Tag: violence

The Trolley Problem of For-Profit Healthcare:

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Loops of Death and Denial

The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment that pits action against inaction. In the original version, a person faces a choice: a trolley hurtles down a track toward five people tied to the rails, but a lever allows the trolley to be diverted onto another track, where one person is tied. The dilemma is simple in its grotesque arithmetic: let five die or actively kill one to save them. A perennial favourite of ethics classes, the trolley problem is most often used to explore Consequentialism, particularly Utilitarianism, and its cool calculus of harm minimisation. Over the years, countless variations have been conjured, but few approach the nightmarish reality of its real-world application: the for-profit healthcare system in the United States.

With the recent death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the trolley dilemma takes on a new and morbid relevance. Let’s reframe the challenge.

The Healthcare Trolley Loop

Picture the trolley again on a bifurcated track. The lever remains, as does the moral agent poised to decide its fate. This time, the agent is Brian Thompson. The setup is simple: one track leads to the deaths of five people, and the other is empty. But here’s the twist: the trolley doesn’t just pass once in this version—it’s on a loop. At every interval, Thompson must decide whether to pull the lever and send the trolley to the empty track or allow it to continue its deadly course, killing five people each time.

But Thompson isn’t just deciding in a vacuum. The track with five people comes with a financial incentive: each life lost means higher profits, better quarterly earnings, and soaring shareholder returns. Diverting the trolley to the empty track, meanwhile, offers no payout. It’s not a single moral quandary; it’s a recurring decision, a relentless calculus of death versus dollars.

This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a business model. For-profit healthcare doesn’t merely tolerate death—it commodifies it. The system incentivises harm through denial of care, inflated costs, and structural inefficiencies that ensure maximum profit at the expense of human lives.

Enter the Shooter

Now, introduce the wildcard: the shooter. Someone whose loved one may have been one of the countless victims tied to the track. They see Thompson at the lever, his decisions ensuring the endless loop of suffering and death. Perhaps they believe that removing Thompson can break the cycle—that a new lever-puller might divert the trolley to the empty track.

Thompson is killed, but does it change anything? The system remains. Another CEO steps into Thompson’s place, hand on the lever, ready to make the same decision. Why? Because the tracks, the trolley, and the profit motive remain untouched. The system ensures that each decision-maker faces the same incentives, pressures, and chilling rationale: lives are expendable; profits are not.

The Problem of Plausible Deniability

The shooter’s actions are vilified because they are active, visible, and immediate. A single violent act is morally shocking, and rightly so. But what of the quiet violence perpetuated by the healthcare system? The denial of coverage, the refusal of life-saving treatments, the bankruptcy-inducing bills—all are forms of systemic violence, their harm diffused and cloaked in the language of economic necessity.

The for-profit model thrives on this plausible deniability. Its architects and operators can claim they’re simply “following the market,” that their hands are tied by the invisible forces of capitalism. Yet the deaths it causes are no less real, no less preventable. The difference lies in perception: the shooter’s act is direct and visceral, while the system’s violence is passive and bureaucratic, rendered almost invisible by its banality.

A System Built on Death

Let’s not mince words: the current healthcare system is a death loop. It’s not an accident; it’s a feature. Profit-seeking in healthcare means there is always a financial incentive to let people die. During the Affordable Care Act (ACA) debates, opponents of universal healthcare decried the spectre of “death panels,” bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies. Yet this is precisely what for-profit insurance companies do—only their decisions are driven not by medical necessity or moral considerations, but by spreadsheets and stock prices.

This is the logic of capitalism writ large: maximise profit, externalise harm, and frame systemic failures as unavoidable. Healthcare is merely one example. Across industries, the same dynamic plays out, whether in environmental destruction, labour exploitation, or financial crises. The trolley always runs on tracks built for profit, and the bodies left in its wake are just collateral damage.

How to Break the Loop

The death of Brian Thompson changes nothing. The system will simply produce another Thompson, another lever-puller incentivised to make the same deadly decisions. Breaking the loop requires dismantling the tracks themselves.

  1. Remove the Profit Motive: Healthcare should not be a marketplace but a public good. Universal single-payer systems, as seen in many other developed nations, prioritise care over profit, removing the incentive to let people die for financial gain.
  2. Recognise Passive Harm as Active: We must stop excusing systemic violence as “inevitable.” Denying care, pricing treatments out of reach, and allowing medical bankruptcy are acts of violence, no less deliberate than pulling a trigger.
  3. Hold the System Accountable: It’s not just the CEOs at fault; the lawmakers, lobbyists, and corporations sustain this deadly status quo. The blood is on their hands, too.

Conclusion: The Real Villain

The shooter is not the solution, but neither is their act the real crime. The healthcare system—and by extension, capitalism itself—is the true villain of this story. It constructs the tracks, builds the trolley, and installs lever-pullers like Brian Thompson to ensure the loop continues.

When will it end? When we stop debating which track to divert the trolley toward and start dismantling the system that made the trolley inevitable in the first place. Until then, we are all complicit, passengers on a ride that profits from our suffering and death. The question isn’t who’s at the lever; it’s why the trolley is running at all.

Excess Deaths Attributable to Capitalism

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A System Built on Exploitation and Neglect

Capitalism, often celebrated for its ability to generate wealth and innovation, also brings with it a darker legacy: the untold millions of lives prematurely lost due to its systemic failures. Capitalism can be attributed to more than 10 million excess deaths per year, and these numbers will continue to increase. These deaths are not simply unfortunate byproducts but are structurally baked into the system itself. Whether through poverty, healthcare inequality, environmental destruction, or war, capitalism’s logic of profit maximisation places human life at the mercy of market forces, with devastating consequences.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Friedrich Engels famously referred to these preventable deaths as social murder, a term that highlights how capitalism creates conditions in which certain populations are systematically neglected, deprived, and ultimately destroyed. Today, Engels’ critique is more relevant than ever as we examine the staggering human toll that capitalism has left in its wake, often invisible in the glow of GDP figures and economic growth.

Poverty and Hunger: The Silent Killers

One of the most pervasive ways capitalism generates excess deaths is through poverty and hunger. Despite the extraordinary wealth produced by capitalist economies, millions still die from hunger-related causes every year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 9 million people die annually from hunger and malnutrition, mostly in regions where capitalist-driven global inequality has made basic necessities unaffordable or inaccessible.[1]

Capitalism’s defenders often point to rising standards of living as evidence of the system’s success, but this narrative suffers from survivorship bias. The success stories of those who have benefited from capitalist growth obscure the countless lives that have been lost to the system’s structural inequalities. As Engels noted, these deaths are not natural or inevitable—they are preventable. They occur because the capitalist system concentrates wealth in the hands of a few while leaving vast populations to suffer without access to food, healthcare, or basic resources.

“For the dead, there is no measure of progress or rising standards; they are simply erased from the narrative.”

This disparity in wealth and access to resources creates a global system of social murder, where the deaths of the poor are written off as collateral damage in the pursuit of profit. These deaths are not merely unfortunate consequences; they are inherent to the capitalist system’s prioritisation of wealth accumulation over human life.

Healthcare Inequality and Preventable Deaths

The lack of access to adequate healthcare is another major driver of deaths attributable to capitalism. In the United States, the richest nation in the world, an estimated 500,000 deaths between 1990 and 2010 were linked to healthcare inequality, according to a Lancet study.[2] Globally, millions die each year from preventable causes—such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, and malaria—because market-driven healthcare systems fail to provide for those without the means to pay.

In a for-profit healthcare system, those without money are often denied life-saving treatment. Healthcare becomes a commodity, rather than a human right. This commodification of care creates deadly disparities, where a wealthy few receive world-class medical attention while millions die from treatable conditions. Engels’ notion of social murder is evident here as well: the system does not kill through direct violence but by neglecting the vulnerable.

“Capitalism’s market-driven healthcare system perpetuates a structural violence where the poor die from treatable conditions simply because they cannot pay.”

This situation is exacerbated by the ongoing commodification of healthcare through privatisation and austerity measures, which strip public systems of resources and force them to operate on capitalist principles. The result is a world where profit motives dictate who lives and who dies.

Environmental Destruction and Climate Change: Capitalism’s Long-Term Death Toll

Capitalism’s unrelenting focus on short-term profit also drives environmental destruction, contributing to a growing death toll linked to climate change. The WHO estimates that by 2030, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths each year, driven by heat stress, malnutrition, and the spread of diseases like malaria and diarrhoea.[3] These figures are conservative, as the cascading effects of climate-induced migration and conflict are difficult to quantify.

David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession is central to understanding how capitalism contributes to environmental devastation. Capitalist economies extract and commodify natural resources, often at the expense of local populations who bear the brunt of environmental degradation. Deforestation, mining, and fossil fuel extraction displace communities and destroy ecosystems, creating conditions that lead to death, displacement, and disease.

“The victims of capitalism’s environmental destruction are not accidental casualties; they are the inevitable outcomes of a system that prioritises short-term profit over long-term sustainability.”

This environmental violence is compounded by disaster capitalism, a term coined by Naomi Klein to describe how capitalist interests exploit crises like natural disasters or financial collapses for profit.[4] The destruction of vulnerable communities by climate change is not simply a tragedy—it is a consequence of capitalist expansion into every corner of the planet, sacrificing human and ecological health for economic gain.

War and Imperialism: Capitalism’s Violent Expansion

The human toll of capitalism extends beyond poverty and environmental degradation to include the millions of lives lost to wars driven by capitalist interests. The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of which were tied to the geopolitical aims of securing control over oil reserves. Wars like Iraq are not isolated failures of policy but integral to the functioning of a global capitalist system that seeks to dominate resources and expand markets through military force.

David Harvey’s theory of new imperialism explains how capitalist economies rely on the expansion of markets and the extraction of resources from other nations, often through military means.[5] The military-industrial complex, as described by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, thrives under capitalism, profiting from perpetual war and the destruction of human life.

“Wars driven by capitalist interests are not just geopolitical strategies; they are extensions of capitalism’s relentless drive to dominate resources and secure markets.”

The death toll of wars driven by capitalist expansion is staggering. From the millions killed in conflicts over resources to the long-term destabilisation of regions like the Middle East, these deaths are directly tied to capitalism’s global ambitions. The victims of these wars—like those who suffer from poverty and environmental destruction—are casualties of a system that prioritises wealth and power over human life.

Conclusion: Reckoning with Capitalism’s Death Toll

The deaths attributable to capitalism are not abstract or incidental; they are the direct consequences of a system that places profit above all else. From hunger and poverty to healthcare inequality, environmental destruction, and war, the capitalist system has claimed millions of lives—lives that could have been saved under a more just and equitable economic model.

“Capitalism’s greatest violence is not its wars, but its everyday acts of neglect, where millions die not from bombs but from lack of food, water, and care.”

The true success of capitalism, then, is not in its ability to generate wealth for the few, but in its capacity to obscure the structural violence that sustains it. By framing poverty, healthcare inequality, and environmental destruction as unfortunate consequences of “market forces,” capitalism avoids accountability for the millions it leaves behind.

It is time to reckon with this hidden death toll. Only by facing the human cost of capitalism can we begin to imagine a future where economic systems prioritise human life over profit. The victims of capitalism are not just numbers—they are the casualties of a system that, as Engels pointed out, murders through neglect, exploitation, and greed.

Endnotes:

[1]: World Health Organization, “Hunger and Malnutrition: Key Facts,” 2022.
[2]: “The Lancet Public Health,” Study on healthcare inequality in the U.S., 2010.
[3]: World Health Organization, “Climate Change and Health,” 2022.
[4]: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Picador, 2007), pp. 9-10.
[5]: David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 145-147.

Systematic Violence

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As humans, we often leverage systems. They seem to make life easier. Whether a routine or a step-by-step instruction through an unknown process, a system can guide us. Systems are also connected, interactive entities, but that’s not for this segment. I am more interested in the loss of humanity that systematic processes and bureaucracy bring, so I am interested in imposed systems rather than systems we invent to find our keys and wallets.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content
Image: Spectrum of System versus Human

If we consider systematisation and humanity on a scale, we can see that any move toward systematisation comes at the expense of humanity. It might make logical sense to make this trade-off to some degree or another. The biggest hit to humanity is the one-size-fits-all approach to a problem. It removes autonomy or human agency from the equation. If a system can be that mechanised, then automate it. Don’t assign a human to do it. This is an act of violence.

As I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Iain McGilchrist’s work lately, I feel one can easily map this to left versus right cerebral hemisphere dominance. System-building is inherently human, but it’s in the domain of the left hemisphere. But my imposition of a system on another is violence—one might even argue that it’s immoral.

As with bureaucracy, these imposed systems are Procrustean beds. Everyone will fit, no matter what. And when human beings need to interact with systems, we can not only feel the lack of humanity, but our own humanity suffers at the same time.

A close friend of mine recently checked herself into a mental health facility. After a few days, she called and asked if I could bring her a change of clothes and some toiletries—deodorant, soap, and shampoo. She had some in her house, but the packaging needed to be unopened and factory sealed. I stopped at a shop to buy these items and I brought them to the facility.

At the reception area, I needed to be cross-referenced as an authorised visitor, so I was asked to show proof of my identity as if it mattered who was delivering clothing that was going to be checked anyway. No big deal, they recorded my licence number on a form and ask me to fill it out—name, phone number, and what I was delivering.

The form stated that any open consumable items would not be allowed. I signed the form. An attendant took the bag and told me that I needed to remove the ‘chemicals’, that they would not be delivered. I pointed to the lines on the form that read that this restriction was for open items and reinforced that I had just purchased these and showed her the sales receipt. She told me that the patient would need to obtain a doctor’s permission, and she assured me that the patients all had soap.

I’m sure she thought she was being compassionate and assertive. I experienced it as patronising. Me being me, I chided her lack of compassion and humanity, not a great match for a mental health attendant. In fact, it reminded me of a recent post I wrote on Warmth. In it, I suggested that service staff should at least fake conviviality. I take that back. Faux congeniality is patronising. She mimicked me. “Yes, systems are so inhumane, but here we follow a system.” My first thought was of Adolf Eichmann, who kept the trains on schedule without a care for the cargo. This is the violence inherent in systems.

Systems are not illogical. In fact, they are hyper-logical. And that’s the problem, logic is traded off at the expense of empathy. And one might have a strong argument for some accounting or financial system process, but I’ll retort that this should be automated. A human should not have to endure such pettiness.

I can tell that this will devolve quickly into a rant and so I’ll take my leave and not foist this violence upon you.

Violence and Rules

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I haven’t yet shared my thoughts that equate bureaucracy with violence, but this is somewhat tangential or perhaps orthogonal.

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalised; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History 1977

Taking holiday, so taking shortcuts in posting. Here, Foucault discusses Nietzsche.

The Violence of Bureaucracy

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Right. So another rabbit hole. Several things I have come across recently have mentioned the concept of bureaucracy as violence. There was a reference by David Graeber and some journal articles I happened upon. I have so much going on that I don’t have time to give the topic justice, but I wanted to employ this post as a reminder—along with the host of other reminders to which I need to attend.

Let’s start with some definitions.

Violence

The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

Parsing the salient parts, I distil the meaning for my intents and purposes to be the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

For further clarity, we arrive at a

Violence is the intentional use of power, against another person that results in psychological harm or deprivation

Bureaucracy

Management or administration marked by hierarchical authority among numerous offices and by fixed procedures.

Ostensibly, my train of thought is that bureaucracy is a deontological structure meant to standardise and normalise a process. Problems arise by the facts that (1) one size doesn’t fit all and (2) it’s a system thinking challenge likely missing dimensions—if the domain is even appropriately defined and accounted for at the start. This is where bureaucracy intersects violence.

bureaucracy becomes a Procrustean bed

In my mind, bureaucracy becomes a Procrustean bed. Speaking of bed… Fais dodo.

EDIT: In a manner of speaking, I might suggest that normalisation, as a rule, is violence, but I haven’t exactly thought it through. I am not particularly comfortable with the notion of self, so against whom would this violence be perpetrated? Nonetheless, this Procrustean notion still springs to mind—as a moulding. Some might consider it to be character-building. But his lot would either deny the violence or consider it to be a worthwhile crucible. But it’s only a crucible when this character outcome comports with their accepted ideal. The only leeway given is in consideration of those with poor childhoods leading to delinquency. This does not diminish the bloodlust for justice, but it allows for blame to be cast, if not on the perpetrator then on the parents or guardians. I digress.

Hannah Arendt spoke of the Banality of Evil. In a manner, the violence that is bureaucracy is just this sort of metaphoric evil. This 7-minute summary (that could have been 4 if not for the stammering and pauses) is about just this point. In my experience, most bureaucracy is of the sort Arendt write about. I feel that this presenter is a bit more conservative about where he might draw this line.

I’ll exit this post with an observation/rant. I was shopping the other day, and I had one item. There was a short queue situated between a cashier and a self-checkout kiosk. We customers seemed to be dequeuing fine when a frontend supervisor appeared to instruct us to choose a register. I was second in the queue so his interaction with the person ahead of me went something like this:

Employee: Are you going to use the self-checkout?

Customer: Yes

Employee: [Looks at the kiosk]

Customer: Unless this register becomes available first.

Customer: [Cocks head incredulously]

Employee: You need to choose one.

At that moment, the cashier freed, and she took the vacancy. Thankfully—as my mind pondered how illogical this policy was (if indeed there was a policy) and how poorly the maths skills of whoever created it—, the self-service registered became available. Crisis averted.

The takeaway in the story is that blood pressure was unnecessarily elevated because of this bureaucratic rule. This is trivial. I won’t bore you with more anecdotes. Besides, I’m pretty sure, you’ve experienced this violence to one degree or another—whether at work, in commerce, interacting with government workers, or who knows what.

What Still Remains

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I haven’t done any film reviews, and I’m not about to start now. I’ve just watched What Still Remains on Netflix.

People become their own kind of monster.

What Still Remains Film Trailer

This is decent post-apocalyptic fare, some catalyst, societies, competing factions, good versus evil, at least in the eyes of the devout. But that’s not what I am going to be writing about.

What still remains contains good writing and strong character development. It does over-employ tropes, but this seems to be the norm these days: modular writing; rearranging the Lego pieces to make something that appears fresh. So what do I have to say?

Spoiler Alert: Proceed with caution…

This is a perfect depiction of the problems with property rights and social contract theory. There are apparently 3 factions—4 if you count independents.

Anna

Initially, there were the Changed, never seen on screen and perhaps not even contemporaneous to the current period, though they may reside in the unseen cities. Anna, the protagonist, and her family are among the independent. Peter, a preacher from the ordained, holier than thou faction. In the realm of ‘if you’re not with me (and our God), you’re against me, thence evil’, they are the arbiters of all that is good. And then there are the Berserkers, as named by the Ordained. To the Ordained, Berserkers aspire to be Changed, but the Berserkers view themselves more along the line of Spartans: Pain is good.

Peter

All scenes are shot in the wilderness, but the various factions have staked property claims with wide perimeters. The penalty for trespass appears to usually involve death of the offending party—or at least a hefty fee. This is Hobbes’ ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ life outside of society quip, though he didn’t exactly account for a class of societies despite this being common in his day.

Berserker

So, these factions don’t actually have property rights; what they have is a notion of property, and they defend it with violence, as is a necessary condition for all property. In so-called modern societies, the violence is obfuscated much in the same manner that supermarkets obscure the carnage behind the meat. It’s still there; it’s just at arm’s length. Violate one of these ‘rights’, and you’ll see the violence inherent in the system.

And then there’s social contract theory—or the gaping flaw in the logic. Anna is an independent, but one can only be as independent as the ability to defend their independence. It’s sort of like contract law. If you can afford to defend a contract, you are entitled to having it enforced.

Redact intellectual property rant.

Anna doesn’t particularly want to belong to either faction, who have divided their world into two pieces in the same manner that, say, Britain and Scotland might have. If you happen to be born there through some loin lottery, you pretty much have to choose a side. Given Sartre’s no excuses policy, you can choose neither; it just won’t bode well for you. You’ve got no real choice.

Social Choice Theory

In Anna’s eyes, upon the death of her mother and brother, she is persuaded with reluctance to return with Peter to his community, a God-fearing bunch. Her mum had indoctrinated her into this cult of God through bible readings, so she was primed for the eventuality. Some independent interlopers attempted to block their return journey by claiming trespass, so Peter summarily offed them rather than paying their ransom—a fee Anna has been willing to tender.

When the two finally reached the sanctuary, Anna quickly realised that she had no say in the matter: she was either a (good) member or (an evil) dead. To reiterate, this is an underlying problem with social contract theory. There is no exit clause.

Side Bar: Some have argued that the cost of coerced—though they’d never use this term—participation and compliance is owed to the greater good. There is no reason given why this is preferred or across which dimensions better is being assessed—or good for that matter—, so don’t ask. Long live Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill with a hat tip to David Hume.

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.

From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each approached social contracts from their own perspectives, but it may be interesting to note that each was a privileged white male of his day. Sure, Hobbes was a monarchist, and Rousseau was the Thoreau of his day, a nostalgist, but he like the others were beneficiaries of the status quo, save perhaps at the margins.

Anna thought she had sovereignty over her choices. In the end, the plot line prevailed, but then again, this was just a movie, so even her choices were scripted.

Calvin & Hobbes

Arguing for the Abolition of Prostitution: Talk About The Men

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Apparently, there was a part 0 and a part 2. I didn’t realise that, so I skipped video 1. My bad, as this is one I was particularly interested in.

In this video, Elly’s premise is to focus on the right to buy sex instead of the right to sell it. Pausing for a moment, I’d like to point out that sex is neither bought nor sold; rather access is rented or leased, in a manner similar to renting a streamed movie on Amazon or Netflix. You retain no rights to ownership or future access. You don’t get to keep it when your time is up. Rather than adopt new nomenclature, I’ll continue with the convention in place.

Rather than asking is there a right to sell sex, ask is there a right to buy it, AND ask is there a right to profit off of selling someone else for sex.

Ignoring whether a right can even exist ontologically, I’ll go along and pretend that a right can exist. We’ve been down this street before, but I am commenting in real time, and I am not yet even a minute in. Essentially, she suggests asking two questions:

  1. Is there a right to buy sex?

  2. Is there a right to profit off of selling someone else for sex?

Clearly, these two questions are related. The right to buy sex begs the question from whom, so even though the focus is redirected from the seller to the buyer, there cannot be a buyer without a seller. In practice, the seller is a critical piece of the equation. For example, I may have a right to buy an automobile, but you only have the right to sell it if it is your property; you can’t rightfully sell me your neighbour’s car.

Separately, is there a right to profit from selling sex [as a first party transaction] in the first place, and for selling someone else for sex [as a second party transaction] in the second place?

[SPOILER ALERT] » This video does not yield the anwers to these questions.  

The next order of business is to use these talking points…

  1. Discuss what motivates men to by prostituted women.

  2. Discuss how they view and treat them rather than discuss statistics.

…followed by this assertion.

“There is plenty of evidence that men are motivated to buy prostituted women because prostitution at its core means the availability of sexual access with little to no boundaries to young, attractive women anywhere at any time for affordable prices.”

This is where I go off the rails and critique poor methodology and poor rhetorical form. Let’s unpack this:

  • There is plenty of evidence that…
    • First, plenty is a weasel word. It carries no rhetorical weight unless it is followed with, well, plenty of evidence. How much is plenty? Is there plenty of counter-evidence? Is the evidence more prevalent than the counter evidence or vice versa.
    • Second, what is the source of this unspecified, uncited, and unattributed evidence. Elly references links; perhaps they are the evidence she is references. What is the quality of this evidence?
    • Not to offend, but this wouldn’t even pass as a Wikipedia comment.
  • …men are motivated to buy prostituted women because…
    • Apart from the inability to actually know someone’s motivation, I am interested in seeing where this leads.
    • Elly uses the noun phrase prostituted women. As she employs the adjective form prostituted, I am led to wonder what the motivation was for this word choice.
      • My initial thought is that she is modifying the noun women because wants to differntiate buying women from buying prostituted woman, but I don’t think this is quite right.
      • My next thought is that her motivation to convey that these women have no agency or volition; they are passive objects who are prostituted against their will.
      • My third, or perhaps it was my first, thought is why not emply the plural noun prostitutes. She has already established context that her focus is women, so I am left feeling there is a deeper subtext. Perhaps I am reading too much in.
  • …prostitution at its core means the availability of sexual access with little to no boundaries to young, attractive women anywhere at any time for affordable prices.
    • This is some definition. I’ll need to unpack this one slowly:
      • This definition get to the heart of the matter from the perspective of the  punter.
      • Prostitution is the availability of sexual access…  Yup. Nailed it.
      • …with little to no boundaries… Wait, what? Where did this come from? Is there some subclass of prostitutes to which this applies? Surely does not define all prostitutes? Does this define most prostitute? As I understand it—at least the escorts of Backpage of days gone by, a victim of FOSTA—, escorts to have boundaries. Moreover, some boundaries can be expanded by an up-charge. Even reading the negative reviews on the Invisible Men Project, it is apparent that many of the complaints were that the woman refused one service or another, which is to say to enforce a boundary. This appears to be counterevidentiary.
      • …to young… I wonder how we are defining young. I wonder what the average age of a prostitute is. A quick Google search of ‘prostitution’ yeilds a recent arrest of 7 women. I am not saying this is a valid random sample or size, but their ages range from 27 to 55 with an average age of just under 40-years old. I suppose to a 70-year-old, these are young. Let’s move on…
      • …attractive women… Attractiveness is relative, but let’s just say there’s no accounting for taste. Without comment, I’ll leave it to you to decide the attraction level of these same arrested women.
      • …anywhere… This is a bold assertion.
      • …at any time… This is an another bold assertion. I am certain there is support for this claim somewhere.
      • …at affordable prices. Finally, the end of this parsing party. Affordabilty is another relative term. Who’s the punter and what’s the cost? I’m noticing that first guy perportedly spent £340 for 45 minutes. That’s about $450 US for the peeps reading on this side of the pond, and I am just going to go out on a limb and suggest that is beyond the affordability range of most Americans by several hundred dollars.

At the end of the day, I am left with the impression that the purpose of this definition is to incite and inflame not to objectively define anything. In the court system, this is what one would call leading the witness. As such it would be inadmissible. I concur.

Her next course of action is to determine ‘If your opponents are aware of widespread social stigma in society against prostituted people, which causes risks or disadvantages during interactions with law enforcement or social services, ask them if Johns are somehow magically exempt from this’.

Resulting from my previous search, it seems buyers not exempt. In fact, 6 of the 8 people arrested were men ‘charged with patronizing a prostitute’.

Again, an unsubstantiated claim was countered in less than a minute. It feels to me that the tactic is to throw so much word salad at the opponent that they simply can process the mis- and dis-information, and without recourse to Google, they may be overwhelmed and convert having never researched any of the false claims. Donald Trump relies heavily on this technique.

If they are unable to see the misogyny in the words and actions of punters, introduce them to punter forums…where prostitutes are rated like products.

The claim of misogyny is one of intent. It is not a claim that the words are offensive. It is a claim that the intent behind the words is fueled by some inherent hatred of women. I’m sorry but this is unadulterated psychobabble.

I did read the negative reviews on the punter forums, and to be honest at the expense of being accused of mansplaining, these don’t read much differently to bad service reviews on on Yelp or Google. And, yes, the woman are rated—albeit like services not like products: like my stylist butchered my hair; my gardner killed my dog; whatever. Linguistically, this is akin to code switching. They are employing the vernacular of the forum.

Do some of these men hate women? Sure. Who knows? Do they hate all women? Do all men who frequent prostitutes hate women? Do they hate all women or just prostitutes? Do they hate their mothers? Is their hatred of prostitutes simply a hidden hatred of their mother manifest in hatred of women? Do they hate other categories of people? Do they kick cats and beat dogs? Of course they do, and then they go home and beat their wives and children and speak poorly about their aunts and mothers.

Of course, this line of reasoning is just as inane as the line that inspired it.

She mentions men who freely admit to abusing and raping women.

Wait, what? I didn’t see that. I must have been distracted by the snuff films.

I can tell this is just turning into a rant. If there is one thing I can’t stand—and there is more than one thing I can’t stand—is sloppy academics. The rules of engagement for defending a position with integrity are simple. If the goal is to win at any expense, then, as the saying goes, all is fair in love and war. But I am not sure what the prize is here. I am not one to have much faith in the intellectual capacity of most humans, but even I am pretty sure that the majority of people can see right through this subterfuge.

Shake it off, Bry. Just shake it off. Push through it. No pain no gain.

Presumed motivators for men to pay for prostitutes are because…

A. Men want to have sex with no responsibilities with maximum control and no required effort of actually impressing and winning over the other person, and because other men are willing to provide it by pimping out others for their own lucrative profit.

Wow. Another unfounded, ungrounded assertion. Just some claim pulled from thin air. Also, I am pretty sure I heard her say A, as if to enummerate some list, but I never heard any subsequent letters.

  • Men want to have sex…
    • So far, so good…
  • …with no responsibilities…
    • I’ll presume she means with no additional strings attached. I am not sure what other responsibilities we could be talking about.
  • …with maximum control…
    • I am pretty sure we’ve already trodden this teritory. Perhaps he feels he has (or even has) more control over a prostitute than over some alternative woman. Perhaps he wife or partner won’t allow him to do something or another, but I have a feeling that this maximum control claim is a bit more hyperbole than reality justifies.
  • …and no required effort of actually impressing and winning over the other person…
    • I am fast-forwarding a bit because this feels like reading it will be like watching paint dry or grass grow. By what Romantic construct is this a thing? Someone’s watched too many Disney films. And this is a game, and the person who pays to avoid effort is a cheater? He jumped the queue. Hmmm. When I say it like that, it does seem awfully juvenile.
  • …and because other men are willing to provide it by pimping out others for their own lucrative profit.
    • Let’s just tag some barely relevent rationale on because we can.
    • And let’s pepper our speech with superlatives so the hyperbole doesn’t feel lonely.

Prostitution exists because of the demand not because of a subset of women who are nymphomaniacs.

I have to admit that I loved this last line.

Also [prostitution does] not [exist] because of poverty. Poverty is a supporting factor.

Rachel wins the strawman argument contest of the year. Who is asserting that poverty is the sole arbiter of prostitution? Apparently, some unnamed source in Parliament.

Prostitution exists for one reason: male demand —Rachel Moran

This logic exhibits a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic rules of transactional economics and equilibrium in context with supply and demand.

Not to be a dick about it, but I can demand a Ferrari until the cows come home, but this will not conjure a Ferrari. Believe me, I’ve been waiting for those cows to come home for ages. Also, the supply of Ferraris does me no good either because the transction price is too high; therefore, I cannot afford a Ferrari.

Rachel however is correct—In your face Jean Baptiste Say!—when she recognises that supply does not create its own demand. Sorry believers in Conservative economics dogma. But I digress.

Even if this nymphomaniac offered her services for free, there could be no transaction without demand, so the monetary exchange is a secondary factor.

Don’t sugarcoat the violence that punters and pimps commit.

Also, don’t differentiate violence that happens on the job, such as a dope dealer or a loan shark that would have occurred, perhaps even sooner, whether or not she was a prostitute. Let’s just pretend that these are related to her line of work because it helps to inflate number to make our position more sellable.

occupation definition

When a prostituted woman is raped or killed, the most likely rapist and/or killer is a pimp or a John. That makes prostitution the only so-called occupation which [sic] changes the most likely perpetrator of severe bodily harm from a partner or relative to your customer or employer.

And this is relavent how? Perhaps we should make associating with partners and relatives illegal. It seems that they are the biggest concern.

Why is this a so-called occupation? Is this not a job or line of work?

Lastly, make it very clear that this dynamic and this level of violence does not magically change under legalised prostitution.

OK.

The set of men buying and selling women doesn’t really change.

I disagree. Where prostitution is illegal, the good men are going to exit the system, and only bad men will remain. Of course, if you define all men who frequent prostitutes as misogynists, then I suppose you’ve created a situation where all men are bad, and so I stand corrected.

Let’s see how that renders as a categorical syllogism:

  • – All men who frequent prostitutes are bad.
  • – Joe is a man who frequents prostitutes.
  • ∴ Joe is bad.

I see how it works. I stand corrected. All punters are evil. Burn them.

Under legalisation, too, men retain their disgust for the prostituted and their disrespect for their boundaries.

Here we go again with the broadbrushing.

Ample evidence are the punter forums of Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. This contempt and the sever mistreatment does not change unless there is effective widespread social intervention that teaches children for elementary school onwards that prostituted women and men are just as human and deserving of respect as anyone else and that all sexual interaction requires enthusiastic consent, which means that it cannot be bought.

Prostituted women and men are just as human and deserving of respect as anyone else…which is why we should deprive them of their livelihoods. Nothing says “I respect you” more than kicking the chair out from under you.  That’s my creed.

Not merely consent but enthusiastic consent. Not only do I have to work, I have to do so enthusiastically.

Abolitionists have an issue not with the prostitutes but in the system they are caught in and the men who operate and benefit from it.

I think I am approaching the end of this clip.

The systems they are caught up in is Capitalism and a market economy, a system that presumes to be able to put a price on anything.

A cynic is…a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. — Oscar Wilde

Hatred of a system does not equate to hatred of a person in that system.

I agree, and so…

Humans have a piss poor track record in understanding complex systems, whether weather, poitical, sociological, economic, or otherwise. The issue here is that you can hate the system and love the person, but if you disrupt the system intentionally or otherwise, the wide ranging effect may prove disaterous.

Punters love the system but hate the women. Abolistionists care about the women.

Where is all this categorical hatred coming from?

Lastly, Elly mentions that she is working on a video piece to summarise the important stats and info on who punters are, what they do, and why they do it.

And here is where I will challenge your integrity. Who here would believe—especially insomuch as by her own admission that she recommends hiding inconvenietly opposing facts—any reporting would contain an accounting of unbiased and unabridged data, metrics, or summaries or that proper methodological rigour would be applied for the study.

On the topic of studies, in the description of the video on the page, there are links, which I’ve copied here for comment.

  • Rachel Moran at Femifest in London
    • This is a PDF of speaking notes or a transcript of Rachel’s presentation in London, based on her experience as a sex-trade survivor. Rachel’s is a sad story, but it is her story.
  • The Invisible Men project on Tumblr
    • Yet again, a list of cherry-picked perhaps 180 quotes from some Canadian forum. This is contemptuous. I only read about a dozen and a half of them. In order to be even somewhat useful (instead of being polemic) would be to see all of the reviews, and to see what percentage of people wrote these reviews. You can’t convince me that there are no doting reviews. These are exempted because they dilute the disingenuous shock value of only negative reviews. Even a simple word cloud would be more useful than this hatchet job. (I feel like finding one of these forums and cherry-picking the rest of the story just out of spite.)
  • Prostitution Research & Education: Abolish Prostitution And Provide Real Alternatives
    • This is a full forum of resources. I have not done anything more than scan the initial page where I landed. I may return for more context. If you seek additional information, visit. I think it goes without saying that the information here is slanted, much like watching Fox News in an attempt to understand American Liberal politics.
  • How Porn Creates the John: Porn, Trafficking and the Social Construction of Masculinity (Youtube video from a lecture given in December 2012)
    • Being on the topic of social constructivism, this one should be right up my street. I haven’t watched even a moment of this video, so am probably commenting prematurely, but it is interesting to me how some people accept the concept of social constructivism when it relates to a different perspective, but rarely do they accept their own perspectives as social constructions. This is a cognitive bias.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng172g_F8rM

I am not so sure I have the interest in commenting on the rest of the series. To be honest, Elly has other series as well. I’d like to take a look, but I’m afraid I’ll have a similar reaction that the position and content haven’t been well thought out. Perhaps a strong editor would help, a disinterested party who would maintain (or otherwise elevate) the integrity of the content and who would provide needed rigour.

In the end, Elly’s message would be stronger and more cogent, and she could shed the chaff whilst retaining the substance.

 

Capitalising on Prostitution

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

DISCLAIMER: This post is a veritable rant. It promises to go off script or at least be oblique to the recent themes I’ve adopted. It is also a bit late, missing the heels of the FOSTA debacle in the United States. 

Prostitution is immoral. It exploits women. It exists in a world of violence. It objectifies and creates a rape culture. It is a vector for transmission of diseases. These are the main arguments against it, yet many of these are arguments against Capitalism itself.

In fact, most arguments of prostitution are criticisms of capitalism or conflated claims to some tangential activity. The most popular conflation is with sex trafficking,  ‘modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act‘.

Prostitution is a category of sex work, which includes dominatrixes in the BDSM space, porn actors (and actresses if you expect archaic sexist jargon), phone sex operators, cam models. Nude modelling is somehow tasteful and not readily included in the collection.

actress

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines sex workers [PDF] as ‘women, men and transgendered people who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services, and who consciously define those activities as income-generating even if they do not consider sex work as their occupation‘. I won’t comment on why they feel the final dependent clause is relevant to the definition. Perhaps it’s in the realm of the aspiring actors or screenwriters who wait tables but don’t consider themselves to be waitstaff.

Returning to the main arguments in turn:

Prostitution is immoral. As a subjectivist, this is a difficult argument to win. Although morality is a human social construct, many people believe otherwise, and even those who don’t ascribe to the notion of an objective morality still adopt and abide by the fabricated moral codes generated by the worldview of, say, Christians or Muslims or some other sect who claim to have direct insight into such codes.

Nothing is immoral that society doesn’t declare to be immoral.

Nothing is immoral that society doesn’t declare to be immoral. In the United States, the institution of slavery—what I call hyper-capitalism or a capitalist’s wet dream—was deemed moral by most. Eventually, the morality was hotly debated, and now, it is considered to be immoral. Time changes everything. In some circles, slavery is still considered to be moral. In other circles, it has morphed into wage-slavery and because money is exchanged within a frame of a labour market, it escapes the definition.

Excepting for local norms, prostitution is not inherently more immoral than banking or retail sales.

Prostitution exploits women. Excepting that there are male prostitutes and sex workers, it is commonly believed that these people are (somehow) less likely to be exploited, so I’ll keep this focused on women. First, it is important to separate prostitution from human sex trafficking. This is not the topic, and it’s a problem with specificity. If you feel that sex trafficking is immoral and should be illegal, that’s fine; but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Focus on the actual problem. <sarcasm>If you want to prevent all women from being exploited, lock them all up in monasteries. Problem solved. </sarcasm>

Prostitution is not inherently more immoral than banking

If one wants to discuss exploitation, let’s discuss a system designed such that a person needs to earn money to survive. Period. Full stop. If you buy into the capitalist worldview, then, that in order to survive a person chooses to be a marketing executive, a customer service representative, a janitor, or a prostitute, is none of your concern.

I have heard many arguments put forth that these women should get ‘real jobs’, jobs that pay minimum wage (or less) and have no other benefits, jobs where it would take a week or more to earn what they could in a day or less. That’s not even rational.

Prostitution exists in a world of violence. Despite trends, the world is still a violent place. Part of the higher probability of violence in the realm of prostitution exists because these women are marginalised by moralists. Even where prostitution is legal, it is still often viewed as immoral. They have little recourse to the legal system. They can’t organise. They are forced underground. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Don’t force these women into alleys and underground.

In the US, recent FOSTA and SESTA hysteria have disarmed women from the tools they used to navigate their environment. They could share intelligence related to which men to avoid for one reason or another. Other tools have cropped up to facilitate this cooperation, but these tools benefit from network effects. The more people having access to the information clearinghouse, the better.

Prostitution objectifies women. I’ll concede this point straight away but not without noting that many things objectify women: the beauty industry, the entertainment industry, the marketing industry in general. If as a society we can resolve objectification and prostitution is the last holdout, I’m onboard, right there with you. But there is no need to make prostitution the poster child for eliminating objectification.

745_600_10964maybelline-color-elixir-gloss-sohelee1[1]

Prostitution creates a rape culture. To be fair, I have no metrics on this, and I am going to pass, but not without saying that it seems to be an implausible claim. And I have read counterclaims anyway.

Prostitution is a vector for the transmission of diseases. Indeed. And driving is a vector for traffic accidents. Of course, given higher frequencies of an activity, one would expect a greater number of outcomes—even with the same probability, the additional exposure may result in hitting this undesirable lottery. And the variety of partners with unknown sexual histories is problematic.

However, a mitigating factor is education—and not simply moralistic lip service. Women need to understand the risks and understand how to diminish it. Yet again, being marginalised does not necessarily allow a woman to be empowered. A client can insist on unprotected sex. If he forces his hand, no one is going to believe that a prostitute can be raped. As with sex trafficking, rape is its own subject and is only part of a larger conversation.

I was winding down, but I found a related quote I wanted to address:

Geena Leigh was in prostitution for 19 years from the age of 18. In her submission to an Australian inquiry into the regulation of brothels, she said prostitution: “has this way of stealing all the dreams, goals and beautiful essence out of a woman. During my years in it, I didn’t meet one woman who enjoyed what she was doing. Everyone was trying to get out.”

Evidently, lack of enjoyment in one’s employment is not limited to prostitutes. The is the problem with fundamental attribution bias. A recent Gallup poll cited that 85% of people hate their jobs. Maybe Gallup only interviewed prostitutes, or perhaps the 15% who liked their jobs were the only ones who weren’t sex workers.

 

Well, there went my morning…

For those wondering (and who’ve gotten this far), the impetus for this post was some other blog posts I happened upon in WordPress’ Reader.