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Craigslist Kills Erotic Services Ads, Will Launch Adult Section
CWmike writes "Submitting to mounting legal pressure, Craigslist has announced that it will remove the Erotic Services category from its classified advertising Web site within seven days. The move comes just two and a half weeks after Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, told Computerworld that the company had no intention of removing the category. While it's taking down the category, it will be launching a new category called Adult Services, for which each posting will be manually reviewed before it appears. 'Unsurprisingly, but completely contrary to some of the sensationalistic journalism we've seen these past few weeks, the record is clear that use of Craigslist classifieds is associated with far lower rates of violent crime than print classifieds, let alone rates of violent crime pertaining to American society as a whole,' said Buckmaster in a blog post today. 'We are optimistic that the new balance struck today will be an acceptable compromise from the perspective of the constituencies, and for the diverse US communities that value and rely upon Craigslist.'"
Dude, it's not a First Amendment issue.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If somebody was posting ads on Craigslist that said, "I will have sex with you at your home in exchange for $150", and the Craigslist admins knew about it and ignored it - There would be a problem.
Isn't there some sort of legal exclusion for user-generated content? I thought, while the user can be held liable, as long as Craigslist employees aren't doing the posting, they're not legally responsible for content posted by their users? Just like Slashdot wouldn't be liable if I post DeCSS or something along those lines.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
The Erotic Review
While I agree with you for the most part, I can't think of any time prostitution has been endorsed by the "Church", which by that I take it you mean the Christian church. Christians are supposed to abstain from sex outside of marriage.
And yet if you do your history, the Roman Catholic church did (this was before ML).
They're not using Times New Roman. The CSS just asks for "font-family: serif;" and you've apparently got Times New Roman set as your default serif font. If you don't like it, change your browser setting to something you find more appealing, and there you go. In general, sans serif fonts are more immediately legible, but serifed fonts are easier to read in larger blocks of text. Since Craigslist posts are generally short, the site would probably be okay with either, but tending towards serifs for body text is in general a good thing.
Does society collapse when a hooker gets beaten up by a weirdo? Does society collapse when a bunch of Chinese girls get brought over in a shipping crate to work in a brothel? Does society collapse when a college girl's boyfriend tells her that if she wants to keep the coke coming she needs to turn a few tricks, and it will only be just once or twice?
I'm not sure about your Chinese girls in a shipping crate example, I think that's more of a customs issue than anything else. It shouldn't be permitted to ship human beings in a crate regardless of why you're doing it.
As for the hooker getting beat up by a weirdo, if prostitution is legal she would call the cops just like anybody else who got beaten up by a weirdo during the course of their job.
As for the college girl, if her coke was available for a reasonable price at the local pharmacy then it's just her choice whether she has sex for money or gets a job in the dining hall or the student center. If her boyfriend is pressuring her into prostitution she can certainly say no. If he uses force she could just call the cops. If she knows that her prostitution and coke use are perfectly legal why wouldn't she call the cops about her abusive boyfriend. Its the wars on drugs and prostitution that keep her more afraid of the cops than of her abusive boyfriend.
Of course it wouldn't be a bad idea to spend some tax money on offering free rehab clinics for people who want to quit using drugs (or indeed cigarettes or alcohol). You could pay for a heck of a lot of rehab clinics with the money saved by not running the police departments as paramilitary organizations engaged in a permanent war with heavily armed drug dealers.
I personally have no interest in using drugs. I don't like anything stronger than ibuprofen and I'll often just put up with a headache rather than taking a tylenol. But I don't like the government prohibiting people from voluntarily taking whatever drugs they wish. It's one thing if somebody slips something in your drink, then you should be able to press charges and have them thrown in jail. But if you put the pill in your own mouth or the needle in your own arm it's none of the government's damn business.
Really? Have any data on that? Or are you referring to the minority Protestant Church leadership?
http://forums.canadiancontent.net/christian-discussion/47723-why-catholic-isn-t-christian.html
http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/cath.htm
I've been in SEVERAL churches of various denominations in the past, and this is in tune with the overwhelming majority of opinion.
Not part of it all anymore, just a casual comment.
It's no so much about difference of opinion. The key word here is 'solicitation'. Examples of things that you can (I believe) be arrested for saying:
* "You wanna buy some weed?"
* "If you'll give me $20, I'll give you head."
* "If you can come up with a porno starring a 6 year old, I'll pay you $250."
* "If you'll shoot my wife, I'll give you $500."
And, even though I disagree with the laws barring the first couple of cases, solicitation of a crime is a crime. And, in the latter two examples, I think that it's for a good reason, as grave harm could come about just because of something that somebody said. You're free to express opinions - Even unpopular ones, but not to solicit criminal activity.
Perhaps I missed the point.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
In the words of George Carlin: "Selling is legal, fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?"
There are several. The "johns" sometimes refer to their consumer activity (in the reviews) as a "hobby". They judge providers on metrics like sanity, drug use, specific acts available, price, looks, whether acts are committed in a "rushed" way or not, and so forth. I think there are some where the "providers" can talk back but I haven't poked around (no pun) at the sites for a long time so my memory might be faulty.
They are fairly depressing sites to read, if you ask me.
I guess now that sex-slavery has been more in the news in recent years this has changed a bit but "back in the day" El Camino through Contra Costa was a hot-bed of (largely) sex-slave brothels, heavily concentrated around the industrial parks of the Silicon Valley. It was quite the company town in that (and other) regards. They were relocating (mostly male) workers to town like mad with wages that would be high anywhere else in the country but that weren't all that impressive against the housing stock and general cost of living, hookers in the alley's so speak, dealers here and there who specialized in the tech grunts, legally dubious surveillance of workers, rampant discrimination against suspect categories, grifters left and right, corrupt police, debt slavery in multiple forms embedded in (revisable at will by the employer) Conditions of Employment and options agreements, restrictions of trade by the big employers in labor markets, and so forth. The region had not come far, culturally speaking, from the gold-rush days and I don't mean the romantic, exciting, images of the gold-rush I mean the ugly, shit-smell, camp-in-the-mud and shut-up-and-get-back-to-work-on-my-mansion-here-have-some-rye-and-a-hooker-if-that'll-help-ya days. The modernization of prostitution on the 'net today looks to me to be direct cultural fall-out of that.
Some of that (not all) was hidden from well-meaning "shiny golden examples" - grunts raised to prominence and prosperity in no small part to serve as false hope to the average and median grunts.
-t
Craigslist doesn't have a hard and fast business model, but they do charge for some ads. But those people are willing to pay because it's very cheap, directed advertising that works well.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
He posted DeCSS in response to the statement "Just like Slashdot wouldn't be liable if I post DeCSS or something along those lines."
Casual Encounters is full of posts for "Generou$" "$afe" "Ro$e$" etc. Most posts are spam; I managed to get 10 real people talking to me one day, and 9 were whores looking for $100-$180/hour. (I didn't have sex with the 10th, she was hot but we kind of talked for a bit and that was it.) One said she desperately wanted to suck a dick and then told me there was a "donation of 100 roses" required. Most of the posts are hookers.
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but they do charge for some ads.
The fees are listed in the craigslist FAQ.
open source modern art: laser taggi
My post was entirely serious; I wasn't talking about the cynical view of dating as an exchange of money for sex, or anything like that. "Roses required", "generous", and "donation" in this context appear to be code for "payment required". Note the #1 definition on urbandictionary for roses:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roses
There have been a number of what appear to be prostitution offers (and "sugar daddy" requests) posted in the personals sections of Craigslist, frequently using those phrases. Random examples that haven't been flagged yet (most of the obvious ones do get flagged quickly):
http://albany.craigslist.org/cas/1140993582.html
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/mld/w4m/1168295593.html
And one of the more explicit ads, actually containing the phrase "escort service" (along with potentially NSFW images):
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/cas/1169942282.html
Better yet, since the ads remain indexed by Google even after they're flagged:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acraigslist.org+%22roses+required%22+-ers+-adg
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acraigslist.org+%2Bdonation+%2Bw4m+-ers+-adg