Disability And Moochers

Meep writes something that I think is very revealing about how our society handles disability:

Apparently AT&T assumes that the only people who would want an iPhone would be hearing people. Now AT&T has announced that they're going to offer a data only plan, but if you check the Text Accessibility Plan page, the PDF form explicitly states that you have to have a certifying agent in order to even get the plan. Why should anyone have to prove they are disabled? I suppose this is their way of separating hearing from deaf so that only "deaf" people can have this option.

We tend to think of accommodating disabilities as making special concessions or exceptions to the rules for disabled people. We think that disabilities constitue an extra burden on some people, so we'll give those people a sort of bonus subsidy to make up for it. Thinking that way sensitizes us to worry about moochers -- people who feign or exaggerate disability in order to get the subsidy without suffering the burden that it's supposed to offset. (Elizabeth Anderson wrote a good article some years back taking to task all the liberal political theorists from Rawls onward for using this sort of "equality defended from moochers" framework.) I would suspect it also *generates* wanna-be moochers, by effectively telling people "hey, there's a special bonus here you could be getting."

The alternative to this is to think not about subsidizing disabled people so that they can be on a level playing field with the normals, but rather about rearranging the options so that suitable options are available for everyone, given the diversity of human brains and bodies. There may be limits at which we'd have to fall back on subsidies-plus-mooching-safeguards, but we're far from reaching them. AT&T's iPhone plans, as described by Meep, could be a good example of the second strategy -- offering various appropriately-priced combinations of voice and data, so that people can pick the one that suits their way of being in the world. In this context, a person who can hear but buys the data-only plan would not be getting some sort of illegitimate bonus. But AT&T is so deeply buried in the subsidies perspective that it assumes that it has some sort of nonsensical need to protect the data-only option from hearing moochers.

This is also a reason to be leery of the argument Harry Brighouse mentions at the end of a long post on whether parents should be allowed to deliberately "design" their children, picking and choosing their genetic endowments. He suggests one possible rule would be that design is OK for correcting defects, but not for giving children extra excellences (e.g. you could take a kid who was going to end up 3'8" and make them 5'4", but you couldn't make them, or their naturally 5'4" sibling, 6'3"). This type of scheme would force the government to officially promulgate a blueprint for what constitutes a "normal" body and mind, and labeling variations from that blueprint (at least in one direction) as defects which is is permissible -- or even potentially mandatory -- to correct. If we had a social system that fully accommodated the breadth of human variability, we wouldn't need to either fix so many genetic "defects" (shortness would no longer be a "defect" if we ended height discrimination), nor to worry that people were going to exploit that fixing process in order to get an unfair advantage.

Resilience

Tim Haab notes that it's becoming increasingly popular to talk about "resilience" as a goal in environmental policy. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to withstand crises. He finds resilience to be a somewhat preposterous proposition, because a resilient system is meant to be able to withstand even unforseeable crises. How, he asks, can we be expected to plan for things we by definition don't know about?

The trick to resilience, and what makes it an important concept, is that we don't need to know the specifics of a crisis in order to know some general things about what will help us deal with it. By looking at what things have been helpful for withstanding past crises (including ones that were major surprises at the time), we can deduce generalized crisis-handling capacities.

For example, one such generalized crisis-handling capacity is resource buffers. A crisis is likely to demand additional resource expenditures to handle, or even to directly attack and reduce the resource base itself -- whereas the reverse is highly unlikely. So if a system limits its resource use to something less than what would be optimal in a crisis-free world, it will, ceteris paribus, be able to weather the crisis better than if it had been straining its resource base to the max.

Democratic information processing is another generalized crisis-handling capacity. It would be easier to handle any crisis -- whatever its nature -- if the system gets an early warning and full information, which we know from past experience is more likely to happen when hierarchies don't restrict the flow and sharing of information.

Diversity -- genetic, cultural, psychological, etc. -- is another useful generalized crisis-handling capacity. An un-diversified system may be optimized for the pre-crisis conditions, but a crisis necessarily changes those conditions. If the system is diverse, there is a greater likelihood that the answer to the crisis is somewhere to be found within the system already

Resilience is always a matter of degree -- no system is perfectly resilient to every possible crisis (though Haab seems to think such a thing is being demanded), and increases in resilience often come with costs (e.g. in the form of foregone profits from leaving a resource buffer). That leaves us with an eminently political question of how much of various types of resilience we want to build into our social system.

PSA

I've gotten several hits recently from people searching for "What to do if your wife uses VAWA." So as a public service announcement, I'd like to recommend that your first course of action should be to stop being violent towards her.

A Real Tro(u/o)per

Here's something non-political for a change. A little while ago loree_borealis linked to a copyediting quiz. I got a perfect score -- luckily, since I earn a living as a copyeditor. But one item stuck out as worthy of further comment. The quiz asked you to find the error in the following sentence:

My hard-working nature and get-it-done attitude inspired a former boss to remark several times that I was a real trooper.

The correct answer was that it should be "a real trouper." But I think "trooper" is an "error" only in the sense of "if the person reading your resume is anal about this kind of stuff, they'll throw you on the reject pile for it." But it's quite likely that "trouper" is an error in the sense of "accurately representing the speaker's meaning."

The expression originated as an analogy to a member of an acting troupe, with their "the show must go on" ethos. But the alternate spelling is, I think, being eggcorned into acceptability. When most people who aren't usage mavens hear the expression, they interpret it as a metaphor for a military trooper. And that interpretation makes sense, since members of the military are also known for their perseverence, as they, well, "soldier on" in the face of adversity. And when such a person -- and I include myself in this group -- turns around and uses the expression at a future date, the military analogy rather than the theater one is what's in their mind. So in that sense, when I (and I assume most other people) utter that set of sounds, what I'm really saying is that someone is a "real trooper," not that they're a "real trouper." My expression just happens to sound the same as one that's spelled differently.

USA! USA! USA! ... no, that's not right

Lauredhel has a roundup of reports on the negative mental health implications of Australia's immigrant detention policies. After a few months, detainess manifest progressively more severe symptoms of depression and self-harm. It's pretty sobering stuff.

Even more sobering is the fact that from what I can tell, Australia's detention conditions are objectively better than the US's. The reports Lauredhel links to call for the demolition of the "jail-like" Stage I building at Villawood -- but in the US, all of our detainees are kept in actual working jails in the same conditions as the convicted murderers and drug dealers (except for the ones in Sheriff Joe's tent city in the Arizona desert). One report comments positively on the improvements in internet access for detainees -- but in the US, detainees are lucky if the jail will let them recieve letters in envelopes. And there are concerns about policies on letting detainees have "excursions," for example when a loved one is hospitalized -- but in the US, detainees are lucky if they get to leave their dozen-cell "pod."

Voices from Detention II

I mentioned Part I of this story when it came out. Here's Part II.

Good news?

It's a little disorienting, in the midst of things like the Sean Bell verdict and Russell Pearce's latest turd, but a story came across the wire yesterday that actually seemed like it could be good news -- the judge in the Indian trust fund case has said it's not a matter of whether, but of how much, money to pay out to the Indians who have been ripped off by the U.S. government's mismanagement of royalties from oil and gas development on lands held in trust. I put a question mark after my title because it's not yet clear whether any of the underlying problems -- the government's cavalier, irresponsible attitude toward Indians, and its pre-1494 accounting system -- will be corrected, or if the government's attitude will be along the lines of "fine, pay them so they'll get off our case for a while."

Addendum: I forgot about two other pieces of good news:

1. Janet Napolitano vetoed the anti-sanctuary law, after activists made a stink about it and the state legislators who voted for it -- including erstwhile progressives like Krysten Sinema -- admitted they hadn't even read it. (OK, so this is actually just canceling out some old bad news, plus new bad news about the level of professionalism in our state legislature, but still.)

2. The U.S. government admitted it was wrong to deny a detained man treatment for penis cancer. Francisco Casataneda is still dead, and it's not clear whether this will lead to any systemic change in the quality of health care in jail, but it's at least a step.

Mean

It has come to my attention, over the course of the last few weeks, that I'm becoming ... mean. Particularly in the comment sections of others' blogs, I've developed a tendency to take what is, on sober reflection, a particularly nasty approach to engaging others, both those who are dimly aware of my existence and total strangers. I don't rescind much if anything of the substance behind my various comments and posts, but I do greatly regret my way of approaching the disagreement and attempting to make my point (in some cases, to the point that I should have just kept my mouth shut in that instance).

My meanness can, I think, be traced in part to my attempting to inch closer to being an ally to various oppressed groups. (I stress in part -- I also blame a generalized mood of personal-life grumpiness, with respect to which I've failed to suck it up and get over it.) I've read a variety of "how to be an ally" type articles over the years, mostly written by members of the allied-with groups. They tend to highlight two major failings characteristic of newly-minted allies* -- attempting to take over the allied-with group's spaces or movement (using your privilege within, rather than against, that group), and walking on eggshells due to a sort of impotent paranoia about making a mistake. It makes sense that these two failings would be salient to allied-with-group people, since they're the ones that directly affect that group, i.e. the things that drive a wedge between allies and allied-with people.

I would add meanness to the list of pitfalls for those approaching ally-ship. Meanness is directed outward, a sort of scattershot viciousness directed at any example of oppression (however serious or mild) that crosses your path (including, occasionally, things that you mistakenly assume are examples of oppression). The mean proto-ally, overconfident in his or her newfound enlightenment, finds seemingly less-enlightened others and unloads their fury on them.

The opposite of meanness is not necessarily kumbaya-type understanding others' position and respecting it and compromising with it (of the sort many progressives have accused Barack Obama of exhibiting). The problem with meanness is not the hard line it takes toward those you're criticizing. The problem with meanness is that it's narcissistic. Meanness is characterized by a focus on venting your negative feelings toward your target, rather than carefully choosing your approach and words for maximum effect in engaging your target. Like the other forms of ally failings, it stems in part from an illicit attempt to conflate your own position with that of the allied-with group, to try to practice the same kind of righteous anger they're entitled to without the prerequisite wounding that makes righteous anger rhetorically powerful and morally legitimate. And meanness is narcissistic in another way -- it often involves a (conscious or unconscious) desire to show off your enlightenment to the allied-with group, to wave in front of them the heads of dragons you've slain. But members of the allied-with groups are typically fairly consequentialist about allies -- they want to be less oppressed, not just to have cheerleaders agreeing with them about how oppressed they are. And meanness is in a third sense narcissistic, in that it can involve a projection of one's own self-loathing. New allies have to deal with a lot of self-loathing -- justifiedly so, as they have just come to understand how loathsome many of their attitudes and actions are. But productive, transformative processing of self-loathing is difficult. It's much easier to attack those who are a few steps farther back on the path, to loathe them or what they're doing in the hopes that it will purge your own flaws.

So I've been mean. I will strive to be less mean, as it's unhelpful to anyone. A heads-up to Alon Levy: If I don't succeed in chilling a bit, you may have to take back that thing you said long ago about me being the only civil blogger.

*I deliberately vacillate here between describing people as new allies or would-be allies -- because I don't know what qualifies one for the title of "ally," or even if an (alleged) ally has the right to bestow it on him/herself or anyone else.