MetaFilter Saved My Pals From Sex Traffickers—Exclusive Interview | Mother Jones. motherjones.com (2010-05-22):

How an online community mobilized to rescue two young Russian women.

Forget the irritating title and summary. Besides being needlessly sensationalistic, the rhetoric of “saving” or rescuing women from sex trafficking is infantilizing and intensely unhelpful; also, it’s just inaccurate as a description of what actually happened.

What is awesome about this story, crappy headlines aside, is how a good friend and an Internet community managed to not only alert two young Russian women that the “agency” was lying to them, that the replacement jobs they’d been promised were actually at a skeazy strip club, and — even more important — while government “hotlines” and “counseling” proved to be alienating and more or less completely useless, an ad hoc group of folks on MetaFilter managed to come together to connect the women with information, a safe place to stay in New York, a friend to advocate for them and help them out, and leads on getting help to secure straightened-out visas — meaning practical solidarity and mutual aid, through an ad hoc distributed grassroots network, scattered throughout cities all across the continent, which managed to foil a gang of lying traffickers, helped two women get themselves out of a really dicey situation, and provided with plenty of resources to help them land on their feet.

(Story thanks to a private correspondent.)

• Electoral Race. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-19). Just saw Rand Paul on Rachel Maddow's show doing a not very good job of explaining his opposition to anti-discrimination laws. Paul did make a few good points – like the one about how the liberal case for forcibly desegregating private restaurants backfires by bolstering the conservative policy of forbidding… (Linked Thursday 2010-05-20.)

• Defensive Driving. Daily Brickbats (2010-05-20). Cops are here to keep you safe. (Cont’d.) (Linked Thursday 2010-05-20.)

Fool's Gold. Daily Brickbats (2010-05-20):

The Nashville Metro City Council agreed to pay $95,000 to Anthony McCoy, who had four of his teeth broken by Lt. Tanya Mayhew. McCoy was being booked into the Metro jail for failure to pay child support when Mayhew asked him to remove his grill. He told her he couldn’t…

In which Lieutenant Tanya Mayhew decides to torture a nonviolent prisoner, Anthony McCoy, by ripping his grill off of his teeth. (It was bonded to the teeth and McCoy bled out of his mouth after she ripped the enamel off his teeth.) His jailers then denied the victim medical care for 10 days. Since the torturer was a cop, when the news came out about what she had done, she was given a 5 day vacation from her government job for this sadistic assault. Meanwhile, the Nashville Metro City Council has agreed to insulate Lieutenant Tanya Mayhew from any personal accountability for her actions, and so are paying out $95,000 to her victim. Of course, they will send the bill along to a bunch of innocent taxpayers who never had anything to do with the assault on Anthony McCoy.

• Itchy and Scratchy. Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-17). In which Roderick discusses itches and makes a Kripkean point about the relationship between neurophysiology and the concept of “pain.” The only thing I’d want to add is yet another grump about the stupid WikiPedia article: if you think it took “research” to demonstrate that “pain causes us to withdraw and itching causes us to scratch,” then you either have a very odd notion of research, or a very odd notion of what’s necessary to prove something. (Linked Monday 2010-05-17.)

• {takebacktheland.org} 'If this isn't neighborhood revitalization, I don't know what is'- Desiree Wilson. Max Rameau, takebacktheland (2010-05-11). As part of the Take Back the Land Movement May 2010 Month of Action, Operation Welcome Home (OWH) hosted an open house celebration on May 10, 2010, and introduced the world to Desiree Wilson, an after-school program assistant supervisor. OWH spared this mother of two and her family from homelessness… (Linked Monday 2010-05-17.)

• Fall Right, Swing Left. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-05-15). "I don't try to make you believe something you don't believe, but to make you do something you won't do." — Ludwig Wittgenstein "Over and over, you're falling, and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time." — Laurie… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• Stress, Labor & Play. rechelon, Human Iterations (2010-05-14). There's a lot of talk in anarchist circles about abolishing work.  Some of it in line with the dream of a high-technology path to post-scarcity.  But a lot of it takes an alternative route and settles for simply building a ludic society — that is to say a culture that… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• Heartwarming marsupial of the week. Jill, I Blame The Patriarchy (2010-05-14). What a darling fellow! This gentle furry woodland creature comes around every night at 8 o'clock to frolic amid the rotting kitchen waste in my compost bin, at which point our nightly staring contest commences. He growls at me, inch-long fangs dripping with disease, for as long as I care… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• You’re not giving me that option. An Act of State is an Act of War (2010-04-24). In matters of state, when an agreement cannot be reached, often the other person will say, "lets agree to disagree". This is impossible. If the person you are talking to is in the same state as you (Phillipines, United States, etc.), and that person supports the state, then he is… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• Ambivalent Sexism. experimentaltheology.blogspot.com (2010-05-15). This is useful: “Ambivalent Sexism Theory, as articulated by Peter Glick and Susan Fisk, suggests that while sexism is a form of prejudice it is marked by a deep ambivalence. That is, sexism is a unique and particular sort of prejudice. Generally, we think of prejudice as being characterized by strong negative feelings (and stereotypes) directed at a despised group. And, of course, many attitudes toward women are overtly derogatory. Glick and Fisk call this hostile sexism.” Which they distinguish from paternalistic or “benevolent” [sic] sexism. I’d just add that these are really two sides of the same coin, practiced by the same men towards different women, or the same woman in different contexts. The point is that the pedestal is always conditional, and the social carrot is very easily replaced with a social stick when a woman steps outside of the narrow requirements of the pedestalized role. (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• INSTEAD OF A POST ABOUT EPISTEMIC CLOSURE: If I were ever to. Jesse, The Perpetual Three-Dot Column (2010-05-07). INSTEAD OF A POST ABOUT EPISTEMIC CLOSURE: If I were ever to join the big epistemic closure debate, the points I'd want to make would be:1. Ideological in-groups have always been able to construct cocoons in which their own favorite sources take precedence over the mainstream media. The Internet may… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• The Myth of the Menacing Militias. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-05-05). Flash back to the end of March, when the authorities hauled in nine members of the Hutaree, a Christian paramilitary group, and charged them with plotting a mass assassination of police officers. The media quickly added the arrests to the ongoing narrative of "rising right-wing violence," with the Michigan-based militants… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• On Enewetak (from The Distributive Passions) Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-05-15). [This immediately follows the section I posted May 2. It originally appeared on the defunct Distributive Passions blog. Bradford Peck was the author of The World A Department Store, and prime mover, along with the Vroomans, in the cooperative movement in New England. Much of this has already taken another… (Linked Saturday 2010-05-15.)

• Amant ou mari? Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-04-24). Proudhon (in)famously wrote, in What is Property?:On distingue dans la propriété : 1° la propriété pure et simple, le droit dominal, seigneurial sur la chose, ou, comme l’on dit, la nue propriété ; 2° la possession. « La possession, dit Duranton, est une chose de fait, et non de droit…. (Linked Sunday 2010-05-16.)