New Strip Club Rules in Detroit!

[DetroitDad]

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/200...tracy_pinched/

Like most of the women I spoke with, Alicia wasn't willing to ask for financial aid or a place to crash from her family or friends. For her, it was a matter of pride, of independence, not to mention control. For them, slinging burgers at a fast food joint means you've really hit bottom, while sex work at least allows for the illusion of being in charge. Looking back, Alicia found that calculation didn't exactly compute: "Sometimes I'm like, Dude, why didn't you just get a job at McDonald's? It's a paycheck," she says, slipping into the second person. "But you were at a point in your life where you had zero money to put food on the table. You had to do what you had to do. It's a survival thing." Not to mention a money thing: When it comes to a paycheck, turning tricks trumps minimum wage.

That's American capitalism baby! I'm always told on the Non Detroit forum that if I don't like it, I should leave....

[professorscott]

Thanks Bear. My post did not mean to imply that law enforcement is a "burden", though of course everyone is free to infer whatever they like from what I post. [[If you think "imply" and "infer" mean the same thing, please turn off your computer now and go do something less harmful.)

My concern is that we tend to pay a lot of attention to activity that is marginally criminal at the expense of activity that is explicitly and unarguably criminal. You can find people who would argue that prostitution should be decriminalized, or marijuana possession. You won't find anybody who would argue that burglary or car theft or rape should be decriminalized.

But when we instruct law enforcement to pay lots of attention to the marginal things [[or worse, things that border on marginal, like, oh, say, strip clubs), and you don't provide enough money for adequate law enforcement in the first place [[like, oh, say, in Detroit), then you don't have anybody left to enforce the unarguably criminal acts.

In my days living inside the D, I saw many, many policemen going into taverns to make sure nothing illegal was going on. I never saw any policeman try to investigate either of the burglaries for which I was the victim, nor either of the two auto thefts. I didn't leave Detroit because of the strip club four blocks from my house [[which there was); I never entered it and didn't give an eighth of a running fuck about it. I left Detroit because of the uninvestigated burglaries and auto thefts; the idea that the police couldn't be bothered with the actual crimes that victimized me and my family, because they were staking out the topless bar to make sure nobody was getting too good of a lap dance.

So I'm in favor of law enforcement, just let's be choosy how we spend our limited funds for it. Let's enforce the laws for which you or I might be an actual victim [[or in my case have been an actual victim) instead of trying to enforce some churchman's idea of morality on the rest of all of us. I don't go to strip clubs, but if you do, God bless you and have a great time. If you want to spark up a joint, enjoy the hell out of it. Those things don't have any impact on me at all, and it's not my business to tell you what to do for fun. I'm drinking a Labatt's Blue, and if you don't like that, I don't care.

The Prof, as you can see, has a mean Libertarian streak, a trait you don't find much in academia. [[But voted for Mr. Obama, so is not pure Libertarian.)