Back Issue: May 2012

The only defense against [totalitarianism] is absolute rejection of its underlying premise:  that it is acceptable and even moral for “authorities” to abrogate the rights of individuals for a “greater purpose” or the “common good”.  –  “Pyrrhic Victory”

The columns from May of 2012 seem so familiar and recent in my mind that it’s strange not to see Links columns on the Sundays.  But they didn’t start until August of that year, and descended from my July guest posting on Radley Balko’s old blog, The Agitator.  There are a few other differences; Q & A columns were still monthly rather than weekly (plus the occasional special like “Mentoring“), and I had just begun the “My Favorites” feature which lasted for two years (this month it was “poems”, the harlotography was “Deborah Jeane Palfrey” and the fictional interlude was “Vocation“).  I was also still doing occasional biographies of people I knew personally (such as this month’s “Terrance“), and in addition to familiar holidays like Beltane and Mother’s Day I was writing about classical Roman holidays like Floralia.

“Sex trafficking” had by then become a very major topic of this blog; “The Naked Emperor“, “Traffic Jam” and
“The Power of Myth” all deal with it directly, while “The Pygmalion Fallacy” covers it in passing as part of a larger discussion of stupid beliefs about robotic whores.   “Whorearchy“, “Naked Truth“, “The Daughters of Shamhat” and “Confined and Controlled” all discuss other beliefs about whores in comparison with reality, while  “Mythbusters” hits on tangential issues; “Greeks Bearing Gifts” and “Stranger Danger” cover other wrongful beliefs about sex;  “Variations on a Theme” compares drug prohibition to sex work; “The Shape of the Spoon” and “Push Comes To Shove” address the nanny state; and “Pyrrhic Victory” looks at widespread surveillance and the descent of the West into fascism.  Finally, “Change of Heart” is a statement about the ethics of outing clients, and “Patterns of Schwartz” profiles the man behind some of my favorite comic book heroines.