Moral Eugenics

Exterminate the brutes?

The Spectacled Avenger has his moments of misanthropy. Sometimes it is difficult to look upon this human comedy and call it good. In my lighter moments, I can at least view it all as a sort of vast carnival of rutting monkeys — very undignified, but undeniably funny. At other times that lighter side of things is much harder to see.

A typical occurrence of the latter happened the other evening on a crowded subway train, as I watched a repulsive little rat-man of dubious moral and genetic quality aggressively elbow a very pregnant woman out of his way in order to beat her to a vacant seat. This low specimen of humanity caused me to wonder how it is that “eugenics” ever became a dirty word. At such times I cannot help but entertain the notion that a little thinning of the social herd might do little harm and much good. It sometimes seems as if the vile and baseborn are crowding out the more noble exemplars of our species. You see, when I’m in my misanthropic mood, when the human comedy seems more like tragedy, I am more prone than usual to reflect on eugenics with indulgence.

Speaking of thinning the herd, consider this story, perhaps a sign of the times, recounted to me by someone whom we had over for dinner last week. She told us of a couple who are of her acquaintance, and who recently made an appeal over Facebook for their friends to contribute to a fund to help them pay for their fertility treatments. No doubt they are possessed of very superior genes and wish very much to grace the world with their continuance, believing furthermore that you and I ought to be willing to pay to ensure that they are passed on.

Of these would-be philanthropists to humanity, I cannot help but think the following: First, if they cannot afford their own fertility treatments, perhaps they cannot comfortably afford to support a child either. Second, adoption might be cheaper and might do more for the common good. Third, if they are unable to see the utter tastelessness of their financial appeal, then I humbly submit that the quality of our species would likely be the better for their not reproducing themselves.

This story is an example of that human comedy — of the rutting monkeys variety — I spoke of. But in such farce lie the seeds of deeper pathos, which becomes evident when we reflect upon the following paradox: much as Plato said that the ideal ruler would be the man who had no desire to be ruler, I am led to think that perhaps the ideal people to continue our species are precisely those who least value doing so. This paradox, from a God’s eye point of view is doubtless very humorous, but from an intelligent human’s viewpoint it is tragic. For what does one see all around one, but the spectacle of the lowest specimens of our genetic and moral stock spreading their seed to the four winds, while their betters, who have other priorities, or other more worthwhile contributions to make to society, have their genes gradually snuffed out over the course of generations?

In that vein, I’m afraid I cannot help but express some degree of sympathy for the following words of Herbert Spencer, that grand old man of Victorian Social Darwinism:

“Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good, is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing-up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.”

(Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (9th edition). London: Williams and Norgate, 1880, p. 400).

In other words, by allowing the transgenerational proliferation of Morlocks, we ensure the future misery and ultimate extinction of the favoured Eloi. Of course, in the eugenic universe, it is almost always left unexplained how it is that supposedly degenerate and “inferior” Morlocks are always threatening to outbreed and swamp the “superior” Eloi. After all, in the natural kingdom ruled by natural selection, “superiority” is cashed out in terms of reproductive success. Reproductive success is the only good coin in the evolutionary realm, and by this standard, it is the Morlocks who are clearly superior and the Eloi inferior.

In any case, Spencer’s is an interesting recasting of typical 19th-century laissez-faire arguments against welfare schemes to help the poor. The typical argument holds that the poor are undeserving of such help, because they are somehow morally undeserving, or because it would be pointless to help them, as they are essentially inferior and can never be improved, and/or that it would be economically inefficient to do so. Instead, Spencer characterizes welfare redistribution as an instance of intergenerational injustice: by helping the poor, we are enabling them to breed in greater numbers, at the expense of our morally healthy and more deserving descendants.

There are of course at least a couple of glaring flaws in Spencer’s reasoning. First, he hasn’t shown that the qualities that make for moral superiority are genetically heritable. Notice that in the slippery wordplay of the Social Darwinists, there is constant equivocation between the descriptive language of physical and genetic inferiority, and the normative language of moral inferiority. Hence Spencer’s “aiding the bad in multiplying” could mean aiding the genetically defective, or it could mean aiding the morally defective. Genetic defects are heritable; moral defects are not obviously so, or not in the same way.

Second, Spencer assumes that policies that will alleviate the lot of the supposedly inferior will also cause them to have more children. Again, the evidence for this claim is lacking. True, other things being equal, in the natural world the longer a creature lives the more offspring it is statistically likely to produce. But among humans, who are capable of procreative choice, a different dynamic may apply. There is some empirical support for this, since development economists will tell you that raising the living standards of the poor tends to reduce their fertility rates rather than raise them, at least in the longer run, perhaps by giving them options for living a meaningful life beyond the mere production of offspring.

(Trivia: the term “proletariat” comes from the Latin proletarius, which was the lowest class in the Roman census. The proletarii were the ones who produced proli — “offspring”. Hence, the proletarius was a mere “producer of offspring”. Since the proletarius owned nothing, his children, his proles, were the only “property” that would be recorded in the census, as they were the only things of value he had to offer the state. They were legion fodder.)

Of course, in reply to this latter point, it is enough for Spencer’s argument if the inferior are enabled to have any offspring as a result of such policies. Welfare needn’t increase their birthrate; that they have any children at all is an evil to be avoided. If the inferior have a birthrate no higher than that of their superiors, say two children per female, but welfare enables them to live long enough to have those two children when they would otherwise die without reproducing, then Spencer could argue that welfare would be socially mischievous. There would exist two more inferiors than should by rights exist, to compete against our healthy descendants for resources. Such is the brutal and inexorable logic of Social Darwinism.

I truly wish that people like that little rat-man on the subway didn’t exist. But sterilizing such vermin wouldn’t solve the problem, because his failing is moral, not genetic. We could sterilize him, but once he had healed from his surgery, he would be back on the subway, pushing pregnant women around. Meanwhile, other genetically “healthy” people would still be passing their bad morals on to their offspring. You see, bad morals can be passed on from parent to child much as bad genes can be; but bad morals don’t reliably track bad genes, nor do they reliably track lack of wealth. This is another of Spencer’s mistakes, for whenever he uses the royal “we” (e.g. “maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies”), he seems to imply those who are affluent or at least solidly middle-class; in effect, he speaks to those who were capable at the time of buying and reading his books, and who were more likely to believe in their contents. To these people it must have been flattering to be counted among the “healthy” or “superior” types. But, Victorian assumptions aside, being solidly middle or upper class is not equivalent to either genetic or moral superiority.

The fact is, the rich are just as capable as the poor of moral inferiority. The main difference is that the rich have material advantages that deflect many of the worst consequences of their vices. The poor are not so lucky — their vices tend to stick. Vices that cause fits of unhappiness or, at worst, depression in the rich, may be utterly life-destroying for the poor. Vice is a luxury the rich can often afford and the poor cannot. The rich substance abuser can pay for a bed in a private rehabilitation clinic. The poor substance abuser will find his bed in a prison or eventually in the gutter. The difference in the two cases is one of circumstance, not of the moral quality of the abuser. Similarly, when the rich neglect their children, they often do so with the aid of nannies and boarding schools. Since the poor cannot afford nannies and boarding schools, poor parents who neglect their children may be thrown in jail and are likely to have their children taken away from them.

Actually, if we must compare the two kinds of viciousness, we might go so far as to say that the viciousness of the rich is worse. Since the rich are less often exposed to the full consequences of their bad behavior, they grow confirmed in their bad habits, less likely to learn from experience they never acquire, and — what’s worse — they encourage such bad behavior in the poor by their seemingly glamorous and consequence-free example.

We cannot discuss sterilizing the morally inferior until we get better at identifying them. As a society we are very good at identifying a subset of the morally inferior — namely those who are poor. These tend to be visible, which is why it was so easy for Spencer and his ilk to see them. He was less good at identifying the ones that were sitting in the House of Commons or the boardrooms of the nation.

Once we have developed better methods for identifying moral degeneracy, we must not shrink from calling it what it is. We must get better at denouncing the morally degenerate. The ability to feel shame was given to us for a reason. Shame is a great teacher; the morally inferior ought to be made to feel it more often.

In an ideal world, each of us would be equipped with a chip embedded inside us, along with some kind of transmitter with a button (perhaps it could come in the form of a phone app?). The latter would be used to administer a small but painful electrical shock to people like the rat-man, who violate those small social norms that the criminal law does not concern itself with. The purpose of the embedded chip would be to receive these electrical shocks from others. In such an ideal world, the rat-man would have received separate shocks from all those on the train who observed his sub-human behaviour. I’m sure it would be a lesson he would not soon forget. And the anticipation of such unpleasant sensations would tend to keep us more aware of the effects of our actions on others. We would have a very concrete incentive not to be the source of displeasure.

If everybody came thus equipped, perhaps we could eliminate the most common forms of incivility in fairly short order. And since I believe practice of the smaller virtues conditions us for the exercise of the greater ones, I can’t help but think we might end up with a better society. It would certainly be a more amusing one.

Opium Dens as Public Policy

After all, it worked so well for the Victorians, right?

The Spectacled Avenger is not in the habit of recycling his blog posts, and he has only done so once before. However, he is about to do so again. Now, as then, his purpose is not merely to fill empty space; he has not run out of time or inspiration to write something new. Rather, he wishes to direct attention to an issue that has become pertinent again.

Back on May 3, 2011 I wrote about Insite (“Insights from Insite”). Insite is a safe injection site in Vancouver’s drug-blighted Downtown East Side. Therein I took what was — and remains — an unpopular position on publicly-sanctioned shooting galleries. I realize that mine is very much the minority view on the subject, at least if the mainstream media is any indication. I counseled caution, arguing that even if we accept the dubious claims about Insite’s immediate efficacy, in the long-term the program, and others like it, may end up doing more harm than good. I am returning to this issue because of a recent recommendation that three sites be set up in Toronto and two in Ottawa. That represents quite an acceleration of the program. Thus, with the possibility of shooting galleries popping up like mushrooms all over the country, I will once more advocate a “go-slow” approach.

I wrote what I did in the belief that the current Canadian government (which, incidentally, I despise with a rare passion) had done a lousy job of articulating its opposition to Insite. Since this is possibly the only issue on which the government and I are in agreement (although for different reasons), I thought I would attempt to make a more coherent case. In short, there are respectable arguments against Insite; one needn’t be opposed to it out of a reactionary conservatism or some instinctive hatred of junkies.

In any case, I still stand by my arguments in that post. These are:

1.     Even if you agree that Insite keeps junkies (relatively) disease free and “healthy”, the empirical evidence about the further claim that it brings more junkies into treatment programs is unproven and likely false, if for no other reason than that the limited availability of treatment programs remains unchanged, meaning that it is mathematically impossible for more addicts to be entering treatment programs, because there are not more treatment spaces available for them to enter than there were before, and those programs were already operating at capacity. In fact, it’s likely that fewer addicts are entering treatment, because since the 1990s the available spaces in Canada for them has been declining, at least according to the few figures I’ve seen.

2.     Insite and programs like it are predicated on the disease model of addiction, which I believe to be mistaken, internally incoherent, empirically unverified, and demonstrably unhelpful in treating addiction — as the poor success rates and abominable relapse statistics bear out.

3.     The disease model and treatment programs based on it view the addict as a patient, when it is his activity rather than passivity that is the core of his problem and also the core of his problem's solution. In this sense, if addiction is a disease, it is what was once upon a time referred to as a “moral disease”.

4.     If addiction is a moral disease in the above sense, then in the long run we can expect a program like Insite to do more harm than good, through the inconsistent moral messages it gives to addicts, and through its removal of motivational incentives to quit using and their replacement with incentives to continue using. However, note that this too is an empirical claim, and one that can only be tested in a longer time frame, which is another reason for avoiding rapid proliferation of safe injection sites.

To these arguments, I only wish to add the following two considerations: First, I urge those of you who profess to be so enthusiastic about the sites to ask yourselves whether you would be comfortable with having one situated next door to your home. If you are not comfortable with it, then you are probably a hypocrite. If you are enthusiastic about them being located in poor or drug-infested neighbourhoods only, then my reply is that the poor are no less entitled to live in decent neighbourhoods than the rest of us.

Second, I am sympathetic to the notion that if it is wrong for me to do something, then it is generally wrong for the government to do it on my behalf — barring a few obvious exceptions. Similarly, if my conscience tells me that a certain action is wrong, then it is probably wrong for me to pay the government to do it on my behalf. I believe that it would be wrong for me to open my home as a safe shooting gallery for junkies. No improvement is made in the moral status of this belief if I were to instead offer money to the government to open a safe shooting gallery somewhere on my behalf.

People like me, who believe it would be wrong to open our own shooting galleries, resent being put in the situation of being forced to pay for such shooting galleries through our taxes. And calling such shooting galleries “safe injection sites” changes nothing in this regard. By all means, let us use that money to create more spaces in treatment programs, if it can be demonstrated that this would improve the situation of addicts. But don’t expect me to cheerfully hand over money to create a comfy space for them to continue to shoot up in.

Without more ado, here is my earlier post…

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Insights from Insite

For someone like me, who is of mildly conservative leanings, the application of public policy can be visualized as the dropping of a stone into a calm pond. Much like ripples, public policy has social effects that radiate outwards from the centre of social action. The most proximate effects are the ones that tend to get noticed, these being more pronounced and closer to the point of impact. The concentric circles further out are less pronounced and eventually fade away into imperceptibility.

However, while those inner ripples are fewer in number, the outer ones are more numerous and widespread. Thus, like ripples, the greater overall effects of a policy might just be those that we least take notice of. Herein lies the task of the conservative social policy analyst. Where others might be tempted to focus only on proximate effects, she must look to the long-term and often indirect effects, to that which is hidden. She must do this not out of a reflexive impulse to pooh-pooh any measure that smells like change. Rather, she must do it out of a desire to urge us to slow down, just a bit, and to consider for a moment whether we may not be creating unintended consequences through the best-laid plans of mice and men.

For some time now, there has been a social experiment going on in Vancouver’s drug-blighted Downtown East Side. It is called Insite, a program that provides a safe injection site for junkies to shoot up in. The main aim of Insite is to cut down on the rate of drug-related deaths by users. A recently-released study indicates that, by this standard, the program is a clear success. There is now talk of expanding the program to various other cities.

However, the current federal government here in Canada has always hated the idea of Insite and has bent over backwards to try to get it eliminated, to no avail so far. They don’t like the idea of coddling a group of citizens they consider to be little better than criminals, and they have gone to some lengths to provide their own counter-evidence purporting to show that Insite is actually a failure.

The government is on firmer ground when it appeals to an economic justice argument, for the fact is, Insite technically subsidizes junkies to shoot up, using funds presumably provided by taxpayers. If a convincing case can be made that taxpayers don’t want to subsidize junkies, then this to me represents a compelling case not to do so. On the other hand, if the program works, and if taxpayers can be convinced that it’s worthwhile, then, Insite is economically defensible. And if Insite relied only on charitable donations rather than tax funds, then no economic injustice would be committed. But I have a gut feeling that the current government would still hate and oppose the program in either case, so their aversion to it really has little to do with economic justice as such

I loathe the current federal government, so it pains me to find myself in ― qualified ― agreement with them. I have grave reservations about Insite. However, my reservations are not based on the federal government’s preconception that addicts are ipso facto criminals rather than persons. Thus, in what follows I will address their problems as if they were upright citizens deserving of just as much respect as you or me, albeit they happen to be citizens with a very serious health problem.

Also, my grave reservations about Insite are not based on any skepticism about the validity of the study indicating Insite’s success. I am willing to grant that the available studies are correct: Insite has been successful in its stated goal of reducing drug-related deaths in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

However, the successes focused on in these studies are what I was referring to above as the inner ripples of policy, its immediate or proximate effects. But what about the outer ripples, the ones that are harder to see or to measure? I heard an interview on the radio last week with a senior administrator of the program (unfortunately I didn’t catch his name). He stated that the goal of Insite was to “keep addicts disease-free until they are ready to make the decision to seek treatment for their addictions” (I’m necessarily paraphrasing here, but pretty accurately, I think).

The evidence indicates they have indeed been kept (more) disease free. This I won’t dispute. But it begs a larger question: What warrant do we have to assume that untreated addicts reliably make the decision to seek treatment? Evidence here varies, but most of what I’ve seen is not encouraging. That is one of the unseen ripples of the policy.

We can also follow the ripples a little further out. For example, what warrant do we have to assume that untreated addicts reliably make the decision to seek treatment when they receive services that enable them to continue using drugs relatively safely? If Insite facilitates addicts’ safe drug use, might it not be the case that a very strong incentive to quit ― the high probability of disease or overdose ― has been removed? This question was screaming to be answered in the interview, but neither interviewer nor interviewee seemed much interested in addressing it. On the interviewer’s part I imagine this was motivated by an implicit desire to display his social liberal credentials to a mostly like-minded CBC audience.

Defenders of Insite have argued that the availability of information and professional consultation available at Insite will help guide users to treatment options. Perhaps this is the case, but again, it is an empirical claim for which we want evidence. The report touting Insite’s success simply tells us that addicts using it are more likely to remain disease-free. It is (tellingly?) silent about how many of them end up seeking treatment. Until we have information on this, the claim that addicts who avail themselves of Insite’s services are more likely to seek treatment remains an unproven hypothesis, not a fact.

There is further reason to doubt this claim’s validity: most professionals in the “addiction services industry” (I don’t really know what else to call it) will tell you that there is a shortage of spaces available in treatment facilities. There are too few spots to service current demand, let alone an increase in demand.  Logically, this means that it would be impossible to treat more patients given current resources. So Insite cannot be leading more addicts to treatment, because the treatment isn’t there for them to be led to.

Obviously this is not an argument against Insite’s claim to efficacy in bringing addicts closer to treatment. If anything, it’s an argument for an increase in resources devoted to addiction treatment. Again, however, we must consider the policy ripples a little further out. Might it be the case that the increased access to addiction treatment information is at least somewhat ― if not entirely ― offset by the convenient and comfortable drug injection environment offered by Insite? At the very least, we must admit that mixed messages are being sent here: “We’d like you to consider getting treatment for your addiction. Here’s a brochure. And here’s a clean needle and a comfy room to shoot up in.” A junkie could be forgiven for taking away from this the message that his addiction is not so bad for him after all, and that treatment is not imperative.

Much of one’s attitude toward programs like Insite will depend on the views one has about the nature of addiction itself. Addiction is a puzzling phenomenon. Once upon a time, it was simply viewed as a matter of lack of willpower, and was thus regarded as a moral problem, a moral failing. We could call this the “moral disease” view of addiction. It has to a large extent fallen out of favour among researchers (along with many other things that employ the term “moral”). Speaking very broadly, the moral disease view has largely been replaced by either of two currently popular models of addiction. Fortunately, my reservations about Insite are unaffected by whichever of these views one happens to hold.

The Disease Model

Probably the most widely accepted and fashionable paradigm for understanding addiction is the disease view, which treats it as if it were a medical condition on all fours with, say, diabetes or cancer. Of course, there is a large psychological component to this particular disease which differentiates it from purely physical conditions, but for treatment purposes, addiction on this model is seen as a medical condition, a psycho-physical sickness beyond the control of its victim. This is the operational viewpoint of most Twelve Step programs.

From what little I know about the history of addiction treatment (and it’s probably more than the average person, for personal reasons I don’t wish to expand on here), the disease model was developed in the treatment of alcoholics in the early 20th century for at least two reasons. One was that clinicians noted that chronic alcoholism had a more or less definite disease pathology, a natural progression or history of symptoms, when left untreated. Another was the hope that by seeing alcoholism as a medical condition, people would be less judgmental of alcoholics, and alcoholics would be more willing to seek treatment once the stigma of their condition was removed. In other words, it was specifically hoped that the disease model would replace the old moral disease view with its accompanying social stigma.

Both of these were valid points to some extent. Chronic and very acute alcoholism does have a fairly well-defined physical pathology. And probably more problem drinkers have ended up seeking treatment than they otherwise would have once the social stigma attached to the “disease” was mitigated.

On the other hand, not all problem drinkers fit a disease profile that was originally developed with the most advanced late-stage alcoholics in mind. It was a one-size-fits-all model that has not proved very helpful in understanding the “disease”, if disease it be. And although more people sought treatment, the treatment programs based upon this disease model have been notable only for their abysmal success rates. Alcoholics Anonymous has been around since 1939. It does not track its success rate in treating alcoholics. You’d think they would want to. But there is probably a good reason why they don’t. Others have done the studies on their behalf, and the general consensus is that Alcoholics Anonymous is a failure at keeping people sober. There are far more failures than successes, and even among the “successes”, relapse rates are sky high. If alcoholism is a disease, and if A.A. is the “cure”, then as a doctor, I’d consider taking my chances by prescribing a placebo to my alcoholic patients.

Long-time members of A.A. will counter by saying that the organization is not supposed to “keep people sober”. Alcoholics are supposed to keep themselves sober; the responsibility for recovery always lies with the alcoholic herself. But doesn’t this seem in tension with the notion that addiction is a disease for which its sufferer is not responsible? A.A. members will also tell you that failure or relapse happens because an alcoholic can’t be treated unless he “is ready” to recover, or has hit bottom and decided to give up the drink. But again, this seems in tension with the disease model’s stress upon the notion that alcoholism is not a function of the alcoholic’s lack of willpower.

Sooner or later it seems, every treatment scheme predicated on the disease model runs up against this tension. The disease model may be better at luring the addict into treatment, but at bottom, the treatments themselves end up stressing willpower and the addict’s own inner resources for recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous is no exception. As a matter of fact, their entire program of recovery can be viewed as a conscious attempt to instill in the alcoholic a transformational revolution of character, the beneficial moral effects of which will hopefully mimic those of intense religious conversion. It is no coincidence that Bill Wilson, co-founder of A.A., was greatly influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is important to stress that such an approach works on the internal resources of the alcoholic’s own moral agency, which seems rather at odds with the disease model of addiction. After all, we don’t cure cancer or diabetes by relying on the character or willpower of the patient.

In a true disease model, the patient is just that ― a patient. But addiction treatment almost always ends up (as it must, I believe) treating the patient as an agent. Perhaps the success of such programs might be improved if they were to be honest about this from the beginning. Maybe we must fess up and admit that kicking addiction is a matter of willpower after all (helped along, of course, by a certain degree of moral support from others). Obviously, putting it this way grossly oversimplifies the phenomenon of addiction. But then again, so does the disease model.

The Rational Choice Model

The other school of thought ― the rational choice model ― is less popular than the disease model, at least among clinicians. The rational choice model has been adopted mainly by behavioural economists because it fits well with the observed behaviour of addicts. In a nutshell, this model views the addict as a rational consumer, in almost all respects the same as you or me.

Generally speaking, when the price of a good increases, consumption of that good tends to fall. The rate of decrease of demand will vary from one good to another, and from one agent to another, but the general trend is obvious. The addict’s consumption of drugs is, in principle, no different. If you lower the price of cocaine or heroin, addicts will tend to increase their consumption of them, and some people will begin to consume these drugs who otherwise might not have.

The fact that the addict is addicted to the drug simply means that his demand for the drug is inelastic relative to other goods. If the price of heroin goes up, before he considers cutting down his consumption, the junkie will instead often forego food or rent. This seems like an irrational consumption choice, but if each of us were to systematically examine our own consumption choices, we would often find similar though perhaps less harmful patterns. I once knew someone “addicted” to electronic gadgets; he absolutely had to have the latest thing, spending well beyond his slender means, even if paying for it meant that he didn’t know how he would make his rent or pay off his ridiculous credit card bill. My wife might say that my penchant for book collecting meets this description. There just happens to be no self-help group akin to Alcoholics Anonymous that I know of for my particular form of consumption aberration (if there were, I’m sure my wife would have left a brochure on my pillow by now).

The rational choice model views the addict as making choices about consumption, based on what they believe will best satisfy their overall preferences. To the third party observer, these choices can seem downright irrational, but to the person making the choice it seems perfectly rational: they have a (very strong) desire for a drug, which gives them pleasure or ― what amounts to much the same thing ― relieves their pain. Any approach to treating the addict should treat them as rational persons making choices based on a preference set and an information set. Such an approach would work on improving their decision-making by modifying their preferences and providing them with information. Inevitably, there will also be situational and environmental factors standing in the way of better decision-making, things such as easy availability of the drug, hanging out with the wrong crowd, etc.

The point is, rather than approaching the addict as a powerless patient whose addiction is an external force majeur that strikes him through no fault of his own (the disease model), the rational choice model treats the addict as an empowered, decision-making agent, responsible for his own conduct. He ought to be praised for his good choices, especially when, as in the case of addiction, good choices are difficult choices. And he ought to be held responsible for his bad ones. The prevailing view that addiction seizes and controls the addict, as well-intentioned as it might be, is probably misguided. It is one part of an overall tendency to “medicalize” conduct that is moral in nature. I will illustrate this medicalization of moral conduct with an anecdote from an essay by Theodore Dalrymple.

Dalrymple was a prison psychiatrist. He was interviewing an inmate who was in prison for viciously beating up his girlfriend badly enough to put her in the hospital. This was not unusual behaviour for this particular inmate. Dalrymple asked him why he beat up his girlfriend. He replied to the effect that he had difficulty controlling his anger and she had made him really angry. Not really his fault, you see. The general gist of his answer was that he was in prison due to a problem largely beyond his control ― he had “anger management issues”, to use the parlance of our times. He simply couldn’t help beating his girlfriend to a bloody pulp. Dalrymple then asked him how it was that since he had been in prison he had managed to be well-behaved, with no outbursts of anger or violence. He replied that the guards didn’t let prisoners get away with that kind of bullshit in prison.

The prisoner had ascribed his violent behaviour to a quasi-disease model of anger, which he probably picked up by osmosis from the liberal claptrap he was hearing around him. Working from within the disease model, the prisoner’s subsequent good conduct behind bars makes no sense. But working from the rational choice model, it makes perfect sense. He was able to modify his behaviour in the presence of a strong incentive, namely getting the proverbial tar beaten out of him by a prison guard. Research on addiction done by behavioural economists bears this phenomenon out.

This has obvious implications for programs like Insite. When we ask ourselves what motivation Insite offers addicts to quit, we mostly come up empty-handed. Again, yes there are brochures and addiction counselors, but there are also the clean needles and the safe and comfy shooting galleries that cancel these out. The rational choice model predicts a poor long-term treatment prognosis for users of Insite. I hope someone will do the research to test this hypothesis. It represents one of those outlying ripples of this particular social policy, one of those rare ones that is, in principle, empirically measurable. And the test should probably happen before the program is expanded, not afterward. That is how conservative policy analysis should work.

Bad History Hits a Red Light

Syphilis, medieval style

In my previous post, I took historian Michael Bliss to task for committing a certain type of error I chose to call the “Has been-Ought” fallacy, or the fallacy of deriving an “ought” claim from a statement about how things were in the past. In this post I’d like to present some more shoddy argument by another who makes her living in the historian’s trade.

It begins with a story that has been in the news here in Canada for the past couple of days. It involved a court challenge to our criminal laws surrounding prostitution and the sex trade. Prostitution per se is not illegal in Canada, but many of the surroundings of the trade are. The challenge to the current laws insists that since having sex for money is not an illegal activity, the other legal prohibitions surrounding it create harmful working conditions which pose a threat to women, and are therefore unconstitutional. The challenge made it through Ontario’s highest court, so now it will presumably make its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Although I have my own opinions on this case, I shall not try your patience with them here. Suffice to say, I believe the decision was a bad one, on much the same grounds as I believe the earlier Insite decision was a bad one — both cases make pronouncements on issues of public policy (not within the court’s mandate), and because they uphold victim culture and further erode the notion that persons are responsible for their own behavior. But enough about my unpopular and possibly mistaken opinion on the matter.

In any case, no sooner had the decision come down, than we were entertained with a flurry of excited articles extolling the economic and social benefits of an industry in legalized brothels in Canada, most of them written in a tone of lurid speculation and hushed excitement. One thing these enthusiastic articles have in common is that they are all written by men. Men, it seems, or at least male journalists, cannot wait to have legalized brothels. The opinions of women, including prostitutes themselves, on the subject are considerably more mixed.

I should say that there was at least one article, written by a female historian, which offered an unusual defense of legalized and regulated brothels. Penned by Professor Jacqueline Murray, and cleverly titled “The Whores of Yore”, it made the argument that the people of the Middle Ages had it right in their attitude towards the sex industry. Prof. Murray seems to be a historian of a rather revisionist bent. According to her, in the Middle Ages legalized brothels were the norm. She further contends that they provided legitimate career options for women who had fallen through the cracks of a society devoid of social safety nets. She also argues that they provided two further benefits. First, they made prostitution healthier, by enabling authorities to conduct health inspections, and by giving prostitutes access to medical care. Second, legalized brothels provided men with an outlet for their sexual urges, which would otherwise find expression in the accosting and potential rape of respectable wives and daughters.

In each of these claims, Professor Murray is dead wrong, and laughably so. Let’s examine each claim in turn.

Legalized Brothels:

Prof. Murray claims that legalized brothels were the norm in medieval times. As an example, she cites the case of the Bishop of Winchester’s ownership of London’s Southwark “stews”. She is right in claiming that brothels were commonplace. But to claim they were legal is quite a stretch. And with regard to the canard about the Bishops of Winchester, sadly, it seems the learned professor has fallen for the historical equivalent of an urban legend.

First off, we are in no doubt of the Church’s official position: prostitution is a sin, for both buyer and seller. This means that, as far as canon law was concerned, prostitution was illegal.

As for Southwark, yes, the land formed part of the manorial lands of the Bishops of Winchester (or more appropriately, the corporation of the Bishopric of Winchester). There would have been a variety of businesses situated on those lands, all of them paying some rent to the bishop. Some of these businesses were “stews” — taverns in which prostitutes customarily plied their trade. The bishop would not have been a pimp or procurer of women, as those who reproduce this story seem to imply. He would merely be a landlord, a receiver of rents from the many tenant businesses, stews included. I suppose this technically means the bishops lived off the avails of prostitution, but they had no direct hand in running brothels. Therefore, Prof. Murray’s claim that “the ‘stews’ of Southwark, now the South Bank of London, were owned and operated by the Bishop of Winchester” is misleading, to say the least.

For a fascinating and thorough history of the Southwark stews, I cannot recommend highly enough Henry Ansgar Kelly’s article, “Bishop, Prioress, and Bawd in the Stews of Southwark,” Speculum 75 (2000), 342-388. You will quickly learn that there is no basis, in medieval London at least, for the claim that brothels were legally-sanctioned operations. They were illegal, notwithstanding that the local authorities often turned a blind eye to them. If that makes them legal, then by that definition an underground dogfighting league is legal so long as it keeps paying off the cops. And in fact the stews of Southwark were shut down by the authorities from time to time. And whores were punished, much more severely than they are in our society. Then, as now, there were occasional moral panics interspersed among periods of official indifference.

In short, Prof. Murray’s high claims of legal prostitution in the Middle Ages are essentially rubbish. At best we can say that in some areas, for some periods, prostitution was de facto legal, but it was never so de iure.

Economic Opportunities for Women:

This argument can be hastily disposed of. I’m sure prostitution did provide incomes to women who were outcast. I suppose if such a woman had cut off an arm or a leg and begged in the streets, then that too would have provided her with an income. Does that make it good social policy to encourage it, or to tax it? Can we really not do better for our women than the medievals did (or rather didn’t) for theirs? Let me ask you this: If you had a daughter who had fallen on hard times, would you prefer she had the “option” of prostituting herself, or would you prefer a proper social safety net to help her get back on her feet? (I know, I’m suddenly raving like a socialist. Chalk it up to my inner Red Tory.)

Part of what makes destitution a bad thing is that it limits freedom by compelling people to do degrading things against their preferences and better judgment. Prof. Murray seems to speak of prostitution as a solution to poverty, when it should be viewed as a symptom of it. She doesn’t seem to realize it, but her views betray a chilling lack of empathy for the poor that makes even a cold soul like mine shudder. This is truly “let them eat cake” thinking at its worst. And yet, ironically, I imagine she prides herself on her liberality, tolerance, and kindness.

Sexual Outlets for Men:

Professor Murray is far from the first person to make this claim. This has been argued since time immemorial. Some medieval theologians thought prostitution was a necessary evil, and a minority claimed that it deterred homosexuality. In short, this line of argument says that men — or some indeterminate subset of them — are lecherous by nature, and that if it weren’t for the sexual outlet that prostitutes provide, they would be busy raping respectable women, or else having sexual congress with men or animals or ripe fruit. This argument is more than a little dubious. What’s more, it manages to be degrading both to men and women at the same time.

Supposedly, a certain proportion of men who visit prostitutes would rape women if prostitutes were unavailable. This is an empirical claim, and to my knowledge it has never been empirically verified. But even if it could be verified, I doubt very much that it can support an argument for legalized prostitution. It implies a reductive view of men as utter slaves to their sexual drives. Furthermore, these sexual drives cannot be controlled, trained or sublimated. If this were true, then it seems to me a more natural answer would be castration, not legalized prostitution. Instead, we’re told by people like Prof. Murray that the only way of dealing with these men is to provide poor women for them to use as sexual “outlets”.

And they must be poor women, mind you, fallen women. After all, we don’t want these men touching the daughters of decent people, respectable people. And here methinks I spot the latent schizophrenia in much “progressive” philosophizing about prostitution: On the one hand, we are to believe that there is nothing wrong with prostitution, and that we should legalize it, tax it, and make it safe for women. Women who engage in it are to be called “sex workers” and are to be treated as if they are skilled tradespeople who have freely made a valid career choice. On the other hand, of course, you would be hard pressed to find people who would approve of their own daughters entering this supposedly respectable trade. What would be your feeling if your daughter's high school guidance counselor suggested she take up this trade, or that she had an aptitude for it? In other words, it seems to be implied by the ruling progressivism on the subject that prostitution is a valid career choice only for the daughters of others, preferably for the poor, or for the daughters of the poor. These are the appropriate outlets for potential rapists to let off a little steam with.

It’s Healthier:

Professor Murray makes the claim that prostitution in the Middle Ages was rendered healthier through legalization. Prostitutes working in brothels were subject to medical inspection, or so she claims. Given the prevailing state of medical science and practice at the time, I can only imagine what these “inspections” consisted of. We can safely assume that they were invasive, degrading, and open to abuse.

We are also told by Prof. Murray that the brothels brought prostitution into the open, and made medical services available to the women. Again, given the state of medieval medical science, I can only wonder what sort of help they could expect to receive from a medieval doctor.

I once wrote an article on the history of syphilis. It was a fascinating subject to research. The mainstream consensus is that syphilis arrived in Europe from America in the 1490s; in other words, it arrived at the tail end of those sexually enlightened Middle Ages that Prof. Murray extols. It is hard to overestimate how the arrival of syphilis ravaged a society that was unprepared for its onslaughts, and one of the main vectors of transmission was through baths and brothels. Read up on the arrival and initial spread of AIDS in North America and you will find the parallels are eerie; many cities in the early 1980s shut down their bathhouses. And much like AIDS in 1980, for the late medieval syphilitic there was no effective medical help to speak of, other than quack cures like mercury. The syphilitic would have mercury baths, causing her teeth and hair to fall out and making her drool uncontrollably. The “cure” was a form of poisoning that was as likely to kill as the disease itself.

(Incidentally, we get our word “quack” from the Dutch kwakzalver, a hawker of salves. The Dutch word became popular in English because it sounded much like “quicksilver”, the most popular quack treatment for syphilis. But I digress.)

The fact is, throughout pre-modern literature, the whore is a byword for short life, as it still is today. Medieval history provides no support for the notion that prostitution ought to be legalized.

Addendum:

It is often argued (for example, by feminist intervenors and amici curiae in the famous Canadian case of R. v. Butler) that the availability of pornography causes men to rape and should therefore be banned. Others argue that pornography provides an outlet for men, and therefore makes women safer. In the absence of any sound empirical evidence, it seems one can make unverified empirical claims either for or against a thesis.

Might not a similar phenomenon be happening with the back and forth regarding prostitution? One side, as exemplified by people like Prof. Murray, will argue that prostitution provides an outlet for men’s sexual urges. But since there is no evidence one way or the other, it can just as easily be argued that access to prostitutes might actually irritate and enflame those aberrant sexual urges and actually cause more men to rape. And after all, if society takes a winking attitude towards using women as sexual outlets, perhaps pushing the envelope a bit is not such a terrible crime? Or at least that is what such lowlifes might be led to think to themselves.

Of course, there is a relevant sense in which much prostitution is akin to a kind of indirect rape. If the typical prostitute is driven to the sex trade through poverty or addiction or literal slavery, then she suffers from a compromised will. Therefore, perhaps the sex she engages in cannot be characterized as entirely consensual. The man who pays to have sex with her perhaps does not physically overpower her and pin her down. Rather, her life circumstances do that dirty work for him.

The Malaise of the Intellectuals

Do we dare to dream?

Warning: This post is short on argument and long on venom. And I think I could technically get arrested for it. And it's so full of earnestness that I almost sicken myself. But I don’t care, because I’m really pissed off.

A Mirror for Princes


Here’s some advice that Machiavelli could add to The Prince were he alive today: When a prince is opposed by the disaffection or animosity of the learned, there are two ways to neutralize the threat. The first way is simple liquidation. If well-executed, this method has the benefit of disposing of the threat quickly and thoroughly. It has the drawback of creating fear in those who are not purged, and fear can easily become the focus around which further opposition will coalesce. It can make secret enemies of those who were once well-disposed or indifferent to the prince.

Much better is the second method: Give each disaffected intellectual a tenured university post and a six-figure salary. This has the proven effect of dulling the intellectual’s common sense; it cuts him off from the real concerns of common life, and in time it may transform him into the prince’s loudest partisan. More importantly, the intellectual will be generally ignored by the people at large, since the common run of people rarely care about what eggheads have to say. The sinecure will offer him just enough prestige to stroke his ego (intellectuals are among the vainest of creatures), while also, somewhat paradoxically, tenure will offer him the kind of security that it would be sheer folly for him to jeopardize. Once the intellectual is so placed, it is left to the prince to wait for time and age and rich food to naturally take their course. Another enemy is eliminated — but humanely, of course.

If there are not enough professorships to go around, or if the intellectual in question is rather less clever or has a drinking problem, the prince can achieve the same goal on the cheap by somehow arranging for said intellectual to be placed as an armchair op-ed columnist in a prestigious large-circulation newspaper (newspapers are a valuable tool — every prince should control the editorial board of at least one). The newspaper should preferably be a daily; that way the intellectual will be too oppressed by frequent deadlines to have either the brains or the energy to offer any incisive criticism of the prince’s rule. He must be kept as busy as a bitch in a puppy mill, churning out diseased and inbred prose that strikes the double-plus-good balance between sententiousness and meaninglessness.

The intellectual-cum-journalist will in due course become too tired and jaded to believe that any real change is possible, or that any change could possibly be in his personal interests. And his salary should make him just comfortable enough that he will not wish to endanger his position by advocating for a substantial alteration of the status quo. As the journalist ages, he may become a sighing and ineffectual cynic. He will also be little-regarded. Or else, akin to a sort of Stockholm syndrome, he will eventually come to love the prince’s regime and his special place within it. The erstwhile enemy then becomes a trusty retainer. But a prince should remember that retainers must always be rewarded: after doing faithful service to his prince, the superannuated journalist should find himself the recipient of a seat in the Senate, where he may doze away his remaining days, his aged head pillowed upon the perfumed lap of a generous public pension. And thus, another enemy of the prince is eased out of this bustling world with nary an eyebrow raised.

So much for advice to princes.

Blowing out the Moral Lights

I am led to these ruminations by my observation of the reaction of Canada’s kept intellectuals and chatterers to the latest tale of scandal and criminality by Canada’s ruling junta (a.k.a. The Harper Government™). For non-Canadian readers, and for those Canadian readers too apathetic to care anymore, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ruling Conservative Party have managed to get themselves implicated in a voter suppression scam in the last election that used automatic phone messages (and in some cases live callers) to direct voters to the wrong polling stations. In some cases these calls purported to be from Elections Canada. Elections Canada is adamant that they never phone voters; they are currently investigating the allegations. New details emerge by the day, and none of them are particularly flattering to the Glorious Leader and his Star Chamber cabal.

To be fair, no watertight case has yet been built to implicate the Tories in the scam, at least not one that will hold up in a court of law. So far. However, given past history (they have already been found guilty of electoral fraud in the 2006 election), and given the uncomfortable-looking contortions the Prime Minister’s communications people have spun themselves into, no self-respecting Tory can cast his unflinching gaze upon the evidence and call it good. Of course, at this point there remain precious few Tories who can be called “self-respecting”. Or “honourable”. The fact is, “Prime Minister” Harper (for I do not recognize him as such) is a known liar, and on multiple occasions he has shown an absence of integrity that makes me shudder. If he were to walk in front of my moving car, I would not brake. And I would consider it my duty as a citizen to back up over him again, just to be sure. I have all the evidence I need, and every passing day gives me more. I am convinced that his party is guilty and that the conspiracy is more widespread than currently indicated. There was fraud committed, no doubt. Harper is guilty of enough else that we may as well throw this charge into the mix. After all, when you’re looking at several consecutive life terms, what’s one more murder in the indictment, right?

If most Canadians’ well-founded suspicions are true, then Canadian politics will have plumbed new depths. The allegations are serious. They strike at the very core of our democratic institutions. As far as I am concerned, what we are hearing about is what in a more honest age would have been called TREASON. I can think of no more serious or fundamental crime against the state, aside perhaps from an outright palace coup by an armed military junta. I will say of The Harper Government™ what Abraham Lincoln once said of the slave interest in America: 

They are blowing out the moral lights around us.

When faced with the prospect of such utter Cimmerian darkness, to await more evidence is folly. After all, why should decent and generally law-abiding citizens put up with being told to wait for the evidence and presume that the junta is innocent until proven guilty, when that junta has itself shown staggering contempt for the rule of law over the past six years?

Innocent until proven guilty? No, because Harper has never once extended the same benefit of the doubt to his enemies. Since he has decided that politics is a form of war, that there is no such thing as a loyal opposition, and that dissent is treason and deserves no quarter, I am no longer willing to play by the rules that he flouts. If Harperian politics is war by other means, then fuck it, let’s rumble. Let’s take the war to his doorstep, to his family, and to whatever other things such a reptile might be capable of loving besides power. He would do no differently if given the chance. Whoever would rid us of this despot is deserving of a statue, a public feast day, and the undying gratitude of generations of Canadians yet unborn.

The Malaise of the Intellectuals

I apologize for my unmeasured and uncouth language in the previous paragraph. I moved myself into a paroxysm of sputtering rage, and I allowed myself to get off track. That tends to happen when I try to describe the obscene moral abyss that is Stephen Harper.

Returning to the topic of kept intellectuals, both academic and journalistic. Our nation’s most noble and ignoble brainboxes insist on referring to the voter suppression activities in winking terms as “dirty tricks” or political “shenanigans”. Again, I firmly believe that the appropriate word is “treason”. Let us first discuss the academics. Then we shall turn to the journalists.

A couple of days ago I had the dubious opportunity to attend an academic panel discussion on the scandal at the university in which I work. This university is about as leftist as such an institution can get — no mean feat! There were two learned professors of political science and one professor of philosophy (the last happens to be a personal friend). The depressing upshot of the whole conversation was that nothing will come of this scandal, that all parties play dirty tricks, and that we’ll just have to wait four years to vote the bastards out, so that we can elect a new set of bastards. This is the sighing and ineffectual cynicism to which I referred earlier.

Their views were in keeping with those of famous (by Canadian standards at least) historian Michael Bliss, as expressed on a CBC radio program this past Sunday evening. Professor Bliss, it is now painfully evident, has become a silly old hack. He has declined into that contemptible sort of character whose sole remaining purpose in the public sphere is to be trotted out to clothe indefensible viewpoints in academic gowns. He usually pontificates on subjects well beyond his professorial magisterium, and in any case his intellect has long since turned into a sort of vanilla pudding in abstract form. Sadly, all that remains of him are his titles and a well-regarded book on the discovery of insulin. The Senate and the grave both yawn before him. I pray the latter take him first.

The learned Professor Doctor Bliss made much of the fact that there had been other scandals in Canadian history. I found this observation not very profound. The general drift of all his vapourings was that, since there have been many scandals in Canadian political history before, we should not be alarmed at this one. However, there are at least three things wrong with this reasoning (I use “reasoning” very loosely).

First, just because something happened in the past doesn’t make it acceptable today. If we can agree that certain past practices were wrong, then we should be able to agree that they’re wrong when they occur today. Put another way, Bliss commits a fallacy of deriving a claim that a state of affairs is reasonable or acceptable, from an antecedent claim that the same or similar state of affairs occurred in the past. The fallacy confuses the descriptive with the normative. This is a fallacy so common among second- or third-rate historians that there ought to be a special name for it. I humbly submit that it should be called the “Has Been-Ought” fallacy, in honour of Hume’s famous “Is-Ought” fallacy, which it resembles, and also in honour of Professor Bliss’ “has-been” status as an intellectual.

(Full hypocrisy disclosure: Perceptive readers of this blog will note that I have myself been guilty of the “Has Been-Ought” fallacy on more than one occasion. Fair enough. I am after all a third-rate historian. It is a trap that we antiquarians often step into. I suppose that when appealing to historical facts, it’s best to remember that the past can teach us much about the limits of what can be done, but that it is the present that must teach us what is worthwhile doing. Or something like that. But I digress.)

The commission of the “Has Been-Ought” fallacy by public intellectuals like Bliss contributes much to a corrosive passivity that filters down from our “thought leaders” to the rest of us. It must stop. Almost nothing will aid and abet a criminal like Harper so much as the knowing wink, nod, and chuckle of the learned in the face of blatant criminality.

Second, Professor Bliss disingenuously ignores the fact that the nature of this scandal is different from past ones. Yes, there was good old John A. Macdonald and the CPR scandal, and innumerable Canadian political scandals that followed (anyone remember the “tainted tuna” scandal?). But very few if any of them consisted of calculated and systematic subversions of the entire democratic process. Most of them were examples of straightforward money grubbing or influence peddling. Quaint stuff really, at least in comparison to systematic electoral fraud. Thankfully, Canadians have a venerable history of using the electoral system to “boot the bastards out of office” when politicians overreach in their corruption. In some cases, powerful parties have been annihilated at the polls, reduced to mere shadows of their former selves. I think this is healthy. But will we be able to rely on this method in the future, after the electoral process has been rotted out by the termites currently in power? No, Professor Bliss, this scandal is very different. Shame on you for being too stupid or dishonest or cowardly to realize it.

Third, as a once-respectable historian, Professor Bliss should have plenty of historical examples at hand showing how fragile a thing democracy is. Within the space of a century the Roman Republic went from possessing admirable governing institutions that were the envy of the Greeks, to having battling gangs of political partisans literally clubbing each other to death in the Forum, followed by a long nighttime of imperial tyranny and decline. Democracy is not history’s default position; to assume so is to take it for granted. For most of history, most of the people that have ever existed at any given time have lived and died under the misrule of tyrants. Democracies are rare and precious things. Again, Professor Bliss, shame on you.

Moving down — far down — the intellectual evolutionary scale, from the groves of academe to the Augean stables of the yellow journalists, let us turn to Exhibit A: John Ibbitson, professional lickspittle and resident oxygen thief at the Globe and Mail, who has, as I write — and doubtless after much straining — broken wind with his seventh column in almost as many days telling us that either there was no conspiracy to defraud the electorate, or that there was one but it was limited to one or two ridings, or that anyone and everyone other than Harper and his Tory banditti were responsible for it. Methinks the shill doth protest too much. His columns are a kind of linguistic flatus: they make a sound and they stink up a room, but they serve little other purpose. To mix my metaphors, the fact is that the Conservative Party of Canada has its collective hand lodged so far up Ibbitson’s posterior that it seems to be working his mouth like a puppet.

What all of Ibbitson’s columns on the subject have in common so far, besides their bad odour, and besides his shameless toadying for a Senate seat, is that they are completely devoid of facts. They do contain plenty of… hmmm… what’s the word I’m looking for… you know, the one that means the opposite of “fact”? Anyway, his columns are larded generously with whatever those are. Actually, don’t bother looking for facts in any Globe and Mail article, since facts have to be dug up and, well, research is not something Globe writers do. It’s not what they’re paid for. Their only job is to chew the cud in the stable and spew something resembling language into a corporate bucket every Monday through Saturday at deadline time.

It has become painfully clear that substantive change will never come from a university or a press, and that if we wait for the intellectuals to do our thinking for us, we will continue our slide into tyranny. We seem to be in the unenviable position of living in an age in which the figures who set themselves up for intellectuals, for our leaders in thought, possess moral qualities inferior to those of the general run of citizens.

We must save ourselves, out on the street. Maybe if we start the parade, they’ll get in front of it, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. In any case, I plan to be at Yonge and Dundas Square in Toronto at 2:30pm this Sunday and I hope to see you there. If you don’t like protesting alone, then send me a message and perhaps we can meet up and protest together.

Manus haec inimica tyrannis.