• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • The Justice Ministry is moving toward revising Japan’s anti-prostitution law to punish the sex buyers, addressing a legal imbalance that has only targeted the sellers for 70 years, according to government sources.

    I hope it’s obvious why only punishing the sellers puts them in a very very vulnerable position, so evening the playing field in that regard is probably good. That said, prostitution should be decriminalized, or better yet legally protected.

    “I want to sell sex.” “I want to buy sex.” “Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?” The state shouldn’t be preventing people from having sex in exchange for money; it should be protecting them to minimize exploitation and generally bad outcomes.











  • I’d argue this is why the government shutdown and the Epstein files are so politically important.

    If the government is shut down, all the new things are just different ways in which the government shutdown is breaking stuff. No healthcare. No SNAP. Furloughed workers. Airports without air traffic control. It was a rut for Republicans since the 24hr news cycle couldn’t move past the shutdown. Then Democrats went and handed them a ladder because they’re abysmal at doing politics.

    And the Epstein files play into the conspiracy brain that has been cultivated in the right wing mind for so long. 24hr news cycle moving on from the story feels like the media trying to bury the story, which feeds into that conspiracism even more. And since this isn’t a made up conspiracy theory, right wingers can’t control the narrative as well as they usually do. There’s a reality to run up against. Everyone already knows who Epstein was and what he did. Trump is obviously implicated. And the House leader has shut down the entire House to prevent the Epstein files from making any progress towards a public release. That obviously feeds into the conspiracy that the files are damning and powerful people are working together to cover it up. I think Marjorie Taylor Green recently announced she’s quitting her current public office role as a result of backlash from wanting to see the Epstein files released and fighting with Trump over it. These are wedge issues that don’t work in Republicans’ favor.



  • As a Pixel 6 Pro user who occasionally has to interact with the Samsung devices my parents use, holy moly I don’t know how anybody puts up with this. We’re talking fullscreen advertisement lockscreen bloatware that can be disabled but not uninstalled, added to the phone out of nowhere with a recent update. The worst android keyboard I’ve ever used in my life. A UI and all of Samsung’s versions of existing apps that I’m constantly fighting just to use the phone. It’s ridiculous. I genuinely don’t know how anyone can run a Samsung device without installing a custom ROM or something it’s actually insane.



  • This article doesn’t even say why Spain isn’t committing to the 5% target. The article OP crossposted says why in the first few sentences:

    But Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said at the time that he would not commit to the 5 per cent target, calling it “incompatible with our welfare state and our world vision”.

    Not sure how the Politico article is better in this case since it seems less informative.


  • Does the article have any problems you’d like to point out, or are we just being weird and racist for the fun of it? The Straights Times is Singaporean, not Chinese. The only link I can find between The Straights Times and the government of China is from a few months ago when the CEO met with several Chinese state-run news agencies to discuss collaborating to “tell the story of the two countries’ development and people-to-people friendship.” That’s the only link I can find. The Singaporean news outlet is most definitely not “a state owned newspaper by the Chinese government.”

    Edit: The Straights Times is republishing this article by Reuters. Any complaints you have would be directed there, not at The Straights Times. You’re being weird.