debitage

26.5.07

An Observation About Racial Self-Identification

For my dissertation I'm doing surveys of people living in the urban-wildland interface in New South Wales and New Jersey, the vast majority of whom are white. The "race" question on the surveys is open-ended. In both locations I've had about 10% identify as some particular non-white race, and a handful of people write "human." In New Jersey, the remainder have referred to themselves as either "white" or "Caucasian." But in New South Wales, there was about a 25-25-50 split between "white," "Caucasian," and "Australian." This confirms my anecdotal observation that white Australians often use "Australian" as a racial term, whereas Americans rarely do that. I'm not sure how many of the "Australians" identify that way because the white dominance of the country leads them to conflate race and nationality, and how many of them do it as an attempt to declare their colorblindness.

Stentor Danielson, 19:25, |

24.5.07

What's a 17-year Difference in Life Expectancy, Between Friends?

Australian Minister for Health Tony Abbott is really scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to sell Liberal* government to Aborigines:

Later he said he believed indigenous people were better off now than when the Howard Government came to power in 1996. When asked to identify progress in the past 11 years Mr Abbott acknowledged more needed to be done but nominated an increasing number of friendships between indigenous and non-indigenous people.

So his example of what the Government has done over the past decade is not improvements in health (his own portfolio), or even improvements in the criminal justice system or economic development (both of which other departments of the government have some control of). It's friendship, the one major area of life that the government can't directly influence. I guess that's Abbott's face-saviong way of admitting "yeah, we've been sitting on our hands."

Admitting such things directly is, of course, not on the agenda, as the Howard Government continues to refuse to say "sorry" to the Aboriginal community. The PM says he's interested in "practical reconciliation," as if there's somehow a tradeoff between practical measures and apologies that prevents you from doing both (and as if doing one of the top things that Aboriginal people are requesting is somehow impractical). And speaking of refusals to apologize to indigenous people, the Pope has also stood by his earlier comments about how great the forced Christianization of Latin America was.

*By which Australians mean "conservative."

Stentor Danielson, 11:42, |

A Note on Comment Policy

I get few enough comments that I don't feel the need to institute an elaborate comment policy, but it's worth mentioning my approach to comments, since I just deleted one. I see my comments box as a sort of publicly-viewable inbox of feedback to me about my posts. So I reserve the right to delete comments that are:

1) Off-topic (including, but not limited to, spam). If you have something to say to me that's not directly related to a post, my email address can be found under the "Contact" link above.
2) Abusive toward other individual commenters (though you may abuse me all you like)
3) Obvious trolling (though I am willing to accept that people sincerely believe quite a lot of stupid things)

I take a very generous attitude toward the expression of offensive ideologies, so read the comments at your own (small) risk. Note as well that my policies are based on the particular nature and purpose of debitage, and therefore should not be taken as implied criticism of other blogs who have different policies.

Stentor Danielson, 11:22, |

Law and Fantasy

I've been meaning to write a big post about immigration, but instead let's talk about elves. In response to claims from various others about the underutilization of law as a plot device in fantasy literature, Ilya Somin cites the following example of the centrality of law to the archetypal fantasy, Lord of the Rings:

For my Property class, I once created a handout illustrating the various common law modes of property acquisition using examples from LOTR. We've got acquisition by creation (Sauron's claim to ownership of the Ring), acquisition by conquest (Isildur's claims); acquisition by find (Gollum); acquisition by exchange (Bilbo, winning the ring in a game with Gollum); and acquisition by gift (Frodo). Gollum could also claim ownership by adverse possession were it not for the fact that adverse possession does not apply against personal property.

I don't think this example quite proves the intended point. Certainly it shows you can use property concepts to analyze what happens in the book. And certainly some of the characters would use these sorts of concepts to assert a moral right to the ring (though Somin overlooks the important role of utilitarian justifications -- both Sauron and the Fellowship primarily claim a right to the ring on the basis of what they'd be able to do with it, and Galadriel and Gandalf both refuse to take it for similar reasons). But until Aragorn reclaims the throne, there is no overarching law -- no publicly established and enforceable code -- to which the characters could appeal in defense of their claims.

The relative paucity of law-based fantasy does, however, mean that I have a niche open to me. I've got the beginnings of several fantasy novels kicking around my computer. The most well-developed one features (as of chapter 4) key plot points arising from laws regarding the citizenship status of indentured servants, the seizure of property for tax arrears, and regulations on corporate takeovers.

Stentor Danielson, 00:05, |

22.5.07

Your Environmentalism Cramps My Style

"Selling clothes dryers in Arizona" ought to be a cliche for exceptionally talented salesmanship, akin to "selling iceboxes to Eskimos." Walking outside here in Pinal County anytime between February and November feels like walking into a dryer. Who would be silly enough to buy a big, electricity-consuming machine to do what a few hours hanging on $2 worth of clothesline will do for free?

I spent four years living in Worcester, Massachusetts, where just about everyone (at least in my working-class and college-student neighborhood) dried their clothes on a line. And this was despite the fact that the crowded houses give you little space for clothes drying, half the year your clothes were likely to freeze (even on an enclosed porch) before they dried, and the other half of the year Murphy's Law would whip up a rainstorm to undo your work. Southern Arizona, on the other hand, has all the space, heat, and dryness you could want. Yet in the 9 months I've lived here, I have yet to see a single clothesline.

The problem is not just that people are unwilling to do something marginally more laborious in order to save money and help the environment. After all, I don't use a clothesline here either. The problem in my case is that I'm not allowed to. My apartment complex, like most of the housing developments that are springing up all over the desert, has a rule against clotheslines. And it's not just clotheslines that are banned -- fabricated communities typically have all kinds of other rules, such as bans on installing solar panels or exchanging your thirsty lawn for xeriscaping. These rules exist because too many people don't want to live next to an environmentalist. The outward signs of more earth-friendly living, like clothes hanging out to dry, cramp their own style, disrupting their illusion of a white upper-middle-class existence that has bent nature to its will. Or at least the developers and property managers who write the rules think people think that way.

Rules explicitly banning environmentally-friendly lifestyle choices are not unique to the Southwest -- Al Gore's town in Tennessee only recently agreed to let him install solar panels. But comparing Worcester and Casa Grande, geography jumps out as a significant factor in explaining the differing use of clotheslines. While Worcester's neighborhoods may be more socially close-knit, they are physically fuzzy-edged, and lack formal neighborhood governance mechanisms. But I was struck upon moving to Arizona at the way built-up land is divided into 1/4-square-mile and 1/8-square-mile blocks, each with a 4-5 foot "privacy wall" around it and a big sign at the entrace with a developer-chosen name (usually something like "Mirage at Ghost Ranch, by Villago" that sounds like what a consultant in Manhattan would think evokes a "southwestern feel.") So it's much easier for Arizona to get burdened with rules promulagted at the level between the municipality and the individual household, where you can theoretically vote with your feet, but you can't vote with your ballot or voice.

What we need, then, is a law prohibiting communities and quasi-community contractual relationships (like homeowners' associations and apartment managers) from making or enforcing rules that prohibit environmentally-friendly lifestyle choices on aesthetic or property-value-loss-due-to-customers'-aesthetic-reactions grounds.

Stentor Danielson, 13:26, |

21.5.07

New Jersey Fire

A couple of interesting post-mortems on the big New Jersey fire:

New Jersey forest fire stokes tensions
Control project was in works before fire

I'll hopefully have something more interesting to say once I get my survey data analyzed.

Stentor Danielson, 18:05, |

20.5.07

Smart People Rationalizing

Mandolin* takes exception to a cartoon in which a character declares that "Political debates ... show how good smart people are at rationalizing." She says this view ignores that political debates have real consequences for people's lives, and that one side is actually correct, and she connects it to the tendency to draw an equivalence between the purported irrationality of both extremes in a debate. But I read the cartoon differently, because I don't think that confronting all sides' potential to be rationalizing is incompatble with the belief that one side is substantively correct.

In the second panel, the character in question says "how can I trust myself to know the truth about anything?" This shifts the point from being "a pox on both your houses" to an expression of legitimate self-doubt. Anyone who engages in political debate for any significant length of time will discover how resistant people's opinions are to being changed by the force of the better argument. This intransigence naturally suggests that there are a lot of "smart people rationalizing," and it's reasonable to self-reflectively ask whether you are one of them.

Mandolin implies that this feeling that all sides may be rationalizing only happens for people in a position of privilege with respect to the issue being debated, because those who are suffering oppression have direct experience of its wrongness and a personal stake in getting the right answer. I would question this on two grounds -- first, because even if your experience of oppression points you in the right direction, it's highly doubtful that it provides all the details of the proper analysis and solution. That is, a woman's experience may tell her that feminists are substantively right, but it doesn't conclusively settle the debate between liberal, socialist, radical, eco-, and other forms of feminism. Second, it takes some reflection -- including confronting the possibility that you may be rationalizing -- to be sure that your experience is pointing you in the right direction. Many men's rights activists and others in objectively dominant groups genuinely feel oppressed. It takes a process of self-examination to determine whether one's felt oppression is real or the product of narrow vision and an illegitimate sense of entitlement.

Further, there's good psychological evidence that most political arguments are in fact "smart people rationalizing." Psychologists have shown that most of our moral commitments are made through an unarticulated, "intuitive" process. Articulated verbal discourse about our views comes after, reconstructing (from a quasi-outsider's position) the reasons for holding our view rather than revealing or expressing (from an insider's position) the actual causes of the belief. This does not mean that our positions are random, unreliable, or wrong. It simply means that our political discourse does not entirely match our intuitive thought processes. So it's difficult to use the conscious tools of political discourse to verify the reliability and accuracy of our own intuitive thought processes, or to change others' minds. And therefore periods of doubt of the type expressed by the cartoon character are legitimate and even necessary.

*Original version of this post misattributed the post I'm responding to to Maia.

Stentor Danielson, 12:24, |