Chris Must List Arrest

I see we’ve gotten back to the Sedition Act, Trinidad and Tobago! How fun!

In 2019, I wrote about the Vijay Maharaj sedition/constitution case, and why I disagreed with the High Court finding of unconstitutionality despite hating the Act. That judgment has since been overturned on appeal (duh!). I continue to hold the view that the Act is constitutional despite hating its substance and being a free speech absolutist. Now, Canadian vlogger, Christopher “ChrisMustList” Hugh has been arrested for sedition (from what I can tell).

Do I think he is guilty under section 4(1)(c) of the Sedition Act? Long story short, yes.

As a watcher of his vlogs, I recall one video in which an interviewee called for an uprising to the system. This was included in the vlog, which was published on the ChrisMustList YouTube channel. For reasons discussed in my previous Sedition Act essay linked above, the mens rea under sections 4(c) and 4(d) of the Act is not “a seditious intention,” but an intention to publish. ChrisMustList, as a vlogger, always intends to publish his vlogs. The sole question in respect of that sedition charge under subsections 4(1)(c) and (d) would, therefore, be whether the thing he published was seditious. I think a call to uprise and overthrow the system in the manner I recall in the video is, by definition, seditious. That’s the boring part.

Do I think this should be a law? No. Arresting and convicting people for acts carried out with seditious intention in the narrow sense contemplated by the Act in sections 4(1)(a) and 4(1)(b) is fine. Arresting people for passively publishing under sections 4(1)(c) and 4(1)(d) simply does not accord with the purpose of criminal law. It does not prevent, deter, reduce, or punish for the substantive crime. It does not rehabilitate criminals. It is just a law for having a law’s sake, and it gives government the power to arrest people for passively (even unknowingly) disseminating seditious content.

If we think it through, what does arresting, prosecuting, and convicting ChrisMustList do about the threatened uprising by the interviewee? Absolutely nothing. What does it do about crime or gang violence in Trinidad and Tobago? Absolutely nothing. What does it do for Trinidad and Tobago? Zip! It is convenient to arrest him because it adds a notch to the TT Police Service’s belt if they achieve a conviction, but it is simply productive unproductiveness. I find it shameful.

The more interesting conversation that we should be having is why this section of law is still on the books. Why has our Parliament not done its job by enacting up-to-date legislation to address our modern needs? The same can be said about the mandatory death penalty and other sections in the Offences Against the Person Act and the Sexual Offences Act, and several other pieces of legislation. Why do we keep having to do judicial gymnastics to get around parliamentary laziness?

I believe that there is too much job security for elected officials who have no real incentives to offer sensible policy solutions. They are reelected regardless of what they do, say, or omit to do. Can we please vote more sensibly next year? What would that even look like?

Populists, Anchor Babies, Diplomats, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

When Vivek Ramaswamy withdrew from the US presidential race, I was overjoyed. He has since endorsed ex-president and fellow businessman Donald Trump… It’s not ideal… but he’s no longer running, which is great. My issues with Vivek can be summed up in two main points: 1. I think that he is an opportunistic and unprincipled populist, and 2. I think that he is a hypocrite. These points overlap in many ways, but I’ll discuss them seriatim below.

Opportunistic Vivek

It is, of course, at the forefront of my mind that Vivek was a politician marketing himself as a businessman first. He is a brand, first and foremost. It is the fact that he is a successful businessman who chose to enter the political ring that makes him a politician. All politiciams should be scrutinised because they are inherently opportunistic until they prove otherwise. Substantively, I think that much of the guy’s campaign focussed on undocumented immigrants and “securing the border,” not because he was particularly passionate about the subject matter, but because he knew that it worked for Trump in 2016.

He chose to adopt the populism that Trump exploited because he knew that it was a formula for incensing the working class masses of Middle America. I am not a fan of populists or anti-immigrant sentiments, but the borderline fascistic ideology is only a small part of what grinds my gears. It is the insult that upsets me more.

The intentional exploitation of xenophobic tendencies for political gain gave me pause, especially because I knew that it was intentional. Everything he did was intentional. It may be the libertarianism values I espouse, or the bored theatre kid in me, but when I close my eyes and think of Vivek, the image that energes is a seething Patrick Bateman mid-bludgeon, enjoying his orgasmic, psychopathic thrills. Only, instead of bludgeoning someone to death, he is insulting people’s intelligence.

Deep down, I genuinely believe that Vivek thinks that “those people” are too silly to be reasoned with, and as a result, he has to emotionally manipulate them into supporting him by fuelling their sense of lack. It is run-of-the-mill marketing, but it is still insulting. I would more quickly trust a shark that told me it just wanted to speak about its lord and saviour Jesus Christ while I had an open wound and was bleeding out on the Pacific Ocean floor than trust a word that comes out of opportunistic Vivek’s mouth!

To facilitate his condescending opportunism, he opined that the children of undocumented immigrants should be denied birthright citizenship in the same way that the children of diplomats are denied the same. The argument was dumb. Vivek proffered that it was because diplomats were not subject to the law that they could not receive that citizenship benefit. His dubious analogy was that undocumented immigrants were criminals and, therefore, were not subject to US law. As such, their children born on US soil should not receive the Constitutional birthright citizenship.

To the drunk or the illiterate, the comparison was sensible. To the sensible, it was drunk and illiterate. The pesky little fact that being a criminal requires a person to be subject to the criminal jurisdiction (which diplomats are not) and be convicted as such (which diplomats cannot be), gets in the way of that tirade. A smart, Harvard-trained lawyer would know that this was foolish circular reasoning…but convenience trumped reasoning because those people are too stupid to know that. I rest my case on this point.

Hypocritical Vivek

A perfect example of that unfortunate man’s opportunism was his hypocrisy when it came to market principles. Our dearest Vivek took to Twitter to praise Javier Milei’s deregulation of the Argentine housing market and the consequent doubling of supply with 20% down and decreasing rents. Vote for him, he said, and it would be a vote for deregulated markets! He conveniently knew of the benefits of deregulated markets but refused (or failed—which is worse) to acknowledge that those same principles applied to labour… and therefore immigration by extension!

This was a most disturbing foursome among himself, Hayek, Friedman, and Keynes, and was very disappointing. Protectionism has never known a prettier, more deceitful face!

To add insult to injury, all this lamenting and fomenting about anchor babies while using market economics like a Miss America world peace campaign came from the chief anchor baby!

Vivek, a first-generation American immigrant, was, through his magical birthright citizenship, the means by which his own mother could become an American. His father, who was on a non-immigrant visa, and who is still not a US citizen, was his family’s route to the US and the only reason dearest Vivek was able to have the opportunities that he could in Ohio. He chose to become the chief campaigner against himself, making a narrow distinction based on the fact of his father’s visa, knowing fully well that his intelligent Indian compatriots whom US citizens want to hire are unable to get work visas because of systemic failures brought about by the kinds of policies he was endorsing. Much less for the remainder of non-Indians whom US citizens also want to hire, who cannot legally enter the US workforce because of counterproductive, bureaucratic nonsense.

I don’t know about you, but a person who not only warns but tries to prevent me from doing the very thing he did, which worked for him, is not trustworthy. That is the epitome of hypocrisy. With that thought, I leave you to think, knowing that in about four years, this man will show up again to try and charm the boxers off many a Midwestern, beer-drinking uncle.

Is life inherently valuable?

I do my best to be mindful of when I hold beliefs and not opinions. Beliefs are conclusions I make without evidence, based on my feelings. Opinions are the conclusions I come to based on thinking through the evidence available to me. When I do notice myself believing rather than thinking, I make it my business to explore evidence and scrutinise my beliefs so that I could test their internal validity. After that, I either maintain or reject them.

The latest of my forays into the domain of my skull has involved my belief in the inherent value of human life. I am not sure when I started having this presumptious belief, but its unsteadiness became clear to me while I was listening to a podcast on abortion. The guest, Dr. Calum Miller, was a pro-life medical doctor. The hosts were both pro-choice comedians. While these descriptors are quite propagandistic, one thing stuck out. Dr. Miller boldly asserted, “Well, the starting premise is a belief in the inherent value of life. We can agree on that.” I am not sure whether I was particularly sleep-deprived or just keen on playing the devil’s advocate, which happens because that is how my personality works, but the first thought I had was “Is it? Must we?”

As I lay in the dark, pillow bent into the most comfortable shape possible, it dawned on me that I did not have any reason to maintain this belief. I was begging the question, and that is a no-go for fundamentals as a rationalist! There is no objective reason to conclude that human life is inherently valuable. We happen to prefer ourselves because that’s what genes have evolved to do. But, to look at the vastness of the universe and think that we, as specks of dust on an inconspicuous planet, are valuable, seems juvenile. This is also often a tool used to justify otherwise immoral things. Any good intentions that underpin this idea should not really count if the idea itself is faulty.

Do I have any idea of what should count? Nope. But just as I had no objective reasons to believe in gods when I became an atheist, and just as the absence of objective reasons did not render life meaningless, I think that if we put our heads together, we could come up with sensible principles. It really all depends on where we start our moral reasoning, and that depends on temperament, as Johnathan Haidt has shown. Circular reasoning, for sure, but in the end, I think the great Tim Minchin said it best. We’re just f***ing monkeys in shoes!

What do you think?

The Hero

by Shawnelle Martineaux

The sun shines boldly on the west today.

With its light,

a shadow is cast coldly

upon the faceless smirk of freedom’s might.

It barely hides the graves.

Half-men were scattered.

Before grief could countenance the scene,

ashes were thrown.

The slates of victors were wiped squeaky clean

The brown brows of “others” sorely battered.

His name is written on a stone.

It is planted

on the ground

in a park

by the swings.

They chant it to kill the voices of ghosts

screaming hymns of judgment from the shadows.

Freedom stings.

Nuance, not race.

It has been an interesting few days. Over the weekend, I watched the story of a hit piece on Yale Law Professor, Amy Chua unfold. On April 8, 2021, she shared a letter alleging that she was being victimized by Yale administrators based on false allegations that she hosted dinner parties in breach of COVID-19 Guidelines. Then, news of Caron Nazario, a US Army Lieutenant who was pepper sprayed at gunpoint during a traffic stop for not having a licence plate spread like wildfire. The story of Daunte Wright being shot after he resisted arrest and attempted to escape police custody completed the unholy trinity of occurrences that have bewildered me. On their faces, all three of these stories seem unrelated, but a common thread connects them. That is, identity politics. I find it all intellectually lazy.

In Chua’s case, she took to Twitter on Saturday to say that the Yale administration did not expect her to fight back as an Asian-American woman. She provided no evidence of racially motivated hate, and stated her unsubstantiated sentiments boldly, as if any questioning of her narrative would be proof of the thing alleged. In the Nazario and Wright cases, Black Lives Matter activists predictably took the opportunity to “peacefully protest” (the well-known euphemism for “riot”), all based on the unsubstantiated presumption that the men were treated the way they were because of skin colour. What’s more, looting is being described as “material liberation” and as usual, the bad behaviour of hooligans is being justified by those plagued by the bigotry of low expectations.

Whenever baseless assertions about racism are thrown about, they rob the persons alleging mistreatment of credibility. In my view, Chua’s situation raises a major issue of a breach of confidentiality perpetrated by the Yale administration, which ought to be independently investigated. Yale has a lot to answer for in their treatment of her. Her eagerness to weaponize her race, however, made me wonder whether there was merit to the allegations raised against her. If there are no skeletons in one’s closet, then sticking to the pertinent issues should be the best move. Imputing racial malice to persons without providing evidence of it would be a lazy jab and a grab, not even at low-hanging fruit, but at fruit already on the ground. That kind of personal debasement is telling of how entrenched identity politics has become in the US.

As regards Lieutenant Nazario, an opportunity to address the very real issue of the US Police’s use of force presented itself. This useful discussion is being drowned out by the race-baiters who thought it necessary to mention that Nazario was an Afro-Latino, despite no evidence of racial motivation in the body cam footage. I am of the opinion that the officer who pepper-sprayed Nazario and his dog was belligerent. I am of the opinion that he was a textbook a-hole. I am of the opinion that he was power-hungry. I have no evidence that he was racist. Further, he has since been fired. The other officer, who seemed reasonable in the circumstances, seemed to be of lower rank than his loud counterpart and he complied with orders while still attempting to assist Nazario with his compliance. Hitting Nazario, pepper-spraying him for no obvious reason, and making him lay on the ground when he was pulled over for a missing licence plate? UTTERLY UNCALLED FOR! Nazario is suing and justice will be served, based on the evidence presented to the judge. The chips will fall where they may.

I think that Wright’s case is different. In the body cam footage, he very clearly resisted arrest. He also clearly attempted to escape. They were aware of a warrant for his arrest for possession of an illegal firearm, and so his detention was lawful. The officer who shot him shouted “Taser! Taser! Taser!” before firing her weapon. She expressed complete shock and regret immediately after she realized what she had done. I think it was an honest mistake, but honest mistakes can also be reckless. Reckless, fatal mistakes are called manslaughter. Manslaughter is a crime, which, if proved by evidence, can result in jail time.

I do not think that someone who could so easily mistake a gun for a taser should be carrying either of those weapons, as her fitness for office would be very clearly compromised. I also do not think that the officer did what she did because she hated black people, as is the narrative that is being pushed. Had it been her black partner— the person initially arresting Wright— what would have been the narrative?

All in all, I think that neither race-baiting moaners nor trigger-happy cops should be held up as beacons of society. More so, at least in the case of the latter cohort, they are not representative of their groups. Failing to acknowledge that causes unnecessary strife and social degradation. We must approach everything with sobriety of mind, fairness, and basic sense. We have all spent too long thinking tribally, and cities are burning because of it. I think conversations between reasonable people are long overdue.

Long live reason!

Aďdendum: After watching this video of the Nazario detention, I can understand the officers’ perspective a bit better. The belligerent officer seems more reasonable.