Intention is nothing. Intelligence is everything."

Ask a toddler to solve world peace and he/she might say something like "Go boom boom the bad people!". That's what it's like dealing with certain non-profits. Full or people with good intention but without the intelligence to choose effective courses of action.

Example: Homeless days in shelter. Got prescribed Ritalin for the first time in my 30 years of life (up 'till then). It was a life changer... After I moved out of the shelter. Was told by the head "you can't take stimulants here. I mean look at it, it has meth in its' name!"

People with good intentions but unable to make good use of it because they had no natural curiosity about the world. Only curiosity in meeting limited sets of metrics that can always be shuffled around and gamed.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#528

Post by cabaalis »

post_break wrote: post #420
fokinsean wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gun vids were removed from Youtube? I heard about this controversy yesterday, I just looked up "Glock 19 safety tips" and there were over 200,000 videos.

They are getting scrubbed in April. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en

That rule seems fairly narrow to me. Selling certain accessories, modifying the guns, etc. I am hoping the ones I've watched on Youtube about people firing and reviewing different guns will not be affected.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#529

Post by otakucode »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #394
edraferi wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot this morning. I think almost every vice would be less damaging to society if it was in the open. Polite society doesn't want to see sex work or drugs, but they still exist. Hiding them makes things much worse for the people directly involved. It's trafficked kids with broken immigration status who are more scared of the cops than their captors. It's drug addicts who OD on tainted d…

I've been thinking about this peripherally for a while, especially the bigger picture when some law is passed, and it seems exceptionally out of touch with the reality, and does more harm than good. A depressing thought: What if we apply something akin to Occam's Razor? What if the lawmakers want to hurt the people struggling at at the lower rungs of society? To me it feels unlikely it is intentional in most cases, o…

I don't think it is so much wanting to hurt people. It's more that they see the poor as barely people, and see the Internet as a seething crowded marketplace where the poor bustle and jostle against each other, breathing each others air, grinding out their meager existences. And if left to their own devices, they will first destroy the pillars of society (major industry) and then themselves. This is a tremendously large topic, but the underlying rabid anti-sex motives underlying this bill and the total lack of caring about how it will furthermore expunge human sexual expression from the Internet goes back to the Industrial Revolution. There was arguably reason for it back then. But no more. It survives purely out of a wrongheaded blind sense of 'denial is virtue, satisfaction is sin'.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#530

Post by dumbfounder »

The intent of FOSTA was right in my opinion, if you are making money from these services then you should spend some of that money policing your services. That seems fair to me in theory. Not sure whether FOSTA got it right or wrong, but I do know some of these players did little to nothing to police their services, and brought about their own downfall.
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