17.9.04

More Google Slander

I'm the #10 result for "in defense of cheney".
Stentor Danielson, 19:45, ,

Vengeance By Outing

I think both Hugo Schwyzer and Abiola Lapite (make sure to see their further remarks in comments) have basically the right take on the tactic of outing closeted politicians who support anti-gay measures. Here's Lapite's take in his comment section:

I do think it acceptable to "out" people who go about crusading against homosexuality, but I don't see how the case of someone like Dreier could ever be rationalized to fit that schema. His refusal to oppose the FMA isn't what I'd call wise, but it is no more a sign of hypocrisy or self-hatred in my eyes than is some black person's opposition to affirmative-action. ... I suppose what really gets me about this "outing" campaign is the underlying assumption that there is only one right way that a gay politician is supposed to think and vote, and that any wavering from that line makes one fair game for harrassment.

In other words, it's justifiable (though not necessarily pragmatically effective) to point out that a politician's personal life is at odds with his or her public pronouncements when the person engages in activity that he or she wishes to make illegal. It's not justifiable when the person's private life makes him or her part of a group that the accuser believes would be hurt by his or her policies. In other words, having gay sex while advocating a ban on sodomy is grounds for outing. Having gay sex while advocating a ban on gay marriage is not. If the latter were the case, then John Kerry would be a huge hypocrite for advocating higher taxes for millionaires.

There are two things that bother me about the outing campaigns. One is emotional. When I read pro-outing posts, I can imagine the writer waving their arms and yelling "oh yeah! Snap!" That kind of gloating schadenfreude is very disturbing to me -- perhaps because in general vengeance isn't an emotion that resonates with me, or perhaps just because I haven't been exposed to enough homophobia to develop a taste for sweet revenge against gay rights opponents.

The second thing is that it places this special burden on members of an oppressed group to act in ways approved by the critic's view of their interests -- something we also see, for example, in the agonizing about "why do those stupid rednecks vote for Republicans, who favor the wealthy?" I can understand the expectation that members of a group would have a special motivation to hold a certain view, but that doesn't mean they have a greater responsibility to do so. Same sex marriage would be just as banned regardless of whether the people who voted for it were straight or gay. If the cause of gay rights is just, then heterosexuals are morally bound to support it.
Stentor Danielson, 16:44, ,

Responsible Mining

Extension Of Mine Fund Tax Added To Budget Bill Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., took the first step Tuesday to stave off the end of the federal program that cleans up abandoned coal mines. Byrd won Senate Appropriations Committee approval to extend a tax that funds the cleanup program for another nine months. ... Without congressional action, the coal tax that funds mine cleanups would expire Sept. 30. If that happens, thousands of abandoned mine sites — mostly in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky — would go unreclaimed. -- via Daily Scoop

I have to give Byrd some credit. I've had a pretty harsh view (warning: really old and poorly-written column) of him because of his willingness to back environmentally destructive mining practices. But if you're going to mine, this is the responsible way to do it -- force the company to pay in advance so that there's money there to fix the problems left behind. Now, this coal tax is more of a Social Security-style pay-as-you-go than a true cleanup savings account, but it amounts to the same thing. Contrast Byrd's responsible approach with the Bush administration, which supports opening land to mining but has cut back on the cleanup tax and diverted what money it did collect into other accounts.
Stentor Danielson, 10:10, ,

We Can Put A Man On Mars, But We Can't Build A New Landsat

Via Chris Mooney, I see that Science has asked the Bush and Kerry campaigns a series of questions about science and environmental policy. What got my attention was the question about the space program. Both Science's question and the campaigns' responses essentially equated the space program with explorations of outer space. They talked about things like the space station and manned missions to Mars. I don't dispute that those things are important. But I think one of the really critical parts of our space program -- though not a charismatic and vote-getting issue -- is its contribution to exploring the Earth. A critical component of any effective program to manage global environmental issues is satellite-based monitoring. A continuous record of remote sensing data is vital, yet neither campaign mentioned it.

Take, for example, the Landsat program. Landsat is one of the most important remote sensing satellites we have. Yet its equipment is staring obsolescene in the face. Landsat 7, our most up-to-date satellite in the program, had a 5-year projected lifespan when it was launched in 1999. Since last year, its sensors have been malfunctioning, compromising the quality of the data it provides. Yet there are no plans to launch Landsat 8 yet. As a geographer, I'd like to hear the candidates commit a fraction of the energy they're putting into medical advances to keeping our environmental monitoring system up to date.

And on an additional personal pet peeve note, both campaigns implicitly defined "science" as "natural science." Given the salience of the role of human activity in climate change (both causation and mitigation), and both campaigns' stated commitment to enhancing the role of citizens and communities in environmental management, you'd think some support for basic social science research would be in order.
Stentor Danielson, 09:47, ,

16.9.04

Hey Mathematicians: We're Way Ahead Of You

I have a tendency to get kind of defensive about the social sciences' turf. So often natural scientists decide that they can barge on in and use their discipline to explain society, as if nobody had ever thought to really sit down and look at society before. So I was not necessarily the most openminded reader of this article about a new book on how mathematicians can explain romantic interaction. Here's how the book's author explains her approach:

A mathematician would choose a subject -- like love -- and would start thinking, "I think there may be patterns that arise from this subject of love." We would then ask ourselves, "What are the key factors that go into love?" That's where we start by making an abstract move: We have to write the problem into abstract mathematical notations. For love, we might have two people. We might call these people X and Y. Then we would ask, "How are these two people going to interact?" We'd create sample equations with X and Y. For example, we might create one equation predicting that X and Y would fall in love, and then suddenly hate each other the next day. There are obvious patterns to human interaction, so we'd test equations to see what looks right what doesn't look right, what matches what we've observed in the real world and what doesn't. We might prepare an equation, plug in variables, and then say, "Hmmm, that equation may be mathematically correct, but the chance of that happening in the real world is highly unlikely." So we'd pick another equation. We'd play with different equations and different mathematical analyses to tell us what people are doing in real relationships. In picking equations we'd come across patterns. We may start to see patterns that we may not have noticed otherwise. These patterns may show us things about relationships that we may not have seen or expected.

This is not some special insight that mathematicians bring to the table. This is essentially bog-standard positivistic social science, of the type that has been done for 50 years. But "run of the mill social science" doesn't sound as exciting as "the mathematics of sex."
Stentor Danielson, 21:59, ,

Utilitarian Stem Cells

Philocrites has a post up expressing concern about cloning and destroying embryos for stem cell research. He objects to the practice as being "utilitarian" and a "commodification" of human life. I agree that utilitarianism* would tend to support stem cell research, but I think Philocrites is wrong in explaining why.

His argument has two main premises. First is the idea that the embryos used in stem cell research are human life (albeit of a lesser category than that of adults). I'll accept this premise for the sake of argument, since without it the question is uninteresting. He is concerned to reconcile that with the Unitarian Universalist "covenant to affirm and promote the inherent dignity and worth of every person." As he sees it, stem cell research denies the second premise, at least with respect to embryos -- stem cell research is centrally concerned with the dignity and worth of people who suffer from Alzheimer's, etc. That may be commodification, if the incentive is financial. But it's not utilitarian.

I'm no expert in UU exegesis, and I suspect it's standard to take a deontological view of the "dignity and worth" principle. But something like "affirming and promoting the inherent dignity and worth of every person" is also the central axiom of utilitarian reasoning. Behind all the debate over happiness versus preference satisfaction is the idea that some metric of human well-being -- perhaps "dignity and worth" -- is the fundamental goal, and all action should be instrumental toward that goal. The real point at which Philocrites' view and that of a utilitarian would diverge is not whether to affirm the human dignity of the embryo, but how to deal with conflicts between affirming the dignities of different people.

The existence of advanced medical science forces us to answer a question about the conflicting interests of embryos and people suffering from disease. In simple terms, we can create and kill embryos to save sick people, or we can let sick people suffer in order to avoid creating and killing embryos. A deontological perspective on affirming dignity places a high importance on the do/let distinction -- it's more immoral to do something than to let it happen. We're morally prohibited from killing anyone no matter how many people we have to let die as a result. A utilitarian, on the other hand, would say that doing and letting amount to the same thing -- we have the power to cause either outcome, and the embryos or sick people are just as dead at the end. Without the strict lexical ordering of principles implied by the let/do distinction (ie, one side taking total precedence), the utilitarian has to make a tradeoff. My intuition is that the dignity and worth of the sick people would outweigh the dignity and worth of the embryos, but I haven't done any sort of detailed analysis on it. The basic point here, though, is that in a utilitarian system the dignity and worth of the embryos are not ignored, they're outweighed.

*Of course, he may be using "utilitarian" in a casual commonsense way, rather than in specific reference to the philosophical position of Bentham, Mill, Singer, etc., in which case this post has no dispute with Philocrites's.
Stentor Danielson, 13:05, ,

15.9.04

I'm Coming Down With A Case Of Roup

This election is turning me into one of those disgruntled "a pox on both your houses" types -- and I'm not even a libertarian!
Stentor Danielson, 18:35, ,

13.9.04

New At OSP: Poetic Justice As Fairness

My first, and hopefully only, comment on National Guard Dome is posted at Open Source Politics. Given my view of Swift Boat Dome, I'm sure you can guess my outlook on the issue.

The title comes from this Crooked Timber post. But looking back at it, I think I'm somewhat misapplying the term. We've got the element of position-swapping, but neither side has drawn the parallel between the two situations and accused its opponent of flip-flopping. Then again, specific political terminology is quickly diluted (consider, for example, Matt Yglesias' pedantic rearguard action against misuse of "scorched earth", or the claim by a person I was talking to the other night that "carpetbagging" is commonly used to refer to political opportunism of any sort, not just that involving moving to a different state).
Stentor Danielson, 19:56, ,

12.9.04

I Am Such A Geography Dork

I came across this, and not only did I think "wow, this is really cool," I also thought "hey, I remember making a series of maps like that one time based on some sketchy information in some booklet."
Stentor Danielson, 17:03, ,

Thomas Covenant Returns

Why must this happen just as I have to buckle down and focus on reading things for my dissertation? Maybe Lord Foul has created dangerously high fuel loads in the Andelanian Hills, and Linden Avery will have to design a community-based management system to prevent catastrophic fires from overrunning the Woodhelvens. Then I could read it.
Stentor Danielson, 01:00, ,