Glenn hits most of the issues I have recognized about this particular case. What no one seems to be asking is: name clients 1-8 and 10-n. If it is fair to identify one who committed a crime, then it is fair to name them all. It, no doubt, would create some international incidents. Since the customer base of the Emperor's Club probably includes some of the wealthiest men in the world, some of whom hold high political office, the repercussions would be resounding.

What is really at issue here is the global and universal nature of this issue. We are not talking about a single or serial exercise in one man's sexual and financial practices; this is a universal disclosure of human behavior and motivation. I recommend each one here pontificating on Mr. Spitzer's actions take a moment or 3 and consider how you may have violated one of your own values or virtues at some time in your life. I have and it is revelatory. This is not a religious or legal violation; it is a moral and spiritual one, and is personal. Laws are put in place to control behavior and maintain control of those with less power than those making the laws. When they are violated, it is an opportunity to review the purpose of the law and for whose benefit it was enacted. Please deeply examine your motivation for taking whatever side of this issue you have taken, and be honest with yourself. There is no one else who needs to know what you discover. Your own discovery may mediate how you cast stones upon another.

I am committed to Oneness through Justice and Transformation

peace,

st john

I'm very disappointed in you [Glenn] that you can't see prostitution for exactly what it is and always has been. ...No "occupation" that demeans and victimizes so many women -- that even the ones who ostensibly "choose" it as a career move (which they don't, not really -- it chooses them) -- can ever be said to profit a woman, no matter how prettily you try to dress it up. ... If you can't see that, and apparently you can't, you are blind. But then, you are not a woman -- you're a man, and its inherent in you to defend the power group you belong to.

Yeah, I took a few Womyn's Studies classes and learned the cant, too. Look, Glenn Greenwald is not sexist, but it appears you are chock full of the more extreme forms of feminist dogma, so nothing will convince you otherwise.

BUT: AND I WANT TO SEE AN ANSWER TO THIS: How do you account for the many, many thriving male sex-worker agencies that service a gay male clientele, hmmm? Where does THAT fit into your "its all about the oppression of shrinking-violet women who do not choose, but rather who passively, like infants, have choices imposed on them?"

From a wimmins,

Mona

"Presidents who break the law by spying on Americans with no warrants, who torture people in violation of multiple treaties and statutes, who start hideously destructive wars based on false pretenses, who repeatedly proclaim the power to ignore laws, and who imprison people -- including Americans -- with no charges of any kind"

What about that? I don't care if baseball players use steroids, I don't care if politicians buy sex, I do care about where my tax dollars go and why my gas is so high, and why we don't hold politicians accountable for the misery they put on us to make the money they are making! Let's investigate where our money is going, and if you don't like prostitution, don't be a prostitute, If you think it's immoral then don't go out buying sex, don't tell others they can't buy it...

Some ‘clever’ unbelievers

Your amusing "paragraph" would have been more effective it it had lacked all punctuation (just a suggestion for the future).

Carry on.

>Don't get out much do you?

:) Well, it didn't feel right screwing around with Billy Madison, as inaccurate as that part might be.

And anyway, dishonesty about prohibition and the WoD really, _really_ pisses me off. They've been waging that war since _1875_, you know that? And by any realistic estimate, it costs the US government as much as the Iraq war ($100B+/year), only it's been going on at that level for decades.

We are looking at literally several dozen _trillion_ dollars tossed down the toilet, millions of lives snuffed or otherwise destroyed, whole Latin American governments and economies reduced to ashes, all because some uptight busybodies thought that food and drink, and human behavior in general, should be regulated first and foremost by it's "morality". The entire modern notion of organized crime was born out of alcohol being on the black market. And the most intelligent thing that dipshit could think of to say was, "Well prohibition is like giving out parking tickets, only for booze"?

It's like calling WW2 a minor skirmish, and rather insults the legions of people who suffered tremendously because of it.

"Kristen may not be a literal slave, but she can be self-hating and self-deluding and wrong. Just because someone says it does not make it so."

She doesn't appear to be a slave. Literally or otherwise. She may be self-hating and self-deluding and wrong, according to you, or she may not be. Either way, that doesn't make her a slave similar to the slaves in the American south or a Iraqi living under American military occupation.

I read it.....I see your point and understand your outrage....but one can argue the two things are not related. Or, in my case, I think it is perfectly possible to see George Bush as a criminal slug and Spitzer as a hypocritcal slug both at the same time.

I'm very interested in how a handful of posters have managed to fixate on my posts and attack me personally so viciously when I have only been saying what many other posters have been saying--and some of them, like AKA Smith, consistently say it better.

Fascinating.