28.12.02

VVV Calpundit has an in-depth post about classifying political ideologies, spinning off from a Matthew Yglesias post on the same topic. They're both concerned about the limitations of the two salient ways of classifying politics these days -- either the popular (especially in the media) single liberal/left-conservative axis, or the two-axis scheme proposed most forcefully by the libertarians.

A brief summary of the libertarian two-axis scheme: people are divided into four groups based on how much freedom from the government people should have in social or economic issues. So you get conservatives advocating government involvement in social but not economic issues, liberals/leftists advocating government involvement in economic but not social issues, authoritarians advocating government control of everything, and libertarians wanting no government involvement. It's become the standard criticism of this model that it's designed to make libertarianism attractive to fence-sitters by using loaded terms like "freedom" and "authoritarian." But I think this scheme is a good way of understanding the political ideology of libertarians, because it reflects how the world looks from their standpoint (I used the diagram for just that purpose in my feminist geography class). Dividing people according to their views on government control reflects libertarians' preoccupation with the issue of freedom from government coercion. To others of us (the reason you don't see liberals arguing that bigger government is necessarily better is not because they're trying to hide their authoritarian side, it's because size of government isn't in an of itself important), however, the libertarian scheme creates some absurdities. For example, it puts advocates of politically correct speech codes in the same basket as people who want to legislate conservative Christian morality. To me, a person's vision for how society ought to be constructed is at least as important as their view on whether the government is an appropriate tool to get there.

In general I tend to be skeptical about neat master-classifications of ideologies (which extends beyond politics to things like the hierarchy-fatalism-egalitarianism-individualism scheme for attitudes toward the environment, or various ways of classifying schools of thought in geography). They can be useful devices for capturing where people stand with reference to certain salient issues, but when looking for a sort of general-purpose classification they run up against the fact that the real world is not so orderly. The terms in which a faction or party defines itself are rarely the same as those on which other factions define themselves -- or the terms the second faction uses to define the first. This point has been impressed upon me just in reading a general history of the United States. The political ideologies and preoccupations of the various pre-Civil War parties and factions defy categorization into any simple scheme I could devise.

So to some degree I think Matthew Yglesias is on the right track by rejecting a deductive approach in favor of an inductive one, and simply asking which party (and I'd add "which faction within the party") a person supports in practice. The parties that exist today are a disorderly reflection of the major pools of political thought. And Matt's scheme is a good way to understand how people's political ideologies will have practical consequences in the world. But at the same time, the party power structure distorts people's political views. I don't mean to suggest that people's ideologies are somehow fully independent of the political power context they operate in. But it seems that, for most purposes that you'd be interested in defining a person's political ideology, there would be a meaningful difference between, say, someone who agrees with all of the Green party's policies but votes Democratic because the Greens don't have a chance, and someone who genuinely agrees with the Democrats' policies. The first person's willingness to vote strategically (or "sell out," from a hardcore Green perspective) in the current environment is important as well, though. It's a difficult situation all around.

I also think Calpundit is doing something worthwhile in challenging readers to come up with their own political classifications. But I think the key is not to treat the exercise as making up an objective, universally applicable model of politics. Rather, it's an issue of defining what the political field looks like from the modeler's perspective. What issues define your position? Where do you see other major factions falling in relation to those issues? I may return and give this problem a shot next year (though this may turn out to be a Josh Marshall promise).
posted by Stentor Danielson at 21:35 -- link --

VVV So the Raelians say they've cloned a human. Honestly, I'm not all that worried. I don't see that cloning as such -- meaning the creation of genetic duplicates of other people -- is much to be concerned about.

Let's look at some of the anti-cloning arguments. Right off the bat we can dismiss a sort of Star Wars scenario where someone creates an evil clone army. Cloning doesn't let you mass-produce adults, it just gives you an embryo in a different manner than the normal process or IVF (and we still can't synthesize eggs from scratch, so it's actually tougher). All told it would be much easier to recruit an army than to create one. The only real advantage of a clone army would probably be the spookiness of all the soldiers being identical.

Turning to a much more legitimate argument, there's the concern that clones will experience a variety of developmental problems. This is based on analogy with the other animals we've cloned, which suffered from a variety of health issues. I agree that it's dangerous to risk this kind of thing on humans at our current state of expertise. But this argument doesn't rule out cloning in the future if a solution to those problems is developed. And it's not an argument against cloning per se. The problem arises from the techniques used to implant dna in an embryo and get it to grow up, not in the dna being identical to another organism's. And it's not an argument specific to cloning -- we should be concerned about any medical procedure that presents serious health risks to patients (especially unconsenting patients -- though every pregnancy involves risks, and it ultimately has to be the mother's responsibility to roll the dice for her as-yet-nonexistent child).

Some people would say it's unnatural. I never accept naturalness on its own as a criterion for anything. It's nearly impossible to define, and in a sense either everything people do is unnatural -- since the opposite of "natural" is "man-made" -- or everything we do is natural -- since if nature hadn't given us the capacity for something, we would be physically incapable of doing it. There may be good reasons why the biological process of sexual reproduction is the best way to determine the genetic makeup of a child (on the level of the whole society I can think of a few, such as genetic diversity and convenience, but "allowing some cloning" and "using only cloning for all reproduction" are two very different proposals). But to argue that means leaving the idea of "naturalness" behind and arguing the specifics of a particular process.

Perhaps the best anti-cloning argument is the psychological expectations that would be put on the child. The experience of test-tube babies should assuage concerns that clones would be stigmatized as "that cloned kid." But there remains a definite concern that the parent of a clones would treat the clone as a sort of duplicate self. So the parent would have unrealistic expectations of how closely the child would resemble the parent, stifling the child's development of individuality and subjecting it to the backlash of the parent's frustration at not getting a full-sized Mini-Me. However much genetics may determine our personalities, it remains true that our sense of who we are is always couched largely in terms of our experiences, which would necessarily be quite different between clone and parent. Further, having the same personality wouldn't mean that the clone would be compliant with the parent's wishes. A person with a genetic predisposition to rebelliousness would be in for quite a surprise. The thing is, though, plenty of normal parents see their children as extensions of themselves and try to live vicariously through them. Cloning wouldn't create a new problem, it just ups the risk of encountering an old one (and ups it by how much we can't say yet). You can still legitimately say that we shouldn't go upping that risk if we can avoid it, but the point here is that the risk is not that big, so it can be outweighed by other considerations.

All in all, though, I don't think we'd ever see much reproductive cloning. After the initial novelty wears off (and that stage will have few enough clones because of the expense associated with a new technique), it's really only something that would be considered by people who are infertile and have a strong attachment to their dna -- barring any major cultural changes, not a huge segment of the population.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:08 -- link --

27.12.02

VVV Gary has the definitive guide to hockey ettiqette.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:11 -- link --

26.12.02

VVV

People Of Color Who Never Felt They Were Black "But you are black." That came as news to Martins, a Brazilian who, for 30 years before immigrating to the United States, looked in the mirror and saw a morena -- a woman with caramel-colored skin that is nearly equated with whiteness in Brazil and some other Latin American countries. "I didn't realize I was black until I came here," she said. That realization has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-complexioned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Colombia, Panama and other Latin nations with sizable populations of African descent. Although most do not identify themselves as black, they are seen that way as soon as they set foot in North America. Their reluctance to embrace this definition has left them feeling particularly isolated -- shunned by African Americans who believe they are denying their blackness; by white Americans who profile them in stores or on highways; and by lighter-skinned Latinos whose images dominate Spanish-language television all over the world, even though a majority of Latin people have some African or Indian ancestry.

This is a good example of what makes me skeptical about affirmative action. How can a simple entry under "race" really capture the differences in life experience that affirmative action is meant to address. A person's racial identity is a combination of their self-identification and their identification by others. Those two things are influenced by a host of factors -- physical appearance, geneology, family and social environment, home region, class, gender, interests, personal style, etc. What basis is the definitive one on which we assign a person to a race? In part that depends on the rationale for affirmative action -- if we're looking for cultural diversity, self-identification is a better measure, but if we're rectifying racial injustices some external criterion like skin color will more accurately reflect the basis on which those injustices have been imposed.

It's possible that cases like the ones in the Post article are fringe cases, and that the construction of race in this country has homogenized the experience of each race to a workable degree. Social policies have to make a simplification of society to be effective -- for example, the atomistic and voluntaristic model of the individual has proven quite successful in promoting beneficial social arrangements such as freedom of speech, even though it's far from an accurate portrayal of how humans work. So maybe racial categorizations for the purpose of affirmative action would be effective in promoting racial equality in a way that makes up for the crudeness of the standard in borderline cases. But I have a suspicion that race's social manifestations may turn out to be much like its genetic ones -- there's more variability within the group than between groups.

I'd also like to make a note of the fact that it amuses me that Cuba's white supremacists call themselves the "Ku Klux Klan Kubano."
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:40 -- link --

VVV John Quiggin makes an interesting argument that war with Iraq is becoming less likely:

Suppose that this [UN inspectors not finding anything] continues until 26 January. By then, hundreds of sites will have been investigated, the best US intelligence will have been tested out, and the key Iraqi scientists will have been interviewed. If nothing has turned up, I can't see how Blix's report can possibly provide Bush with a casus belli. And by then, it will be too late to go back to the omissions in the declaration.

I think he's made a couple of unreliable assumptions. Regarding the last sentence I've quoted, I don't think going back to a report that was only a few months old is such an impossibility. Bush went back a decade to find evidence that Saddam was willing to use weapons of mass destruction. If anyone questions the delay, he can point to the claims that have already been made about the inadequacy of the Iraqi declaration, say he wanted to let the UN process run its course before making any moves, and if worse comes to worst point out that there's no point in launching the war before deployment to the Gulf (which is still in progress) was complete (implying support for Powell's "when you pick a fight, make sure you'll win" doctrine rather than Rumsfeld's "assume the best-case scenario" doctrine).

Second, I think the very fact that Blix's report doesn't provide any evidence (and I'm cynically inclined to say it won't regardless of what weapons Saddam actually has) could be made into a causus belli, with the added bonus of showing that the UN (and by extension world opinion) is irrelevant and need not be coddled. Bush has been so unequivocal in asserting that the US has ironclad intelligence on Saddam's weapons that he won't be able to back down from it, and the aspersions he's been casting on the inspectors' integrity and skill will further tip the balance. If Blix doesn't find anything, that just shows how sneaky Saddam is (and hence how much he's in breach of the inspections agreement) and/or how incompetent and yellow-bellied the UN is. Tony Blair will vouch for the US's secret intelligence, and the Anglo-American forces will roll.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:17 -- link --

VVV Rauhallista Joulua!!

I feel the need to point out that my Finnish book describes Finnish holiday parties (in English) as "jollifications."
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:46 -- link --

VVV

Israeli Rabbi Warns Jews Of Christmas Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau on Tuesday urged Jews in Israel not to celebrate Christmas or New Year's Day, warning that such observances threaten the identity of the Jewish state. Lau encouraged Christian Israeli Arabs, foreign workers and immigrants to mark the holidays. But he said Jewish families should not "be swept into keeping a way of life that is not their own, while obliterating and losing their self-respect." In recent years, small numbers of Israeli Jews have begun celebrating Christmas, putting up lights in shops and even trees in homes. The trend began with the influx of thousands of Christians — many of them married to Jews — in the early 1990s as part of a wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Lau warned that such habits could bring about assimilation between Jews and Christians.

This sounds delightfully Pat Buchanan-esque. I've never been entirely comfortable with the idea of Israel as a "Jewish state," even though that was the whole basis for creating the country in the first place. It reminds me too much of the insistence from certain quarters that America is a "Christian nation" (though I should point out that in the example I'm quoting, Rabbi Lau isn't asking the government to get involved). The historical argument on that count is irrelevant -- whatever the actual status of the country was, I don't want the country now to have a government that is religiously aligned. So I wonder how Israel can remain true to its mission to be a homeland for the Jewish people and still be a modern liberal democracy, with the religious nonpartisanism that requires.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:22 -- link --

24.12.02

VVV Ampersand over on Alas, A Blog has a good (and oft-linked) post about the Venezuelan crisis. Her first point cuts straight to the chase:

But as non-Venezuelans, our priority ought to be strongly supporting Constitutional, representative democracy. If Venezuelans object to the course the government is taking, do they create change through the elections described in the Constitution, or through non-Constitutional means?

This is pretty much the point I made several months ago about the efforts to force Askar Akaev to step down from the presidency of Kyrgyzstan (and a better example, as Venezuela's democratic institutions are more democratic than Kyrgyzstan's). Upholding the rule of law on principle is essential, and exceptions should only be made in the most extreme cases -- those in which the end sought is of extreme importance, and the normal functioning of the system offers no reasonable means of achieving the goal. Venezuela's oil industry leaders are essentially holding the nation hostage.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 18:17 -- link --