Prostitution - selling sex - is legal in much of Europe.
But the feminist myth is gaining strength there that when women make men pay for it it's the men who are exploiting the women.
And so there is a push by the long-establised alliance between feminist and religious blue-noses in France and Germany to criminalize buying but not selling sex.
The same alliance that, in America, gave us the 19th amendment in a failed effort to cement in place the 18th.
Only dictatorships plunge into prestige projects as their people struggle with desperate poverty and even starvation.
So said American propaganda, back in the Cold War.
Organic food freaks who refuse to eat anything with "chemicals" in it.
The self-righteous among them are every bit as annoying as self-righteous vegetarians, tea-totalers, or non-smokers.
Among all four, a not unusual added attraction is being a know-it-all.
You can't talk to these people any more than you can talk to converts to libertarianism, Marxism, or Islam.
Many are the varieties of fatuity by which people define themselves.
The quest for identity, belonging, and meaning.
BBC NEWS reports the solemn ceremonial military reception in Britain of "sacred soil" collected from seventy battlefields in Belgium by schoolchildren.
A museum official who received it spoke with apparent sincerity of the special bond between the peoples of Britain and Belgium.
BBC reminds us next year will be the 100th anniversary of the start of The Great War.
The soil will be central to ceremonies.
Even while it was being fought and for a century thereafter, this war was all but universally thought a vast disaster without point, brought on by the utter incompetence of the European ruling classes.
Perhaps the patriots will win out over that view, in the long run.
Gide and Nabokov.
The Immoralist and Lolita.
Hard to believe Gide's PG rated bit of humorless gay pederasty un-porn was supposed to be hot stuff in 1900.
A third of the way through and it is boring.
Going nowhere, very slowly.
Boo passes on as news to him and possibly others that people working Thanksgiving do so because employers make them and not because they want to.
And in both shock and dismay that "workers count for nothing in today's corporate world."
And yesterday?
Dreiser's hero in An American Tragedy at 16 gets a job as a bellhop at a prestigious luxury hotel.
His work week comprises four days of 6 hours on and 6 off and three 6-hour days.
A sixty-six hour week with such poor pay the hotel allows their bellboys, elevator operators, and housekeeping staff to eat in the kitchen, and most of their income is tips.
No holidays, no paid time off, no insurance.
Dreiser has no idea how exhausting a schedule of six on and six off is and gives his characters busy and eventful social lives in off hours.
But I have been on guard duty and I know, and it leaves you constantly too tired to want to waste your chances on anything but sleep, and you never get enough of it.
My late maternal grandmother, born before 1890, worked fourteen hours, six days a week, as a young girl, all of it straight time, with no insurance, no job security, and no paid time off.
Exhausted children, beaten into it, and brutalized adolescents in those years, staggering with fatigue, falling asleep on their feet, worked horrific hours at dangerous machines in unsafe factories for employers with no responsibility for injuries, permanent disabilities, or death.
I suspect Boo's grandmothers did nothing of the kind.
Some labor historians have vouched for the truth of claims of the slavocracy that slavery appeared downright paternalistic, compared to the treatment of free labor in the North.
Maybe it did, sometimes, after the importation of slaves from Africa was stopped.
If you do A then, long after you are dead, a certain batch of people will exist.
If you do B, long after you are dead, a completely different batch of people will exist, better off than the first batch.
Any preference?
It's one thing to go out of your way to make people happier.
It's another to go out of your way to make happier people.
In the first case, people are better off thanks to you.
In the second case, not.
It may be said against assertions of human egoism that, cruelty and sadism apart, humans are sincerely distressed by the suffering of others.
And it is obvious this motivates a great deal of charity and at least plays a role in the heroic rescues we so often hear about that are so much praised.
But it more commonly motivates avoidance.
Particularly but by no means only when one is unable to help - more usually when we are unwilling to incur the costs or run the risks - , one mentally or physically averts one's gaze.
Unable to effectively ignore, avoid, escape, or blot out the spectacle, people not infrequently become angry at the source of their distress and sometimes end their discomfort in another way.
We read of parents killing infants they could not quiet or lull to sleep.
And of mercy killings.
Too, the cruelty and sadism we set aside are far from nothing and, together with cool indifference to the fate of others, explain far more of human conduct and affairs than sympathy, empathy, benevolence, or all of them at once.
In all these things, women differ from men, physical strength aside, only by being greater and more shameless hypocrites.
And perhaps more susceptible.
Try to avoid annoying expressions of hatred for white people, meat eaters, poultry farming, abundance, and the European discovery, conquest, and settlement of the Americas.
