debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

29.10.05

The Spirit of Fitzmas

The liberal pants-wetting over the Scooter Libby indictment is really sad. A mid-level functionary that 95% of Americans have never heard of gets indicted, and this is what's supposed to bring down the Republican Party? It doesn't say much for liberalism that we hope our philosophy wins, not on the merits, but because we can catch some folks on the other side breaking the rules.

For some historical perspective on the effectiveness of scandals, let's think back to Watergate. Watergate was an even better scandal than Plame-gate -- an uncharismatic president (unlike our current Mr. Personality Cult) was directly implicated (not just members of his administration) in something that was unarguably a crime (there are still people who defend outing Plame). And what were the ramifications? Republicans won five of the next eight elections and eventually took over Congress. Nixon himself went down in infamy, but there doesn't seem to have been any long-term damage to the party or to conservatism. The biggest political impact was that it increased cynicism about politics in general (since Nixon's crime -- like Libby's -- was non-ideological). Given that depressed voter turnouts favor the GOP, that's not exactly an outcome Democrats should be excited about.

Stentor Danielson, 17:03, ,

27.10.05

More Notes Here And There

1. So I guess I was wrong about Harriet Miers. In my defense, I still think that if she had gotten to the Senate hearings stage, the GOP would have (reluctantly, but still) lined up behind her. But it looks like she felt so out of her own depth that she couldn't make it that far.

2. The obvious move now would be to nominate someone who is a raging ideologue (to please the base) but has competence and credentials out the wazoo (to defuse the factional momentum, which built its case on Miers' incompetence). I've heard talk (offline) about how the Miers episode was a brilliantly devious move by Karl Rove. That's an awfully convenient belief. If the other side is run by evil geniuses, it absolves you of having to look at your own side's failings.

3. Chris Clarke reminds me of how much I hate that Margaret Mead quote about a small group of citizens being able to change the world.

Stentor Danielson, 21:32, ,

The Cultural Theory of Sprawl

Following on yesterday's post about how discrimination is a cause of changes in the landscape (namely the growth of exurbia), Joel Hirschhorn points out how that landscape is in turn the cause of more discrimination:

Analyses of the failure of all levels of government to prevent or effectively manage the Katrina calamity in New Orleans have generally missed a crucial point. Alongside bias against poor people and African-Americans is automobile apartheid, born of fifty years of suburban sprawl. First-class citizens drive motor vehicles, second-class Americans walk, cycle, or ride public transit. Certainly many of the latter are poor, but millions more are middle-class Americans.

When emergency response largely ignores the plight of second-class citizens, no one should be surprised.

Automobile apartheid means anyone who wants mobility through walking, cycling, or public transportation suffers discrimination in a built environment designed for automobiles. In the past 20 years, as automobile addiction has increased, sprawl has run rampant, the number of trips people take by walking has decreased by more than 42 percent, and obesity has skyrocketed.

Putting these two posts on sprawl side-by-side also makes an interesting illustration of grid-group cultural theory. The foundational claim of CT is that people with different ways of life fear a different set of risks. The risks feared by the exurbanites quoted in the previous post are familiar. They're the risks of social deviance and disorganization -- crime, school discipline problems, lower-caste people moving in next door to the brahmins. CT argues that these risks will be most salient to people of a Hierarchist disposition, and in fact the exurbanites' preference for strong social order and caste solidarity is apparent. Even their protest at the end of the article that they give generously to charity fits in, as charity donations are a form of supererogatory noblesse oblige (rather than a duty) associated with the higher-ups in an Authority Ranking/Hierarchist form of social organization. It's these risks to social order that drive Hierarchists to exurbia.

From an Egalitarian perspective, however, the actions of Hierarchists are constantly creating dangers to others, particularly to the lower-ranked members of society. Hirschhorn takes up this banner by making a persuasive case that the automobile-centric environments of exurbia are *more* dangerous, due to traffic accidents. Pedestrians -- who are more likely to come from the lower strata of society -- are particularly vulnerable. Hirschhorn's overarching concern with "apartheid" is classically Egalitarian, as is his practice of pointing to technology and environmental destruction as the key sources of risk.

Where are the Individualists in all this? In Douglas and Wildavsky's initial statement of CT, they argued that the most stable alliances are diagonal on the grid-group diagram* -- and in fact the Individualists do seem to ally with the Hierarchists in creating exurbia. The biggest Individualists would be the developers who build exurban towns. They live to take advantage of demand, and the elite Hierarchists have the biggest effective demand. The greatest risks to the Individualists, then, come from Egalitarian attempts to rein in the Hierarchist cash cow. Indeed, the Individualists are so cozy that they happily indulge in the fruits of Hierarchy by taking advantage of government subsidies that facilitate sprawl. Individualist rhetoric also provides a convenient cloak for the Hierarchists, whose viewpoint is often considered impolite. Individualists' focus on consent and motive at the level of the individual transaction and faith in the invisible hand to take care of the larger picture allows them to divert attention from structural inequalities of the type Hirschhorn denounces and the Hierarchist exurbanites positively desire.

*Which perhaps explains why I, as a Fatalist, find Hirschhorn's Egalitarian perspective (as well as the implied Egaliatarianism of the author of the article about the exurbanites) so convincing.

Stentor Danielson, 10:48, ,

25.10.05

Exurbia

The Washington Post has a frightening article about the denizens of exurbia (so frightening, and so consistent with the stereotype, that I wonder whether the reporter might not be engaging in a bit of selective quoting). The sight of a pickup truck has set their upper-class hearts a-pounding, and so they flee to a sheltered enclave:

"We never discuss politics," said Nina Kraemer, who was hosting a scrapbooking get-together at Dominion Valley's sports complex the other night. "I don't know, I guess something would have to spawn a conversation for one to occur. We talk about traffic -- we talk about that to the nth degree. We're afraid to go to the Target because we might not get back to the bus stop on time" to meet the children after school.

Let me get this straight -- they moved into one of the least pedestrian-friendly and public-transport-feasible settlement patterns, and then they have the gall to complain about traffic?

I guess we can at least be glad that these folks are disinclined to vote. Given their unabashed race and class prejudice, I can't imagine they'd be likely to vote for the good guys.

Stentor Danielson, 21:59, ,