Archive for the ‘South Korea’ Category

A few miscellaneous lunchtime links

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
  • Stings have become standard as a means for achieving high arrest rates when it comes to prostitution (not to mention drugs).   As depressing as that is, the comments you see under such stories are encouraging.  As with this story about an operation in Birmingham, people tend to think its a waste of resources and shouldn’t be a crime to begin with.
  • Another disturbing strategy I’m seeing is the increasing use of anti-prostitution sweeps and stings as a means to seize people’s cars simply as a revenue source.  I recently wrote about a Detroit sweep that seized 70 cars and today there is a story of Canadian operation that seized 11 vehicles.  The state usually makes money on seizures independent of whether the owner is ever charged or found guilty, thereby creating perverse incentives for law enforcement to target innocent people.   Used in the drug war for years, the expansion of this practice into other consensual crime areas shows the government’s desperation for creative finance measures to compensate for fiscal recklessness.
  • South Korea is a master of mass prostitution arrests.  After an investigation of a bar, they recently arrested “252 male visitors and 37 alleged prostitutes – including 37 civil servants, working for government or state-run companies, 94 professionals, such as doctors, accountants and businessman and 121 others. The three owners of the bar were also arrested.”  It doesn’t say whether they seized everyone’s car but they have clearly saved the country from a bunch of guys who wanted to get laid.

    If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

    Who cares?

    If, however, a woman falls down with a man for money in Clayton and no one knows about it or is hurt by it, will it get you arrested?

    You bet.

  • The U.S. Supreme court hears arguments over California’s new law that makes it a crime to sell a violent video game to anyone under 18.

Posted in Alabama, Canada, North Carolina, Pornography, South Korea, United States | Comments Off

Saving our soldiers from the evils of sex

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Apparently some countries don’t like the prostitution business that seems to spring up around American military installations overseas, especially South Korea and Japan.

Aggravated by the nonstop sex trafficking incidents involving Filipino women around the U.S. Military base in South Korea, the  Philippine  government decided to stop sending their women to the sex industry abroad.

Interesting wording.  The Philippine government decided to stop sending “their women” to the sex industry abroad.

So starting in 2004, the Pentagon made it a court martial offense to patronize prostitutes, which of course, does nothing more than push it further underground making criminals out of the people we expect to put their lives on the line in war.

I recently read a book called “Hell in a Very Small Place” which is about the French battle at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam during the French Indochina War.  Rather than punishing soldiers for their normal interest in sexual pursuits, the French actually arranged for mobile field brothels to supply their soldiers with Vietnamese prostitutes.  Apparently they didn’t think that sex would tarnish their soldiers’ morals making them unfit to sacrifice their lives in battle.

Of course, as always, the U.S. government is too busy imposing their sense of morality under threat of prison to spend even a second dwelling on the futility of their policies and the harm they do.  As was the case in the 30s with alcohol prohibition, almost all the problems people use to justify the banning of prostitution are in fact caused, not by the prostitution, but by the laws banning it.

It’s the height of hypocrisy for a government to send a soldier off in the prime of his life to risk his life to protect us and then deny them harmless pleasures in the name of morality.

Posted in Japan, Prostitution, South Korea | Comments Off