debitage

Oppression Vs. Privilege

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:52:00 +0000

Ampersand says that by his current working definitions, oppression and privilege are simply the opposites of each other. He defines them as follows:

Oppression is a system whereby:

1) A group �A� is systematically mistreated in comparison to non-As in a given social context.

2) The distinctive traits of group �A� are viewed as exceptions to the �unmarked� or �default� traits of a �normal� member of society.

3) Members of group �A� are effectively prevented from holding a significant number of high leadership positions in society�s controlling institutions.

Privilege is a system whereby:

1) A group �B� is systematically, unfairly advantaged in comparison to non-Bs in a given social context.

2) The distinctive traits of group �B� are viewed as the �unmarked� or �default� traits of a �normal� member of society.

3) Members of group �B� hold a near-monopoly on the high leadership positions of society�s controlling institutions.

My first thought, left in the comments at Alas, is that I would remove point 3 from both definitions � lack of leadership positions is a likely consequence (and a common reinforcing mechanism) of oppression as defined in points 1 and 2, but I don�t see why it needs to be elevated to definitional status. Also, it�s potentially distracting, since it implies that "number of As in leadership positions" is a simple measuring stick for level of oppression (and there are cases where I�d say oppression is still present despite things being fine on the number-in-leadership front � Christians being privileged over Jews comes to mind).

Second, I would change "non-A" to "B" in the oppression definition, because oppression is always relative to a specific oppressor group. For example, black people are oppressed because they're systematically mistreated relative to white people, but not necessarily relative to any other non-black group such as Native Americans.

Finally, I think that while points 1 and 2 are both part of both definitions, I would reverse their order in the case of privilege. As I see it, the core of the concept of oppression is the harm it does to the oppressed -- being oppressed means bad stuff happens to you in a particular way. In the case of privilege, on the other hand, I think the mechanism is what's central. Privilege is about being seen (by yourself and others) as unmarked and normative, and feeling entitled to have the world operate on that assumption. Advantages flow to the privileged person, and harms to the oppressed, as a consequence of that mechanism. When one person tells another "check your privilege," they aren't saying "think about how good you have it!" so much as they're saying "remember that not everybody is, or should be, like you!" It's a subtle distinction, because the two parts do go together, but I think the words are not quite opposites because they stress different elements of systemic inequality.

Purslane and Potatoes

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:35:00 +0000

At the risk of proving that vegan food is all weird stuff, here's my lunch from today:

This is one of my new favorite things. Our CSA has been giving us verdolago, also known as purslane, the past few weeks. It was kind of sad, though, because when I went over to the trading area, everyone had traded in their verdolago for whatever else they could get. But I was also happy, because that made it easy for me to trade for another helping.

Ingredients (for enough to serve one person, as seen in the picture):
- Oil for frying
- One potato
- About 1/4 of a normal store sized onion
- A few shakes of garlic salt
- A loose pile of purslane/verdolago (leaves and small stems) a little bigger than the potato

Heat a little oil in a frying pan. Chop the potato into small cubes, and dice the onion. Put the potato and onion in the pan and cover, stirring occasionally. When the potato has cooked enough to get soft, add the garlic salt and verdolago. Cover again, and cook for a few minutes (be careful -- verdolago is a succulent, so some of the leaves will pop like popcorn).

In the picture I made some edamame to eat with it, but I've had this as a meal all by itself.

Assumptions

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:16:00 +0000

Here is an interesting example of the way that society makes assumptions about people fitting into a certain way of life, then penalizes those who don't fit. In this case, nominating petitions for some candidates in Arizona are being challenged because the petition signers gave their PO Boxes instead of their street addresses. But the reason they did that is because they live in rural areas of an unnamed Indian reservation where there are no street addresses.

Border Befuddlement

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:13:00 +0000

Today the Supreme Court said it won't hear a challenge to the fence the U.S. is building on the Mexican border. The challenge was based on the fact that the law providing for the building of the fence said the Department of Homeland Security could ignore environmental laws, which means the fence threatens various desert species and ecosystems.

I think the "ignore environmental laws" thing is unequivocally bad policy. And I'm sure the environmental side's lawyers had all kinds of interesting arcane legal arguments. But I find it hard to be very upset with the Supreme Court over this decision, because when it comes down to it, Congress has the power to re-write its own laws. Our Constitution was written in the 18th Century, so there's no "right to a clean environment" in it, much less rights for nature in and of itself. All of our environmental protections are established by Congress, and what Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away. The property-rights-based challenges that are working their way up may have more ground to stand on (since while the Founders may have been too early for John Muir, they knew all about John Locke), and may be better politics to boot -- a property-based challenge takes the progressive concerns about militarized border enforcement and environmental protection and marries them to a core conservative concern with protecting private property, through the less politically marked medium of preserving border-area communities and economies.

I find it a little strange, then, to hear Democratic members of Congress complaining about the outcome of this case. They can blame Republicans for passing the bad law in 2005. But the Democrats have controlled Congress since the beginning of 2007 -- so they have the power to introduce a bill that would change the bad law. They could tack it onto something like an Iraq funding bill or wiretapping authorization that they were going to pass anyway and that Bush wouldn't dare veto.

I also find this statement by DHS secretary Michael Chertoff depressing:

"We have had multiple meetings with some of the most bitter critics, people that we have talked to again and again," he told the Houston Chronicle's Editorial Board on June 6. "Now consultation means we try to see if we can work out an accommodation. It doesn't mean we consult for two years, it doesn't mean that a local official has a veto."

I've spent a lot of time reading research on collaboration and consultation in policymaking. And the lesson that gets hammered home again and again is that if the agency treats it as a one-way flow of information -- an opportunity to convince the public that the agency's decisions (which they'll carry out regardless of the results of the consultation) are right -- then the whole thing is a charade. And this lesson is more important the more politically charged the issue is.

What UUism Means To Me

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:07:00 +0000

The church I went to as an undergrad had a segment of the service called "What my faith means to me" or "What University Church means to me." Every week, one member of the congregation would give a mini-talk about their religious background and outlook. It was an especially useful device for that congregation, since we were coming from such wildly diverse backgrounds (from Pentecostals to agnostics, and including at one point both the president of the College Republicans and the head of the campus feminist group) and thrown together for just a few short years. In 7 semesters, I never quite had the right combination of self-assurance and extroversion to do "What my faith means to me."

I think a similar sort of confessional may be in order right now, though. I don't recall exactly how it happened, but at some point years ago I got adopted into the UU blogosphere. I've been linked (with a gold medal, no less) on Philocrites' UU blog list through numerous purges and trimmings, and my posts have been fed into pretty much every UU blog aggregator there is. And because of all this, I get commenters from time to time who begin their comments with "As a UU, you ..." or something similar.

I've decided it would be useful to set out exactly in what sense I'm a UU. I don't mean this post as a criticism of those who make a UU-centric reading of and response to what I write. But I do think there is a potential for misunderstandings if all someone knows is that, since I'm on a UU blog aggregator, I must identify as a UU. So here's "what UUism means to me":

The easiest way to begin is with biography. I was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -- the largest and most liberal of the Lutheran bodies in the US (to be even more specific, we always ended up, for geographical reasons, in German Lutheran churches, though my mom grew up in Swedish Lutheran churches and my dad had been a Methodist). When I went off to college, I joined University Church, Colgate's ecumenical protestant church. I attended UC faithfully for all four years (minus the semester I spent in Australia), even becoming a deacon my senior year.

During my last two years at Colgate, I began drifting away from orthodox Christian belief, starting with the doctrine of Hell (I was aided in this by, of all things, a Jehovah's Witness friend). Over the summer before my senior year, I heard several people speak favorably of the Unitarians. I looked them up online, and was excited to discover the combination of a church-type social organization with a deeply open-ended and liberal theological non-doctrine. At that point I took up using the term "Unitarian" to describe my religious orientation.

Nevertheless, I didn't actually set foot in a UU church until the following summer, during an internship in DC. I attended Universalist Memorial every Sunday that summer. Then I headed to grad school. In theory, going to grad school in the heart of New England should have been the perfect way to get more involved in a UU church -- but in fact it was a 40-minute hike through downtown Worcester to get to First Unitarian. So my attendance quickly became spotty at best, and I may at some point have gone a whole year without going to one service there. (Interspersed with this was attending my hometown's Lutheran church while visiting family, occasional visits to a much more conveniently located Methodist church, and a few trips -- at the invitation of my housemate -- to a Mennonite church.) Halfway through my second summer (which I spent at another internship, this one in Dayton, OH) I discovered the Miami Valley UU church, and went there for the rest of my time in Dayton. After that I returned to Worcester for several years.

Leaving Worcester, I went to Australia again to do my dissertation fieldwork. I was a faithful attendee at St. Anthony's Uniting Church. I loved the community there, though its orthodox protestant theology (the Uniting Church was formed by a merger of Australia's Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists) didn't quite match my beliefs. Returning to the US, I moved here to Casa Grande, where there is no UU church. Going to the nearest one (40 miles away) would be both too expensive (in gas and time) and ineffective at one of the key benefits of church attendance in my book -- forming relationships with people in your local community (which is also why the Church of the Larger Fellowship wouldn't work for me). So at the moment I have no church home. I did, however, get married back at First Unitarian in Worcester -- I wanted a wedding in a church setting, and the UUs' beliefs about marriage are closer to mine and Christina's than any other church.

What all this means is that I have never been a member of a UU church, or even attended one on a regular basis for more than a few months. The culture of UUism is largely alien to me. When I occasionally look at other UU blogs that focus much more explicitly on the church, I can't really connect with what they're saying -- either about church politics, or about UUs' heritage, or about how UU practice should or should not change. This isn't a criticism of those bloggers -- those discussions are obviously important for people deeply involved in the church, and there's no reason it ought to be relevant to me given my position. But it is something that differentiates me from the typical "UU blogger."

Why, then, keep calling myself a UU? Why not "secular" or "lapsed Lutheran"? Besides the hits I get from being in various UU blog aggregators, that is. Several things.

First, it's a useful way of giving Jane Q. Public a very quick pointer in the general direction of what I believe. It signals a respect for (the potential of) religion as an institution (which is both true as well as reassuring to people who might be freaked out by outright atheism), while also indicating the extreme liberalism and non-doctrinalness of my theological views.

Second, there's the thing that drew me to the UU label (and to those churches I've managed to attend), which is what I understand the UU approach to doing religion to be (at least potentially). First and foremost, of course, is its non-doctrinalism. I like the idea that no text or authority has a metaphysically privileged status or is beyond critique, and that it's reasonable to expect some wisdom to be found nearly everywhere in the human experience (and here I would take things like the 7 Principles to be descriptive summaries of what UUs have come to believe, rather than prescriptive axioms which they must work to bring themselves into accordance with and to ground their beliefs on). Related to this is UUism's tentativeness, fallibility, and openness (between persons and over time) with respect to any question. (There's also the fact that, insofar as I'm willing to frame my beliefs in a language approximating orthodox Christianity, I would endorse the heresies of unitarianism -- one god, not a trinity -- and universalism -- nobody goes to hell.) Finally, I like that UU churches put "doing community," both among members and between the church and the wider world, prior to having all of the answers, so that practice dyamically informs the interactive (neither solitary nor collectivist) search for truth and meaning. (In other words, I see UUism as having an inductive style, whereas orthodox churches usually strive to be deductive.)

In the end, though, my beliefs and history are prior to, and the sole basis for, my affiliation with the UU church. If I ever come into conflict with what, "as a UU" I should be, then it's my ties to the UUs that must give.

The Paradox Of Change

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:13:00 +0000

Barack Obama is running on a platform of "Change we can believe in." Most of his backers seem to assume that change is going to happen in a progressive direction. Let's look at why that won't happen.

To even get started, we have to assume that Obama wants to change the country in a progressive direction. This, of course, is a patent falsehood. But we'll assume it for the time being.

There are two aspects of progressive change: substantive and procedural. Substantive change means things like withdrawing troops from Iraq and limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Procedural change involves change in how our government is run, most notably the excessive power claimed by the presidency over the last eight years.

Obama will have to work with a center-right Congress, not too different from the one we have now. That Congress will seek to stymie any substantively progressive measures that come through -- for example, a climate change bill would be so watered down by the time that it reaches Obama's desk that the ecological footprint of the ink he uses to sign it could well outweigh the bill's actual impacts. That means the only way he can create any real substantive change is to do an end-run around the legislative process, claiming authority as The Decider to do whatever he wants.

In other words, achieving substantive substantive change would require abandoning (or even working contrary to) procedural progressive change. And achieving procedural progressive change would destroy his ability to achieve substantive progressive change.

The Tenacity Of Rationalization

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:34:00 +0000

The human brain is a marvelous organ, and perhaps the thing it excels at the most is rationalization. Here's an illustration.

I read this post, about a professor so aloof he couldn't engage in small talk with his (suspiciously stereotypical) plumber. The consensus is that this refusal is a form of classisim or elitism, as the professor is effectively saying to the plumber that the plumber is so beneath the professor, his interests so gauche that the professor has gone out of his way to avoid having any common cultural reference points, that the professor can't even show him recognition as a human being rather than a pipe-fixing automoton.

My thought process went something like this:

Well, I probably wouldn't engage in much small talk with a plumber either. But it's not because I'm elitist and I think I'm better than him.

Oh really? Try me.

I don't really make small talk with anyone. It's nothing against the plumber -- I wouldn't make small talk with other academics, either.

The plumber doesn't know, or care, what you do around other academics. The issue is that you've committed an actual slight against him, a slight which, given its context, will function to reinforce class-based elitism. What you do to anyone else is beside the point.

But I'm just not good at that kind of socialization. I'm an introvert -- so where's the sympathy for how these kind of social interaction expectations disadvantage me?

Don't think about pulling that "reverse discrimination" crap. Social interaction is a learned skill -- a skill you can choose to learn, or choose to not learn because you've got something else oh-so-important to spend your time doing. If anything, being able to be introverted (not to be confused with withdrawing as a self-defense mechanism) is a privilege, not a source of disadvantage.

OK, so I won't make this all about me and my needs. But when I try to put myself in his shoes, I think that if I was a plumber, I'd want to be left alone to do my job in peace. After all, back when I was stocking shelves in the grocery store, I hated it when people tried to make small talk with me.

You say it's not going to be all about you, and yet it still is. For starters, what you would want in his position has exactly nothing to do with anything. What matters is what he wants in his position. Then there's your wank-tastic example of being a shelf stocker back in college, as if that means you're down with the hoi polloi. Take a second to think about why you hated people talking to you so much. It's not just some innocent aspect of human diversity. It's probably because you were (consciously or unconsciously) embarassed about working such a menial job.

And if I'm honest with myself, at the end of all this, if I had to have a plumber over tomorrow, I'd still end up going in the other room while he worked. And I can't be entirely sure that my italicized anti-rationalization voice isn't just rationalizing my elitism in a different, sneakier way.

Odds And Ends

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:44:00 +0000

1. There are some good posts about the fact that veganism is not cruelty free by Brownfemipower, Noemi M, and Elle.

2. I'm really tired of the "You fools! Don't you see that McCain is anti-woman?" posts. For the sake of argument, let's grant the three main premises of such posts -- that there are a substantial number of Clinton supporters who are liable to vote for McCain in November, that a substantial number of them are primarily Clinton supporters due to feminism (rather than because they're moderates or racists or whatever), and that a vote for McCain is a net detriment to feminism. Even given that, do you think any such Clinton-McCain supporter is going to say "huh, that argument wasn't convincing the first 33 times I heard it (or thought of it myself), but this person wrote it with just the right blend of vitriol, desperation, and subconscious sexism that I'm convinced"?

Nothing Has A Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:01:00 +0000

Via Joe Carter, J. Buziszewski says the purpose of a thing should determine what we do with it:

The first objection is that it is rubbish to talk about natural purposes, because we merely imagine them; the purposes of things aren�t natural; they are merely in the eye of the beholder. But is this true? Take the lungs, for example. When we say that their purpose is to oxygenate the blood, are we just making that up? Of course not. The purpose of oxygenation isn�t in the eye of the beholder; it�s in the design of the lungs themselves. There is no reason for us to have lungs apart from it.

Suppose a young man is more interested in using his lungs to get high by sniffing glue. What would you think of me if I said, �That�s interesting�I guess the purpose of my lungs is to oxygenate my blood, but the purpose of his lungs is to get high�? You�d think me a fool, and rightly so. The purpose of the lungs is built into the design of the lungs. He doesn�t change that purpose by sniffing glue; he only violates it. ...

Consider the young glue-sniffer again. How should we advise him? Is the purpose of his lungs irrelevant? Should we say to him, �Sniff all you want, because an is does not imply an ought�? Of course not; we should advise him to kick the habit. We ought to respect our design. Nothing in us should be used in a way that flouts its inbuilt purposes.

This does nothing at all to support the contention that there are real purposes to things. I maintain that the idea of inherent purpose is, in fact, rubbish -- all there are are different uses that someone may make of a thing. Some of these uses may be ineffective -- your lungs will probably not make a very good paperweight. Others may be effective at producing bad results. The glue sniffer, for example, will pretty effectively produce a variety of health problems and ultimately an early death, which are bad because we can safely assume he doesn't want them.

How a thing came to be can be useful input into judging whether a use will be effective and what results it will produce. But it's not morally determinative. What's morally determinative is our evaluation of the results. Re-purposing a thing to new uses is a valuable expression of human creativity, not a form of poor discipline to be met with raps on the knuckles.

Ultimately, "purpopse" arguments depend crucially on the implicit assumption of design -- that a thing's existence is due to the intent of an obedience-worthy being. (Thus calling this type of philosophy "natural law" is false -- it's actually "divine law," since it's divine intent rather than the resulting structure of nature that matters.) Why God's intentions should matter to us (matter inherently, that is, since divine law arguments aspire to more than "do it or you'll get sent to hell") is unclear, except that it's a useful cop-out.

I mentioned above that there's a clear way to judge uses -- by their consequences (I tend toward "satisfaction of the desires of all affected" as my metric of consequences, but the exact metric is not relevant here). Buziszewski seems unable to comprehend such a thing, imagining that if "(the designer's) purpose" is removed from the equation, there's no way to tell if what you're doing is good or bad. This is the morality of the fatalist, the paper-pusher at the bottom of the hierarchy who is either too sycophantic or too soul-deadened to exercise any judgment, who takes refuge in "just following orders," who wants nothing more than to be a cog in someone else's machine.

The other day, I got an email back from tech support in response to reporting a minor glitch in a program. The tech support guy's message was petulant -- he essentially told me that I wasn't supposed to be using his program the way I was, because I was exploiting an unintended loophole, and therefore he had no sympathy for me in encountering that glitch. Buziszewski would probably have been chastened and dutifully begun using the program only in the way its authors intended, since that's its purpose as revealed by the designer. I, on the other hand, weighed the consequences -- the annoyance of having to work around the glitch to use the program my way versus the annoyance of the extra steps involved in using it in its intended fashion -- and decided that continuing to use it my way had the best overall consequences in terms of my time and the value of the files I was producing.

All The Cool Kids Are Doing YouTube Posts

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:46:00 +0000

This post is in honor of the fact that I just discovered that my favorite band has posted a video of my favorite song of theirs:

Värttinä: Synti

Then there's my favorite-of-the-last-few-weeks band:

Rodrigo y Gabriela: Diablo Rojo

I don't usually pay much attention to lyrics, as evidenced by all the non-English and instrumental songs I listen to (though Synti does gain points for being about lizard foetuses). But here's one I actually can understand the words to:

Stuart Davis: Jonah

And what the heck, while I'm posting music, here's my interpretation of what Rickrolling was like in 1908.

Kiosk Update

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:37:00 +0000

Now in the Kiosk (my sidebar place for pet peeves): maps that have lower elevations colored green and higher ones colored yellow or brown. This color scheme is especially absurd for maps of Arizona, where the higher elevations have far more actual greenery than the lower ones (Mogollon Rim and Sky Islands vs Sonoran Desert).

The Social Construction Of Disabilities

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:16:00 +0000

Here's two posts I've encountered recently that touch on the idea of social construction of disabilities. First, Michele smacks down the move by some philosophers to argue that if a disability would hurt Robinson Crusoe, then it can't be regarded as socially constructed:

The example wrongly suggests that we can use a "Robinson Crusoe" test as the litmus test for distinguishing authentic disabilities from cases of purely socially constructed disadvantage. Take the example of deafness. According to the "Robinson Crusoe-test" deafness is an authentic disability: "Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island and unable to hear properly after a stroke, would still be disabled." Sound enough, but so what? The reason why a deaf Robinson Crusoe is disabled is that he lives in a very special social environment, an environment in which he cannot cooperate with other human beings. It would just be wrong to infer that, since deafness is an impairment to human flourishing in the Robinson Crusoe environment, then the disadvantages to which it leads in other environments are purely socially constructed.

I find the term "socially constructed" to be a problematic one, since it's so often mis-understood (and here I lay the blame on both over-enthusiastic proponents and lazy critics) to mean that something isn't really real. Perhaps a better way of thinking would be to think of advantages and disadvantages (in general, not just those typically treated under the heading of "disability") as being matches or mismatches between a person's capacities and qualities on the one hand, and the requirements imposed by their social and natural environment on the other. As Michele points out, everyone is always in a specific social and natural environment -- it's a fallacy to think there's some neutral environment or non-environment state in which we can judge a person's capacities and qualities.

Second, there's Shiva's post (via Ryan) about when suicide (assisted or otherwise) is justifiable:

If most depression is (and I do think most depression is) caused primarily by social conditions, then the obvious, non-medical solution to the problem is to change those social conditions (which, obviously, is easier said than done). However, if someone has truly endogenous depression (that is, in social model terms, their depression is not a result of disability, but is in fact their impairment), to the extent of unrelentingly feeling suicidal, and no drug treatment is successful in having a positive effect on it (as does happen in many cases), then is forcible suicide prevention - that is, denying death to someone who truly cannot find anything positive in life - really justifiable?

I basically agree with Shiva's position -- people have a right to choose to die, in implementing that right we need clear safeguards against pressuring people into exercising that right, when in doubt we should err on the side of life, and many of the things that lead people to feel suicidal are largely caused by their social environment. Where I would differ is in whether the question of endogenous versus social origins of a given person's suicidal desire is relevant to the justifiability of that person choosing suicide.

Things that are socially constructed are still real. A person who is suicidal for social reasons is still actually suicidal, and keeping them alive against their will is just as much a violation of their desires and a source of suffering as it would be if their suicidal wishes were caused by genetics. It may be possible to help such a person by changing the social conditions that cause their suicidal-ness -- but the fact is that such major social change is going to take a lot of time. Since the socially-suicidal person is suffering now, in our imperfect world, they have a right to give up and decide they don't want to wait around hoping for the revolution (I would say this is a general rule -- people have the right to cope with their problems in the here and now rather than martyring themselves waiting for major social changes to eliminate the source of their problems). Further, just because a person's suicidal desires have a social origin doesn't mean they can be fixed by social changes -- the effects of events in a person's life can have permanent impacts on their psyche (and body) that continue long after the cause is gone.

We should work to fix the social conditions that lead some people to become suicidal. But until we've completed that task, there will be socially-suicidal people popping up, who deserve the same choices as the endogenously-suicidal people who may always be with us.

Deporting Valedictorians And Hurricane Evacuees

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:09:00 +0000

I suppose part of the reason this blog has hardly any readers is that I don't comment on stories or issues until a few weeks after everyone else has. Nevertheless, here's a couple immigration-related stories that got a lot of attention a little while ago.

First is the case of Arthur Mkoyan, a high school valedictorian who may soon be deported because his parents brought him to the US from Armenia when he was 2 years old. I was a bit annoyed at the tone of the article and of most of the people blogging about it. Specifically, I was bothered by the implication that Mkoyan should get to stay in the US because he's a valedictorian. While this reasoning would help him personally (and it's likely to be what gets him status if he manages it), it doesn't address the larger issue, and indeed tends to reinforce the idea that immigrants have to prove themselves to be exceptionally deserving. (And in connection with this, I can sympathize with his Representative, who is made out to be a bad guy because he has a blanket policy against introducing "private bills" that pick and choose individuals to get legal status.) As far as I'm concerned, the reason Mkoyan should get to stay in the US is that the US is the only country he's ever known, because he was brought to it at a very young age through no choice of his own. And that rationale applies regardless of his GPA.

Second is Border Patrol's declaration and half-hearted not-quite-retraction of a policy of checking immigration status during natural disaster evacuations. The result is to make many Latin@s -- including those with legal status up to natural-born citizen -- reluctant to evacuate, either because they fear consequences for themselves (if I flee my house without my passport, I still have my skin and my accent, but others don't have those advantages), or because of the consequences for their family and community members. So not only are people being unnecessarily exposed to natural disasters, they're also being set up so they can be blamed for "choosing" to stay behind a la the poor black non-evacuees during Katrina. This links in to the sanctuary cities and Sheriff Joe issue in terms of making every occasion an occasion for checking people's status, regardless of whether such singleminded focus on immigration enforcement undermines the government's other duties. It also reveals an important aspect of disaster management -- disasters intensify people's interactions with the State. Complying with disaster management plans puts you in direct contact with police, the national guard, and other direct agents of state coercion, whereas failure to comply puts you wholly outside their protection (or even in direct opposition to them, as a possible looter). This would be fine, even beneficial, if you are on good terms with the state -- if you trust it to be acting in your best interests. For people who have a longstanding antagonistic relationships with the state, however -- such as people of color and immigrants -- natural disasters are a prime occasion for the state to increase its pernicious interference. And all of this applies not just to the immediate disaster management (evacuation, etc.) but also to the longer-term recovery process.

A Different Way To Lose My Job Because Of Immigrants

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:35:00 +0000

Here's a creatively, hilariously bizarre anti-immigration argument, made by superdestroyer in the comments to a Matt Yglesias post: Newspapers in the U.S. are in a death spiral and laying off staff left and right because the print media supports open borders, and so now our country is full of people who can't read English and don't care about their communities, and thus don't read the newspaper.

There was an article on Editor and Publisher a little while ago that mentioned that the newspaper business is actually doing better in Latin America, so perhaps I should be burnishing my Spanish just in case the worst happens at my current place of employment (I should note that I actually have no clue about the financial outlook of my employer). My wife went to Mexico recently and brought back some gifts wrapped in a Mexican newspaper that had some very different ideas about page design than I'm used to.

Barack Obama, Marxist?

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:26:00 +0000

Obviously Tom Delay's remark is meant to be a smear, not a substantive point. But since there are so many people around who throw around the term "Marxist" without the first clue what the main principles of Karl Marx's philosophy were,* I'll take this as a teaching moment.

Let's look at some of the key elements of Marxism, and how Barack Obama stacks up:

The starting point of Marxism is the idea of historical materialism. Historical materialism means that the driving force of history is changes in the material conditions of existence, i.e. the economy. Historical materialism is opposed to the philosophy of Marx's mentor, Georg Hegel, who promoted idealism -- the idea that the development of ideas is the driving force of history. Marx also slammed a variety of other early socialists for being idealists, because they assumed they would create a socialist system simply by convincing people that it was a good idea. Looking at Obama, he appears to fall clearly on the idealist side -- what else is "the audacity of hope" than a statement of idealism? His campaign is built on changing the way people think and feel about politics. (Though ironically an Obama win may be due as much to the underlying economic conditions -- the looming recession -- as to Obama's idealism.)

The next key concept in Marxism is class struggle -- the idea that the way that societies obtain the material conditions of their existence (their economic organization, called the "relations of production") divides people into two or more groups with antagonistic interests. The struggle between them eventually results in changes in the relations of production, reshaping society. Under capitalism, Marxism holds that the two main classes are the bourgeoisie (business owners) and proletariat (workers). Obama is hardly a proponent of class struggle. He, like practically every politician in the US, worships at the altar of the "middle class" -- a nebulous concept that allows practically all Americans to feel like they're doing OK but aren't part of some snooty elite. Where Marxists would insist that the idea of the "middle class" is a false ideology that functions to disguise the basic class antagonism (John Edwards had shades of Marxism on this point), Obama deliberately promotes a rhetoric of unity.

Since economics are the real basis of society, Marxism regards cultures and belief systems as a superstructure shaped by them (though some later Marxists, like Gramsci, held that the superstructure played an important role in stabilizing the economic base). Marx famously declared religion to be "the opiate of the masses." A partial case could be made for Obama holding some Marxist views on this point -- his remark that Pennsylvanians are bitter and turn to religion can be interpreted as an endorsement of Thomas Frank's thesis in What's the Matter With Kansas, which was a basically Marxist argument. On the other hand, Obama is by all accounts a sincerely religious person -- indeed, much more so than John McCain. Whatever you think of his religious beliefs, it's hard to reconcile someone who proudly declared that "we worship a great God in the blue states" with standard Marxism.

Marx did not think that the present condition of society was a good one. At the root of Marx's beef with capitalism is the idea of exploitation of wage labor. The basic argument is this: Each hour he (in Marx's writing, it was always assumed to be "he") works, a laborer produces stuff worth a certain amount -- say $20. But the owner of the factory pays him a wage of, say, $5 -- enough to live on (to "reproduce his labor power"), but less than the amount of value his labor produced. The owner keeps the rest for himself. Thus wage labor is inherently exploitative. Obama certainly has concerns about workers getting a raw deal -- he supports things like the increase in the minimum wage, expanded health insurance coverage, and easier unionization, all of which would offset the tendency of owners to pay workers as little as possible (hence exploiting them more). But in no way does Obama see exploitation as inherent to the wage labor system.

Marxists believe that the contradictions in capitalism will lead it to an inevitable crisis. According to Marxism, the capitalist quest for profit through increasing exploitation of the workers will ultimately undermine its own basis (the less you pay your workers, the less stuff they can afford to buy), especially once the system runs out of new geographical and social areas to expand into. Obama would beg to differ. Rather than seeing economic crises (such as the current recession) as inherent to the system and likely to bring it down, he sees them as instances of mismanagement that can be overcome. He tells everyone that with a few adjustments around the margins, the capitalist system will bounce back and produce prosperity for everyone. A less Marxist view can hardly be imagined.

Connected to the inevitable crisis of capitalism is the idea of the proletariat as the agent of revolution. According to Marxism, the workers -- driven to desperation by the increasing oppressiveness of wage-labor exploitation -- will come together as a united class. They will sieze the advantage of capitalism's crisis to rise up and take over, smashing the bourgeoisie and doing away with the capitalist system. This is a key difference between Marx and other early socialists -- according to Marx, the revolution has to be carried out by people whose place in the system of material subsistence gives them the means and motivation to rise up, not by a social movement of well-meaning activists. With that in mind, let's look at Obama's electoral coalition. In the primaries, his base of support was not built on the oppressed workers -- indeed, just the opposite. As the "wine track" candidate, he built from the top down, starting with the rich and highly educated voters that, from a Marxist point of view, are inexplicably voting against their material class interests for idealist reasons. While he had support from blacks of all classes, he gained comparatively little support from working-class whites, Latin@s, and Asian-Americans. This is hardly the recipe for a proletarian revolution.

Finally, we come to Marx's proposed solution to the problems of capitalism and class struggle: collective ownership of the means of production. In other words, the workers -- on a business-by-business basis, or as a whole nation -- should own the factories and investment capital, etc., eliminating the separate parasitic, exploitative owner class. Can anyone imagine that this is in any way part of Obama's platform? Take health care, for example. Obama's health care plan was explicitly crafted in such a way as to not threaten the role of private insurance companies. If Obama's plan -- or even the Clinton/Edwards plan -- is passed, the US will still have a health care system that is further from the ideal of collective ownershup of the means of production than the health care system in practically every other First World (i.e. capitalist) country on Earth. Or consider environmentalism, often pointed to as a stalking horse for communism. Obama's key proposal here is a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Businesses may not like the added cost and regulation it would entail, but it does exactly nothing to transfer ownership of the means of production to the workers.

In sum, Obama is an idealist, class-struggle-obfuscating, religious, pro-wage-labor, pro-survival-of-capitalism, wine-track, pro-private-ownership candidate. Not a Marxist.

* Same goes for "postmodernist." And on the other side of the aisle, there's lots of misuse of the term "neoconservative" (hint: it doesn't just mean "conservative, but scarier-sounding").

If You Disagree So Much, Why Are You Here?

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:20:00 +0000

The title of this post is an argument I see frequently in the comment sections of blogs. A frustrated fellow-traveler of the blog author will demand to know why a commenter who clearly has foundational philosophical differences with the author (e.g. an anti-feminist on a feminist blog) insists on reading and commenting. I find this argument a bit troubling.

The first thing to note is that it's an argument about the opponent's substantive views, and hence different from accusations of trolling or disrespectful presentation (though the same commenter may face both sorts of accusations from different people). It says that a certain level of disagreement on the issues is enough that you have neither justification nor concievable motivation to continue reading and commenting.

With special interest blogs, that kind of argument makes sense. There really is no good reason for a person to go on, say, a knitting blog and post repeatedly (even if completely sincerely) that knitting is boring and the blogger ought to go buy their sweaters at Wal-Mart like a normal person. With political blogs -- those that advocate for or against changes in public policy and culture -- it's different. Knitting can be practiced privately by knitters, and it doesn't affect anyone else. But political issues affect everyone in a given society. Liberals and conservatives can't just go off to their own clubs and leave each other alone (like, say, Trekkies and Star Wars fans can), because the two groups have to share the same tax rates, the same prevailing attitudes toward sexual harassment, the same air quality, etc.

The fact that political discussion is about issues that affect everyone, not just those who agree with the policy in place, means that there's a basis for cross-ideological discussion. A person can justifiably seek out engagement with opponents -- even those with very fundamental disagreements -- for a variety of reasons: to evangelize, most obviously, but also just to understand the other side, and even perhaps to learn something from them and discover that they're correct in some way.

There are, at the same time, good reasons to avoid cross-ideological engagement: to strategize with fellow-travelers, to work out intra-factional disagreements without the distraction of having to justify everything from first principles, or to have a respite from cross-ideological engagement elsewhere. It's entirely reasonable for a blog author to declare that the purposes of their blog are best achieved by limiting certain cross-ideological engagement -- e.g. "this is a blog for environmentalists to talk about how to address climate change, so we're not interested in arguing about whether climate change is real or not." (Or even "this is a blog for us to have fun mocking climate change deniers, so we're not interested in substantive arguments about whether climate change is real.")

The argument in this post's title assumes that the obvious default -- or even the only reasonable course of action -- is to limit cross-ideological engagement. I think this is wrong, and in fact I would argue that for a publicly-posted blog, the default is to be open to cross-ideological engagement. The blog author can limit that engagement to any degree they want, but it requires an affirmative declaration. Once such a declaration is made, the proper response to ideological opponents is "this isn't the place to discuss foundational disagreements like that," not "why are you here if you disagree?"

It should be said that the titular argument often arises out of a reasonable frustration on the part of the blog author and their fellow travelers. I know I've thought it about several commenters who seem to pop up in every post by Hugo Schwyzer to accuse him of being misandrist and having double standards. Their arguments seem to be making no progress, so I begin to wonder why they are there. But I have to remind myself that they have every right to try to engage in cross-ideological debate unless and until Schwyzer declares that his blog is not the place for debating the foundations of feminism (and I should note too that as fruitless as his commenters' quests seem, Schwyzer doesn't seem to be making any more progress in winning them over to his side).

A Speculative Political Ecology of Genetically-Modified Carbon-Capturing Trees

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:48:00 +0000

I'm a bit late to the party in talking about Freeman Dyson's idea that we can solve global warming by genetically engineering trees to capture extra CO2 and store it underground. Most of the commentary has consisted of ridicule, though a few folks think it's a great idea.

I'll say up front that of the geoengineering proposals out there, some form of carbon capture and storage is the most reasonable, and I think worth pursuing in some form. (It's far better than the other most popular idea, shooting massive amounts of sulfur into the upper atmosphere to shade the Earth -- I can't imagine such a plan not having catastrophic unintended consequences.) Nevertheless, I think Dyson's plan for carbon-capturing trees (CCT) is a bad way to approach the problem.

Most of the ridicule has centered on Dyson's optimistic estimates of how quickly the technical barriers could be overcome (in terms of timeliness, and of making the carbon capture effective). I'm willing to grant him that, because what's more interesting to me is to try to imagine how the political ecology of implementing the technology would play out. We have enough experience -- from reforestation schemes in India, ecological reserves in Brazil, palm oil plantations in Indonesia, old-growth logging in the USA, etc. -- to make some reasonable predictions on this front.

The first thing that would have to be done is to make CCT worth people's while to plant. The obvious mechanism here would be a carbon tax -- either the government would collect the tax from carbon emitters and pay it own agencies, or a private firm, to carry out the planting, or carbon emitters would preemptively plant CCT to offset their emissions and reduce their tax burden (or ensure compliance with a more command-and-control type of carbon regulation). It's likely that mainstream environmental NGOs would get in on the action, planting CCT as part of their mission to improve the environment. The main point here is that it's big, elite-controlled institutions that are going to be able to access these funds, to sell their proposals to the money-controlling agencies (though it's possible that poor households will be used as the footsoldiers, on the pattern of many resettlement and cash-crop-encouragement schemes in the Third World).

So if we have CCT seeds, and money to make planting them profitable, the last thing we need is a place to plant them. The search for this land is likely to result in significant social injustice. It would be simple if we could just replant the extensive areas of the Earth that have been deforested over the past couple centuries. But forests are not simply cut down and abandoned -- that land gets used for other things (farms, homes, etc.), and the people living there may, rightly or wrongly, not be keen on having their land reforested. Dyson, to his (inadvertant?) credit, does recognize that most CCT will be planted on land that is currently forested with non-CCT.

In either case, however, we have to ask how the CCT planters will get access to the land. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that CCT will get most of its land the same way as virtually every other big-money land use project ever -- it will be stolen (morally if not legally) from vulnerable populations, especially indigenous people. Governments, of whatever level of ostensible democractic-ness, (and some land-owning corporations) will hand out permits to plant CCT in certain areas, disregarding the existing local uses of the forests. Around the world, poor and indigenous people have repeatedly been -- and are still being -- forced out of land they had used for subsistence activities because the authorities wanted to use it for logging, industrial plantations, or wilderness-style nature reserves. This would lead to severe negative impacts on the displaced people, as well as potential militarization of the area to prevent sabotage by disgruntled peasants (and simply attempts to continue using the land).

Dyson imagines that, with CCT in place, the forest ecology would bounce back and the forests would be able to serve a dual role -- carbon capture and the other ecological benefits we get from preserving natural forests. I think there are three reasons to be skeptical of this. First, we have to consider the incentives in place. The dominant incentive is going to be to "produce" carbon capture. The money is coming from taxes (and perhaps charitable donations) aimed at removing CO2 from the atmosphere. So the clearest and easiest way to measure payouts is to pay per CCT or per unit of CCT biomass. In the face of such a bureaucracy-friendly indicator, side constraints demanding ecological preservation are likely to be weak in practice. The result will be carbon farms, not functioning naturalistic ecologies. This problem would only be exacerbated if, instead of simply sequestering the carbon, the trees produced something marketable -- such as fuel -- from it. That would add a second motive running counter to preserving the prior ecological values of the forest.

Second is that the CCT would not be suitable for preserving the pre-CCT ecology. Current forests contain a great deal of biodiversity, both intra-species and inter-species. CCT, however, will have a much more restricted range, being one variety each of a few species (particularly if, in the interests of defending their intellectual property, the genetic engineers insert some equivalent of the terminator gene or make the carbon capture gene recessive, thus preventing the CCT from incorporating the existing diversity in their wild relatives). Even-aged dominant-species monocultures are unlikely to be optimal for preserving ecological balance, even assuming (probably over-optimistically) that the projects always use genetically modified versions of species native to the biome where they're being planted.

Finally, bouncing back is a time- and space-intensive process. It takes time for trees to grow. And for the ecosystem to recover from a disturbance of the replanting-new-trees type would require a substantial area of undisturbed area in the neighborhood from which other species could spread back in. The likelihood that the genetic modifications would be preferentially made to fast-growing "weedy" species like pine, in order to let CCT operations get up and running quickly, would partially address this point at the expense of exacerbating the previous one.

Ultimately, these ecological problems with CCT plantations will not just hurt the environment (and thus indirectly all of us), but they will specifically hurt the people living in those ecosystems. I can imagine a potential limited role for CCT, in cases where people are intending to replant trees anyway (e.g. for shelterbelts between farms). But there would have to be safeguards in place to prevent the emergence -- and environmentalist endorsement -- of large-scale CCT plantations. Meanwhile, mechanical-chemical routes to carbon capture seem more promising as a way of undoing the effects of our emissions.

(The speculations in this post are based on a wide variety of political ecology studies I've read. The most on-point one is Paul Robbins' "Tracking invasive land covers in India" from the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in 2001.)

Three Notes on Food

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 30 May 2008 06:17:00 +0000

1. If there was ever a biological organ that would convince me that creationism is true, it wouldn't be the eye or the bacterial flagellum -- it would be the avocado. I find it positively creepy how perfectly suited a ripe avocado is to have its fleshy part scooped cleanly away from the seed and rind, and spread directly on a sandwich.

2. Most of my diet consists of "foreign" food -- curry, burritoes, stir fry, etc. That's not surprising, since the standard American diet, even for the poor, is so meat-heavy. But I have to give the USA credit for developing what I would consider the world's most perfect food -- the peanut butter and jelly sandwich*. It's not fine dining (and I think it loses something if you try to fancy it up beyond using low-budget whole grain bread), but it's a workhorse. I've gone long periods, including the present, in which I ate PB&J for one meal every day.

3. In theory, veg*ans have a more restricted diet than omnivores. And certainly I've encountered the problem of having to search the whole menu for the one item that is, or could be made, meat-free (though at this point I've come to like the way my choices are limited -- I think if I went to a dedicated vegan restaurant the amount of choice I'd have would be overwhelming). But it occurs to me that the restrictions aren't always one-way. There are many omnivores who refuse to eat certain foods (particularly tofu) because they're vegetarian foods. This goes beyond simply preferring the meat versions of dishes, to treating "vegetarian foods" as somehow polluting, as if eating them would turn you vegetarian, with all the social stigma and emasculation that entails (similar to many men's paranoia that certain behaviors or desires will turn them gay). (Note that I said "many omnivores" -- if my description doesn't fit you, there's no need to leave a comment about how you just really don't like the taste of tofu.)

* Perhaps not so perfect for people with nut allergies or celiac disease, but then again you can find someone who's allergic to pretty much anything.

The Verdict Of History

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:04:00 +0000

On a message board elsewhere on the internets, I got into an argument with a friend over the validity of "verdict of history" arguments. That is, arguments that we should do something (in this case, support same-sex marriage) because otherwise people in the future will look back on us as embarassing or even reprehensible troglodytes for our backwards views. The discussion made me get a lot more clear in my own head about what I found problematic about such arguments, so I'm copying my final post over here:

The argument I'm objecting to goes "We should do X, because people in the future will see X as obviously right."

One line of objection to that argument is to ask whether people in the future will in fact see X as obviously right. The (usually implicit) argument in favor of that happening is that history is trending in a certain direction, and X lies in that direction. The argument that history is trending in a certain direction is, in turn, based on the idea that policies that are right eventually win out. That means that we have to first have an argument that policy X is right: X is right, therefore X will be accepted in the future, therefore we should do X. But in that case there's no need for the middle term -- you could reason: X is right, therefore we should do X.

If you don't start with "X is right," then you need another argument for why 1) X will be accepted in the future, and 2) why I should care whether people in the future approve of my actions.

A related objection can be made if the future's knowledge of X's rightness is based on new information that they will have access too -- for example, they'll have experience of whether a certain policy is successful or a failure (e.g. Massachusetts and California will see that the sky still hasn't fallen after a decade of letting same-sex couples marry). The problem here is that, on the one hand, if we can be certain in the present which way that data will turn out, then we don't need to launder that certainty (or rather, the reasons for it) through hypothesized future events before we can use it in the argument. On the other hand, if we can't be certain how events will turn out, they can't be a reason for picking one side or the other of the present argument. (This is not to say you can never express confidence that events will prove you right -- just that those events cannot provide an independent reason for someone today to change their mind to agree with you.)

Veridct of history arguments are comforting (most of us want to believe that justice will prevail and society will come to see that we were right). And they may be rhetorically effective because they play on others' desire for social conformity. But they don't provide a logical justification for any position.

Too Old And Sick? Or Too Conservative And Hypocritical?

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:34:00 +0000

Belledame's post reminds me of something that's been bothering me for a while: the propensity of many liberals -- including many who are quick to condemn sexism that's used against Hillary Clinton or racism used against Barack Obama -- to resort to bigotry against John McCain. Specifically, I see a lot of people pulling out ageism and ableism/healthism(?) (e.g. here). Recently, for example, many liberals were just so very concerned that the media hadn't gotten an adequate look at McCain's health records, and hadn't interpreted his occasional pre-cancerous skin growths in the worst possible light. And oh dear, he hasn't had a psych eval -- why, he could have PTSD or something!

Here's the thing: John McCain is hardly a newcomer to the political stage. He's been a member of Congress for 26 years -- and an extremely prominent one, too (how many people can even name Arizona's other senator*?). He's been campaigning rather energetically for the past year. So we have plenty of relatively direct information about how he'd govern. So there's no need to make tenuous inferences from his health records.

I'm not saying this because I love McCain -- I voted against him in 2006, will vote against him in November, and assuming he loses then (and I'm still living in AZ), I'll vote against him again in 2012. But I'm not voting against him because he's old and might get skin cancer. I'm voting against him because he's pro-war, anti-soldier, pro-torture, anti-immigrant, anti-environment, anti-abortion, anti-GLBT, pro-corporation, and a bunch of other things of that nature.

Making a big deal over McCain's health reinforces the idea that old people are frail and unable to contribute to society, that we should judge someone's moral worth by the pronouncements of the medical establishment, that people with health problems can't be relied on to have significant responsibilities, that any views or behaviors we don't like in someone else should be attributed to mental illness. That's not cool, even when the person you're saying these things about is loathsome and would make an awful president.

*Jon Kyl, who is even worse than McCain -- he's just quieter about it.

Religion And Hurricanes

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Sat, 24 May 2008 05:26:00 +0000

Via the Evangelical Ecologist, I see Jonah Goldberg making the entirely unoriginal argument that environmentalism amounts to a religion. I think there's actually a grain of truth to this -- environmentalism, like any other philosophy, including a pose of clear-headed pragmatism, is too often turned into a practice of personal purity rather than a goal-oriented project. Unfortunately, when conservatives like Goldberg try to make this argument, they get twisted around and start labeling anything that would advance us toward the environmentalist project's goals as mere personal purity. Telling anyone they ought to do something differently becomes inappropriate sanctimonious moralizing.

What makes this iteration of the argument interesting is the parallel Goldberg draws between (allegedly) religious blame for Hurricane Katrina and Cyclone Nargis:

I heard Gore on NPR the other day. He was asked what he made of evangelical pastor Joseph [sic] Hagee's absurd comment that Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for New Orleans' sexual depravity. Naturally, Gore chuckled at such backwardness. But then the Nobel laureate went on to blame Katrina on man's energy sinfulness. It struck me that the two men were not so different. If only canoodling residents of the Big Easy had adhered to "The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally Friendly Sex."

I think if we deconstruct the two claims, we can see how environmentalism can avoid both being a religion in the bad sense, and being the kind of ineffectual lip servce Golberg advocates (under the term "conservationism").

Take Hagee's claim about Katrina first. Here's the alleged causal chain leading from sexual license to deadly weather: New Orleaneans had un-Biblical sex, God saw the sex, God decided the sex was bad and should be punished, God directed Katrina to strike New Orleans.

Then do the same for Gore's claim*. People (mostly outside of Myanmar) burned fossil fuels, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 trapped the sun's energy on the Earth, causing a rise in temperature. The rising temperature increased the number and strength of cyclones, and one such enhanced cyclone was Nargis.

Notice a key difference here: Hagee's claim requires a conscious power to intervene -- there's no other remotely plausible way for un-Biblical sex to cause a hurricane than for an intelligent God to see the sex and make a moral judgment that it deserves punishment. Gore's claim, however, can be stated in purely secular, physical terms. It's not that fossil fuels are bad, and therefore the people of Myanmar got flooded, but rather that fossil fuels cause the people of Myanmar to be flooded, and therefore fossil fuels are bad. Burning fossil fuels is not an act of personal sin for which we are punished, it's an act of (indirect) violence against other people.

It's possible to re-frame Gore's claim in a religious way, as some sort of revenge of Gaia against a sinful humanity. But that is, at root, a misstatement of the claim, because it improperly imputes a moral judgment as part of the description of events, rather than as a conclusion drawn from them. It's a misstatement whether it's made by a wooly-headed greenie who thinks it's a good argument, or whether it's made by a conservative who thinks that's the only way to interpret environmentalist claims. And therefore, Goldberg's attempt to draw a moral equivalence between Hagee and Gore, and thereby to paint all environmentalism as moralizing, fails.

(I obviously don't believe that Hagee's claim is based on anything more than hate. As for Gore's, his hypothesis is still very much up for debate among scientists -- but challenging its empirical foundations as a matter of atmospheric physics is entirely different from, and indeed antithetical to, challenging its rhetorical form as inappropriate religious moralizing.)

* Gore actually, and quite rightly, hedged his comments on Nargis much more than most conservatives have admitted. But "climate change caused Nargis" is still a respectable hypothesis, and it can stand in for the general class of environmentalists' claims of harms due to poor environmental management.

Kiosk

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:06:00 +0000

I haven't updated the Kiosk (the spot in my sidebar where I list things that irritate me) in a while, so here's a new one. I'm currently irritated by people who take pictures that were perfectly funny as-is, and insist on sticking a "HAY LET ME EXPLAIN THE JOKE" caption on them so they can be LOLcats and get posted on icanhascheezburger. LOLcats are limiting our range of creative expression!

Are Veg*ans Oppressed?

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:15:00 +0000

Nosnowhere mentions the phenomenon of veg*ans who see themselves as being oppressed on the basis of their diet. This is strange, she says, because veg*anism is really about the oppression of animals. In the comments, Elaine Vigneault offers a list of the hardships that veg*ans face.

I've long agreed with nosnowhere's side -- I think it doesn't make sense to think of ethical veg*ans as an oppressed class. To explain why, I look to the contrasting aims of tolerance versus universalization, and an analogy with feminism. To be oppressed is basically to be treated as if you or your activities are less valuable, and to suffer added costs and harms, on the basis of some characteristic. By this standard, women constitute an oppressed group in our society -- in a variety of ways, women and feminine activities are treated as less valuable than men and masculine activities, and women face higher hurdles in their lives. When someone recognizes oppression, their desire is for what I'll call "tolerance" (admittedly a word troublesome history). Tolerance means that people oppressed on the basis of a certain characteristic want to be able to live their lives free of the oppression that disadvantages them relative to people without that characteristic.

When enough people recognize a form of oppression, they can form a movement with its own name -- in the case of oppression of women, "feminism"*. The goal of a feminist with respect to women is to end the oppression and achieve the above-mentioned tolerance. But the goal of feminism with respect to feminists is not tolerance but universalization. Feminists don't want society to tolerate feminism, allowing feminists to do their feminist thing on an equal basis with anti-feminists. They want to win, converting everyone to their views about the existence and badness of oppression of women -- aiming at tolerance of feminism undercuts its ability to achieve tolerance of women.

Feminists do face hardships for being feminists, over and above the hardships they may experience as members of the movement's intended beneficiary class (i.e. women) -- for example, being stereotyped as unattractive and humorless, and having their views discounted as coming from an irrational fringe. But these hardships take on a different meaning because of the different status and desired end goal of feminism versus womanhood. Since feminism is a movement aimed at changing the prevailing social system, it is unsurprising that the system would -- passively or actively -- throw up obstacles. So while it's entirely reasonable to work to reduce those obstacles so as to enable feminism to achieve its goals more easily, there is a real difference between the first-order oppression perpetrated by a social system and its derivative resistance to people who challenge the first-order oppression.

The analogy here, I'm sure you've figured out, is that animals are like women in being first-order oppressed, and veg*anism is like feminism in being a universalizing movement encountering resistance in its quest for tolerance of the first-order oppressed group. To call veg*ans oppressed, then, is to conflate two different sorts of relationship to an oppressive social system. (Though the situation is muddied by the fact that even many ethical veg*ans adopt a posture of seeking only tolerance for veg*anism as a way of avoiding unproductive conflict with omnivores.)

The hitch, though, is that this analysis applies only to "ethical veg*ans" -- people who take up veg*anism as a way of advocating for the interests of animals. But there are other reasons to be a veg*an -- because it's cool, as a personal spiritual practice, because you think it's healthier, because you hate the taste of or are allergic to animal products, etc. Such "non-ethical" veg*ans adopt the same diet as ethical veg*ans, but because their aims are not built on achieving tolerance for animals, they can consistently advocate for tolerance, rather than universalization, of veg*ans. And because of that, I think non-ethical veg*ans -- who face the same hardships qua veg*an as ethical veg*ans -- can lay a claim to being victims of a first-order oppression (in somewhat the same way that a lack of accommodation for kosher diets is an aspect of first-order anti-Semitism**).

*For convenience, I'm using "feminism" in the very broad sense that covers anyone opposed to women's oppression, though I recognize that some people dislike that term because they see it as referring to a specific and problematic diagnosis and program for action.

**I found this post interesting because an Orthodox Jewish friend once told me -- and I don't know how widely this theory is held -- that the whole point of the kosher laws is that non-Jewish society will be unlikely to tolerate people who practice them, thus encouraging Jews to maintain a close-knit autonomous community rather than blending in with their neighbors. And while I'm tangenting, I also wonder whether, given that AFAIK all vegan food is kosher, an attempt to tolerate both Jews and vegans with the same meal would actually fail to fully tolerate Jews because it would impose added dietary restrictions (e.g. "if you don't want to be forced to eat a cheeseburger, you have to give up hamburgers too").

Language Footprints and Individualism

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:34:00 +0000

Navel-gazing aside: I do most of my blog reading these days at work, but I've made a commitment to never post to this blog from work. So I have a tendency to have post ideas floating around for a while before I get around to actually posting them (if I even do at all -- in a large part, blogging is for me a way of getting ideas to settle down in my head by fixing them to a page, but if I wait long enough they settle on their own and writing them out becomes just a chore), by which time the conversation I'm responding to has often moved on.

Lauredhel mentions the idea of a "language footprint." Patterned after the common idea of an ecological footprint, your language footprint is the extent to which your activities negatively impact the survival of other languages.

Raising awareness of the problem of language extinction, in which a few global languages drive out other languages spoken by smaller and less powerful groups*. But I think the "footprint" metaphor tends to frame the problem in too individualistic a way. The description on the language footprint site lends itself easily to being thought of as a matter of individual choices of language, a la a rude tourist asking the waitstaff for "water" rather than "agua" or "yaku." And indeed, the comment section of the above-linked Hoyden About Town thread is full of people proudly professing that they study a phrasebook before travelling internationally.

The issue here is not that learning the local language before traveling is unimportant**. It's that it addresses only a small aspect of the problem of language extinction. Language extinction is fundamentally a structural problem. English is not encroaching on other languages because Anglophones are ruder than speakers of Pitjantjatjara or Saami. English is encroaching on other languages because our world is becoming more and more globalized and the global political-economic system is dominated by English-speaking countries.

Ecological footprint calculations can break down this sort of structural responsibility and apportion a share of the blame to individuals to a limited degree, because it's possible to distinguish differential environmental impacts of different lifestyle and consumer habits -- driving a Prius vs an SUV, being a vegan vs a meat-and-potatoes person, etc. (I forget where I found this first, but it's interesting to note in connection with the structural factors in environmental impacts that even Buddhist monks in the USA have twice the world average ecological footprint.) But with respect to language dominance, the negative structural effects on smaller languages are a result of the system as a whole (i.e. the level of global integration and dominance of Anglophone countries), making it next to impossible to talk about more or less "language-friendly" practices beyond the small potatoes of learning the languages of your tourist destinations. Certainly one could engage in activism aimed at changing these structures (either at a global level or in more locally-focused projects), but factoring that in as an element of your individual language footprint seems to warp the metaphor beyond utility.

*This can be a complexly multi-scalar process. If I recall my freshman-year class on Peru correctly, English is encroaching on Spanish at the global level, while within Latin America Spanish is encroaching on indigenous languages such as Quechua, and at the same time Quechua is actually encroaching on less-popular indigenous Andean languages as the region's Indians consolidate a new form of native identity in the face of globalization.

**Although it is interesting to me the different motivations involved. I've only traveled once to a non-English-speaking area, and while I did study my German phrasebook en route to Bonn, it was less out of a desire to be conscientious about my impact on German speakers or a desire to get a real experience of local culture, than it was because I was afraid I might get hurt and not be able to tell people "Rufen Sie die Krankenvagen!"

Disability And Moochers

noreply@blogger.com (Stentor) — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:41:00 +0000

Meep writes something that I think is very revealing about how our society handles disability:

Apparently AT&T assumes that the only people who would want an iPhone would be hearing people. Now AT&T has announced that they're going to offer a data only plan, but if you check the Text Accessibility Plan page, the PDF form explicitly states that you have to have a certifying agent in order to even get the plan. Why should anyone have to prove they are disabled? I suppose this is their way of separating hearing from deaf so that only "deaf" people can have this option.

We tend to think of accommodating disabilities as making special concessions or exceptions to the rules for disabled people. We think that disabilities constitue an extra burden on some people, so we'll give those people a sort of bonus subsidy to make up for it. Thinking that way sensitizes us to worry about moochers -- people who feign or exaggerate disability in order to get the subsidy without suffering the burden that it's supposed to offset. (Elizabeth Anderson wrote a good article some years back taking to task all the liberal political theorists from Rawls onward for using this sort of "equality defended from moochers" framework.) I would suspect it also *generates* wanna-be moochers, by effectively telling people "hey, there's a special bonus here you could be getting."

The alternative to this is to think not about subsidizing disabled people so that they can be on a level playing field with the normals, but rather about rearranging the options so that suitable options are available for everyone, given the diversity of human brains and bodies. There may be limits at which we'd have to fall back on subsidies-plus-mooching-safeguards, but we're far from reaching them. AT&T's iPhone plans, as described by Meep, could be a good example of the second strategy -- offering various appropriately-priced combinations of voice and data, so that people can pick the one that suits their way of being in the world. In this context, a person who can hear but buys the data-only plan would not be getting some sort of illegitimate bonus. But AT&T is so deeply buried in the subsidies perspective that it assumes that it has some sort of nonsensical need to protect the data-only option from hearing moochers.

This is also a reason to be leery of the argument Harry Brighouse mentions at the end of a long post on whether parents should be allowed to deliberately "design" their children, picking and choosing their genetic endowments. He suggests one possible rule would be that design is OK for correcting defects, but not for giving children extra excellences (e.g. you could take a kid who was going to end up 3'8" and make them 5'4", but you couldn't make them, or their naturally 5'4" sibling, 6'3"). This type of scheme would force the government to officially promulgate a blueprint for what constitutes a "normal" body and mind, and labeling variations from that blueprint (at least in one direction) as defects which is is permissible -- or even potentially mandatory -- to correct. If we had a social system that fully accommodated the breadth of human variability, we wouldn't need to either fix so many genetic "defects" (shortness would no longer be a "defect" if we ended height discrimination), nor to worry that people were going to exploit that fixing process in order to get an unfair advantage.