26.3.04

Away

I'll be away for the weekend. See you on Monday.
Stentor Danielson, 11:44,

Which God Will Bless America?

One frequent argument made with respect to the Pledge of Allegiance is that, if we took "under God" out of the pledge, we'd have to take "in God we trust" off our money. The implication is that "in God we trust" is obviously OK, but my reaction -- perhaps demonstrating what an out-of-touch northeastern liberal academic elitist I am -- is "what's God doing on my money in the first place?"

But I think citing "in God we trust" as an acceptable bit of religious establishment actually speaks well of conservative tolerance of other viewpoints. You often hear, with respect to things like the Ten Commandments, a variation on the argument "how would you like it if they were posting passages from the Qur'an?" -- the assumption being that Decalogueophile evangelicals would be unhappy to have another religion being promoted. But it seems to me that the Christian God -- the one who talked about "render unto Caesar" and camels going through the eyes of needles -- would be quite unhappy with being praised on our currency. So what god is it in whom we trust? I think it's safe to say that conservatives see no problem with government endorsement of Mammon.
Stentor Danielson, 11:44,

25.3.04

Gnostic Feminism

Gnosticism is often portrayed as feminist in some sense because it promoted equality of the sexes. But if I'm correctly understanding J. Puma's essay on what Gnostics mean when they say the world is an illusion, it looks like they also had the idea of situated knowledges figured out 2,000 years before Donna Haraway (though feminists accept situatedness rather than hoping for gnosis to overcome it).
Stentor Danielson, 22:41,

Bush's New Strategery

Somebody tell me this is a parody.
Stentor Danielson, 17:49,

Commentary And Cartoons Out The Wazoo

As mentioned previously, I didn't get my commentary and comics from the last issue of The Scarlet online at the time. So now I can bring you two weeks' worth of student newspaper goodness. First, the freshest material:



This week's column was "Bush: Blinding US With Mad Science*," and came with its comic.

Three weeks ago (we took two weeks off for spring break), we published these:



"GOP: Small Government, Big Bills," and its comic.

*This headline reminds me of one of my favorite Onion briefs. They said the House passed an All Your Base Are Belong To Us amendment, but "Opponents of the amendment protested that it would potentially set up U.S. the bomb."
Stentor Danielson, 16:51,

24.3.04

Indians And Alcohol

Oneidas Move Ahead In Liquor License Quest McKeon said under federal law, Indian tribes' sovereignty does not automatically include the right to sell liquor. Tribes can only do so if they follow certain procedures. They must first pass an ordinance to permit the trafficking of liquor. The ordinance must then be approved by the U.S. Department of the Interior. And finally, it must be deemed consistent with the laws of the state where the application is filed. The Oneida Nation passed its ordinance several years ago, and it has been approved by the Department of the Interior, Reed said. If all falls into place for the Oneidas, they will have something only a handful of bars or restaurants in Oneida County have: a space where patrons can both drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. Just 20 waivers for the [New York] statewide smoking ban have been issued in the county, but the Oneida Nation is not subject to the law. Restaurant and bar owners have blamed the ban, which was implemented in July 2003, for steep declines in their profits. Now they fear the Oneida Nation's resort complex will siphon away their smoking patrons. "If we allow them to have a liquor, it's going to affect everyone from Syracuse to Albany," said Ralph Dittenhoefer, president of the Oneida County chapter of the New York State Restaurant and Tavern Association. "We will all urge the liquor authority to oppose or deny the license."

I'm mostly posting this because the regulations governing Native American alcohol sales were new information to me, and they contrast with the usual situation of tribes being able to get away with things (like selling tax-free cigarettes) that non-Natives can't. I would imagine that the provision was put in place because of just these sorts of conflicts -- situations in which you have two communities living side-by-side, with free movement of people and goods but potentially very different laws.

That said, it's interesting that bar owners are trying to use the liquor license process to correct the imbalance created by the Oneidas' tobacco-related freedom (exacerbated by additional state laws). This region suffers from chronic economic depression, but the Oneidas have been able to exploit their tribal status to create a comparative economic powerhouse (of only 5 Greyhound stops on the fastest route crossing upstate New York, one is Turning Stone). In a more successful region, there would be less standing resentment of the Oneidas from the surrounding community and less percieved threat to their well-being.
Stentor Danielson, 23:25,

Cheap Gas

As Gasoline Hits Record Price, Bush, Kerry And Democrats Spar Over Policy And Next Move As senators called on the Bush administration on Tuesday to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help curb prices, Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, accused President Bush of neglecting energy conservation and favoring oil companies. The Bush re-election campaign blamed Mr. Kerry for voting against oil drilling in Alaska last year and for his past advocacy of higher gasoline taxes. "It's clear we need a new energy policy," Mr. Kerry said. He cited a survey released Tuesday by AAA, formerly the American Automobile Association, showing that the average price for a gallon of self-serve regular unleaded was $1.738. The group said the price was a record, not taking into account inflation.

I suppose one should expect in a campaign like this that everything that happens becomes a reason to blame the other guy. Still, it's disingenuous of Kerry to cite the AAA study, since inflation-adjusted gas prices (which are what really matter) have held pretty steady (and his statement doesn't seem to recognize that the organization formerly known as the American Automobile Association has KFCed itself).

In his statement Kerry seems to be mostly using the high gas prices as a hook to introduce his overall energy plan, which contrasts favorably with Bush's. That's good if the debate goes there. But the press seems to want to make this out to be just about who can offer lower gas prices. That kind of pandering battle is bad politics and bad for the envrionment. Perhaps I'm just coldhearted because I rarely drive, but I think that high gas prices ought to make us think about whether we should be using so much gas, not about how we can make gas cheaper.
Stentor Danielson, 18:05,

Swidden Conservatism

Talking about the different metanarratives that have been applied to George W. Bush, Matthew Yglesias says:

Then there was a lot of Bush-as-Reagan -- rejecting his father's moderation, Bush offers us bold, slash-and-burn conservatism.

My guess is that by "slash-and-burn" he means something like "gung-ho and destructive," by analogy to the actual slashing and burning element of slash-and-burn agriculture. But there may be something to a comparison between Reagan/GW Bush conservatism and swidden agriculture. Reagan comes into office and hacks away at liberal governance (like high taxes), clearing the ground for the growth of conservative crops. But after eight years, the country can no longer sustain the Reagan system, so we elect the anti-Reaganomics moderate GHW Bush. Under Bush and Clinton, liberalism grows back. With the budget recovered after the Clinton years, GW Bush comes along and hacks away liberalism and replants conservative stuff.
Stentor Danielson, 09:50,

Super Lack Of Funds

Sierra Club Ads Target Bush, Toxic Waste ... The ads, running on television or radio in four cities, blame Bush for not supporting reinstatement of the so-called "polluter pays" tax that funded expensive cleanup of federal Superfund sites. The tax levied on the manufacturers of toxic chemicals expired in 1995 and the Superfund, which boasted $3.6 billion in reserve at its peak, ran out of money last year. Sierra Club spokeswoman Annie Strickler said that forces ordinary taxpayers — not polluters — to foot the bill for cleaning up some of the worst toxic waste sites. There are nearly 1,300 Superfund National Priority sites in the United States. ... The Bush administration has said it will not support the tax until Superfund is overhauled. Critics of the tax are concerned that it's not linked to a company's actual environmental record.

I cite this here not so much because of the ads, but because of the issue raised -- the using-up of the Superfund tax. It connects up with some things I've posted earlier. On the one hand, shifting the burden from industry to taxpayers as a whole is consistent with the idea of Bush's environmental policy as a way for government to help out business -- in this case by rehabilitating currently "underutilized" sites so that they're available for more easy development.

On the other hand, there's something to the idea that the tax ought to be callibrated to companies' environmental records. The point is not to blame industry as a whole for pollution. Rather, it's to link the creation of pollution to its remediation. As I pointed out in my post about Ed Rendell, pollution taxes serve the additional function of discouraging the taxed activity. Thus, it makes sense to make the system give incentives for cleaner processes.
Stentor Danielson, 00:02,

23.3.04

Elk Testing

Elk Deaths In Wyoming Blamed On Native Plant A lichen native to the Rockies is to blame for the deaths this winter of at least 300 elk in southern Wyoming, a die-off that had baffled wildlife scientists and cost the state thousands of dollars, officials said Monday. ... Elk native to the area weren't affected by the acid [produced by the lichen after it is eaten], but those killed in the die-off apparently had moved in from Colorado and may have lacked microorganisms needed to neutralize the acid, state biologists said. The Colorado line is 50 miles south of where the elk died. "Elk are incredibly adaptable, tough animals," Game and Fish spokesman Tom Reed said. "They'll get by on thin rations, and they'll make do somehow. But this year, nearly 300 of them paid the price for that adaptability."

Shouldn't that be "they paid the price for not being quite adaptable enough"? After all, the microorganisms that the local elk had were an adaptation that the newcomers lacked. Had the newcomers been less adaptable, they still would have died -- it would just have been from starvation on their old range rather than from lichen poisoning on their new range. On the other hand, the three elk that died from the Game and Fish Department's test to see if the lichen was responsible did pay the price for the other elk's adaptability, since if they had starved it would have been obvious and there would have been no need to test. I suppose you might want to say they paid the price for their comrades' adaptability plus our ignorance and desire to find out what was going on (though if the die-off had turned out to be anthropogenic, many more elk might have died from our decision not to test).
Stentor Danielson, 14:06,

22.3.04

Splashdown

For all of the people who find this site by searching for Splashdown's Blueshift album, the band's page now has links (click on "sounds") to where you can download Blueshift and other music. As of posting this, the site is down, but you can bookmark it and come back or something. For those of you not searching for Splashdown, you should be. You won't be the first to get into them only after they broke up.

UPDATE: Dave points me to this site, which has Splashdown mp3s and is actually functional.
Stentor Danielson, 18:44,

A Thought About Marxism

Though I have only a passing acquaintance with this element of Marxism, it seems that classical Marxist thought takes two contradictory positions on the revolution. The basic idea of the revolution is that eventually capitalism will create a huge proletariat and motivate it to rise up. With the bourgeoisie destroyed, the proletariat will fashion a just communist society on the basis of their shared class interest. Since the resulting society is just (i.e. non-contradictory), the dialectical process of history will come to an end.

On the one hand, communism is thoroughly rooted in capitalism. The revolution doesn't just do away with capitalism, it transcends it. As bad as capitalism is, Marx saw it as serving a necessary historical function in conquering scarcity and nature by developing industrialization and innovation. With that task accomplished, the revolution could then appropriate the fruits of capitalism and use them for communist ends.

On the other hand, the revolution is said to provide a clean slate. The idea of a clean slate is necessary to explain why communism would be different from previous historical phases (capitalism, feudalism, slave economy). Previous phases had internal contradictions arising out of their historical development, which generated the conditions for their own downfall. Communism, on the other hand, was to be a classless and permanent social arrangement. The proletariat had to be washed clean in the blood of the revolution, so to speak.

These two directions have spawned two divergent elements of more recent Marxism. Some Marxists seem to have emphasized the connection to capitalism, leading them to place their hopes in a more evolutionary development (Dick Peet, for example, was accused at the AAGs of having become a Keynsian welfarist rather than a Marxist radical. I'd say Habermas has been led out of Marxism entirely). This is perhaps a more realistic approach, especially considering that previous endogenous transitions in economic form were more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Second would be the eco-catastrophists. They forsee (and perhaps grimly welcome) a collapse of capitalism that truly wipes the slate clean. There's little they'd like to salvage from capitalism because they see capitalism's major products -- industrialization and high population -- as inherently unsustainable. They ridicule attempts to deal with capitalism's crises through capitalist products (e.g. technological solutions to environmental degradation). After the catastrophe (not really even a revolution anymore) we can start over from scratch. To judge from what I've read of his most recent pessimistic work, David Harvey seems to be leaning in this direction.
Stentor Danielson, 18:33,

21.3.04

Environmental Justice Comes Back

Via folkbum, I discover that John Kerry's website has a whole page on environmental justice, lending some support to my prior feeling that, while Kerry may overall be an unprincipled weasel, the environment is one issue that he does actually care about independent of political calculations. The page promises:

... John Kerry proposed creating Environmental Empowerment Zones to ensure that environmental justice is considered in decisions that affect these communities and, more importantly, to empower communities from the ground up for positive change. By empowering local officials and citizen leaders, Environmental Empowerment Zones will overcome economic, civic and cultural barriers and help ensure that no community will be forced to live with a dirty and unhealthy environment. ... John Kerry will reinvigorate action on environmental justice at the federal level. He proposed creating a new Assistant Administrator position for Environmental Justice at the EPA and will revive the Office of Environmental Justice. Today, this office is under-staffed, under-funded, and undermined on a daily basis. Kerry will bring life back to this office so that it can serve as a resource and advocate for community activists all over America. John Kerry will also build on President Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order to include environmental justice in laws, regulations and policies.

The page is explicit in linking health and environmental quality. Compare that to Bush's environment issue page. The introduction states that "The President favors common-sense approaches to improving the environment while protecting the quality of American life" -- as if environmental improvement and quality of life are opposed values. It's a pretty standard tactic, emphasizing the idea that environmental protection comes at a price, thus making weak action sound like a pragmatic compromise. In its discussion of brownfields -- a classic environmental justice problem -- there is a brief mention of health. But the emphasis is placed on the fact that brownfields are "eyesores" (feeding the idea that environmental protection is largely an aesthetic question). Bush also stresses that brownfields are "underutilized" -- that is, that the main problem is that there are chunks of land sitting idle. In a sense, this isn't entirely bad. It's interesting to note how the presentation of the brownfields question parallels Bush's larger environmental philosophy as described in a paper I wrote about Healthy Forests -- he believes that the role of government is to make land and resources more easily available to business. What's most important, though, is that the issue of economic productivity swamps any concern for local health impacts in the way that Bush frames his brownfield policy.
Stentor Danielson, 13:10,