[lbo-talk] Re: banning sex toys(the horror, the horror)

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, I'm an unabashed pro free-market advocate. And I also think this is an important issue. The logic of the position you take -- perhaps you would accept this -- is that all other issues must be subordinated to, and deferred until after, whatever it takes so that the very worst things are stopped, whatever those are. People starving say. We shouldn't worry about women's equality or gay liberation or freedom of speech or fredom to practice unusual sexualities any of that distraction until the worst is fixed. Which means, of course, we cannot do anything about those distractions for the rest of our lives and probably through those of our great-grandchildren. Sigh:

 
>From Brecht's To Those Born Later, which gives me my handle, An die Nachgeborenen:

 

 Truly, I live in dark times!

                                                      

        The guileless word is folly. A smooth

                                                      

             forehead

                                                      

        Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs

                                                      

        Has simply not yet heard

                                                      

        The terrible news.What kind of times are

                                                      

             they, when

                                                      

        A talk about trees is almost a crime

                                                      

        Because it implies silence about so many 

                                                      

             horrors?

                                                      

        That man there calmly crossing the street

                                                      

        Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his

                                                      

             friends

                                                      

        Who are in need?It is true I still earn my

                                                      

             keep

                                                      

        But, believe me, that is only an accident.

                                                      

             Nothing

                                                      

        I do gives me the right to eat my fill.

                                                      

        By chance I´ve been spared. (If my luck

                                                      

             breaks, I am lost.)They say to me: Eat
and

                                                      

             drink! Be glad you have it!

                                                      

        But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what

                                                      

             I eat

                                                      

        From the starving, and

                                                      

        My glass of water belongs to one dying of

                                                      

             thirst?

                                                      

        And yet I eat and drink.

 
. . . .

 

 

 jks

frank scott <frank at marin.cc.ca.us> wrote:
this debate is interesting for what isn't being said about "free"
markets, and "free" marketing...we seem to have some closet and not so
closet pro-market folks here, arguing sexual freedom, and some market
controllers there, suppressing all the way...really?

so, in this society of wonderful laws for people who can afford them ,
if i have the money, i can get housing, dildoes, hotel rooms, vibrators,
young girls or boys, pet food and other wonderful consumables, and
that makes me a libertine, and if you haven't the money , you can't get
housing, education , nor any of that other stuff, and that makes you ,
um, lazy, shiftless, welfare prone, anti-sex and anti-free market ?

that may seem a stretch, but if it's so damned important to be able to
buy sex toys, in a depraved environment in which dogs and cats eat and
quite a few people don't, who is on what side of which issue of freedom?
and where does that freedom occur? in our heads? up our asses? or in
some other part of the material world that isn't under discussion here?

fs

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