So we, as a society, have “peeping tom” laws to protect people who might unknowingly expose themselves to the creepy peepers of, well, creepy peepers who get their thrills from seeing and sometimes photographing strangers revealing more than they meant to.
It would seem reasonable enough to consider surreptitiously taken “upskirt” photographs as violations of peeping tom laws. But not in Massachusetts: On Wednesday, the Supreme Judicial Court in that state ruled that upskirt photographs are legally ok, as the laws there are written to apply only to protect victims who are “partially nude,” not those who are merely wearing short skirts.
In the wake of the ruling, legislators and women’s rights advocates are saying that the laws — written before cell phone camera were ubiquitous — need an update.
Naturally, this has some of the dedicated Human Rights activists in the Men’s Rights subreddit in an uproar. How dare anyone challenge their sacred right to take pictures of women’s panties on public transportation without their consent!
“Wearing a skirt has consequences!” What a perfect slogan for a “movement” that is about little more than tearing down half of humanity in the name of, what, a man’s right to be a peeping tom? Put it on a t-shirt, Demonspawn, and show the world the kind of creep you are.
NOTE: Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing me to this.
UPDATE: The Massachusetts State Legislature, moving surprisingly quickly, has passed a new law explicitly banning upskirt photos; it could be signed into law by tomorrow.
Libertarianism relies on everyone else to keep up their end of the social contract. They’ll happily drive on well-lit, well-paved roads that other taxpayers have paid for, but don’t ask them to contribute.
Re: upskirting, I think there might be a market for panties printed with “FUCK YOU, CREEPER”. Preferably in LED lights.
I still go for mandatory creepshot-recognition technology in phones – that make the phone explode or melt down on the creeper’s hand.
Including Massachusetts, last I checked.
This is exactly my main objection to Libertarianism. Anarchists, at least, have proposed models of community-level governance that might keep people aware of how their actions hurt others, or at least keep them honest. Libertarians seem to think that in the absence of government, people would just police themselves. It’s like they’ve never even read Lord of the Flies.
Or else, they think they’d be the ones on top of the heap, and don’t care what happens to the rest of us.
My favorite is the ones who want to get rid of things like workplace safety and labor laws, claiming that The Market will favor the more humane employers or something. We tried that, fairly recently, and it didn’t work. Anyone who was awake for the Industrial Revolution portion of US History should be aware of the breadth and depth of human suffering when there are no labor regulations. Hell, anyone who was awake in the last couple of years should be aware, thanks to shit the Bangladeshi factory fire or the Apple plant suicides. How anyone can claim we’d be better off without worker protections is beyond me.
I had a similar thought during the last Presidential election, when one of the Republican candidates (probably Ron Paul) said he supported a business owner’s right to refuse to serve black customers. I was like, but wouldn’t that business owner’s refusal limit the freedom of the black people in the community? Especially since, should racial discrimination become legal again, they probably wouldn’t be the only business to make that choice? But Libertarians are so focused on the individual (usually themselves), they don’t think about the social context we’re currently in. Anti-discrimination laws are another one of those things that exist precisely because the Free Market didn’t magically solve them.
I got modded! Did I use a verboten word? Am I posting too frequently? Should I post more cat videos?
Bingo. Our “freedom from” is a terrible infringement on their “freedom to”. Meanwhile, their “freedom to” takes away more and more of OUR “freedom to”! How sadly ironic is that?
Yup! And yet they have the temerity to refer to everyone who uncomplainingly contributes as the “looters”, “moochers” and, my personal favorite, “sheeple”. When the revolution comes, their heads should be the first ones on pikestaves.
American libertarians really need to read about the Triangle Shirtwaist incident. I think some of them probably think the things that have happened in Bangladesh recently wouldn’t happen in the US, but they can and have happened here.
I can’t speak to what libertarians in other countries believe, but American libertarians seem to be corporate fetishists with undertones of white male supremacy.
I’m not sure where I’ve heard this; it may have been here, so I apogizing if I’m repeating someone! There’s a county in Oregon where the people keep voting against raising property to pay law enforcement. Crime is sky-rocketing:
http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2014/03/crime_cave_junction_josephine.html
The Oregon State Police are taking up the slack, but that’s not their job:
http://www.opb.org/news/article/state-police-bailing-out-understaffed-sheriffs-department/
American libertarianism in action!
Reblogged this on sindhuspace and commented:
What about ‘upfront’ photos?
American libertarians really need to read about the Triangle Shirtwaist incident.
Or more recently, the Hamlet chicken plant disaster. IIRC, that, the Shirtwaist incident, and the recent Bangladesh one all were caused in part by locking the exits. Another example where not making laws and enforcing them makes people less free; they were literally locked up!
As far as I know, it’s the same thing here.
Libertarianism used to be a broad and diverse movement that was mostly concerned with, y’know, liberty. Noam Chomsky used to call himself a Libertarian.
Libertarianism was hijacked by corporate interests in the 80s. Anybody who still calls themselves a Libertarian is either a corporate stooge in on the con or is a victim of the long con.
A few words from Wikipedia.
Yeah. They like to throw around “The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”, but pair it with a lot of twisting to make the victims look like aggressors. (Criticism is censorship! Boycotts are discrimination! No-one is harmed by bigotry or sexism!)
emilygoddess: RP, the libertarian poster boy, sets off the mod filter.
Thanks, Hellkell. I figured it was probably that.
Pardon me for my slowness, but why exactly does RP set off the mod filter? You mean just mentioning his name?
It’s like the one troll who had to call everybody a wh*re. One person’s obsession with the word makes it unusable for the rest of us.
It’s better than the other way.
@grumpycat, you got it. Just mentioning his name will send your comment to be moderated. Too many of his fanboys came to vomit talking points all over the comments.
Oh, okay,. Eek. Well, I guess that makes it extra good he’s not POTUS.
I don’t think that captures it – all US conservatives especially hate paying taxes. (Even low-income conservatives who don’t have to pay taxes are upset that taxes exist. Because the collected tax money is going to Those People.)
A US Libertarian is basically a Republican who: (1) Isn’t a fundamentalist Christian and (2) favors an isolationist foreign policy.
You’re right that they tend to be social conservatives on most issues…provided the issue can be justified with any argument other than “The Bible says…”. They’re willing to accept arguments like, “It’s always been this way, and it works to my advantage, so it must be the natural order of things.” So casual racism and sexism are fine, but creationism isn’t.
I knew a US Libertarian who was a fundamentalist Christian – a born-again, no less.
Doesn’t Vox Day call himself a “Christian Libertarian”, or didn’t he use to? As I recall, he did…and his opinionations sounded identical to those of any Nazi propagandist.
Yeah, I’ve met plenty of self-declared “libertarians” on the net who were basically Christian fundies. I guess the difference is that standard conservative doesn’t like government, while the “libertarian” drones on all the time about privatizing the entire government could really work (hint: it wouldn’t).
My only familiarity with the term was in the 70s. It was more or less the wholly owned property of hippies and anarchists and some other leftie loonies. Against restrictions on drugs and on sexual behaviour – and very little more than that for the most part.
And Chile is an excellent case in point…and by “excellent” I mean it’s a failed state in every respect but the media won’t report it as such, because that would indict the CIA, the Chicago Boys, and Uncle Miltie Friedman. And also because that would make its alleged “return to democracy” look perilously like a sham.