22.11.03

Kennedy Ad Absurdum

I've shrugged and put up with the volume of "news" that has been published today to commemmorate the anniversary of JFK's assassination. But I find it difficult to believe that the Morning Call had to run a story pointing out that there's hardly anything in the Lehigh Valley named after the former president.
Stentor Danielson, 15:42,

21.11.03

Healthy Forests Passes

Congress OKs Bill To Cut Wildfire Threat The Senate passed the bill [Healthy Forests Initiative] by a voice vote less than an hour after the House approved it 286-140. The rapid-fire votes came after a three-year impasse on wildfire legislation. ... The measure would authorize $760 million a year for thinning projects on 20 million acres of federal land — a $340 million increase. At least half of all money spent on those projects must be near homes and communities. ... Judges would have to weigh the environmental consequences of inaction and the risk of fire in cases involving thinning projects. Any court order blocking such projects would have to be reconsidered every 60 days.

I'm not thrilled that it passed, but it looks to be about as good a version of Healthy Forests as we were going to get. It kept some of the key Senate provisions, such as the increased funding and requirement to focus on intermix areas. Now let's hope that we get a new president and a changed Congress in 2004 and that they can do a better job -- though if the amount of time it took a Republican-dominated Congress to get Healthy Forests going is any indication, this policy may be in place for quite some time.
Stentor Danielson, 23:10,

Don't Upset The Homophobes

Matthew Yglesias proposes the following as a potentially significant utilitarian argument against gay rights:

For whatever reason, the thought of gay people, gay sex, and gay stuff in general just strikes me as icky. Contemplating it makes me uncomfortable, as does seeing it in real life or on TV. I find the thought of discussing a gay co-worker's marital problems intolerable. This may be irrational on my part, but there it is. The more closeted gay people are, the happy I'll be. Obviously, gay people will be less happy, but homophobes outnumber homosexuals by a sufficiently large number that our preferences, though less intense, should take priority.

Yglesias suggests three common ways out of the problem: discard utilitarianism for a rights-based ethical system, declare that such "other-regarding preferences" are not to be taken account of in utilitarian calculation, or challenge the setup on empirical grounds. The first is a type of intuition-based argument frequently used against utilitarianism, and which I find pretty weak -- the clash of the ends prescribed by utilitarianism and those prescribed by moral intution seems as likely to prove intuition wrong (indeed, moral arguments are made for that reason as often as they're made in order to give direction for situations that intuition doesn't give an answer to) as the other way around. The second argument seems to be an arbitrary restriction on the utilitarian scheme, especially since other-rgearding can be a powerful way to protect the interests of the minority (for example, the widespread feeling that, as offensive as the KKK is, it ought not to have its speech curtailed). The third I would agree with, especially when you consider that the other-regarding preferences that gay-friendly heterosexuals such as myself and Mr. Yglesias have outweigh some of the preferences of the homophobes.

However, I think that even if we concede the empirical issue, the situation described above is not an effective argument against gay rights. The situation can be summarized as a clash of interests -- gay people and homophiles have an interest in gays being able to do gay stuff, and homophobes have an interest in that not happening. One or the other has to give (or some combination of the two). The way Yglesias presented it presumes that the greater interest has a claim to being preserved, so the weaker interest -- in this case, gays' and homophiles' interest in gay rights -- must give way. But I don't think that's necessarily the operative consideration. The situation may favor the homophobes if our intention is to take both interests as fixed and ask one side to suck it up and deal with having their interests thwarted for the greater good.

However, utilitarianism should prompt us to ask whether either interest could be altered, so that the clash is eliminated and a higher overall utility can be achieved. In this case we should take into account the difficulty of making a proposed change. Regardless of the origin of one's sexuality, once it's there it's fairly resistant to change. While homophiles may be convinced that homosexuality is bad, it's unfeasible for homoseuxals to be made heterosexual. On the other hand, most homophobes can be convinced to accept homosexuality. Further, the relative benefits of changing the homophobes increase when you look at a long timescale. There will be homosexuals in every generation, requiring society to constantly expend effort in "fixing" them (presuming this can be done) in order to retain the optimal utility. On the other hand, social attitudes toward sexuality reproduce themselves, meaning that once homophilia is widespread, it will become engrained in the culture. (One counter-situation might be if homoseuxality is entirely genetic and can thus be removed once and for all, but the implications of eugenics on that scale would require a far longer post.) Forcing homophobes to endure a loss of utility can serve as a motivation to take that responsibility, just as condemnation of homosexuality is meant to motivate homoseuxals to fix the problem by acting heterosexual. This is similar to the way we might be reluctant to bail out the losses of people who choose to live in flood- or fire-prone areas -- giving them disaster relief is better than not, but withholding it can motivate them to choose the best course of action, which is to not put themselves in the situation of needing aid in the first place.
Stentor Danielson, 15:59,

The Mayhem-flower

I was going to do a cartoon about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling, but I couldn't think of anything good. It worked out for the best, since the Opinions section of The Scarlet was awash in pro-SJC commentary. Instead, I did a cynical Thanksgiving cartoon:



My column this week was "Energy Bill: Pro Capitalism Or Pro Capitalist?," and has its very own cartoon. I had been meaning to write something for this space about the energy bill, but this commentary will do instead. I'm curious in a way what my fellow grad students would make of my implicit approval of capitalism in this piece. Granted, I'm not taking a libertarian or neoliberal stance -- indeed, some of my arguments depend on the reader accepting my brief case that things like environmental regulation are a necessary part of well-functioning capitalism. But I still decline to point to capitalism as the problem, and instead hold it up as a standard that Congressional policymakers fail to meet. I imagine one response would be that the cronyism that I decry is an essential feature of the inner logic of the capitalist system. Such a view would be consistent with the often-expressed opinion that what people usually call Communism -- a system that institutionalized corruption and cronyism -- was in fact capitalism taken to its logical conclusion.
Stentor Danielson, 01:31,

20.11.03

Hymns

Philocrites has a post up asking for readers' favorite Unitarian-Universalist hymns. I'm not terribly familiar with what hymns made it into the standard UU hymnals, but I was lucky enough to remember that we sang my favorite hymn of all time, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," at Miami Valley UU this summer, and thus I could vote for it. The question got me thinking about some of the other hymns I really like. Most hymns are not very exciting -- the same few "churchy" chords, and made up of only quarter notes (did people used to think rhythm was sinful?). But there are some that are really powerful musically. Anyway, since I was puttering around the web looking for sound files, I figured I'd blog my short list of favorite hymns. I don't know which of these are in UU hymnals, but this is my blog, and I'll do as I please. Ones that I've found sounds and lyrics for are linked, but be warned that the sites start playing the midi automatically when you go to the page.

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" This was written for Abraham Lincoln's birthday, and is sometimes known as the Black National Anthem. There's a tendency for people to play it slower than I'd like (the midi I linked to is all right, tempo-wise).

"I The Lord of Sea and Sky"

"Earth and All Stars"

"Battle Hymn of the Republic" This used to be my favorite song, way back before I started listening to popular music. Unfortunately, a lot of arrangers tend to want to make it a slow, soulful, "Amazing Grace" type of song. I much prefer a version that keeps to the military march character of the original.

"O Come O Come Emmanuel" I left Christmas songs off the list, but this one sneaks on because it's technically an Advent song, and it's quite underrated (as compared to most Christmas hymns -- I mean, does anybody need to be told that "O Holy Night" is a good song?).

"God of Grace and God of Glory" This was popular at Colgate's University Church (I think Harry Emerson Fosdick, the author, had some connection to Colgate). There's apparently an alternate tune, so when we sang it to that tune at Universalist Memorial in DC I was quite disconcerted.
Stentor Danielson, 19:33,

Fuel For China-Bashers

China Set To Act On Fuel Economy The Chinese government is preparing to impose minimum fuel economy standards on new cars for the first time, and the rules will be significantly more stringent than those in the United States, according to Chinese experts involved in drafting them. The new standards are intended both to save energy and to force automakers to introduce the latest hybrid engines and other technology in China, in hopes of easing the nation's swiftly rising dependence on oil imports from volatile countries in the Middle East. ... Some popular vehicles now built in China by Western automakers, including the Chevrolet Blazer, do not measure up to the standards the government has drafted, and may have to be modified to get better gas mileage before the first phase of the new rules becomes effective in July 2005. The Chinese initiative comes at a time when Congress is close to completing work on a major energy bill that would make no significant changes in America's fuel economy rules for vehicles. The Chinese standards, in general, call for new cars, vans and sport utility vehicles to get as much as two miles a gallon of fuel more in 2005 than the average required in the United States, and about five miles more in 2008.

I can think of at least three ways that this fact will be adopted into American political discourse. The most common will be its use by environmentalists -- "even China has better fuel efficiency standards than we do!" Granted, Chinese officials deny that environmental protection was a rationale for the change, but fuel efficiency improvements should help the environment just as much regardless of why they were implemented. Fixed bureaucratic rules are like that -- they have a sort of life of their own independent of the reason they were implemented and are maintained, unlike rules or habits of action or policymaking, which are sensitive to motivation.

I can also see this fact being brought up by some anti-environmentalists -- "environmental regulations are oppressive and unjust, as demonstrated by the fact that Red China likes them." This is a parallel construction to the Nazi fallacy ("The Nazis did X, therefore X is bad," an argument I've seen most often with respect to gun control).

What will be most interesting, I think, is how this fact is incorporated into considerations of US-China trade. Environmentalists are optimistic that the lure of the Chinese market plus the new regulations will spur American car makers into developing more fuel-efficient models. This may be the case. But the pessimist in me wonders if there won't be a second line of attack by American car makers: they may lean on the US government to pressure China into reducing its regulations. This kind of cronyism is par for the course in trade negotiations, and may be cheaper for Detroit than the R&D necessary to make more fuel-efficient cars. The US government could frame China's regulations as unfair to American companies, and hold out prizes like Most Favored Nation status and membership in the WTO as enticements. Beyond its effects on car sales, this strategy would have the added benefit of reducing the pressure on the US to raise its standards, something many in our government don't want to do.

Even if the US isn't successful in getting China to change its policy, opposing the standards would play well at home. The effect on the American automobile industry fits nicely into the ritual China-bashing that goes on before elections.
Stentor Danielson, 14:31,

19.11.03

Omissions

Apparently Wesley Clark, Denis Kucinich, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman also spoke (live or electronically) to the NCAI meeting. Unfortunately Native Times requires a subscription to look at most of its content, so I wasn't able to find anything there, and none of the mainstream newspapers seem to have covered the event in any detail. I went over to Indian Country Today, but so far as I can tell they don't have anything about the meeting. What ICT did have was this article about a commemmoration of the 1794 signing of the Treaty of Canandaigua between the federal government and the Oneida Nation. The article emphasizes that the treaty is the basis of relations between the US and the Oneidas and has not been broken by the federal government -- indeed, it quotes Michael R. Smith as pointing out "a federal court ruling last summer recognizing that 'the treaty is in effect.'" What the article doesn't mention at all, beyond identifying Smith as the Oneidas' land claim lawyer, is the reason a court had to issue a decision upholding the Treaty. The treaty has been violated in practice by the state of New York, leading to a long and thus far unproductive lawsuit by the Nation. This omission makes the article rather surreal.
Stentor Danielson, 15:21,

Dean Stands Up For Native Americans

Dean Appearance Draws Large Crowd To NCAI Surrounded by some high profile Native Americans past and present, Dr. Howard Dean addressed several groups of Native Americans at the 60th Annual convention of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) Wednesday morning in Albuquerque, NM. ... Dean also appointed to [sic] disparties in health care and said Indian Health Service (IHS) spends 1/3 of what is spent on medicare recipients. He said Indian people need better facilites to meet those needs. He told the main convention he would settle the Cobell trust fund lawsuit within the first two years of this administration. "The facts are not in dispute, this country did not take care of Native American peoples' resources," Dean told the audience.

Obviously you're not going to go in front of a Native American audience and tell them you don't think the trust fund case should be settled, but it sounds here like there were a lot of noncommittal weasel words he didn't use, and he made a concrete promise. Contrast this with John Kerry's statement, which was big on nice-sounding rhetoric but lacked specifics. Good on Dean, if he has the skill and commitment to accomplish it. My sense is that Dean's more likely than anyone else running to be able to whip agencies like the BIA and Forest Service into shape.

The rest of the article deals with yet another example of people dredging up past statements that Dean made -- this time, a comment opposing casinos. Dean's response paralleled his handling of his past support of the Yucca Mountain waste facility, NAFTA, and assault weapons. He pleaded federalism, saying that opposition to casinos was what was good for Vermont, but that he supports other places taking a different approach.

I think Dean's shift indicates something about how democratic politics works: voters are parochial. Elected officials face a demand to do what's best for the entity they represent, not what's best for the world. That's why pork barrel projects are so common -- Congresspeople know that the way to get reelected is to do things for their district, not to do things for the country. These past statements reveal that Dean's populist side has tended to get the better of his straight-talking idealism. The two sides sit uneasily together, as he tells supporters "you are the campaign," then insists that he doesn't care if his stances are popular. Hopefully Dean's lack of connections with entrenched Washington bureaucratic interests (who are the most important players in resisting a settlement of the trust fund suit) will mean that he continues to see doing right by Native Americans as the best course of action for America.
Stentor Danielson, 14:50,

God Says You Don't Need Kids To Have A Family

The most popular argument against gay marriage at the moment is that marriage exists for the purpose of raising children, and a homosexual couple is incapable of producing children the usual way. The Massachusetts Supreme Court dealt with this objection from a legal standpoint. I'd like to take a stab at it from a Biblical standpoint.

To start off, let's clarify the basic framework of the question. Marriage is an institution that formalizes the union of two people into a single social unit, a family. The question is whether that family exists for the purpose of adding a third member. Our text is the Bible's description of the creation of the first family, commonly used to prove that God didn't intend for there to be gay marriage:

Genesis 2: 20-25, NIV 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

The description of marriage is consistent with my statement about forming a new social unit -- the man and his wife become "one flesh," one thing, a family. Note the rationale given for the union: Adam needed a helper, and none of the animals would cut it. It had to be a helper of his own kind. The purpose of marriage, then, would seem to be the support that the spouses offer each other.

There's no mention of children here. The first child (as well as the first explicitly mentioned sex) doesn't show up until chapter 4. The bit I quoted ends with the observation that Adam and Eve were naked but felt no shame. This seems to imply that they were as yet asexual. They discovered their nakedness, and became ashamed of it, only after they ate the forbidden fruit. It seems reasonable to conclude that the reason they became ashamed was that part of the knowledge that the fruit gave them was knowledge of sex. Thus, not only was the first message originally childless, it was originally sexless.

There's clearly heterosexism in this passage that isn't easy to explain away. But what's not in it is the idea that marriage is about children.
Stentor Danielson, 00:00,

18.11.03

It's That Time Of The Semester

Posting may be more sporadic over the next few weeks, as I have other work to do.
Stentor Danielson, 23:17,

Finally, Some Good News

Mass. Court Rules Gay Marriage Ban Illegal The highest court in Massachusetts ruled on Tuesday that the state cannot bar gays and lesbians from marrying, but it stopped short of ordering the state to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In a 4-3 ruling that could make Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage, the Supreme Judicial Court said the state may not deny the rights conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry. "We declare that barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution," the court said in its ruling.

This makes me proud to be a temporary Massachusettite. Now, we have to brace for the backlash.
Stentor Danielson, 11:49,

16.11.03

Goddess And Wildfire

I'm going through a whole bunch of news stories about the California fires for a paper analyzing the event from a political ecology standpoint. That's where I found the column I linked to in the last post. And just a couple stories later, I came upon another old column that links the subject of my big paper from last fall (Goddess religion) with my big paper from this fall: "Some Say We Should Look At The Fire Inside."
Stentor Danielson, 22:55,

The Other View Of Fire

I recently ran across a column taking essentially the opposite view from the John Krist article on the California fires that I commented on a few posts ago. Tim Rutten says that halting suburban development is unthinkable, and that fires like the recent ones are the price we pay for freedom. My own sympathies lay more toward the Krist side, but Rutten's column is an excellent exposition of the pro-suburbia-despite-fires attitude that I said Krist was forgetting existed.
Stentor Danielson, 22:48,

Retroactive Legislation

There have been a couple cases recently of what I'll call "retroactive legislation" with regard to the environment. That is, cases in which new, lower environmental standards were applied retroactively to violations committed when the standards were still higher, thus exonerating the violators. The one that's gotten the most press has been the EPA's decision to stop pursuing companies who violated air quality standards because the companies' actions wouldn't be violations of the newly implemented standards. Today Bill at The Agonist points to a story describing how retroactivity is built in to the easing of MTBE restrictions that's part of the energy bill that Congress is working on.

On the surface of it, this retroactive legislation sounds like a dirty trick. After all, we wouldn't punish someone for doing something that was outlawed after they did it, because at the time they were essentially told by the government that that act was OK. However, this principle is not symmetrical. Most laws -- and pollution standards fall into this category -- have a sort of universality to them, coming with the presumption that the thing they outlaw is a bad thing in general, not just a bad thing after the law is passed. To pass a law lowering MTBE standards, for example, implies that in the government's judgement there was, from a public health standpoint, never anything wrong with pollution in the newly legalized range. If the old law was unjust, why perpetuate that injustice by taking violators to court? The one reason I can think of that the violators should still be prosecuted is the idea that, independent of a law's content, obedience to the law is a good thing, and thus people should be punished for willfully breaking the law even if the law is stupid. Certainly many corporations could use a lesson in the importance of following the law. Nevertheless, I think (not being a lawyer, all I have is an opinion) the "no harm, no foul" criterion can reasonably be said to outweigh the "respect for the law" one.

This is not to say these bits of retroactive legislation are not bad. But declining to prosecute people who violated the old standard when it was in effect is no worse than declining to prosecute people who would have violated the old standard if it had remained in effect in the future. Retroactive legislation is bad because the new rules are wrong and because not upholding the old standard hurts the environment, not because it's a sneaky and illegitimate trick.
Stentor Danielson, 18:35,

Elections According To Google

Scott Timmreck points out that Googling "don't elect Bush" gets you a mere 10 hits (11 now, counting only the ones that show up on the initial results page). That sounds sad on its own, but consider that a similar search for Lieberman, Sharpton, Edwards, Moseley-Braun, Kucinich, or Clark turns up nothing. Meanwhile, the only person saying "don't elect Kerry" is Kerry's own blog.
Stentor Danielson, 13:44,

Subsidizing What?

Subsidizing Catastrophe: Aid Programs Sow The Seeds Of Future Disasters Typically, this phase is referred to as "disaster recovery." What it ought to be called is "disaster facilitation," for in seeking to soothe the pain of one catastrophe, institutions of public aid all but guarantee its repetition by rewarding the bad decisions that helped make it possible in the first place. ... Yet despite the evident risk of fire in the areas that recently have burned — and the statistical certainty that they will burn again — vast sums of money soon will be poured into reconstruction of homes in the danger zone. Although well-meaning, this assistance amounts to public subsidy of recurring disaster. And subsidy it is. The difference in price between FEMA's low-interest loans and the commercial lending rate represents a cost borne by U.S. taxpayers. Building and permit fees waived to expedite reconstruction of fire-ruined homes are a financial drain on local government and, by extension, all the local residents who rely on its services.

There are certainly nits to be picked in this article. For starters, there's Krist's (the author) assumption that the "event" side of the fire hazard is entirely natural, overlooking the way human management of the landscape shapes the size and intensity of a fire, in addition to determining whether anyone will be in harm's way. His belief that people can simply not live in fire-prone areas is also questionable -- after all, nearly every part of the Earth burns eventually. Further, residents of the damaged areas are not all millionaires with their suburban "testosterhomes" and thus the ability to live anywhere they choose -- they may be people driven out of the city by astronomical land and rent prices, and attracted by the good deals that developers' political and economic power allow them to offer. Ceasing aid to these people would have to be accompanied by structural changes that would make relocating realistic for them.

A response might be that people can live in fire-prone areas, but they must bear the risks of it themselves. This is a sort of community autarky model, in which the activities at a place must be supported by local resources. The alternative, according to Krist (and this is where I want to go with this post), is "subsidizing disaster." A "spatial insurance" model of society* -- in which multiple areas are linked, allowing ones not hit by disaster to help out those that are -- prevents disasters from driving people out of disaster-prone areas. (A similar argument could be made with reference to vulnerability-enhancing behaviors.) Generous aid decreases the motivation to avoid future disaster, thus setting society up to bear the burden of aid again. Krist's complaint is that this is an avoidable cost.

The thing is, we're not just subsidizing disaster. We're subsidizing a certain lifestyle and method of interacting with the environment. There's an ideology of private property, of the right to live wherever one wants and do with one's land as one pleases. These rights are threatened by fire, which doesn't get along with certain residential and landscaping choices. Disaster aid promotes not only the recurrence of the disaster, but also the continuance of this freedom, which our society values. Krist probably does not value this (and I'm somewhat sympathetic to that position), but it's important to recognize that the subsidy is more than just a shortsighted waste of money.

*The alternatives are a "temporal insurance" model, in which you save during the good times to tide you over in the bad, and a "low needs" model, in which your resource demands are so low that bad periods aren't bad enough to hurt you.
Stentor Danielson, 00:50,