The second step was the law the country passed at the beginning of May—the one that The Publica makes sound like a horrifying, dystopian mess. In fact, the measure had the support of the Belgian sex workers union…

But the law also explicitly protects the right to refuse specific customers, sex acts, etc.

It stipulates that “every sex worker has the right to refuse a client,” that “every sex worker has the right to refuse a sexual act,” and that “every sex worker has the right to interrupt a sexual act at any time.” It also says that “any sex worker has the right to perform a sexual act in the manner they wish” and that “if there are dangers to the sex worker’s safety, the sex worker may refuse to sit behind a window or advertise.”…

“If a sex worker exercises the right to refuse more than ten times in a six-month period, the sex worker or the employer may seek the intervention of a governmental mediation service,” according to UTSOPI. “That service will assess if there is anything wrong with the working conditions, if there is a problem in the employer-employee relationship. The service can also offer professional reorientation possibilities.”

I don’t trust Reason’s reporting on this very much, and the article is full of libertarian junk. I’m curious as to why the sex workers’ union supported this, though. Maybe they think the protections it includes are sufficient. Like 100 other things, it’ll come down to how it’s enforced.

Giving a fake name isn’t illegal

Never said it was

Of course it’s a miscarriage of justice

Used that exact phrase to describe this in the original post

You are screaming at someone who agrees with you

Well fuck you too

Ok, I won’t comment in the acab comm about whether the stories there are good agitprop.

Would have loved to have had this exchange instead of a bunch of people putting words in my mouth.

I didn’t say the cops handled this well. I said they can be criticized here and we should check their story.

My disagreement with you is solely limited to whether this is good agitprop.

I brought up how pretrial detention is used everywhere, including in AES states, because when we use stories like this to say things like “its not justification for keeping her in jail without trial nor hearing,” we show our ass a bit. Lots of persuadable people out there would point out that there’s a reason some people are held before trial; it’s not some unique horror of the U.S. criminal legal system. We make the exact same argument when libs push “China bad because they exercise authority” articles.

This is you saying that they didn’t do such a bad job here

I’ve said a number of times that criticizing the cops is fair here, and that we should check their story. I’m saying this isn’t a great one to spread as agitprop because people who are not as hostile to cops as us won’t dismiss these facts the way we do.

but your response was just:

There it is

On a forum with multiple Jeffrey Epstein emojis, a “yeah that 13 year old really seemed like an adult” comment was inevitable. I wasn’t really sure what you were getting at or if you were just making an oblique joke.

As for why the cops didn’t think “this person isn’t really 18” or why they didn’t look through photos of missing people: again, criticizing the cops is fair here, and that we should check their story. I don’t know how to say that more clearly.

I didn’t say the cops handled this well. I said they can be criticized here and we should check their story.

“one big reason people give fake names upon arrest is that they know they are wanted for more serious crimes.” I don’t even know how that follows from or applies to this story?

And even if everything she told them was true its not justification for keeping her in jail without trial nor hearing.

Every country, including AES states, detains people before initial hearings in certain circumstances. One factor in deciding if they should be held in custody or out on bail is “do we even know who this person is?” You don’t want a situation where you arrest someone wanted for a serious crime, they lie about their identity, and you let them go – this is something we clown on cops for fucking up!

I’m not saying this girl was wanted for a serious crime. I’m saying if you were to share this as agitprop without reading the article, a lot of people you’re trying to agitate will come back with observations like this, because “cops let serious criminal slip through their fingers due to laziness” is basically a cliché in popular crime stories.

Alright folks, let’s hear all the things I didn’t say.

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If you don’t want to talk about the value of this as agitprop, don’t respond to a comment talking about the value of this as agitprop.

I’m not talking in hexbear to make optics

Then you shouldn’t have replied to my comment about the value of this as agitprop.

The story is not “cops arrest kid, find out kid is 13, then lock kid up for two weeks anyway.” It’s understandable to think that’s the story, because it’s implied the way the tweet is worded. The story is “cops arrest person, person says they’re an adult, person changes story and never provides any verifiable information, cops keep person locked up until they find out she’s 13, then they release her.”

And that’s the problem with using it as agitprop: when you tell a story that promises something big, and then closer inspection fails to deliver, people write your story off and trust you less in the future. It’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

It is viscerally upsetting, especially for those charges. The problem with using it as agitprop is that anyone who reads the actual story is presented with a scenario that undercuts that feeling – she lied about being an adult, then changed her story, and never provided a way of verifying her ID (parents’ names, home address, a phone number, etc.). It comes across as a bait-and-switch.

There is no reason to push a story like that as agitprop when there are a million equally upsetting cases that have no such caveats.

Is no one here trying to figure out how to bring more people left?

It’s maddening trying to talk about how to persuade people. You bring people along step by step, with stuff that’s really hard to argue. You don’t throw them into the deep end right away and give them easy things to push back on. We do have to actually do politics, we do have to actually think through how to move someone from skepticism to agreement.

Somehow we got to where any tactical discussion like this is met with “we should just yell at people in Maoist Standard English and if they don’t immediately agree we write them off.”

Yes, we absolutely should be talking to people who are sympathetic to the left but aren’t there yet. The goal is to build a mass movement, not sit in a tiny leftist club and call everyone outside of it fascists.

There it is

That plays well for other leftists, but not for people who aren’t there yet. It’s much easier to get people on board with “we should be skeptical and check the cops’ story” than it is to get them to wholesale reject anything the police say. And if the latter is your position, you can get proven wrong.

I’m saying it’s bad agitprop. It’s bad agitprop because there are a lot of important facts beyond “a 13 year old was in jail.” If you present a story as a horrible injustice but someone clicks through and reads “she told police she was an adult, waffled on that so it was guaranteed she was lying about her ID one way or the other, and never gave any real info that could be verified,” you look like you didn’t read what you shared, or you look like you’re exaggerating.

There are factually innocent people in prison. People keep getting beaten by cops at the drop of a hat. You have cops catching themselves on video lying. This is what we want to use as agitprop, not “the cops kept someone in jail for two weeks because they didn’t know who they were, and they didn’t know who they were because the person lied to them.”

There are things to criticize here, but it’s a bad example to push when there are a million other much clearer miscarriages of justice out there.

As for believing the story: we should absolutely be skeptical, but “if the facts hurt my position I don’t believe them” is an unfalsifiable stance.