Prostitution And The Ipswich Serial Killer

 General  No Responses »
Dec 132006
 

There is currently what appears to be a serial killer on the loose (hopefully that is out of date before I finish writing this) in the Ipswich area targeting prostitutes. Why prostitutes ? Who knows what goes through the mind of a deranged killer, but one possibility is that prostitutes are relatively easy targets.

Frankly the current laws on prostitution in the UK are creating this situation. Whilst prostitution is not in itself illegal (something that many do not realise), the UK does seem to go out of the way to make prostitution as dangerous as possible. Because brothels are illegal, prostitutes are driven onto the streets (except of course for illegal brothels where women or men are kept as sex slaves); because soliciting for trade is illegal prostitutes have to keep their activities relatively discreet making some measure of safety by formalising things more difficult.

The moral minority who want to get rid of prostitution should realise that the attempt to get rid of prostitution by legal sanction is a complete failure. Whilst there are still women desperate enough to do almost anything to get money … frequently to feed a drug habit, prostitution will survive no matter how dangerous it becomes. And using the law to make a serial killer’s job easier is less moral than prostitution itself.

Ideally brothels should be legalised and sited in locations of existing late night activity … where nightclubs are located. Prostitutes should be encouraged to form worker’s co-operatives to run these brothels and the brothels should be inspected regularly. Not only would this make it far more difficult for a serial killer to prey on prostitutes, but would allow additional services for prostitutes … drug rehabilitation publicity and help for example. Legal brothels would also make it far easier to crack down on the kind of places that keep sex slaves … itself something that is well worth making a few sacrifices to stop.

I would far rather live next door to a brothel than make women work the streets and allow sex slavery to continue, and no I don’t visit prostitutes.

At the very least it is time for a brothel in Ipswich whilst this serial killer is still free … asking prostitutes to stop working for a while is not practical unless we are going to take care of their addiction to drugs at the same time!

Slavery

 History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 272006
 

The UK prime minister has just released a ‘statement of regret’ for Britain’s participation in the slave trade which is fair enough … after all slavery was and continues to be a crime against humanity. Some are calling for him to go further and issue a full apology and hand out reparations, which is where things get a little tricky.

The history of slavery is a little more complicated than just excessively greedy British merchants sailing to Africa, seizing millions of Africans and dragging them across the Atlantic to live and die in atrocious conditions. For a start, many of those merchants bought their slaves from native slave traders who had been in business for many years already.

In Africa it was common for African tribes or nations to enslave prisoners of war (a common practice in many other parts of the world) and sell those slaves on to slave traders who would them take them East or later West for resale. As many if not more slaves were sold East to Arab slave traders as were sold West to European slave traders.

In addition, the pirates of North Africa had their own slave trade by seizing Europeans from sea or land and selling them into slavery in their own markets. Whilst not of the same scale as the outgoing trade from Africa, it still counts as a crime against humanity for each of the estimated 1.5 million victims. Including a number of US citizens … the Barbary Pirate attacks on US ships was the chief reason why the US Navy was started.

In fact slavery or similar states (serfdom, enforced contractual slavery, etc) has been so widespread that there are very few parts of the world that did not have slavery at some point in the past, and probably very few of us who do not have slaves as ancestors.

So when we talk of reparations for the crime of slavery, who should pay ? And who should be paid ? It is not an easy question to answer. Of course Britain is included amongst the group of debtors, but do we get credit for the amount of efforts Britain made to abolish the slave trade ? And what about the other slave traders … other Europeans, Arabs, and Africans ?

IT: A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

 Computing  No Responses »
Oct 152006
 

First of my real blog entries on IT … or computing, or anything related to technology really.

I work in computing so it is hardly surprising that I have a few opinions on it (or IT), but I’ll try to restrain myself from getting too technical.

Today’s entry is about how having too much knowledge can actually slow you down when trying to resolve an issue. You see, I had a bit of a problem on my SGI workstation when trying to run GIMP or Ufraw (both of which are essential to doing any kind of photographic work). When trying to use either, the application would crash with a little error message saying that I had run out of memory. This was kind of hard to believe as I have 1.5Gbytes of memory in the SGI, and I was not processing any unusually large files.

However I had recently upgraded the software on my workstation, so my instinct was to blame that. The error message indicated that the problem was with a component called glib so I spent hours recompiling that component using multiple different versions so see if I could eliminate the problem. No luck. I even read the source code to the relevant part of glib and tried a couple of experiments to see what was wrong that way. No luck.

After all that time, I spent some more productive time hunting in the appropriate place to find out my problem was probably related to an IRIXism … rqs which was not written to take into account just how many shared libraries applications based on GNOME use these days. A quick fix using rqsall and all was fixed.

Ignoring all the technical details, my knowledge of how Unix works had led me down the wrong path because all the symptoms seemed to indicate an application problem where the real problem was with the operating system. A quick hunt where all the experts hang out showed where the problem was. If I had looked to begin with, I would have saved myself a great deal of time!

However hunting down the wrong path was useful … it helped me practice some skills which need occasional use.

Oh! Don’t assume that my experience is common with those who use Linux. If you stick to a stable distribution and don’t mess too much you will not see this sort of thing.

Designer Stuff

 General  No Responses »
Oct 152006
 

It has just struck me … we have all this designer stuff … designer glasses (I wear ordinary ones), designer jeans, designer whatnots, etc. But who designed the other stuff ? After all we have ordinary jeans … were they designed by the tea boy, or a passer-by on the street ?

After all everything needs a designer, even the cheapest most rubbish sun-glasses you can find. In fact it’s possible that there are more design skills in designing something cheap and nasty as in designing something more expensive. After all it takes some skill to be so cheap 🙂

So remember ‘designer jeans’ are just expensive jeans.

Photography: Return To Arundel

 Photography  No Responses »
Oct 062006
 

On Wednesday (kind of late to post this, but as nobody reads it anyway, who cares?) afternoon I returned to Arundel and more specifically Swanmore Lake to make some images there. Just walked around the lake with a short detour along the long trail north.

It seems my memory of the place had been distorted by time, and the low level of water in the lake was a bit of a shame but I may have come up with some good images (they haven’t been processed as yet). Unfortunately I missed the dramatic sky that was on show on the train back … an oil slick spreading across the sky, white clouds highlighted against huge black clouds and small black clouds highlighted against whispy white skies.

And I managed to damage my foot again … am I jinxed ?

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