debitage

1.2.08

The Last Acceptable Form Of Discrimination Is All Of Them

In response to the rightly-ridiculed news that some Mississippi legislator wants to ban restaurants from serving fat people, Rachel at The F-Word
asks, "for all of you who doubt fat is one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination, what say you now?"

I say, "the existence of an anti-fat law proposal doesn't disprove the fact that there's still loads of discrimination against women, gays/lesbians/bisexuals, people of color, immigrants, disabled people, trans people, the poor, non-Christians, the elderly, non-human animals, and probably a bunch more I'm forgetting. The fact that one kind of discrimination is common doesn't mean it's a unique exception to our otherwise egalitarian society." I realize her comment is aimed at people who deny that anti-fat discrimination exists at all, and she (and the commenters who echo the framing) would probably admit that all those other discriminations exist too. But I still get annoyed at "last acceptable discrimination" rhetoric, because it comes off as a narrowness of focus on one issue and an exaggerated sense of one's own place in the oppression olympics.

Labels: fat, oppression

Stentor Danielson, 23:05, |

Obama Is A Pot Head!

Ampersand points out that in the past, Barack Obama expressed support for decriminalizing marijuana. He and his commenters lament that while decriminalization is both eminently reasonable and widely supported by the public, it's also a political non-starter.

I think one reason for is what most voters do with information about candidates' stands. Contrary to the assumptions of all the makers of the "who should you vote for" quizes, people don't have a set of policy preferences and then pick a candidate they think will support those policies. Instead, people look at politicians' issue positions as indicators of their character. They ask what kind of person would have taken that stand?

This kind of character analysis is not unreasonable. Candidates' explicit policy plans never survive first contact with Congress, and there are always unexpected events that the candidate can't have offered a plan for. So we should be paying attention to the kind of judgment candidates exercise, and the core values and dispositions that drive them. To stick with the Obama example, I find his early stumbling on the question of "clean coal" plants much more informative than the promises of X% renewable energy by 20-whatever in the policy paper ghostwritten by his environment advisor.

The problem lies in the mental templates people use to transform a policy stand into an inference about character. The primary template that most Americans have for "the kind of person who would advocate legalizing marijuana" is "irresponsible hippie" -- especially if the person is, as in the case of Obama, already seen as young and liberal. So a voter could easily think (subconsciously or not) "I happen to agree on the merits with legalizing marijuana, and I trust that in my case it's for good, responsible reasons. But the most likely reason that Obama's advocating it is that he's a dirty hippie, and despite our fortuitous coalition on the marijuana issue, I don't want a hippie to be the leader of the free world."

Labels: elections, psychology

Stentor Danielson, 22:37, |

31.1.08

Rooting For A Race War

I'm sure there are tensions of various sorts between non-Latin@ blacks and non-black Latin@s (not sure where black Latin@s fall) in the US. These tensions are worth addressing (in a way that's led by members of those groups). But I'm rather discomfited by the prurient interest the media seems to have taken in this issue, prompted by Barack Obama's low poll numbers among Latin@s. I get the distinct impression that there's a significant segment of whites who really want a black-Latin@ race war so that they can take the focus off themselves and say "see, everybody's (equally) racist!"

(I'm trying out this tags thing. Unfortunately, Blogger has completely changed their system for coding templates since 2003 when I created this template, so I can't fix the layout to make the "labels" line look nice until I completely rewrite the template.)

UPDATE: An amusing update, that seems to corroborate my theory a bit: According to the Pew Research Center, blacks and Latin@s have a more positive view of the state of black-Latin@ relations than whites do.

Labels: race

Stentor Danielson, 23:32, |

There's a term for what the government is doing ...

... it's "aiding and abetting." Specifcally, DHS is (in a moral, if not legal, sense) aiding and abetting domestic violence by abusers who use their victims' lack of immigration status as a way to control them, by restricting the access of those victims to status that's not dependent on the abuser. It's a sadly common pattern in law enforcement (in immigration and elsewhere) -- crack down in whatever ways comes easiest, on whichever people you can get your hands on, without thinking about how that crackdown can generate unintended consequences elsewhere and inhibit your ability to deal with the people doing the really bad stuff.

In very tangentially related news, on NPR this morning they had a report about mercury contamination in fish. The health experts they talked to said (paraphrased) "the general public should go ahead and eat lots of fish, but children and women of childbearing age should be careful." So women and children are apparently not part of the "general public." It's a nice illustration of how environmental health science still treats the middle-class adult white male as the generic person, with everyone else handled as an exception to the rule. I also like the way they slip from the risks specifically related to pregnant and nursing mothers into warning all "women of childbearing age" -- I guess the public outcry got them to back off explicitly labeling all women as "pre-pregnant," but the mentality behind it stuck. (This is not to say that the mercury contamination versus health benefits of fish tradeoff is being significantly overblown in one direction or the other. Obviously, as a vegetarian I'd prefer that anyone who can afford to do so avoid fish for reasons unrelated to mercury, as well as preferring that everyone could afford to do so, and that fish not be contaminated both for their own sake and for the sake of whatever people or other animals eat them.)

Labels: feminism, health, immigration

Stentor Danielson, 22:52, |

28.1.08

Hillary Goes Nativist

(I know I promised I'd go back to writing about the environment, but this was too good to pass up.)

Contrary to the popular desire to blame Bush and post-9/11 hysteria for the worst aspects of the US immigration system, most of the really bad law -- including the divide-and-conquer between "good immigrants" and "criminal aliens" -- was signed back in 1996 by one Bill Clinton. Now it seems his wife wants a second round of cracking down:

"Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process. They are immediately gone," Mrs. Clinton told a town hall meeting in Anderson, S.C., Thursday. On Wednesday, she told a crowd in North Bergen, N.J., that such criminals "absolutely" need to be deported. A day earlier, she told a rally in Salinas, Calif., that aliens with criminal records "should be deported, no questions asked."

..."No legal process," the New York senator said at a forum in Tipton, Iowa, according to a political news outlet, the Politico. "You put them on a plane to wherever they came from."

I do, however, have to agree with one person in the comment section here. In what they believed was support for Senator Clinton's proposal, "bah" said:

the immigration laws as set forth in the constitution should be followed to the letter and any amendments or changes/modifications to those laws should be approached with extreme caution .

just because the founding fathers could not anticipate many of the current problems today, we as a nation should not quickly and mindlessly trash heart and soul american constitutional principles just to suit some real or perceived narrow social or economic interest(s).

I agree. Here, in its entirety, is what the Constitution says about immigration law:

The Congress shall have power ... To establish a uniform rule of naturalization.

Sounds good to me. I think "open borders for everybody but anti-US terrorists" fulfils the definition of a "uniform rule of naturalization," and sticks pretty close to what the founders intended.

As for Clinton ... who's the Green Party nominating this year?

Labels: immigration

Stentor Danielson, 09:50, |