ANEKANTAVADA

J. Bradford Delong's commenters deconstruct Obama

2011-08-25T10:42:00.003-05:00

Damn straight:

If you look at Obama as a politician, his entire MO is to look at what his political opponents are proposing, and then take a position that's one step closer to the center than theirs. It's what he did in the primaries, it's what he did in the general, and it's what he's done in office. That's the whole thing, the super-high level multi-dimensional chess that the rest of us were too dense to comprehend, the brilliant nefariousness, everything. Of course, such an approach is entirely disinterested in policy and outcomes, but that isn't really Obama's problem or interest. And also of course, if you don't really concern yourself with outcomes, your outcomes aren't likely to be all that great.

If you spend a lot of time trying to deconstruct an approach like that you end up tieing yourself in knots -- it's rather like trying to deconstruct extreme nonsense verse. Such attempts end up revealing more about the doconstructor [sic] than the subject matter itself.

AuOso said...

This is simply the Democratic congressional election strategy transported down Pennsylvania Avenue. Everyone dives for cover and makes sure they camouflage themselves by sounding just a little more moderate than their opponent. The Republicans have become adept at exploiting this, first filling the message void Democrats have created for themselves, then moving ever further to the right, pulling the Democrats with them.

It really doesn't matter how many seats we win, the Republicans win the future. We have been arguing who has the better approach to supply-side economics for the last thirty years. We have done nothing to change that conversation, even when the evidence was plain that supply-side was a sham. This was the President's responsibility and his biggest failure to date.

I mean, am I the only one to find Obamapologistas relentlessly, tiresomely Panglossian? "He did it the best way he could, and no other way could have possible led to a better outcome [in this, the best of all possible worlds]". Or the similar tune, "Maybe it could've been done better, but considering everything, it maybe wasn't the best but it was the most you could expect given the opposition [in this, the best of all possible worlds]."

I understand the impulse to avoid the fallacy of "If X had just done Y, we wouldn't have all these problems." Yet at the same time, it's senseless and anti-logic to insist that nothing could have happened in any other way, or that every other possible way for Obama et al. to have played things in the past 3 years would've been a) worse or b) IMPOSSIBLE.

Ugh and argh. Might I toot my own horn a bit here and say that a number of friends have found my old/previous posts on Obama to have been borne out, in essence? Though most of them, at the same time, don't want to spend too much time thinking about that because it's too disillusioning... Somehow my happy bubble of pessimistic optimism... cynical happy-realism... um, whatever it is I have, I still have. But as for a while now, it doesn't include much confidence, happiness, or willingness to vote for centrist Democrats.

Shit from the Vaults: BSG

2011-06-19T21:29:00.002-05:00

So, a little something from my files. I expect I may get some comments from friends on this. I'm hoping I'm able to ignore them -- I'm behind in about 15 things, most of them annoying :-/ But I still wanted to put this up here so it could be squeezed out of my mind grapes.

Warning: SPOILERS.

---

“I’m not going to live in it. Captain, I’m a monster.”
--The Operative, Serenity

Although I found the series quite affecting and effective—high production values, sharp writing, great characters that drew you in, suspenseful action—there is one thing perhaps that so galled me about BSG (Battlestar Galactica) that it took me out of the series completely and made me basically, care less for whether our heroes, our species, survived. I repeatedly came back, because of the factors I mentioned before—it was an extremely good series. But each time I came back, my excitement eventually waned and I plowed through episodes, hoping for the sweet release of conclusion, again swept up into individual scenes or episodes but left empty on the whole. The thing about this incredibly gritty show, full of emotional-political verisimilitude, vast constellations of moral gray, constant compromises and moral vicissitudes, the thing that eventually overcame the excellent characters in my mind and made their convincing emoting tedious was that eventually, all was overhelmed to me by the question “Do we (they) deserve to survive?” Is there a bridge too far such that, as a species, you no longer deserve to live? Is there any compromise that must not be made, else we’ve lost ourselves in the breach? To me, the interesting question may not necessarily be if there’s such a line, but rather, where it is. But BSG seemed to so constantly answer that there was no such line, or if there was, it was understandable, even admirable, to cross it. (And for the sake of narrative continuation, to assume that the line re-set somewhere afterwards; otherwise, if the idea that there was no line was truly embraced, the moral anguish and grittiness disappears, robbing the weighty episodes somewhat of their heft because if anything goes, without remorse or question, there is much less dramatic tension.) Such dynamics may be quite interesting to watch, and even may again reflect the complexities of reality, yet it felt to me like this larger question (Are we truly damned if we do this?) was time after time ignored, forgotten, never raised or sort of waved away by an affecting scene reuniting friends or lovers, or more often distracted from by a new tragedy to be wrought on our characters in order to once again make them sympathetic.

Within this gray moral universe, all of the characters, at some point, became monsters to me, monsters who, like Whedon’s Operative, had no place in the “better world,” no place in a world that once again knew peace, no place being the founding patrons of the continuation of our race. If one admits this, as The Operative did, there are a number of possibly interesting ways to explore it—perhaps no compromise is to far, because survival means the ability to try and make amends or do better next time, and without survival there is no next time. Perhaps survival means continuing on in the hope that your descendants can reach a place where they can make more sophisticated moral choices—again, echoing The Operative’s idea of founding a brave new world that would have no place for those such as we. Or perhaps morality only matters when you can afford to indulge in it without jeopardizing the existence of your species. If so, however, such a message goes against the cultural tropes we’re brought up in (though it fits rather well into the realpolitik world where it’s said that “The Constitution is not a suicide pact”).

We’re well-versed in the idea that some things are worth dying for, and the characters in BSG are no different, constantly risking their lives for each other, for the species, for life, for love, for faith, for loyalty (and for craven self-interest in Baltar’s case, time and again)—but the thing is, all of these came into conflict with each other time after time, and it seems like pretty much all of the characters violated one in favor of the other at some point. A case in point, to me, was the quite excellent episode where Adama pater refused to jump (that is, leave the area at effectively faster-than-light) the Galactica because he wouldn’t leave Kara Thrace behind. (He later said to his son that had it been him, they would never have left.) An excellent, affecting episode—yet it seemed to me that the show (or more accurately the writers) never fully grappled with what this meant in real terms. That is, Adama was willing to risk the ship, and by extension the fleet, and by further extension the human race, to recover Kara (essentially, his adoptive daughter). At no point does this, which is essentially a dereliction of his duty on multiple levels, come back to bite him directly (though this trait manifests itself in other ways and causes other crises throughout the series). Co-occurring with this is the recurring evidence of his crew’s devotion to him. This devotion decays, frays, and re-forms throughout the series, and its tattering does have its roots in his devotion to personal loyalty over larger duties (for example, standing by his closest friends even after rather startling revelations about them [SPOILER] i.e. that his first officer and old friend Tyrol is actually a Cylon, the human race’s enemy throughout the series, responsible for the genocide of billions at the series’ start [/SPOILER]). But time and again he is able to draw on his moral authority, both narratively in the form of taking the part of “hero” in a number of stories, and within the plot, such as various grunts, non-comms and officers staying devoted to him through thick and thin and his actions in guiding, commanding, and occasionally taking over the fleet of human survivors. Perhaps, one thinks, they respect his personal loyalty and see it as representing his loyalty to all of them as individuals—yet this loyalty to individuals is a liability for the human race itself, something that tended to be voiced only by villainous or characters of darkly-tinged morality. Further, it seems clearly selfish—he pushed the envelope for his adoptive daughter, yet he tells his biological son that he would’ve pushed even further had it been him. He clearly is able to sacrifice the lives of others of his crew—not just on the line, in battle, where he does indeed endure his children putting themselves in danger’s way, but in leaving behind, arresting, overthrowing or executing those who expediency or necessity requires. Again, there is much to admire for such loyalty, but it made it hard for me to take credibly when the show and characters demanded certain sacrifices must be made for the sake of humanity—excusing torture, rape and extra-judicial execution, justifying the suspension of democracy or secretly rigging the stakes against it, sublimating personal feelings or desires, etc. etc. etc. Yet for our main characters, risking our survival was ok, even admirable when they did it. This is what I mean by our characters nobly putting their lives on the line for their principles—but what principles they were doing so for that week depended. Thus in the end no line couldn’t be crossed for some reason, and no value was sacrosanct in the face of whatever plot-relevant value we were worried about this week.

This created characters of incredible moral complexity, but that’s another manifestation of this problem—people with this much emotional damage just wouldn’t function any more. I suppose that’s often true, it’s a bit of the reality of all action-packed fiction, but BSG plumbed new levels of moral ambiguity, constantly, and this is reason #eleventy the finale didn’t work for me. There would not be a happily ever after for people so scarred—PTSD has nothing on them. Further, I didn’t want there to be a happily ever after—they had become so compromised, so “gray” that I didn’t care for them as human beings. They/we did not, in my opinion, still deserve to live. Nor deserve to die, per se, I’m just saying my empathy for the characters had left me. The show’s genius, or one of them, was the ability to keep thrusting us into the characters’ inner conflicts and make us care, but it feels rather like being a fan of your college sports team—at some point, you’re probably cheering on at least one alleged date-rapist or so, but when they pull a touchdown out of a difficult situation, get that surprise interception, you cheer as loud as anyone. Only later, perhaps, (maybe after the conviction) does the victory taste of ash.

Baltar is the incredible example of this. Ron Moore has said, I think, that the two-faced and morally ambiguous doctor (something like BSG’s own Snape) is his favorite character, and he is a character of exquisite ambiguity, falling climbing and jumping from one dilemma to the next, betraying people and saving them at somewhat unpredictable intervals. But the one constant in the series was that he always, always, always ran away from personal danger—if he could save his craven life, he would do it in whatever craven way available to him. (Ok, two constants: he also couldn’t and wouldn’t say no to sex, for any reason, at any time, with an attractive woman of whatever species it seemed. Sex ranked perhaps one and a half steps below survival in his driving passions, though his extreme lack of foresight often meant that he was surprised by unwise sex endangering his survival.) This man gets a happy ending at the end, seemingly redeemed in the series’ eyes—and seemingly for essentially one or two acts of non-cravenness, for standing up for once for what was right, and charging into battle guns blasting, with luck saving him more than anything else. One act of bravery, conducted stupidly and impulsively, excuses years of bad acts? For fucks’ sake, show.

Bottom line for me was that BSG refused to face the simple idea put forward in Joss Whedon’s Firefly: that perhaps sometimes the sacrifice one must make to make a “better world” compromises the possibility of making such a world in the first place. Perhaps survival—interestingly, pursued relentlessly and at all costs by the creator’s favorite character, still to be forgiven in the end—does break all ties, yet when it was narratively convenient, it didn’t. But it seems that the show didn’t want to completely admit this—that some lines, once crossed, bar a peaceful end. Oh sure, people suffered for their choices, but in the end those who survived were effectively fêted as heroes, given a musical-emotional tongue bath by the beautiful, but to me hollow, ending. One who had made the darkest act, an act of passion that doomed reconciliation between two races and caused the near-annhilation of one of them, wandered off, apparently too broken inside to stay in society, yet the fact that he nearly caused the end of two races in his rage wasn’t really broached. Again, it’s one thing for a protagonist to do such a thing; it’s another for him to do it and the show pull our heartstrings for him nonetheless (and to have spent so long convincing us that survival was paramount and anything could be betrayed in its service for most characters).

I believe that some lines, once crossed, do all but preclude redemption. I say “all but”, because perhaps, given enough time, enough good acts, enough work and regret, redemption can be conceived of for nigh anything. But BSG didn’t just sometimes ignore the question of how much redemption was enough; it was very fond of forgetting the idea that redemption was necessary in the first place. It wanted to be dark and gritty, nigh-nihilistic, while asking us to believe in fate and some kind of loving God or something. But in reality, neither the Cylons, nor the One True God, nor Moore or anyone else had a Real Plan. The God that, apparently, actually exists, in the end, and sent Head Six, Head Baltar, and [SPOILER] Reincarnated Thrace [/SPOILER] had a plan that inexplicably included the near genocide of the human race, in order to teach the human race… what? Nothing? Should we be comforted, tolerant, or even terribly interested in a God that apparently can intervene enough to send Angels directly into people’s heads and guide them ‘round a merry chase, but chooses to either abet or not to prevent a genocide? What lesson were we supposed to learn from that? The God crossed a line right there in the very beginning of the series, wiping out (or allowing to be wiped out) billions, and spending a disproportionate amount of time inside the mind of one of the least morally scrupulous characters, without seeming to do much to truly redeem him until a futile, moronic gesture crosses him over.

I’m not annoyed that BSG asked or posed or created such questions. I just continue to be annoyed that it didn’t even seem to realize that it HAD done so.

Return of the mack

2011-04-07T12:04:00.003-05:00

Ok, this actually has nothing to do with Mark Morrison or being ostentatious to attract members of the opposite sex. It's simply the return of my oh-so-typical situation of getting sucked into reading news and commentary instead of getting things done that are due imminently.

But I'm using bits of Scott's Seeing Like a State in my course, and got sucked in to reading Brad DeLong's review of it from some years ago, and then a much better (in my opinion) response to his review and long discussion thread at Crooked Timber. If you have any interest in market-state debates and other fiddly detailed arguments on human governance systems, a solid reference (the comments as much so as the original post). There's something interesting to be said, I think, about the separation between many "pop" or run-of-the-mill libertarians and the dedicated academic libertarians that engage in the much more interesting (imho) and complicated debates the deal with all sorts of complications and refinements and imbroglios with markets, ideology, institutions, and government (like the interesting idea that markets can only ever be instantiated by the presence of government, or at least, effective markets of a given scale, and of course the fact that markets are always constituted contextually, not abstractly, and as such abstract rules about their efficiency or rectitude can't be applied a priori... and now I'm boring even myself) (ok, I'm not, but probably all of you). I'm sure this is common not just in the academic/pop libertarian circles (cf. any other philosophy) but I find it most interesting perhaps in libertarianism (perhaps because of its somewhat unique claims to a sort of intellectual purity and certitude)--

"'Will governments or market actors figure that out first and harness the proper skills first? Almost certainly the market will find out first.' No. There’s never a guarantee, and you have no data to show there is. The pretense that there could be either way is the ideology of modernism, and libertarianism is the last of the modernist ideologies, mostly as parody.--Seth Edenbaum

For a final bit of procrastinatory pretentiousness: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Placeholder Post: "Free Will" is undefined

2011-03-18T12:51:00.004-05:00

Hello all -- haven't been here for a dog's age, for a number of reasons. But my semi-regular mid-morning splurge of reading a backlog of news, blogs, emails, etc. brought me to some folks cynical on the future of human survival and one dude cynical on conservation or sustainability, period (conservation being the propping up of things found unfit to survive, seeming to be his point). For one thing, it occurred to me that both of these dudes (one immensely annoying, one that I simply disagree with--and who is one of the few folks linking to this blog) seem rather certain of their conclusions. They both, to be sure, use critical thinking processes and scientific evidence to reach their conclusions. But they seem to evince a certainty in things I neither a) share, b) find productive, or c) find utility-maximizing. That is to say, if we know anything from patterns from history (which both thinkers rely on extensively, with good reason), we know that certainty that you have reasoned correctly has very little, if any, correlation with the odds that you have reasoned correctly. Many people who are certain are wrong, and many who are tentative have been proven right. So their certainty in their pronouncements I find annoying (says the guy with enough certainty to declare things on blogs).

But this spiraled into a series of other thoughts in the shower (few enough of which had to do with the papers that I need to grade, others I need write, or the breakfast I need to eat, sigh), and led me back to an idea I had the other day:

Free Will is undefinable.

I've had this thought before (though I'm not going to be arsed with finding a link for yeh), but my thought before was more that you could not put into precise words what you mean by free will. This is true for a certain number of people, but Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) among others have simply summed it up as this: the ability to make choices that don't originate purely from material causes (i.e. it can't be traced through physical causes and changes in the brain and environment, i.e. it has a supra-natural--supernatural, if you will--origination). In other words, if there is no soul or manifest self beyond biology, there cannot be free will, because biology, like everything else, is subject to deterministic laws. (For our purposes here, I define even chaotic results are deterministic, in that their outcomes are still determined by physical laws, there is just room for multiple outcomes under the determined constraints. Philosophy Bro briefly broaches some of this under indeterminism.) But it occurred to me a bit ago: a soul is undefined.

Ok, so this is turning into a post, not a placeholder. But: the soul. Let's stick with Christian conceits--if Hell were unending torment, or Heaven unending pleasure, what would that mean? It occurred to me--the human brain is configured in such a way that it would eventually just stop registering pain if it went on forever; you'd become inured to it. If you didn't, or if it kept escalating, you'd go some form of crazy--you would no longer be yourself. And once you've lost your mind, can you keep losing it, some more? Same with unending heavenly bliss--novelty is important to human satisfaction. If you just get the same pleasure again and again, you again become inured to it (see: hard drugs) and need "higher highs". And again, if they keep going higher ad infinitum, well, we're back to insanity in the membranity.

But it's all heavenly and shit, right? It defies the laws of physical reality. Ok -- so -- imagine you, but it's a you with no maximum capacity for pleasure or pain. You can keep getting "higher" or "lower" forever. And ever. Like, not years, decades. Centuries. Millennia. Eons. Umm... no. "You" would no longer be "you", at least, not in any way you recognize--are you the same person you were as a newborn? No? Well imagine that level of change... times infinity. But, if it's your soul, it's something that's *more* you than *you*, right? It's your *essence*. Well, if our essence is something so essential that it's the same from when we're a newborn (imagine here, for example, newborn Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, Stalin, Gandhi, Mandela, and MLK--and imagine that at birth, somehow, their essences are as different or distinct from each other as they were at any other point in their life), then our essence is something that is essentially unknowable, un-understandable to us, ourselves.

Ok -- all of this is to say that all that we know of ourselves is grounded in material reality. If free will is defined as the ability to make decisions outside of physical causes, well--imagine what that means. What does it mean to make a choice unconstrained by anything? If we had a "soul" unconstrained by our biology, how would our choices differ? "Well," one could say, "They would be rational." Ok--rational according to what metric or goal? That is to say, would they be rational at maximizing our own "well-being", at maximizing the world's, at pure logic, at what? And what reason would "they", this soul, have to maximize any of those things if it wasn't constrained by biology and physics et al.? Without human subjectivity, as I've been telling my students, there is no reason to prefer existence to non-existence, good to bad, life to death, justice to injustice, fairness to unfairness.

This all changes, of course, if one presumes the universe is set up in some way to achieve some transcendental good of which we are only dimly aware (or any other transcendental goal, I guess). I would argue that "good" is undefinable outside of our experience, but it cannot be proven that there is not some ultimate "good" or "bad" we're stretching to in the very fabric of being (in the same way that it cannot be proven that my carpet is not made of infinitely many ingeniously disguised Timorese Leprachauns).

Schools, school reform

2010-11-10T12:36:00.003-05:00

I've been away from this blog. All none of you readers may have noticed that. I'm not going to bother giving excuses or making pithy comments about it here; just wanted to note this interesting link/conversation:

A *MUST* listen-to for people concerned with education, schools, school reform. Discussion of the movie Waiting for Superman, Harlem Childrens' Zone, Promise Schools, and charter schools and more. (Apparently only 1 in 5 charter schools "succeed", and programs like the Harlem Childrens' Zone have endowments greater th...an some colleges...) This convo starts around 9:20.
http://www.theroot.com/http://www.theroot.com/multimedia/confab-oct-1-2010

One excerpt: "If you look at the top ten countries in math, science and reading scores, all of them have teaching forces that are unionized. If unions are the problem, these all should be dropping down..."

J-Friend ASP points out "And some or our worst performing US states are the least unionized..."

J-Friend AL amplifies: "I read a great Diane Ravitch critique of the film recently, too. Ah, here it is: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/"

She also "Really want to read the Paul Tough book about the HCZ - I like his writing on education a lot."

Clinton Apologizes For Helping Crush Haitian Farmers

2010-04-06T19:19:00.005-05:00

I can hardly believe it, but Change.org is reporting the former President Clinton has apologized for his role in bringing (so-called) free trade to Haiti, helping lead to a situation of exacerbating poverty, where "six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't."

Ruth Messinger points out in the piece that

Prior to the era of so-called "free trade," Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19% of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80% of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25%.

As was pointed out in a previous J-post on Haiti by J-friend K. McAfee

Like other networks and op ed pundits, CNN reporters refer to Haiti's extreme material poverty despite, they say, a history of US efforts to "help". None have any sense of whom was actually helped by the 1915-35 US occupation (US & French banks, agribusiness, and the small Haitian elite), US support of Duvalier and other dictators (same beneficiaries, plus sweat-shop owners), the US aid & trade policies that undermined staple food production and created dependence on US rice exports, or US-backed neoliberal "adjustment" loan conditions and deliberate, ongoing undermining of the imperfect but legitimate Aristide and Preval governments by the US government and the Clinton Foundation.

It's nice to see someone in our government admit to any of this, even if it's after they're out of office. Better than never after all! -- or -- the interesting example where Colin Powell expressed "regret"* at the US role in the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973 that the US most certainly helped instigate (with former SecState Henry Kissinger playing a key role in that particular 9/11 disaster that set a dictatorship into motion that would, among other things, claim over 3,000 lives, among his other adorable war-criminalistic-sheningans that have led him to having to consult a team of lawyers to figure out where he can travel that he may not be extradited to Chile!), but (as can be seen in the same article above) this was followed by the Administration coming out and "clarifying" Powell's regret, so as to give no hint of an admission of guilt, to re-obscure the open secret of our actions in Chile and elsewhere.

If you've read the J/Anekantavada before, you know this isn't the first time I've looked askance at US actions, to say the least. To see us looking back on any of our "mistakes" (which I put in scare quotes because they were often the intentional action of our leaders) and, if this is true about Clinton, apologizing, well... I can't say it gives me hope, or quite makes me particularly proud to be an American, or makes up for the then and continuing actions of American Empire, but... gosh darn it, admitting when we Fucked Someone Else for fun and profit is a step, and a rarely taken one, much less apologizing for it. So, 1.5 cheers I suppose.

*An excerpt of Powell's 2003 comments can be found here. The money shot, in reference to a question of how the US could be the "moral superior" looking to bring democracy to Iraq, after our actions against democracy and human rights with respect to supporting the Chilean dicatorship:

So it is the will of the international community that Iraq disarm, and not just the moral superior position, as you describe it, of the United States. We have no desire to impose upon the Iraqi people a leadership that is to our choosing, but to give them an opportunity to choose their own leadership.
With respect to your earlier comment about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of. We now have a more accountable way of handling such matters and we have worked with Chile to help it put in place a responsible democracy.
One of the proudest moments of my life was going to Chile in the late '80s and speaking to all of the military officers in the Chilean armed forces, all the senior officers, and talking to them about democracy and elected representative government and how generals such as them and me -- I was a general at the time -- are accountable to civilian authority so that incidents of that kind or situations of that kind no longer arose.

There's quite an interesting implicit admission of wrong-doing here, considering the emphasis he puts on how things "of that kind" can't happen again, despite, of course, the fact that they happened many times before and many times since...

A somewhat uninformed screed that didn't fit in Slate's comment box

2010-03-25T11:04:00.003-05:00

I skimmed this piece by Ron Rosenbaum on Slate about a book on the persecution, and insufficient condemnation of said persecution, of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a prominent critic of Islam who has been under death threats for years because of it. I've seen Hirsi Ali; I don't like Hirsi Ali, I disagree with Hirsi Ali, although as I point out below, I certainly believe she shouldn't be threatened and should be protected from the threats on her life. From my reading of her, her strident critiques of Islam are of a piece of Hitchens' and other "New Atheists'" critiques on religion more generally. That is, absolutist critiques that, in their condemnation of persecution, intolerance, and irrationality, veer into irrational essentialism in characterizing religion (Islam or otherwise).

What follows is not an entirely coherent rant, from skimming a piece I found tiresome and somewhat coherent, even if I agreed with the underlying point. I really should address my direct criticisms of Ali at some point, but for the time being, here's my somewhat befuddled, procrastinatory words on Rosenbaum's piece:

Wow... I consider myself an intellectual, but obviously not nearly enough--I haven't heard of most of these people (excepting Hirsi Ali). So I can't comment on, what is to me, the inside baseball here. All mainstream intellectual commentators I know of have condemned violence against dissidents generally and against Hirsi Ali specifically, should the subject arise. And the probability I'm going to read Berman's book is near zero. But from Rosenbaum's piece, it seems like if you strip the sarcasm from his caricatured hypothetical reaction to Rushdie's persecution ("Sure, I'm for his not having his life threatened and all, but I'm tired of all this magic realism stuff, and he seemed arrogant when I saw him interviewed on TV. Maybe he was too contemptuous of the culture of the people who want to murder him"), the main thing wrong with it is the obvious indifference to the threat. But once you mount a vociferous defense of their rights to be free from persecution -- along with whatever material support one might muster as a public intellectual -- isn't taking a critical look at the actual work, attitude, motivations of the persecuted a perfectly valid pursuit? That is, do the "tired of magical realism" and "arrogance" critiques really belong with the lukewarm defense of Rushdie or Hirsi Ali's rights? And should it be verboten to think that, perhaps someone *is* too critical of the culture of the people who want to murder you? After all, if it's *not* possible to be *too critical* of such a culture, then the civilians who have died or been persecuted by US actions, say, under imperialism, foreign adventurism, Iran-Contra, etc. etc. are absolutely justified to have any level of anti-Americanism. (And mayhaps they are.) Or, does persecution only count when it is intellectual, and not when it is, say, blatant disregard for your right to and quality of life? If it's not possible to be "too critical", then both the most extreme Palestinians and the Israelis are right in their abhorrence of the other (if not right in violent actions against one another).

While violence against someone for their ideas -- or nationality, or siting above a resource you covet, or strategic importance of their country -- are all reprehensible and should be opposed in the strongest terms, I don't see why that would exempt the persecuted from criticism. Shouldn't it be possible to abhor the threats against someone, but disagree with them in whole or in part? I agree that the criticisms listed here against Hirsi Ali by intellectuals I've never heard of sound petty and insubstantial, but in my own reading and listening to Hirsi Ali, I find much to substantively disagree with her on, regardless of the righteousness of her freedom to express it and the clarity of *parts of* her critiques.

Since I don't know these intellectuals that are being chided, perhaps they deserve it -- from their quotes here, they do. But the conflation of their pettiness with larger issues of tolerating intolerance and the Enlightenment enterprise itself is, to me, somewhat unconvincing as it's all placed within the rarefied air of commentators I've never heard of. *I* think Hirsi Ali is arrogant, too sweeping, and in a way, racist in her anti-racism, so to speak. I'm no public intellectual, but for me there is no conflict -- I disagree with her on many points, but she should certainly not be threatened. That seems to be a mainstream consensus -- how much does it matter that the Intellectuals' Intellectual are insufficiently down with it? I read two hours of news a day, have a PhD, and feel totally outside of this. I suppose since it's the circles Hirsi Ali, Berman, Rosenbaum and Hitchens move in, it makes sense to be upset at their anti-racism-racist apostasy--for them. But attaching it to a larger critique of Enlightenment and modern liberalism requires more practical connections to the rest of us than this rarefied screed seems to take into account. Otherwise, the implication seems to be simply that one can't criticize the unjustly persecuted--or that one must be very careful to balance enough defense with your criticism, another form of relativism. It's clear that we must defend the persecuted--but what this piece doesn't seem to deal with is how to distinguish the defense of people we disagree with from the obligation of an intellectual to voice disagreement; implying that such disagreement equates to being objectively pro-persecution is an insufficiently rigorous proposition.

Continuing the conversation

2010-03-14T00:26:00.004-05:00

Cross-posted in the comments at DconstructingD; responds to D's comment on this post of mine:

Hmm. We seem to be partly talking past each other. The idea that kids are more civic-minded -- or "a generation of polite, smart, civic-minded Kevin Arnolds", is completely besides the point of my argument. The main problem I have is with people justifying their complaints with "it wasn't like this when I was younger" or some such. Your preferences as a consumer, citizen, etc. are perfectly reasonable and I have no particular issue with the things you named. They may not be my preferences in all cases, or my concerns, but I have zero issue with you having them in itself -- it's the idea that in a past age things were simpler or better or more civil that I take issue with. And not even the simple idea that they may have been -- but rather that arguments that things were better are near-uniformly backed up with, not evidence, but anecdotes, assertions and personal memories. I also find the idea that family life was "simpler" rather than full of different problems to be uncompelling; there are a number of added complexities in today's life, but every generation pretty much has faced more complexity than the previous in certain terms; I don't think we can assert a secular progression in the complexity of family life without defining a lot a lot of terms. The proliferation of information and media don't mean life or relationships were less complicated--for example, there are assuredly certain things in life made more simple by not, for example, owning indentured servants or worrying about slave revolts or attacks by the indigenous peoples. We have a complex war on terror, but don't see armies advancing throughout Europe; we have nuclear proliferation, but the risk of nuclear annhilation seems to have decreased from Cold War brinkmanship. We have venereal diseases, but AIDS is no longer a death sentence.

As far as the civic-mindedness of kids these days, I'm not arguing just from personal experience. There actually are several articles (popular and, I think, scholarly, though I don't feel like searching) that have made this argument; indeed, they made it before I believed it. I was equally skeptical. But my students today are quite different than my students 7 years ago, and much much different than my fellow students when I was in school. I vividly remember in the 90s how completely uncool it was to care about anything. This was clearly different than how the 60s and 70s were portrayed, and certainly, the amount of overt political activity on U of M at least decreased dramatically from the 60s to the 90s. I would argue the 90s were more apathetic than usual; some, and FAR from just me (other faculty, as well as several journalists) have argued the pendulum is swinging the other way. As far as I see it, the jury's out, but this isn't my assertion only, it's a number of people's. And it's certainly plausible -- I think the most likely mechanism is that only a minority of people (or kids) are usually politically active at any juncture in history; in the 60s this minority may have swelled to be more significant; during the 90s I would near guarantee that it decreased; there are signs, far from concrete, that it's back on the rise.

It seems like you and I have been talking past each other in our discussions for months now, I don't know why -- your focus wasn't so much on "kids these days" and insofar as it was it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; my focus wasn't on how kids were objectively better, and I *certainly* never claimed they were uniformly a group of nice Kevin Arnolds (and I firmly remember Dennis the Menace in several incarnations, thank you! :) My larger point is that if one wants to complain about an issue at hand, that's fine and even often laudable/important/necessary; but the assertion that things were better before is both unnecessary and, I think, largely a product of age and not fact. If one wishes to seriously assert that things are qualitatively or quantitatively different, it should require evidence.

My point was that Language Log and other posts have shown that these concerns are perennial, and as they point out in the comments, if it were indeed true that each generation was losing something over the previous generation, then since the complaints heard of insufficient reading and respect to elders in Sumeria, Rome, and Egypt means that, even at some small objective decline of, say, 5% or less per generation, we would now be at approximately 0.01% of the civility or what have you of Rome. The details of whether or not kids or people are more or less civil would require lengthy debate, but I certainly wouldn't argue it's because they're inherently more beneficient--your point that less-racist kids would be a product of their parents' upbringing is, to my mind, clearly a big part of the truth. But the source doesn't affect the existence (or non-existence) of this quality. Kids have mocked each other with racial, sexual, etc. slurs for time immemorial. I don't know that they do it more or less, though perhaps more openly.

Anyway. I don't know why this is the second or third or fourth time we've had a version of a debate where we seem to not be getting each other's points, but I rather enjoyed it more when we were amplifying each other's ideas rather than deconstructing them. It's important to do both, to be sure, but I still prefer the former :) I don't disagree with a number of the things you find bothersome or disturbing, I do on others. As far as this generation, I'm not the first to have thought things are changing among them, nor the only one, and I think the data would back up a change in attitudes, though perhaps not action. I can't make a strong case of this, but as it's based on more than just my own experience, it takes a faint stab at what I'm asking for. I would say that if I wanted to be taken seriously, I need more evidence--just like if I wanted to seriously argue that they are worse. After all, things *do* change, I just think it occasionally behooves us to define what we think is changing and back it up.

Occasionally, but not always, and especially not if the point we're (or you're) making is really something else :)

More evidence for a pet theory of "Kids Today"

2010-03-13T14:58:00.003-05:00

Language Log has a nice bit on the "kids today"/"decline of civilization" trope that consistently gets my goat. (Similar J posts can be found here and, less directly parallel, here.

J-fave & friend D has been on this trope recently, to my mild peevitude.

I'm not sure why this trope annoys me so much, other than perhaps because it seems like a so relativism-laden "my perspective is the objectively correct one" type of attitude. While it can be a source of commiseration, it's also sometimes sallied forth like a prophetic warning. And it is not, of course, that things can't get worse or perhaps haven't gotten worse, but I think it's intellectually incomplete to simply say "Things/Kids/Civilization Is Going To Hell"; Jon Stewart said one of the wisest things I've heard in popular discourse years ago, pointing out to (either Bernard Goldberg or Rick Santorum) that for all the "negative" directions in culture -- violence on TV, swearing, etc. etc. -- it is simply *not OK* to be a racist. You cannot be openly, blatantly racist and a major mainstream public figure--there are certain things that are not OK to say, that were 20, 40, 60 years ago (to say nothing of the sainted times of our blessed and perfect in every way Mary Poppins-like Founding Fathers); there is no de jure, legal segregation, Jim Crow, while still with us in legacy, is not with us in poll taxes or the nearly 5,000 lynchings and racially-motivated murders between 1865 and 1965. As I said on D's page,

"The fact that they used *different* words to curse at people 100 years ago doesn't mean they were more *polite* words. And certainly no one has been caned on the floor of the Senate in a while. Nor has their been a fucking duel between congressmen. Nor are racial epithets, many of which used to be fine in every day speech, acceptable any longer, a huge step FORWARD in my mind. We are, if anything, more civil -- no one has called me "boy" because I was black in my life. I'd say that's plus 1,000,000 points; I'll deduct 100 for inappropriate [placement of the word] "shit" [in an ad that D saw].

The theory I posed years ago, and feel like is increasingly vindicated, is that when people complain of the conditions of youth, civilization, etc. today, they aren't comparing civilization today vs. civilization before, they're comparing their adult perception of civilization vs. their childhood perception of civilization. Of COURSE things were simpler when you were a kid -- to you! Because -- YOU. WERE. A. KID. Don't confuse this with the world actually being materially simpler or different. For example, I believe (though am not going to look for the stats to show) that the "Roaring 20s" had the highest murder rate in US history; there has certainly always been sex out of wedlock, VDs, war, incivility, swearing, porn, violence, etc. This is not to say the rates of all these things have been constant--they clearly haven't--but nor have they been linearly increasing. Some things, like swearing, one has to look at the language used and what was considered indecent when, but you can see people being chided for salty language in Shakespeare's plays and no doubt before that; we didn't invent naughty words nor their overuse, just because *different* words are naughty now. Kids have always, always been seen as not respectful enough to their parents it seems, so to establish this as a fact and not a cranky complaint takes far more effort than any person who's ever said "Kids these days" in my earshot. And like I mentioned, open racism has simply become verboten--surely a nearly unalloyed improvement, if one that is vastly insufficient compared to actually coming to an end of racism (especially its institutional manifestation). Long story short, some things may be worse, others better, but 99.9999 times out of 100, I'll bet you it's because the world SEEMED simpler when you were a kid because you were a freaking kid; you hadn't been exposed to (if you were lucky) the worst that humankind can muster, or the full wages of every day disdain, incivility, and a lack of an regular, caring space (i.e. parents/family). Whether you were poor and lived simply or had a life of quiet elegance in Greenwich, you hadn't seen very much of the world, had you? So let's be careful about comparing how the world seemed to you then and how it seems now; making any grand pronouncements thereof in reality should be a grand research undertaking (UNLESS, you just want to be cranky -- which is completely fine, I like to be sometimes myself, but don't confuse it with having an accurate bead on the world).

Anyway, the Language Log entry as well as the customarily excellent LL comment area is well worth reading on the topic of Kids Today.

J Signs on to Captain Plaid's Manifesto

2010-03-03T00:34:00.004-05:00

J-fave Captain Plaid has briefly returned from his hiatus to lay out why he is (and what is) a "propservralist".

I pretty much sign on to his points without comment; I'm sure I could find things to disagree with, with world enough and time, but his points, on the whole, I find near divine. So why bother? I spend enough of my time disagreeing with things as it is.

He's threatened to take it down, so barring a cease and desist from the ornery Scot himself, here is the pertinent post:

So here’s my first post in what seems like forever. I'd like to think I can do decent work as evidenced by other posts but this one is long, scattered about, likely full of spelling and grammar errors, hardly clear, etc. Still, for the time being, it will have to suffice. I might remove, or even amend, so grab it if you want to keep it and of course please do feel free to offer comments here or via facebook/johngunn or twitter/juntogunto or email at johnralphgunn@gmail.com or …

I've used "propservralist" at times to describe how I’m politically geared. Although it is a work on progress, which should be very much refined, I offer the following as a stream of consciousness summary:

I'm proudly PRogressive and find the idea of taking on problems via legislation and regulation a most rational response.

o I like the idea of letting technocrats and experts nail down ideas yet for the average voter this policy wonk gearing isn't very attractive. Frankly, the US has a very anti-intellectual tradition and some have learned to use this to their advantage. Public policy, the common good, planning, regulation … has been demonized all too much in this last four or so decades. I believe information must be made available to the populace and yet also can accept that “leaders” may at times be required to make decisions the masses may resent.

o I favor a Progressive tax system where taxes are minimal on the least among us and shift gradually upward so that percentage paid increases on the margins above a certain level. I don’t want to go back to 90% marginal rates yet I don’t see that much difference between say 33% to upwards of 40 or even 50%. If you don’t understand what “marginal” means in the above please do a little digging or ask someone to explain.

o I also don’t see why we should allow many multi-nationals and the most affluent to often avoid taxes via offshoring, accounting gimmicks, and the like. I highly recommend David Cay Johnston’s “Free Lunch” and “Perfectly Legal” to see how some game our systems. We can use tax policy to accomplish goals, reward, incentivize … but let’s demand accountability for results and use a “claw back” if and when goals aren’t met.

o Sunshine, open meetings, transparency … are must haves. I can distrust big gov’t as much as Big Biz. The worst of any arrangement is Crony Capitalism.

o I want whistleblowers protected and even rewarded.

o I believe information must be made available to the populace and yet also can see when the grownups must make the decisions for the masses.

o I expect some apathy comes from inadequate education, perceived powerlessness, unsatisfactory alternatives to getting involved, insufficient information, the costs of gaining more knowledge (I’m a big fan of Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy” ideas), and simply an unjust status quo.

o I’m very much in favor of government subsidies to be provided to journalists doing public service, fourth-estate, type work. Without a well-informed citizenry that a vigorous press provides democracy won’t work. The current model is folding and the consequences can’t be denied. Watchdogs must be fed. In fact, the care and feeding of young folks and even the more seasoned doing work that can’t be measured by the bottom line of business is something we could do a much better job at as a society.

o Government exists to provide individuals and their families and communities with a chance to live their own lives in dignity. It can also allow them to form relationships with others free from the hand of powerful public and private forces.

I am pOPulist in that I can't help but think bottom up.

o I believe the common man must always confront the powerful interests which often do in fact hold him down.

o You don’t ask for power but rather you take it.

o I worry that the “tea party” types are stealing our mojo here. Some groups tap into fear and frustration easily but the Left left that approach decades ago. The Conservatives (“Cons” hereafter) have learned to reach our lizard brains where the ancient limbic parts respond to threats, emotions, etc. all too well.

o The recent months have seen a revival of “producerism” that worries me however. While some poor are sorry and hardly do their part, I’d argue most do. Working with the poor can be incredibly frustrating yet we’ve hardly invested enough in social work and related fields since the so called “War on Poverty” back during the 60s. We couldn’t have “guns and butter” LBJ. I’ve read persuasive pieces that it was a false war and a drop in the bucket to transform generational poverty.

o I am convinced being a scrapper is necessary in politics, perhaps especially in the South. I like the label “economic elite” as frankly many have obtained the point where they can buy media, PR, marketing, and the like.

o "Fascism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, persecution of unpopular minorities, exaltation of the mediocre and romantic exaggeration of the wisdom and virtue of the masses" are all possible outcomes of populism. Suspicion of elites has a long history here.

o The idea of broader economic growth doesn’t I’d argue make me a Communist.

o A focus on individual civil liberties, private property, popular sovereignty and democratic republican government is what nearly every populism effort has been built off of.

o Labor can work with biz. Free enterprise on steroids, namely neo-liberalism, however is often just a race to the bottom.

o Today's laissez faire is not as Adam Smith envisioned. I’ve been reading some Smith lately and he’d howl at how many of his ideas have been bastardized.

o Popular culture and popular will have a role to play in this process, but only after sufficient education and only after their more passionate elements have been diverted and diffused. Popular anger and uneducated public sentiments are more likely to lead to hasty and irrational judgments. The conflict of elitism in Progressivism and the popular will in Populism is certain.

o I believe it’s generally a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. The way the modern Cons have privatized pretty much everything, the opportunity to profit from making war is hardly just for those selling weaponry. When Eisenhower left office, he warned us of a Military-Industrial Complex but many don’t know an earlier draft also had Intelligence as part of the mix.

I am conSERVative in the sense that I tend to be cautious and greatly respect traditions. Please note some of the following is placed here simply because many of the Cons have managed to make people think these are “Conservative” ideas.

o I can be a bit of an Agrarian at times. Jeffersonian ideas remain rather attractive to me and simplicity from being near the land is likely how I’d like to wind up my days. Hope springs eternal at least.

o I personally find caring for our environment very much a conservative trait.

o Many of the Conservatives I knew long ago wouldn’t recognize today's movement conservatism types. Many of them were more Libertarian geared and I just don’t think they’d fall for the likes of those occupying positions of power in today’s GOP. Then again, the powers that be in the Democratic Party would be run out of town on a rail by many silenced or ignored hippies like yours truly.

o And while I am attracted to Libertarianism personally, I don’t think it will work that well for such an interdependent world. If you want to go Galt, truly it’s possible. Go right ahead. I bet most would make it less than a year in the Gulch. Just don’t take the balance of the world with you involuntarily as you go off into Randian fantasy land please.

o Neighbors, small businesses, local focus and control, …, if they are Conservative valued ideas, which I’m not certain they are, are certainly fine by me.

o As late as the Nixon administration, the provision of public goods by government was considered perfectly compatible with a market economy. Since then, free-market fundamentalists have largely changed and mastered the debate.

I am libeRAL as I believe humanity can advance.

o Our civil liberties must be protected. No exceptions!

o I believe in the power of law. She’s not perfect and I’ve seen injustices, often related to power and poverty frankly. I’m very concerned with the burrowed in Federalist Society sorts on benches across this land. Our Alabama Supreme Court is largely bought and paid for by the Business Council of Alabama and other Big Mules like Alfa. The Court of Criminal Appeals used to be rather hostile to defense lawyers and I know for a fact they dodged a serious question I once raised in a brief.

o Lockean libertarians who recognize the need for social insurance and regulation were once celebrated yet are now having rocks thrown at them.

o I favor same-sex marriages or at least civil unions. Discrimination can hardly be tolerated as to a person’s sexual orientation.

o I had a person once tell me liberals believe people are inherently good. I'm not sure I buy that yet I do think many are. On some of the laggards, ignorant, … I occasionally think of how I used to work with critters by making it easy for them to do the right thing. Policies to prod, channel, and the like are OK for me but then again just help and a hug work on the face to face work I try to do. I know for a fact I helped some kids I taught or have known and likely could have done more if carrying a fair work load and able to really teach and represent.

o Education is an investment. We ought to be proud to spend money for our future generations.

o Clinton’s welfare “reform” sounded perhaps good on paper and was a winner politically yet only a booming economy avoided a train wreck. The costs of having those babies being taken from their mothers so she could do some type of “make work” is hard to measure but I bet there were and are costs.

I'm a pragmatIST in just getting stuff done.

o I can accept the projection of military power can be persuasive and useful in many, many areas yet hardly think we need the footprint we currently have. We can’t afford it. It’s not our job alone. Finally, our national interests do not justify invading or even threatening a sovereign country absent some rather certain and serious threats. Hegemony sends the wrong signals to many in the world.

o Weapons manufacturers and profiteers love war so we’ve a duty to be cautious with our treasure but certainly blood.

o I certainly think alliances, cooperation, treaties, diplomacy, intelligence, etc. aren’t incompatible with national security.

o The religious right annoys the hell out of me. Their abstinence only sex education” is just one disaster. Kids can have their parents opt them out but let’s let the average kid hear the whole story please.

o For someone to impose their morality into another’s personal life is just wrong.

o I have a healthy skepticism of government and authority.

o I worry about climate change and think the science sound. Even if not, what do “we” really have to lose to shift away from a carbon based economy sooner rather than later?

o I think reflexively anti-government libertarianism yield a lack of investment in badly-needed public capital (schools, infrastructure, etc.) and vulnerable to Big Biz. We can’t run a country, state, city “on the cheap” but can certainly demand smart spending with limited waste.

I also like stirring stuff up, bitching, confronting conventional wisdom, challenging authority, reading, studying, pondering, etc. I am perfectly prepared to change my mind. I hope I am not an ideologue. My ideal politicians are those like Russ Feingold and Chuck Hagel. I like Anthony Weiner, Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, etc. I do not support term limits. More to follow but I’m done for now. Except for this quote:

“When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.” - Abraham Kuyper

Peace, John

I found a "copy and paste" portion that I can't track down now. I blended some old stuff and apparently let something slip by. I'll tweak as I have time.

--Captain Plaid: Progressivism meets an Ornery Scot

CNN's shameful, ahistorical condescension on Haiti: A colleague retorts

2010-01-17T13:47:00.003-05:00

J-Friend Kathy McAfee wrote the following, trying to put the problems in government, organization and institutions in Haiti in context, contra mainstream bashing of Haiti and, tangentially, the UN. (The post she was specifically responding to is reprinted as well, after her piece.)

(It is worth noting that Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere, is one of the two prime examples of what might be called "The Monroe Doctrine Inverse Relationship Between US Intervention and Country Welfare", as Haiti is one of the places the US has had the most direct intervention. Another country with a long history of US intervention, Nicaragua, is the second poorest country in the hemisphere. While some treat this as an example of the determination of poor people to resist reform or the hopelessness of any aid model, I think it's rather damning evidence of the true wages and intentions of US intervention--both Nicaragua and Haiti have had democratically elected leaders effectively vetoed by the US; see my earlier posts that dealt with similar topics.)

----------------------
"Friends: An incensed listserve comment quoted CNN's knee-jerk bashing of the UN via the conjectures of network action-figure prototype Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

>>Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after United Nations officials ordered a medical team to evacuate the area out of security concerns, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta reported.... :<<
This is my response, trying to widen the perspective. Probably somebody with more recent and intimate knowledge of Haitian politics could write (and has done) something better. If you've written or seen something good, please forward.

Kathy McAfee
----------------------

Although Gupta admitted he wasn't sure why, by whom, or to where the medical staff were being relocated, it's possible that he was right in this case. But let's not take CNN coverage at face value.

Like most US media competing for ratings from this catastrophe, albeit with sympathy for the victims, CNN's version of reality is unencumbered by any knowledge of present or past Haitian reality. Intentionally or not, Cooper's portrayal of Gupta as US lone hero, his interview with US general Honoré, and the inference of his constant question, "Why are our (US-military) efforts to get aid where it's needed still blocked?" adds to the UN-bashing and US adulation that is standard CNN fare.

In contrast to other Roland Hedleys, Cooper takes a stab at context. For instance, his explanation of the landslide linked to deforestation cites tree-cutting for charcoal, which does occur, but his subtext is that Haitians at least partially brought their troubles upon themselves. There's no mention of two centuries' shipping of tropical hardwoods to Europe or of Haiti's huge post-colonial payments to compensate France for loss of slave plantations, or the long international embargo of the country as punishment for the first successful back independence struggle.

Like other networks and op ed pundits, CNN reporters refer to Haiti's extreme material poverty despite, they say, a history of US efforts to "help". None have any sense of whom was actually helped by the 1915-35 US occupation (US & French banks, agribusiness, and the small Haitian elite), US support of Duvalier and other dictators (same beneficiaries, plus sweat-shop owners), the US aid & trade policies that undermined staple food production and created dependence on US rice exports, or US-backed neoliberal "adjustment" loan conditions and deliberate, ongoing undermining of the imperfect but legitimate Aristide and Preval governments by the US government and the Clinton Foundation.

US media now depict Haiti as a non-society with a non-government. Cooper keeps glancing over his shoulder in fear of the mass panic he says he expects, Other networks have gone out of their way to find evidence or report rumors of "looting", fighting over supplies, price gouging, and violence, occasionally punctuated by tales of "miracle" rescues, usually involving somebody from the US. Bill O'Reilly, having described Haitian society as "lawless" and entirely "run by gangs", was frustrated when Fox's on-the ground reporters refused to follow his script, pointing instead to food being distributed by Haitians, their impressive efforts to dig people from the rubble, and the amazing dignity and calm the wounded, thirsty, and distraught masses filling the street and parks.

Pat Robertson's claim that Haitian's are being punished for the "deal with Satan" that enabled them to overthrow their French masters doesn't deserve comment. But even Fox couldn't outdo David Brooks, conservative "dean of DC columnists", who reminded NY Times readers that poverty such as Haiti's cannot be cured and is no way caused, lessened, or worsened by any US or other policies. Brooks wrote, citing Samuel Huntington, that the real problem is Haitians themselves: Haiti's "progress-resistant" culture, with its "voodoo religion", "social mistrust", failure to internalize responsibility, and neglectful "child-rearing practices, is the underlying cause of Haiti's tragedy.

Meanwhile, thousands of brave and generous Haitian and internationalists are doing what needs to be done, and we can help. For now, Partners in Health/ Zanmi Lasante, largely Haitian-run, seems to be one of the best-positioned, experienced, and trustworthy sources of emergency aid, so that's where my too-small donation has gone. Later, we can return to solidarity support for the indigenous Haitian organizations that have determinedly been building social strength from below and fighting the legacy of isolation and exploitation from abroad.

-------------
To: Retort
Via: BT

16.i.10

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after United Nations officials ordered a medical team to evacuate the area out of security concerns, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta reported....

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday that the world body's mission in Haiti did not order any medical team to leave the Port-au-Prince field hospital. If the team left, it was at the request of their own organizations, he told CNN.

Gupta assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little he could do without supplies. And more people, some in critical condition, were trickling in. Gupta monitored patients' vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition.

"I've never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous," Gupta said.

He reported that the doctors and nurses began returning Saturday morning.

Search and rescue must trump security. ...They need to man up and get back in there.

With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti's capital, ambulances had no where else to take patients, some who had suffered severe trauma -- amputations and head injuries -- under the rubble. Others had suffered a great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the clinic.

Gupta feared that some would not survive the night.

He and his television crew stayed with the injured all night, long after the medical team had left, long after the generators gave out and the tents turned pitch black.

At 3:45 a.m., he posted a message on Twitter: "pulling all nighter at haiti field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable. turned my crew into a crack med team tonight."

There have been scattered reports of violence throughout the capital. Gupta said the Belgian doctors did not want to leave their patients behind but were ordered out by the United Nations, which sent buses to transport them.

"There is concern about riots not far from here -- and this is part of the problem," Gupta said.

"What is striking to me as a physician is that patients who just had surgery, patients who are critically ill are essentially being left here, nobody to care for them," Gupta said.

Sandra Pierre, a Haitian who has been helping at the makeshift hospital, said the medical staff took most of the supplies with them.

"All the doctors, all the nurses are gone," she said. "They are expected to be back tomorrow. They had no plan on leaving tonight. It was an order that came suddenly."

She told Gupta, "It's just you."

Gupta sent out another tweet before dawn:
"5a update. we lost all generator power. sun will come up in about 30 minutes. now confident we will get all these patients through the night"

Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, lacked adequate medical resources even before the disaster and has been struggling this week to tend to huge numbers of injured. The U.N. clinic, set up under several tents, was a godsend to the few who were lucky to have been brought there.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was unforgivable.

"We can't be leaning so much toward security that we allow people to die," he said Saturday.

"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said Friday night. "I've never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there."

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.

"I find this astonishing these doctors left," he said. "People are scared of the poor."

--
Kathleen McAfee
International Relations
San Francisco State University

Bill Maher (6/19/09): "We have a Center-Right Party and a Crazy Party... Democrats are the new Republicans"

2010-01-11T14:26:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite rants from Maher since "Bush should just carry around an actual straw man with him to argue with. 'I believe in doing whatever it takes to keep America safe -- Straw Man here, nothing!'" (On the same show, Gloria Steinem I believe made the pithy comment "There are two kinds of people in the world: those that divide people into two groups, and those that don't.")

Anyway: Maher rants about the need for a "first party" and critiques Democrats and the lack of coverage of liberals/progressives in the MSM. And when he says "These aren't radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended," it's not a liberal fantasy. See for example, part of my discussion with J-fave Becky here and the linked report I discuss in it on actual American public priorities here. (See also this post.)

Maher:

Last week in this space, I criticized President Obama for not fighting corporate influence enough, and it made some Liberals very angry. My phone rang off the hook.
...
As far as you folks on the Right that think that we're somehow in league --- we're not in league! I was criticizing Obama for not being hard enough on the corporate douche bags you live to defend. I don't wanna be on your team. Pick another kid.

So I stand by my words. But there is another side to the story. And that is, that every time Obama tries to take on a Progressive cause, there's a major political party standing in his way --- the Democrats.
...
We don't need a third party, we need a first party. You go to the polls and your choices are the guy who voted for the first Wall Street bailout, or the guy who voted for the next ten.

We don't have a Left and a Right party in this country anymore. We have a center-Right party and a crazy party. And over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the Right, and the Right has moved into a mental hospital.

So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby --- that's the Democrats.

And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers, and Civil War re-enacters...who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans. And who actually worry that Obama is a Socialist. Socialist? He's not even a Liberal. I know he's not, because he's on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don't see actual Liberals. And if occassionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or Dennis Kucinich, they're treated like buffoons.
...

Shouldn't there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military party? A party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the right, universal healthcare, legalizing pot and steep direct taxing of polluters?

These aren't radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual Progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren't being served by the Democrats. Because, bottom line, Democrats are the new Republicans.

h/t to BradBlog.

"Three Approved GMO's Linked to Organ Damage" -- the Serálini group returns

2010-01-09T15:57:00.002-05:00

Repost from Truthout.org:
Three Approved GMO's Linked to Organ Damage

Friday 08 January 2010

by: Rady Ananda, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: InertiaCreeps; Edited: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

In what is being described as the first ever and most comprehensive study of the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers have linked organ damage with consumption of Monsanto's GM maize.

All three varieties of GM corn - Mon 810, Mon 863 and NK 603 - were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities. Made public by European authorities in 2005, Monsanto's confidential raw data of its 2002 feeding trials on rats that these researchers analyzed is the same data, ironically, that was used to approve them in different parts of the world.

The Committee of Research and Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN) and Universities of Caen and Rouen studied Monsanto's 90-day feeding trials data of insecticide-producing Mon 810, Mon 863 and Roundup® herbicide absorbing NK 603 varieties of GM maize.

The data "clearly underlines adverse impacts on kidneys and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, as well as different levels of damages to heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system," reported Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen.

Although different levels of adverse impact on vital organs were noticed between the three GMO's, the 2009 research shows specific effects associated with consumption of each GMO, differentiated by sex and dose.

Their December 2009 study appears in the International Journal of Biological Sciences (IJBS). This latest study conforms with a 2007 analysis by CRIIGEN on Mon 863, published in Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, using the same data.

Monsanto rejected the 2007 conclusions, stating:

"The analyses conducted by these authors are not consistent with what has been traditionally accepted for use by regulatory toxicologists for analysis of rat toxicology data."

[Also see Doull J, Gaylor D, Greim HA, et al. "Report of an expert panel on the reanalysis by Séralini et al. (2007) of a 90-day study conducted by Monsanto in support of the safety of a genetically modified corn variety (MON 863)." Food Chem Toxicol. 2007; 45:2073-2085.]

In an email to me, Séralini explained that their study goes beyond Monsanto's analysis by exploring the sex-differentiated health effects on mammals, which Doull, et al, ignored:

"Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMO's, or not proportional to the dose. This is a very serious mistake, dramatic for public health. This is the major conclusion revealed by our work, the only careful reanalysis of Monsanto crude statistical data."

Other Problems With Monsanto's Conclusions

When testing for drug or pesticide safety, the standard protocol is to use three mammalian species. The subject studies only used rats, yet won GMO approval in more than a dozen nations.

Chronic problems are rarely discovered in 90 days; most often such tests run for up to two years. Tests "lasting longer than three months give more chances to reveal metabolic, nervous, immune, hormonal or cancer diseases," wrote Seralini, et al, in their Doull rebuttal. [See "How Subchronic and Chronic Health Effects Can Be Neglected for GMO's, Pesticides or Chemicals." IJBS; 2009; 5(5):438-443.]

Further, Monsanto's analysis compared unrelated feeding groups, muddying the results. The June 2009 rebuttal explains, "In order to isolate the effect of the GM transformation process from other variables, it is only valid to compare the GMO … with its isogenic non-GM equivalent."

The researchers conclude that the raw data from all three GMO studies reveal novel pesticide residues will be present in food and feed and may pose grave health risks to those consuming them.

They have called for "an immediate ban on the import and cultivation of these GMO's and strongly recommend additional long-term (up to two years) and multi-generational animal feeding studies on at least three species to provide true scientifically valid data on the acute and chronic toxic effects of GM crops, feed and foods."

Human health, of course, is of primary import to us, but ecological effects are also in play. Ninety-nine percent of GMO crops either tolerate or produce insecticide. This may be the reason we see bee colony collapse disorder and massive butterfly deaths. If GMO's are wiping out Earth's pollinators, they are far more disastrous than the threat they pose to humans and other mammals.

Further Reading:

Health Risks of GM Foods, Jeffrey M. Smith.

Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops, Union of Concerned Scientists.

Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years, The Organic Center.

More Thoughts Popping In For a Mo'

2009-12-26T14:06:00.005-05:00

A childhood friend is a sustainability consultant, I noticed recently. My friend and officemate's sister is in the joint business-Natural Resources program at University of Michigan. There are many arguments for why and how corporations must be involved in sustainability, and indeed they must be. However, I do not think they will like it--I can see no way that sustainability can be achieved without lowering consumption. From my time at a Fortune 500 company, I saw that their goals year-on-year were not just growth of the company, but increased rate of growth. That is, "This year we grew 5%; next year's goal is to grow 7% with a 'stretch goal' of 9%." As a recovering engineer, I thought this odd, as something growing at increasing rates is often called an explosion, and is to be avoided. And in any case, since I do think we are consuming much, much more than is sustainable, the only remedy for that is to consume less. Efficiency is not going to get us there -- we'll just be consuming too much more efficiently. Especially since efficiency gains are almost always overtaken by overall increases in consumption. If you increase efficiency by 5% but sell 10% more products, well, you've done pretty much nothing for sustainability.

I don't see any consultancies or other very market/business-oriented advice figuring out sustainable ways to decrease consumption--here I mean economic sustainability. I'm sure it can be done, but this is the challenge before us, at least those most concerned with corporate sustainability. We are going to need negative growth--and while theoretically that could be done while profits increase, it almost certainly won't be--decreasing consumption and proper internalization of externalized costs -- i.e. costs to the environment, to society, placed on us by companies that don't pay the full costs of their economic activities -- would both tend to rather decrease profits. I am certain this can be done while raising quality of life for many people (mainly people who have low quality of life, not those who already consume well and waaaaay above their "fair share" of resources), but when some people consume too much, some too little, and on the total the system is unsustainable, re-distribution is really the only game in town in terms of sustainability and justice. I haven't seen much talk of any of these things -- especially, say, within COP15 type circles -- which is why I view most of them as unserious in terms of actually helping avert continued and growing disasters for both humanity and our environment around us.

Related readings:

The Local Politics of Global Sustainability (Prugh, Costanza & Daly, a pivotal book in my own intellectual development)

Steady State Economics:

The environmental consequences of growth: steady-state economics as an alternative to ecological decline (Booth);
Steady-State Economics (Daly, the foundational text);
Ecological economics and sustainable development, selected essays by Herman Daly (Daly; duh)

Carbon trading (especially pertinent now):

Carbon Trading: A Critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power (Lohmann, Hällström, Nordberg and Österbergh, editors; available online here and highly recommended);
Lohmann can be seen and read on Democracy Now! here from their December 15 show;
More from Lohmann at his home institution The Corner House);
A shorter reading on the topic from Michael Dorsey here,
And a debate with Dorsey and Dirk Forrister here, though I'm told Dorsey was not nearly as critical of Forrister as he is clearly capable of being.

In Other News

2009-12-26T13:00:00.004-05:00

Back in my blog's primary activity (increasingly unfortunately I think), reading and criticizing Slate, this article ("Saying No to Obama: The U.S. president is popular, but world leaders are finding it easy to defy his wishes" by Shmuel Rosner) is not particularly worth reading, but that it produces a pretty damned good Fray response from Mutatis Mutandis. Highlight:

It is hard to say what the right course of action is, but Obama seems far more reticent and hesitant than a president with a majority in both chambers ought to be, even allowing for his need to find a strong majority for health care reform. I think it is time to seriously question whether Obama's interpretation of bipartisanship is wise. The US political system is an adversarial system, with distinct roles for majority and minority.

Read the rest here.

In COMPLETELY other news, aka Now for Something More Completely Different:
A montage of funny clips about supervillain weaponry, that, for some reason, popped into my head:

"You take that away and you are looking at a bunch of pissed off nutbags with ray guns and giant, I don't know, a giant octopus-slash-tank with laser eyes."
"I've seen one of those."
"I like the cut of this guy's jib."
"I like the cut of his hair."

And of course, the classic:

Race in America: Part the Next, A Partial Response to D

2009-12-26T12:02:00.002-05:00

Continuing this conversation: Race in America: D responding to J responding to D

Wherein D owns what she says, smooths D-Fave J's ruffled feathers, and elaborates, possibly inciting deeper discussion or perhaps further division.

Sayings: owned. Feathers: unsmoothed. Further discussion: imminent. Further division: unknown.

(from my previous post): "Wow. I'm kind of surprised to read this from you at this point, D."

Ok, I'm just gonna say this. This sort sounds like I'm your pet project and I backslid or something. Am I supposed to be sorry for my comments? You should know by now that there is almost always deeper thinking behind my ideas. Rather than shame or disappoint one another, let's get right to them... [some time later] My culture is not the caricature that Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock present to great comedic effect. White America is not Buffy and Chip upset because their tee-time was pushed back half an hour because Obama's motorcade was going through town. Sure, the comedy is in the way white people are ignorant to their incredible privilege and have wackaloon ideas about what it means to be put out, but when this is the pole that I have to swing from, how can I be allowed to have a real voice in the race discussion? It has been my experience (and here I mean ME as an individual) that I am not allowed, outside of our conversations, to be taken seriously in any meaningful public discussion about race. Unless, of course, I concede to the default POC position. And in some ways, J, isn't that what your response to me tried to get me to do?

Horsehockey. This point is one that's repeatedly had my blood pressure rising. You have every right to your voice, to your process, to your indignation at caricature. And in no way was my response an attempt to get you to concede the "default" POC position (which would be questionable anyway because such a default is as contested as anything else one may care to name, and any given person of color you may talk to may have a different default). I wasn't present at these other conversations, so I can't characterize what happened there. But my response was critical and disappointed because I freaking WAS critical and disappointed. Does my mere reaction (or expression of it) deprive you of your voice? Does my disappointment in our difference in point of view mean I'm engaged in a ploy to "shame you" into line? I do see your point here, or think I do: you don't want your perspective to be sidelined or undermined by emotional valences attempting to get you to give up your point of view out of guilt, rather than engaging you on the points and convincing you, or failing to, on the logic. All well and good. But you hardly shy from expressing your emotions, clearly and strongly, on your own blog, and even when I feel somewhat besieged by a disagreement between us, I don't presume you're trying to undermine me with an end-run around logic. I felt disappointed in your perspective; maybe I'm wrong to, but I thought I understood you and you me better than this at this point, and I was surprised to read these viewpoints from you, that I've heard many times from others before and that I find disappointing. I may have been wrong every time up to and including now to be disappointed, but I don't think expressing it is an attempt to make you fall in line. It's just expressing what I feel. Whether or not you should be sorry begs the question entirely; I wasn't thinking about you, to be honest, when I said that, but about me: it was how I felt. Surprised. Because "at this point" I thought I understood where you were coming from better than I apparently do, and I didn't think we'd be having a conversation in this way on these points because, like I say, I've heard variations of what you say for years. And usually such a conversation takes place before the types of conversations you and I have had have been, um, had.

I can see how that might sound condescending, or shaming, but it's also true. And except that we have a personal relationship (that doesn't extend to having met in person =} and I don't think you have one of the same kind with the Field Negro) I don't see how my comments are different, and certainly aren't worse in emotional valence, than when you say of him "I have learned a great deal from the field and respect him immensely, I think this idea (if indeed he actually believes it) is preposterously naive." You do hedge it because you don't think he believes his own theory, or rather, that if he does perhaps it is more in the service of rabble-rousing than serious inquiry, but you surely know as well that HE "almost always deeper thinking behind [his] ideas." This applies even if his theory is serious rather than simply provocative. (I do wonder if you've taken this point up with him on his blog, I'd be eager to learn how he responds.) To briefly light on the relevant point from Field, as you summarize it, "That the black power elite are neither powerful nor elite because the real white power elite can jack-slap them back out to the fields the first time they forget their place. He usually suggests this idea after a powerful black person has fucked up royally... He violates common rules of logic when he applies his pet theory not to the broader community of high-achieving black professionals, but only to those who have fallen from grace." Insofar as I agree with this point, which is at least somewhat far, I would say it's true if stated differently. "The black power elite are neither [as] powerful nor [as] elite [because the risks, penalties to them when they do fuck up are much higher, at higher stakes than the white power elite]." This may or may not be true, but I hardly think it naive, and it doesn't violate rules of logic. If you command equal power to other elite, but only in a restricted set of circumstances -- that is, your power is equal in amplitude but much more tenuous and less stable and reliable -- than in a real way, you are less powerful. Now, one can argue many elements of that formulation, but I happen to think it's largely true. Whether or not this is the specific case of Tiger is rather like arguing whether or not Hurricane Katrina was specifically caused by Global Warming -- a direct correlation with the individual event may not be possible or valid, but it can be seen to fit into the pattern one would expect from the actions of the larger phenomenon.

Anyway. There is more to say, but I feel like we already have much to talk about. This is really a better conversation had over drinks I think--maybe we can do so some time and tape it for re-distribution on the respective blogs. There are too many nagging points, clarifications to be made, reconsidered, and remade to be an easy conversation taking place through large passages of writing, where seemingly the suite of points to be analyzed just grows continuously anyway.

(This is part of the reason I've been reluctant to return; it seems like one of those conversations like getting tangled in parachute silk, it just gets the more tangled the more you move. For example, when I try to deal with this: "I would suggest that white people are forbidden from giving explicit thought to race--at least since the 1960s. Sure, as a group, white America has a lot to make up for after 150 years of cross-burnings, lynchings, fire bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, water hosing of freedom marchers, George Wallace attempting to prevent the integration of the U of Alabama, and promotion testing that favors white applicants. I am the first to admit that white America showed its ass. But that doesn't mean we should have to give up our voice entirely. If anyone, anywhere tries to stand up and say something about the white race these days, they are labeled a Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist as a matter of course." Is so far from comporting with my experience as to be hard to rationally address. I'm surrounded by white people who give explicit thought to race; you can read white people giving explicit thought to race in any of our nation's major publications; you can see it happening in classrooms I myself have taught and attended. Talking about "the white race" may be fraught, but I have never personally been present where a black person tries to shut someone down for saying it. It's a squeamish topic, it's one someone may be attacked for, but being attacked for your point of view in no way counts as not having a voice. Attempts to shut someone down by guilting them, criticizing them, even defaming them may make people dread to speak, but is emphatically not denying them a voice. The first and latter are, of course, not cricket, but to imply that these tactics are limited to use against those who speak of a "white race" is simply incorrect. And I would further maintain that it's not the concept of a white race which is viewed as sketchy, but rather the phrase "the white race," because of its associations with, say, neo-Nazism. Well, unfortunate connotations also don't constitute an unfair tactic by themselves.

To try to get back to big picture, what I'm trying to say is that I don't doubt you've had experiences where people have tried to guilt, shame, restrict, and condescend to you rather than addressing your actual points. However, in comparison, my experience has been that such worries have almost always been exclusively internal in conversations I've been present for. That is, white people worry about being seen in a negative light, or guilted, shamed, or unreasonably dealt with for expressing honest opinions, but never have I seen a black person in a conversation such as this try to do any of these things. There is simply an uncomfortableness and lack of easy ability to communicate; having a voice doesn't mean having a voice that doesn't require being uncomfortable. I can believe your experiences are different; that doesn't make them more, or less, representative than mine.

Race in America: J's Manties in a Bunch, responding to D

2009-12-10T14:44:00.006-05:00

This post responds to a post by J-Fave Daktari here.

Wherein I kind of lose it a little bit, and hope that it's still clear that I hold D in the utmost regard, it's just an issue that got my goat, and then got my goat's panties in a bunch. --J

Wow. I'm kind of surprised to read this from you at this point, D. Sooooo many things. I agree with you that Carmen VK's racial identification is imprecise, but racial identification is by nature (as you point out) imprecise. Many, many countries have considered themselves to be races unto themselves, and they can't be said to be wrong any more than they're right.

"There have been times when I have thought that these shifting ideas about what to call POC was merely a way to prevent white Americans from having any sort of voice in the race discussion. As long as you can shout down the majority group by making them feel prejudiced for daring to open their mouths, you own the direction and tenor of the discussion. Bad form, I say."

My jaw HIT the floor here. Let us say, at best, I think you over-estimate the extent to which "People of Color" think/care about what the majority does. That is, while "proper" identity terms have been at times used quite certainly to make others feel prejudiced, I would basically scream out loud that that is not why they were developed. They were developed, in my educated amateur-ish opinion, because after black Americans finally got a fucking VOTE in what we would be called by majority culture, which was only 40+ years ago, we had and have trouble figuring out what it should be. It shifts constantly as we try to find our identity constantly, and debate what we want to emphasize, own, spurn, celebrate, face up to in terms of the willy-nilly thing that is "black culture" in the US. Race, and culture, are impossible to precisely define, but I would definitely say there is a "pole" around which the African-American/black culture centers, and a "pole" for majoritarian culture, primarily the culture of those who don't necessarily have to give explicit thought to race. (There are of course many other poles, especially for the other large racial minorities, but let's confine ourselves for the moment.) That is to say, and I'm trying not to be shrill here, but honey, the terms black, Negro, Colored, African American, Afro-American, Black-American and others are not about you. We're not shifting around to annoy you (the bulk you--majoritarian culture), we're shifting around because we want a term that will do the impossible.

Let me give you a brief parallel: so, I work on food. I recently listened to a talk by the fantastic manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Wayne Roberts. He pointed out that the term "food security" lacked an immediacy and confused people, especially post-9/11. The accepted definition of food security is something like "access by all people at all times to enough and appropriate food for a healthy and active lifestyle", but post-9/11 people think more in terms of "secure from attack." Hunger and malnutrition are neither sufficient because they don't inherently entail the issue of access (the prevalent, by far, cause of hunger/malnutrition/food insecurity); food sovereignty is a growing term but lacks common currency in the Global North, over-emphasizes an ideal of the nation-state, isn't clear as to what group is the appropriate unit of "sovereignty", etc. Similar problems evolve from "food democracy." All this is to say, there is no one term that can encompass what we need to encompass within food justice circles. We can't all agree, and the terms in favor shift all the time. We're not doing this, certainly, to keep people from understanding or speaking about food. We're doing it because it's impossible to have the "one right term." The same is true, if not more so, for terms for racial groups.

Then you go into the "we're all human" and "we're all mixed race" and "we're all out of Africa." Well, those things are all true, but the years of research debunking a deep biological meaning for race simply mean that its primary importance and meaning comes from the social. And just because something is socially defined doesn't mean it's not real, it's just different in kind than a strict biophysical property. "Race" is a social construct; but then so are the identities "Christian", "Hindu", "Atheist" "Agnostic" "Democrat" "Republican" "Anarchist" "Bat-shit Crazy Follower of Ayn Rand's Fucked Up Ideas." Yet we'd never argue that "there's no such thing as Christians", or "look, all religious beliefs and lack thereof originate from humanity's inability to know and understand everything; I'm going to say we're ALL agnostic because all faith or conviction against faith hinges on the problem of 'a-gnostia' (the word I think I just made up meaning "a state of not-knowing")".

I mean, yes, of course it's important for us to emphasize, identify with, realize and cherish our shared humanity. And race is not all-defining and should not be; even under slavery, race was not *all* that a human being was, master or slave (though it did determine, if you were a slave, nearly all of how you would be seen by others one could argue). The fact that we share a common ancestor is relatively immaterial to all this, because as you imply the biology of it all is a red herring.

By debunking the red herring, you haven't really said much about the actual import of the situation I'm afraid. Tiger's deal is a complicated one, and the race aspect originates in a combination of internalization/indoctrination and earlier solidarity. That is, the rules under slavery were "one drop of black blood makes you black". Impossible to enforce in real life, of course, but certainly true in terms of if a black ancestor could be reasonably identified for you, you were automatically not white. If you were fair-skinned and, say, had some kind of social status, and it wasn't your father or mother but perhaps grand or great-grand that was black, you might hold onto not being a slave or total second-class citizen. But first class was closed to you.

Well, a couple hundred years of that attitude, and African Americans/black (which I use interchangeably for blacks within the US) internalized a lot of it. Self-policing means that if you have, let us say, "some drops", and (primarily these days) some subset of typically black phenotypes, you are considered "black." There is/has been a lot of push-back from mixed race people, but let us remember that openly mixed-race kids has only stopped being of some significant degree of social note in your own lifetime, I'd think.[Addition: Outside of this internalization, "claiming" mixed race individuals as black was in part solidarity and strategy, I think, as also until relatively recently, being identifiably mixed race was almost as much of a problem/stigma as being black. So mixed race children were forced to live the social experience of their black parents to some extent, both while they were raised and to an extent as adults I would think; identifying as black was a statement of solidarity, and a strategy in coalition-building to fight all racial prejudice. Beyond that, claiming mixed race people as "black" allowed blacks to point to many successful African Americans as role models and counter-examples for our supposed inferiority. But many, many of the early successful African Americans were mixed -- their success came in part from either "passing" as white, or from advantages gained from, say, a white father who supported his mixed-race kids with one of his slaves. But once they had achieved great things, through either mechanism, it was useful and quite sensical to say, both for the sake of our own role models and to "prove" something to majority culture -- "See! You see! Black people CAN do that; we ARE as smart, as capable! Your own standards say one drop of black blood makes you black; well look at him/her! Black, powerful and proud!" The rhetorical usefulness of this quite drops if you start talking about mixed race explicitly, beyond which, since race *is* more social than biological, it makes perfect sense in that atmosphere to claim mixed-race people, who would've been equally discriminated against where they could be identified, as black. Since it's socially constructed, they were black, because they were treated as such.-end Addition]

As far as "I read a recent blog post on Feministing wherein people say that if a minority calls me an epithet, it's just being rude, but if I call a minority an epithet, it's a hate crime, I wonder how f*#@'d up our ideas about race have really become", I thought we'd already had this conversation. But in any case, something well reflecting of my opinion of this is here and I address it directly here. I'm heavily indebted to this essay by Stanley Fish. I disagree with much in the article, but not with the overall point here: "The hostility of the other group is the result of [racist] actions, and whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed." The details of this formulation may be more arguable in a world where oppression is more subtle, but its substantial truth, I think, remains.

It seems to me your panties got rightly in a knot over some of the foolishness around Tiger. That foolishness, however, doesn't invalidate all race, just as the East Anglia data set debacle doesn't invalidate Global Climate Change. We may be much closer to a world where "Money and fame make everyone colorblind", but we are not there. Money and fame makes a lot appear colorblind, and we are perhaps closer to that than the world of the joke

Ques: "What do you call a black, Harvard-educated bank president?"
Ans: "A nigger";

but we are no more wholly in the wealth & fame colorblind world than we are wholly in the one of the joke.

In defense of Meat

2009-12-08T11:23:00.005-05:00

An interesting viewpoint here. I say "interesting" I guess to be purposely milquetoast; I largely agree with what Harvey Ussery has to say, but of course, there are boatloads of critiques, glossed-over points, retorts to critiques and counter-critiques to be had, as seems to happen all the time with food. (This is my impression right now of what seems to be the "local-food-backlash", that is, a flurry of academic and popular articles on how local food actually may be worse, from energy efficiency, causing smugness and related moral turpitude, etc. etc. I was flabbergasted when a mathematician shook her head at me when I maintained that, ceteris paribus (all things being equal), local should be more efficient. I think it's pretty much definitionally true that local food is better, all things being equal; a separate question is whether and when they in fact are equal. But I feel like the local critique is as much founded in a backlash as it is in the fact that local is, of course, not an unconditional universally-good free panacea. I still think the science bears out that more local food systems are a better idea, on average, than a far-flung food system. But I digress.)

Worth a read; not necessarily a new argument but a passionately and clearly phrased one, and one that I think I'm on board with (but can't be sure because my mind has been quite hijacked by work for the past several days and is not all with me). Ussery seems like an interesting guy in the Joel Salatin mode (so much so that I was looking askance at his website to see if he shared some of Salatin's more, um, iconoclastic political views); worth looking more into.

Real World: Rachel Larrimore

2009-12-05T12:43:00.003-05:00

Slate-slash-Double-X writer Rachael Larrimore joins much of the rest of the world as she moves from "Wishing I could quit you" to "Ok, I'm quitting you" with Sarah "WTF?" Palin. I've previously accused Larrimore and her XX compatriots as being "increasingly gormless", which I pretty much still stand by (despite liking many of them as writers in other contexts), but let us be gracious here and welcome Rachael to the fold. Or rather, not welcome her to the fold because that sounds patronizing and as a Republican woman on a Neoliberal webmagazine, she doesn't need it.

Long story short, her statement that "I realize now that what I most liked about you was an idealized image of you that I created" rings so very true, and is certainly something I think Dems are familiar with [fake sneezes while saying "Obama"... and then fake sneezes and says the names of 99% of all politicians ever]. When she goes on to say "I like that a woman can have a political career while raising a bunch of kids, that one could succeed without having the right pedigree or giving those kids country club names, that you were unabashedly pro-life," well, then her defense of Palin makes sense, a theme I explored last year as part of a more general realization about why wanting a president you "can have a beer with" (or skin a moose with) actually fits within a progressive worldview better than you might think.

So I really want to be snarky about this, but one thing I do respect about Larrimore has been her willingness and bravery in reasoning through her center-conservative politics out loud, in a left-ish forum, and I think such exchanges of earnest views are important and too uncommon. So, I'll stop here before I say something patronizing AND snarky.

Reasonable words on GM Foods

2009-12-05T11:50:00.003-05:00

I'm rather skeptical of genetically modified foods myself, both on grounds of safety and efficacy in addressing hunger (and I realize these are heavily contested points and I'm just not going to venture back into them now), but an article at The Guardian maintains that the new synthesis is in, and it's one I largely agree with:

On Wednesday night a debate on GMOs at the illustrious Royal Society of Chemistry HQ in London suggested a breakthrough. Afterwards the feeling was that it was a win on points for the GM sceptics... But [GM proponents] can take heart: the debate was less a defeat for GM than for the way it has developed. The corollary is that if the government really believes that the only way to increase yields is through GM technology, it will have to fund this itself.

The winning argument on Wednesday was not really about science at all, but about the ethics of a method of increasing yields that delivers such power into the hands of the multinationals... GM may be a small part of the answer. But it has a mixed record in Asia, where it has tended to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, and it is unlikely to be any part of the answer to food security in Africa for the foreseeable future. As the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation pointed out last year, there is enough food for everyone. It just isn't available in the right places... globally the need is for publicly funded science to investigate sustainable agriculture in the widest possible meaning of the word: better farming practices, a viable pricing system and, for the global north, a radical change in patterns of consumption.

The "consensus position" (of three or four people I've talked with) is that a reasonable position genetic modification includes a much larger public sector involvement and relative decrease in blockages from Intellectual Property Regimes (if not directly challenging established patents, then developing GM products in the public domain via universities and government funding; many have pointed out that whatever the pluses and minuses of the "first" Green Revolution, a key component of it was the public rather than proprietary nature of a significant portion of its technologies), AND most (of the three or four I've had an extended discussion with) agree as well that large-scale public epidemiology trials should be conducted. GM proponents often proclaim that it's the most widely tested, heavily regulated technology, yet there have been no systematic human feeding trials that I've ever heard of, and certainly no longitudinal ones. Since we're already eating them anyway, seems to me it only makes sense to do large-scale trials taking some people "off" GMs to the extent possible (this would pose a challenge but could be done in part using organic foods) and comparing to a paired sample of people maintaining a GM-diet (not hard since most corn and soybean in the US is already GM). Such trials would be complicated, but there seems little reasonable rationale for not doing them, and doing them would begin to settle much between proponents and opponents (not all, not by half, but much, and would be a substantial improvement on the status quo).

Of course, the thing about the consensus over making GMs:
a) publicly funded/public domain
b) widely, openly and long-term tested
is that it seems quite unlikely to happen, whatever we agree to. GM companies and most governments have no intention of vigorously supporting either position... making articles like that in the Guardian all the more important. If all those of good intent can agree on these two propositions (or something like them) and bridge the divide between people legitimately concerned with hunger and justice but with different evaluations of GM, we can force the hand of governments and companies. Arguing between ourselves has produced more heat than light; hopefully the event reported by the Guardian can be the foundation of a new direction?*

*Rather reminds me of an article a friend recently posted: Let's All Agree: Factory Farming is the Real Evil, Not Vegans. Which I can rather agree to, if one adds the corollary that "factory farms are the enemy, not meat-eaters. Even unconscientious meat-eaters aren't the enemy; we don't want to wipe them out, we want to convince them. Vegan/vegetarianism is threatening and foreign to many people, and trying to shock and shame them into better behavior seems to more commonly generate anger than conversion. Surely, vegans have as much a responsibility as small-farm omnivores to promote co-operation and reasonable discourse, and all of us have a responsibility to convince others. In looking to do so, we should evaluate what's most effective, not necessarily what seems most morally satisfying, most extreme, or most attention-getting. All of those have a time and a place, but it's not always the time and place for all of them. I don't read a lot of vegan writing, but it seems to me there's responsibility on both sides for toning down rhetoric and looking to work together against factory farming, rather than against each other. (Especially because I think consumer activism is severely limited and mainly symbolic by itself, without political agitation and structural change, anyway.)

No relation to anything: GET OFF MY LAWN YOU DAMNED KIDS!

2009-12-03T10:56:00.004-05:00

The World is Going to Hell, and Always Has Been.

Nice bit here from commenter "Barefoot Bum" on PhysioProf's blog:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

– Socrates (apocryphal)

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

— Hesiod, Eighth Century B.C.E.

The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of
today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for
parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.”

– Peter the Hermit 1274 CE (apocryphal)

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

– G. K. Chesterton

Organic Agriculture can feed the... Africa.

2009-12-03T10:38:00.004-05:00

"UN report concludes organic farming offers Africa the best chance to feed itself"

The report is over a year old (news reporting on it can be found here, the report here), and it seems largely based on pre-existing methodology and links by University of Essex's prominent agroecologist Jules Pretty and colleague Rachel Hine.

It seemingly belies the trope that the case of food security in Africa is too desperate, too urgent, and too important to leave to something silly like organic agriculture, though I'm sure the argument will continue in earnest, despite the apparently growing evidence mostly on the side of organic agriculture. (Though the evidence is not unequivocal, perhaps.)

More on Sustainable Futures: Further thoughts on why the "Tragedy of the Commons" needn't be

2009-11-05T12:43:00.002-05:00

I've posted on Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" before (and reprinted a money quote from the article linked in that post below), but reading Paul Robbins' excellent Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, I was reminded of recent Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom once again and came across this well-done article on her work and common property research in Forbes, of all places. Elizabeth Eaves writes:

That's where Elinor Ostrom comes in. While many economists continued to assume that collective action just didn't work, several decades ago the Indiana University, Bloomington, political scientist began to study when and why it did work. On Monday, her efforts won her the 2009 Nobel economics prize.
"What Ostrom showed was that a lot of ordinary, not very well educated people who'd never read about free rider problems basically developed institutional arrangements," says Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Groups of fishermen figured out how to limit their catch, while farmers collaborated on irrigation problems. "Sure there's a free-rider problem, but people turn around and find ways to solve it," Folbre says.

Continuing a theme I've read several times in recent weeks, Eaves goes on:

Why did other economists miss this part of the picture? "Economists didn't pay attention to ethnography," Folbre says--that is, they didn't observe actual people at work. "Why go out in the field when you have a nice theory?"

I have some respect for economics, or at least, the idea that the study of markets is a useful one, but the idea that where theory and reality conflict, reality is wrong is one repeatedly and disturbingly voiced.*

Going back to my previous post on this area, an extensive quote from Ian Angus's piece is appropriate here:

A Politically Useful Myth
The truly appalling thing about "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not its lack of evidence or logic -- badly researched and argued articles are not unknown in academic journals. What's shocking is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and United Nations agencies.

Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.

The success of Hardin's argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn't question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus.

I think the concept of the inherent unsustainability of humans and our inability to create a better future (or simple extreme unlikelihood) falls rather into the same area, though not out of maliciousness of desire to maintain the status quo, at least not on D's part, to be sure. Rather, as I alluded to in my post on "Limits to Know(th)", I think the evidence and the science just don't line up so simply as to be able to say with any certainty that we can't pull this off (any more than to say with certainty that we can; my point is that the evidence is equivocal, so we may as well agitate for sustainable and equitable change presuming that it is possible, however likely or not it may be).

Ending off, I quote Robbins in regards to the Tragedy of the Commons, in the passage that inspired this post, and helps maintain my inspiration that the venality and doomedness of the human race has been greatly exaggerated. Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, it's too early to call, but unlike his death, it's not necessarily inevitable.

Robbins:

But empirical evidence compiled for the last three decades shows less support for [the Tragedy of the Commons model], and time and again evidence of collective stewardship appears in the management of resources ranging from fisheries from Maine to Turkey, pastures from Morocco to India, and forests from Madagascar to Japan. While "tragedy" theory suggested failure, the literature was filled with "exceptions", locally organized techniques, rules, and decision-making structures that organized extraction, defined user communities, and maintained harvests and yields. The empirical record on common property management is far too large to survey here, but the accumulated case material is impressive (see National Research Council 1986; Feeny et al. 1990; Burger and Gochfeld 1998)... Success of collective management, theorists maintained, is a result of the fact that such commons are not unowned (legally, res nullius but are in fact commonly held property (legally, res communes) (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975). Failure of collective management, by contrast, merely represents failures in the specific structure of rules that govern collective property... Recovery of sustainable management is a task of crafting new and better rules, not one of slicing up the commons into private bits, nor imposing strong-arm central authority (Ostrom 1990, 1992; Ostrtom et al. 1993; Hanna et al. 1996)..."

*From John DiNardo's review of Freakonomics:

"June ONeill, [then] Director of the Congressional Budget office, the agency charged with credibly assessing the effects of government policies, reminded [her] audience at an American Enterprise Institute meeting [about the effect of the minimum wage] that theory is also evidence.” [DiNardo's emphasis] A more ironic illustration from Deaton (1996): That evidence may have to be discarded in favor of “science” could hardly be better argued than in Nobel Laureate James Buchanans words in The Wall Street Journal: “no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimum scientiﬁc content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”

David Harvey has similarly quoted location theorist/economist August Lösch as having said if "the model does not conform to reality, then it is reality that is wrong," although Harvey seemingly places this in the context of Lösch ascribing a normative role to theory, that is, science should serve to create a better, more equal and more rational world. Nonetheless, with the "Politically Useful Myth" of the tragedy of the commons in mind, Hardin was rather practicing the inverse, using "science" to maintain a status quo of rampant inequality.

Sustainable Futures III: Limits to Know(th) II

2009-10-27T23:15:00.002-05:00

J-Fav Raj Patel posts something relevant to the recent talk of sustainability here on Anekantavada:

One of the latest nuggets comes from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It shows both that communities can manage forests with restraint and sustainability, and that leaving resource management to people who live with the consequences can sequester much more carbon than handing resources over to a government far away, and run by the rich.

Haven't read the original article; the abstract is available here. It's co-written, incidentally, by a former professor of mine and edited by the recently-Nobel-Prize-winning (and J-research-based-fav) Elinor Ostrom.

Response to D: Limits to Know(th)

2009-10-27T16:38:00.006-05:00

(This responds to the post from J-fav D here responding to my previous blog post.)

Wow D, you are way too certain of your own premises for my comfort =o

For one thing, despite your pessimism on people and the ability to control ourselves without top-down (or other external environmental) regulation, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, has made her career of showing examples of precisely this. There is also a not-insignificant number environmental historians who believe that there are examples of this in the past. There are certainly examples of both groups that have exercise sustainable management of common pool resources, and of groups that have exercise population control (i.e. with the use of various plants that could be used to terminate pregnancies). One can definitely argue that the tendency of other human groups, perhaps the majority, to expand often or inevitably wipe out smaller pockets of sustainable living, but now one is arguing something rather different. That is, if sub-groups of the human population have managed to live sustainably over long periods (and I would maintain the evidence strongly supports that some groups have), then they are indeed examples of biological populations not controlled by “natural limits” but rather self-imposed social limts. To then say that this is wholly disproved by other groups that don’t live by limits is to essentially say that one (albeit significant) set of groups of the human population represents the one “true” nature of the entire human population.

Further, the whole argument that it’s not going to happen pains me almost physically, because it reminds me so vividly and precisely of the arguments that, for example, slavery (especially its “peculiarly American institution”) would never end, or that women would never achieve a more equal place in society, or contribute to science. Go back 75, 100 years, and you could find no doubt thousands of people, perhaps millions, people as smart as you, who would say “Not. Gunna. Happen.” Slavery is here to stay; women are biological incapable of becoming plant ecologists; blacks cannot handle freedom. We know this for a fact.

And they were wrong as the day is long. As wrong as we may be to say that humans can’t/won’t be sustainable; as wrong as we may be to say that humans can/will be sustainable.

The point to me is that I don’t know. Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out that we’re in a unique juncture in history (though someone since pointed out to me that you could say that about almost all important junctures of history). Be that as it may, I think it’s only scientifically honest of me to say I don’t know. Oh, sure, we can extrapolate from other biological populations, from human history, from so-called first principles, from whatever you like, but since we all admit that both ecological and social systems are more complicated than their underlying phyisco-chemical constituents, it seems nonsensical to me to then essentialize the larger system down to anecdotes of dumb people we’ve seen, met, and heard of and known and believe exist, the biological destiny of unsustainability, and wrap it up and call it a day. It is, to me, an amazing amount of hubris that I’m not willing to take on, nor think it is productive or useful to do so. To me, saying the we can’t/won’t be sustainable is equally preposterous and hubristic as saying we absolutely will be. Who the fuck knows? Besides which, I think most people agree that the complete extinction of the human race in the near-to-medium term is unlikely, almost no matter what we do to the world. To maintain that we will simply rinse & repeat our mistakes ad nauseum is to ignore the possibility of culture and biological evolution shaping us otherwise. It would take an incredible holocaust to wipe out all the humans on earth; barring that, assuming we achieve something like the average species lifespan (what is it, a couple million years?—ah, wikipedia says for mammals it’s one million) it seems hopelessly facile to me to presume that humans 500,000 years from now will be essentially the same as humans today (and to argue that we will, with certainty, find a way to destroy ourselves before then is equally empirically weak). Any given projection of what humans will be like in the (evolutionary) long term is incredibly flawed, given that predicting this for even the simplest of organisms is wildly dicey, to say the least. Doing this for the most socio-ecologically complex organism on earth is lunacy.

Now, most people respond implicitly or explicitly to this by clarifying that they mean the short-term: they're not concerned with the long-term of the human race in terms of millions of years, but rather, can we avoid disaster in the next 50-200. Who the fuck knows? I certainly hope so. I certainly think study of environmental history gives us reason to think it's possible, as much as it gives us reason to be pessimistic that it's likely. I certainly hope we do not have massive depopulation events and tragedy. But I take solace in the idea that it seems almost inevitable that we will change towards a more sustainable way of being. (One can view this as being of a cloth with what my mom calls my abnormal comfort in rationality, inspired by a trip to Ireland 2 months after 9/11. She was worried about my safety, to which I responded "Well, there are something like 37,000 flights per day in the US, so even if I was flying ON 9/11, the chance that I would've been hurt is overwhelmingly unlikely." There was a pause before she told me I was not like normal people and I should just reassure her that I would be careful and call her when I landed.) And if it is possible to reach in the long term, I think it is only sensical to believe in it and try for it in the short.

The point of my post on the Continuum was that if one believes it is physically possible that we will stave off disaster, it makes no sense to go around emphasizing only that it is unlikely or near impossible. If it is physically possible, it is so in some large part because of our will and ability to learn and organize. Or ability and will to do so is negatively affected by emphasizing its implausibility. So if one cares about pulling it off, one needn't be Pollyannish about it, but why persist with dwelling in negative examples and unlikelihoods?

In my work, I've already seen countries and people accomplish things I never thought possible; feeding a city of 2.5 million people, switching a country as a whole to urban and peri-urban and organic agriculture. If humans found a way to fly when it was said it couldn't be done, if we could get to the moon, split the atom against all odds--why not believe and invest in our ability to break the "scientific" laws of human unsustainability?

"Oh, that's different" people say. Possibly, I say. But equally: Bullshit. We knew women were inferior (though I suspect a number of women all along knew they weren't). We knew slavery was forever. We knew that humans flying was ridiculous. We knew that the sun would never set on the British Empire, that agriculture could never be improved to produce more food, that Rome would never fall, that Monarchies were ordained by God--as Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black, imagine what we'll know tomorrow. In all of those cases, there were all the reasons in the world, and all the dumb/racist/misogynist/scientifically informed people you could want to say it wasn't possible. I'd rather be one of the ones saying it is and turn out to wrong, but I hardly think I'm in bad company to assert that another world truly is possible.

My mentor's mentor, biologist Dick Levins, has said that we know from history that the vast majority of today's "scientific fact" will turn out to have been wrong in the future. The challenge is not, therefore, in simply finding science today that is wrong. It is in finding science that will stand the test of time. I think the same applies to this situation; so many of us know it can't or won't be done. I find this attitude to be a fine way of combining hubris, cynicism, and counter-productiveness. I'm not smart enough to say we can't do it. So I spend my time trying to figure out how we can--what facts will allow us to stand the test of time. To me, to do otherwise is self-indulgence almost equal to that of avoiding vaccinations. It may seem fine for an individual to indulge in, but really, we can't afford it.

J's Reasons Why Maybe... We Can Do this: An abbreviated list

Prugh, Costanza & Daly's "The Local Politics of Global Sustainability" (ISBN 978-1559637442)

Elinor Ostrom's "Governing the Commons" (ISBN 978-0521405997)

The City that Ended Hunger (aka Belo Horizonte)

None of these mean or guarantee that we can do this, but I'll tell you what. If in any case I believe in the slogan "Yes We Can!" it is in this arena. No, We Might Not. Yes, It'll Be Hard. No, It Won't Happen Tomorrow. No, It's Not Wildly Likely, A Fait Accompli, or Inevitable. But: Yes, We Can.

Strategicallly Optimistic

2009-10-26T23:07:00.005-05:00

I've been reading materials on subsistence food systems, sustainability, environmental problems, and "human nature" well, for a while now but also several as of late. A speech Bill Rees gave at the Ecological Society of America meeting this summer, along with one of his articles and numerous comments by pretty much every ecologist ever (with the exception of certain Marxist ecologists of my acquaintance and likely a couple others) speak of the problems of human nature in achieving sustainability. Humans have an inherent tendency to expand; humans are inherently selfish; etc. etc. Rees, who has a PhD in population ecology, claims in one of his articles that ecologists are reluctant to treat humans as ecological beings and to deal with their population ecology scientifically--and concludes that our "nature" is to expand.

I think this is problematic in a bunch of ways, but there is one that I'm going to address right now that makes reference to a couple of the others. [? -- ed.] Having talked to Prof. Rees in person, he says that we might (he's not very optimistic) be able to head off absolute disaster by constraining human nature through culture; his example was the rituals and efforts towards monogamy overruling our non-monogamous nature. This is a weird mental exercise to engage in, because it puts human culture in the position of being "unnatural." That is, if our nature is to do one thing (expand/consume more, have random hookups) and our culture constrains it, then you're defining our culture out of our nature. This is some extreme mental yoga if you are, as Rees claims to be doing, treating humans scientifically because nothing about humans can be unnatural in a materialist sense: everything that exists is natural, and more to the point, culture, being derived from our biology, must also be natural and hence "part of our nature." Now, intuitively what he says makes sense because the dichotomy between nature and culture, impulse and impulse control, id and superego, nature and nurture go deep, deep, deep into our culture (however natural or unnatural it is). But I would say this dichotomy is not only unscientific but unhelpful twice over: it obscures the nature of the relationship between our "nature" and our "culture", AND I find it extremely unhelpful rhetorically.

Having wandered around for awhile without getting to the point, I'll skip discussing why obscuring the nature of the relationship (or rather, obscuring the fact that culture and biological impulse go hand in hand, and are not clearly distinct; at the very most, they are like water and cold in the analogy of snow: you need both to create snow, and you can't assign priority to one or the other, snow only makes sense in terms of their interaction) is bad science in my opinion, and move on why the splitting of the two is bad strategy in my opinion.

Given that Rees, and many others, thinks it is at least possible for humans to learn/think/choose our way out of this, a key part of doing this is mustering the social movement, structures, and education to support it. Clearly, people of the "humans are naturally unsustainable" camp don't think it will happen "by itself", ex nihilo. If you think the solution is "culture" or some other self-maintained restraint, then seemingly people have to believe that humans are at least capable of said restraint. That is, if restraint is cultural it seems necessary that people think it possible in order for it to be possible. (I'm sure one could argue this is not strictly logically necessary, but I'm not going to.) Certainly it seems to undermine your effort if you convince people that they CAN'T control themselves to be sustainable. Yet this is exactly what the rhetoric of "humans naturally expand/consume" does. People who don't believe self-control is possible certainly seem unlikely to exercise it. People also (understandably) don't usually view saying that human nature is unsustainable to mean that humans can learn to be sustainable; nature is viewed as immutable, insurmountable. To then claim that we can control ourselves through culture plays into a societal narrative that tends deeply towards vulgar biological determinism, i.e. that if something is part of our "nature" we can't control it. So it seems both unwise and unscientific for Rees and others to say our nature is one thing but we can (theoretically) get beyond it through culture* because in our deterministic narrative, we tend to view such attempts to get beyond nature as noble yet doomed (cf. monogamy).

If cultural change can lead us to sustainability and such a cultural change is possible according to the laws of reality, such a cultural change is as "natural" as expansion. Expansion may be easier, or more likely, or our inertial course, or whatever, but if we can stop doing it, then the ability to stop doing it must also be natural, no?

If you think we can control ourselves and successfully achieve sustainability (at least, before the worst of the worst disasters happen) then it behooves you to promote this idea. If culture is the vehicle, surely a culture that believes its objective is possible will be more likely to embrace & achieve said objective. If you're not of the camp that believes it is physically impossible, it makes little sense to contribute to that point of view because you can only fulfill your own prophecy.

This isn't as deep as it seemed to be in my own head, but nonetheless, it seems not to be grasped by people like Rees. It makes one think he doesn't believe his own statements of the possibility, because if you believe in it, why constantly discourage people from thinking it may be? It would be like Civil Rights leaders showing up at rallies 40 years ago and saying "there's really no way we can ever achieve our objectives. Now--let's go do this thing!" You don't have to say it's easy--that's hardly what, say, MLK did--but nor did he say "I may not get there with you, but it doesn't matter, because you won't get there anyhow." I study what I do -- successful or partly successful examples of sustainably providing human rights -- because my analysis is that hearing about and learning and believing in positive examples is more important to a productive solution than talking about their improbability. Talking about the challenges has its place. Scaring people may have its place. But if your very success depends on your belief in its possibility (more so than usual--you know, when it literally depends on it), pessimism seems almost like a selfish indulgence.

*If you aren't materialist about it, that is, believe in the soul or spirit, or some other higher being or place beyond nature, you could be consistent in an argument that our non-material being/spirit/consciousness/soul must get beyond our nature to save ourselves. But outside of this viewpoint, it doesn't make sense, because our nature is all of us that exists; if we can do it, it too is part of our nature and therefore the characterization of our nature as expansionist but controllable is at the very least, imprecise language. Understandable and sensical in a certain context, where one might mean "basic drive" rather than "immutable trait", but certainly imprecise.

Babbling, hopefully in an interesting way, about veganism

2009-09-26T19:06:00.004-05:00

This responds to this article on the HuffPo by Ari Solomon.
---------------------
Despite agreeing with much behind what Solomon says, I think he undermines himself in this article that is, basically, a screed on vegan's rationality. Yet, he clearly has feelings about veganism that go beyond the rational or "logical." There is nothing inherently wrong about this, but from a rational/logical perspective, I find this sentiment ill-formulated:

"All animals deserve to be free from unnecessary pain, fear, and suffering at the hands of humans."

It may be morally hard to disagree with that, but it *is* a statement on morality, a value statement, not a logical proposition. I wouldn't argue that working to help fellow humans or, say, broad secular humanism are purely "logical" systems. For example, I myself choose to work in an area pertinent to social justice because of my relevant beliefs, not because it is in some unassailable way "logical." And of course, one cannot actually practice what Solomon is talking about literally, because the growing of vegetable crops takes an undoubtedly huge toll on animals as well, from their production (i.e. pest elimination, exploitation of pollinating bees) to their harvest (i.e. threshers killing field animals; tractors crushing soil fauna), their processing (even vegan and vegetarian processed foods tend to be made in plants, where there again will be pest control and likely "maximum allowable" animal parts from processing plant mishaps with resident rodents, say), and their transport (I'm sure we could cut down the number of insect deaths and roadkill if we demanded all food transport took place at low speeds, i.e. not interstate highway speeds.)

This is not to critique veganism as inherently flawed, and heaven forbid that someone think I'm defending careless or thoughtless eating. Local food, ethically produced food, organic food, food where you personally know the farmer, and yes, vegetarianism and veganism all help address numerous problems in our food system, that threaten our ecosystems and ourselves. But come on--addressing many of these issues is a moral choice, verging on a choice of "faith" in how the world should be run and for whom.

"...if we say we care about cruelty to animals then it's time we start caring about all animals. Yes, dogs and cats are companion animals but in terms of suffering our canine and feline friends feel the same as a pig, cow, chicken, lamb, or turkey. To pick and choose species in terms of whose pain we care about is incredibly hypocritical and inconsistent."

There is much, *much* to agree with in veganism. But this article sets out to talk about its logical premises, and then leaves numerous logical holes, filled in with values. Values that may be noble, or righteous, or just, but nobility and righteousness verge on what one could call spiritual choices.

Solomon seems to aspire to the intellectual rigor of, say, a Peter Singer, but seems unwilling to fully embrace utilitarianism or a similar system where there is consistency, but as with any system, absolute consistency or certainty leads to counter-intuitive or extreme results. An absolutely consistent veganism along his lines would lead to conclusions way beyond what most would consider reasonable or, dare I say, "rational". For Singer's utilitarianism, this comes in often with his famous equating of animals with humans without higher reasoning/brain functions; in Solomon's case, the inescapable conclusion that "consistency" would demand could be, for example, not eating almost all crops in the US, considering the animals killed in the production of almost all plant-based products, especially those processed or transported for any significant distance. By the same consistency, one could similarly critique and therefore conditionally ban the use of, say, wind power, airline travel, and tall city buildings that, even with technological advances, will likely inevitably kill significant numbers of birds, etc.; one could conditionally ban non-emergency speeds above, say, 30 or 40 mph to avoid killing insects or inadvertent roadkill.

I don't disagree with the aspirations of veganism; but seeking to avoid the "exploitation" or unnecessary pain on all animals is a *value decision*. It must be discussed as such, especially if you wish to talk about all meat and all animal products; veganism has no special claim on logic, and to appeal to such a claim is not only inconsistent, verging on perhaps hypocritical, but also counterproductive. Just like telling religious people that they can't possibly be religious and care about logic, telling everyone that they can't possibly care about animals unless they follow vegan rules generates far more self-satisfaction and (illogical) righteousness than it does converts or reasoned discussion.

HoYay! brought the Visigoths at the Gates

2009-09-22T19:10:00.004-05:00

-or-
"I wanna be noted for the fall of your Civilization! At the Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Woo!"**

Interesting article on the otherwise-annoying-me-quite-a-bit-recently Slate today, reviewing James Davidson's "The Greeks and Greek Love." Author Emily Wilson goes over Davidson's "fascinating, meandering, funny, and thought-provoking study of how ancient Greek men loved one another." Observing the current state of things vis a vis gay marriage and the status of same-sex relationships, Wilson calls it

"a central problem for modern Westernized societies. Many countries allow same-sex couples the right to a "civil union" but withhold from them the name of marriage. The Netherlands was the first modern nation to legalize marriage proper for gay people, in 2001. Since then, seven U.S. states have also legalized gay marriages, although one, California, has just backtracked. On May 26, Californian lawmakers upheld a ban on same-sex marriages in the state... The ban is based on the idea that there is—or should be—something fundamentally different about sexual and romantic relationships between people of the same sex and those between a man and a woman. Since history is so often invoked, either implicitly or explicitly, on both sides of the debate, now is a particularly good time to look back at the history of same-sex relationships."

She goes on to say that the book

"ought to be required reading for anybody curious about the antecedents of the current impasse. [It] is a landmark study that challenges earlier historical interpretations of the evidence. For instance, [some] scholars... have argued that the Athenians were obsessed with anal sex, which they saw as an act of domination and humiliation. Davidson brilliantly shows that this interpretation is largely a projection on the part of modern historians, who have been reluctant to imagine a world where gay relationships could be expressions of love, affection, and appreciation, rather than deeply skewed power arrangements."

Observing Davidson's arguments on the Athenians ("same-sex relationships—which seem to have generally taken place between youths in their late teens and young men in their early 20s—were an important part of a boy's journey to manhood... [and] many men continued to be interested in "boys" even after marriage; happily married poet Sophocles and unhappily married philosopher Socrates both flirted with young men at drinking parties and caused no scandal in doing so. (The amazing thing about Socrates' sex life, according to Plato's Symposium, was not that he fancied the gorgeous Alcibiades but that he resisted having sex with him, even when snuggling under the same blanket"), Cretans ("Cretan rituals were equally strange, from an Athenian perspective..."), and Spartans ("In Sparta... a curious kind of sex seems to have been the custom between well-behaved men and chaste teenage boys. Apparently the lover was supposed to relieve himself only by rubbing against the boy's cloak: The cloak had to remain on at all times, as a sort of all-body condom"), I realized that I must have missed that part of The 300.

Of course, the funniest thing to me about the article (and somewhat exemplifying Slate's more-than-occasional breathtakingly tone-deaf and dumb contrarianism) is that it reminds me of a typical Slate contrarian years ago who was all "can't we have just ONE uber-violent movie with mainly manly men battling, oiled and sweaty, without just ASSUMING homoerotic tones?" To which I thought, sure, go ahead, but if I were you, I wouldn't take my stand on HoYay's inappropriate over-application and tie up the end of my mediocre article on the (lack of real) homoerotic undertones in action movies by talking about "The 300" and fucking SPARTA, where there actually WAS homoeroticism, you know, in the form of HOMOSEXUAL SEX. Not explicitly in The 300 itself, if I recall, but in that silly thing called "real life."

This being, after all, the same real life where two of Western Civilizations's most influential cultures, Greece and Rome, had common and rather accepted forms of gay love and managed to, oh, form the rhetorical and historical basis for much of modern Western society. (Not to mention the many celebrated philosophers we so often cite in our paeans to reason or democracy who, at the very least, batted for both teams, and of course that historical war juggernaut, Alexander the Great.*) But, I'm sure Rome's eventual fall was probably due to a lack of heteronormative "family values."

*"Alexander the Great, just steaming through Persia; took out Darius the 3rd as we all know. And then he ran on... and after a while his army's going, 'Hang on. Alex, I think we lost 'em. You know, I don't know where we live any more, and we've killed most of the people we've met. So would you just like to chill out.' And Alex is going, 'Look, I'm 32, I'm gay, I'm on a roll. Let's go!' On you go."

**

Brilliance: "Obama Administration Statements On The Public Option or A Nervous Boyfriend Trying To Talk His Girlfriend Into Anal Sex"

2009-09-21T20:58:00.004-05:00

From J-Fave Fire Mickey Kaus:

Which is it?
Obama Administration Statements On The Public Option

or

A Nervous Boyfriend Trying To Talk His Girlfriend Into Anal Sex

"I’d be happy [if we didn't] do it ... and if there was a way of doing it that [was okay with you], I’m happy to do it that way, as well."

"I'm just kinda talkin' about how it might be okay to do. If you're into that sort of thing."

"No-one is being forced to [do] it."

"I see nothing wrong with having [it] as a choice."

"Whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the [issue]."

"It's certainly not a deal-breaker."

"Only if you're cool with it."

"These are legitimate concerns, but ones, I believe, that can be overcome."

“I just want to figure out what works.”

"No, I'm just kidding! Unless you were serious ..."

I can't top or add anything to that, except to say that these all seem to be Obama, except the last and fourth-to-last. And the second... ok, so it looks like there are 3 examples that are, as far as I can tell, "Nervous Boyfriend Trying To Talk His Girlfriend Into Anal Sex", and 7 "Obama Administration Statements On The Public Option (That Could Feasibly Double As 'Nervous [and Overly Officious] Boyfriend Trying To Talk His Girlfriend Into Anal Sex')".

*Addendum to previous post (Genetically modified Crops: Critics of the GM Critics Gone Wild?)

2009-09-03T13:20:00.002-05:00

(*&#@(*$&)@#%!

I'd already half typed this out and then accidentally deleted form the copy'n'paste clipboard... argh.

Ok.

Let's give it another go...

----begin digression----
*One may ask how this fits with my and others generalized critique of corporations, especially as relates to their role in food and GM crops. That is, you could fairly argue that I tend to paint them with a broad brush, rather categorically. Firstly, I wouldn't really consider corporations a "side" the same way I consider "pro-GM" as a "side." Corporations are not equivalent to a point of view, and my point was that you can't (or shouldn't) dispute a point by dismissing everyone advocating that point as cynically motivated. Corporations are far from everyone advocating GMs; you have food activists, university researchers and even researchers within ag. corporations who cannot be uniformly assumed to be irrational or motivated by, say, greed over the welfare of others. (Of course, I don't really accuse corporations of being irrational in their pursuit of objectives I think are often detestable, or at least questionable.) Indeed, I have friends and colleagues who believe in the potential and need for genetic modification, and I don't presume that they are irrational, motivated by greed or other ulterior motives, or anything but, in most cases, genuine concern for others and an intellectual belief in the need/utility of GM crops. This is more what I was referring to. One shouldn't, of course, categorically dismiss *groups* OR *sides*, but besides pointing out that corporations aren't, to my mind, a proper "group" in this sense (in that they're made up of people with a wide diversity of opinions, even some that dispute the primary positions of their own company) and insofar as they are a group, they're a group that as a matter of record and fact are committed to profits and not to social welfare; when the two conflict, they have and do argue that the former must come before or even at the expense of the latter due to the rules of their constitution and "personhood." This is a topic for another time, but is a primary component of what I see as problematic with corporations.
---------end digression-----------

Genetically modified Crops: Critics of the GM Critics Gone Wild?

2009-09-03T12:59:00.004-05:00

See this story in Nature on the backlash against an article published finding that

"...[caddis-fly larvae] fed only on Bt maize debris grew half as fast as those that ate debris from conventional maize. And caddis flies fed high concentrations of Bt maize pollen died at more than twice the rate of caddis flies fed non-_Bt pollen. The transgenic maize "may have negative effects on the biota of streams in agricultural areas" the group wrote in its paper, stating in the abstract that "widespread planting of Bt crops has unexpected ecosystem-scale consequences.""

I've said much on GM before, but as far as this article about the swift and forceful critical attacks--as attacks they can be described, when the scientists are charged of scientific misconduct by critics, as we were in an article on organic agriculture, when most would admit that the "misconduct" is usually, at most, from strident but perhaps valid disagreement on wording or analytical approach, my challenge to the types critiquing the GM crop critiques is:

1) Find studies that *find negative effects from GM crops* that you feel are well-conducted. The probability that all studies that critique/find negative effects of GM are poorly done is exceedingly low.
2) If you actually feel all the research finding negative effects are poorly done, for the sake of science and balanced analysis, point out how this is similar/dissimilar to problems in "pro"-GM articles. That is, while it's unlikely all "anti"-GM science is badly done, the probability that all of them are badly done and all of the studies supporting GM are well done (back of the envelope calculations here...) zero point zero percent. A synthesis of the methodological flaws in each body of literature would be far more helpful than systematically decrying all articles with contrary findings and pointing to all positive findings.

In essence, it would be nice for those advocating GM to stop pretending all the evidence against it is bunk, bad science, or politically motivated. The feeling that those opposing GM accuse you of the same is not an excuse, especially considering the attitude in the Nature article of some critics that "That's just science." Accusing people of intentional misconduct is not an everyday reaction, or it shouldn't be, and anyone categorically insisting that their side is rational and the other sides aren't (or otherwise assumes bad faith on an entire side of a discussion and not on the others*) shouldn't really be listened to.

Starving during surplus; surplus of starving

2009-08-27T15:53:00.002-05:00

Another bit here reinforcing the importance poverty/lack of socio-economic power in causing hunger and malnutrition (a topic J recently got in an extended discussion with J-friend NP; to be re-posted here eventually).

Quoting Ms. Nierenberg of the WorldWatch Institute,

One of the most interesting things Thurow explained was how the success of African farmers became their failure-in 2001, the Ethiopian harvest was the best most farmers had ever seen. They had record yields and had more food than ever to feed their families, as well as to bring to market. But that surplus caused prices to collapse more than 80 percent. Farmers couldn’t pay their debts and they cut back their expenses the next season-they planted less, they used less inputs like fertilizers and hybrid seeds, and planted just enough to (hopefully) feed their families. When the famine hit hard in2002-2003 , the same farmers, write Thurow and Kilman, who had carried their surplus grain to market the season before, were now carrying their malnourished and starving children to food aid centers. And at the same time, Ethiopian grain traders had warehouses packed to the ceiling with surplus food because foreign aid agencies were buying foreign-mostly U.S. grain-instead of from local suppliers. As a result, while millions of people in Ethiopia went hungry, more than 300,000 tonnes of grain rotted either in fields or in storage.

This is rather similar to a story that was formational in the J-career related to food issues, from a 2002 NYT story, Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots (original article is here, but I wanted to make sure readers weren't blocked by a possible NYT subscription wall). Not to pick another debate with NP, but these articles reinforce the pivotal role of poverty/lack of political power in hunger, as in both cases, there are surpluses that are going to waste rather than feeding people (although the details seem reversed, with farmers getting high, possibly inflated prices in one circumstance but underpaid in another, although J highly suspects that the farmers benefitting in India in 2002 were primarily large farmers). Fortification or yield increases or self-generation of pesticides (through genetic modification or other means) would none of them address the problems of hunger confronting the millions of people in these cases, because neither production nor nutrient content were the problem. (The argument with NP to be reprinted here revolved somewhat over Golden Rice (yes, again); one of his points was the fact that it might not solve "the" problem is not a reason it can't solve "a" problem; we'll leave it here by saying that is at least plausibly true, even if I think it to not be the case in the overwhelming majority of the time that genetic modification can solve hunger problems when market/governance problems are at root in the examples given, so even granting his point it appears like it may not be generally applicable solution, beyond potential safety and health problems J sees with GMOs... BID (but i digress)). One certainly can't make the point that production could have a secondary positive effect by lowering food prices in the Ethiopia case as in that case, low food prices (and a reliance on agricultural sales rather than self-sufficiency) contributed to hunger via farmer poverty; in the Indian case it appeared that the government was controlling the distribution of surpluses based on international and domestic political pressures, so price and supply themselves weren't necessarily prime factors there either.

BONUS J
Great quote from J-friend JCR, in response to a quote from another J-friend (""Americans are a stupid people by and large--we pretty much believe whatever we’re told.” -- Det. Norris, Baltimore PD, "The Wire"):

We have a very long history of mistrusting the government and believing in the importance of the individual over the community. We're steeped in it, and we don't often question it. This fundamental attitude is easy to manipulate, so that health care for everyone is bad (because you need more government investment to do it), while tax cuts for the rich are good (on the assumption that someone who is rich got that way by individual merit).

We're no lazier or dumber than the rest of the world, but our basic beliefs don't serve us as well as they could.

For the record, JCR partly credits this blog post by Frank Schaeffer for what he calls a not "completely original" sentiment. (Of course he's right; "There's nothing new under the sun", but then again, genius is, in a way, saying what others have thought but perhaps did not realize: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.")

Oh, for fuck's sake

2009-08-14T09:44:00.004-05:00

Sigh.

Apparently, the US is a criminal sex offender. So be on the look-out should this country move into your neighborhood.

I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise... I've found myself rather in agreement with critiques of recent years observing that we've come to accept prison rape as an informal additional punishment, a nonchalance which can't help but be reflected in the actual approach of the prison-industrial complex to investigating and stopping it. There's a good point to be made that we shouldn't accept rape as an informal punishment any more than we would accept it as a formal one -- I can't imagine (or I can, but'd rather not) it would pass Constitutional muster as a NON-"cruel and unusual" punishment, but our being so blase about invites it to stay part of our system.

Speaking, unfortunately, of rape, there is the continuing and seemingly worsening wave of sexual violence in the Congo, where apparently we're (the US and UN) helping to mentor other countries' armed forces in sexual violence:

AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about this issue of the US-, the UN-backed Congolese army in the area now increasing the rate of rapes? And we’re actually not just talking about women and girls, but also of men and boys, as well. Is that right, Christine?

CHRISTINE SCHULER DESCHRYVER: That’s totally right. I have to say, since they started like with the new operation called “Kimia II” with the Congolese army and supported by the UN forces, the situation here on the ground is terrible, terrible, because now we have the militias just—not just going and rape the women, they are burning villages, they are killing the people, they’re raping men. They are like—they already use the same methods like Janjaweeds in Darfur. So now the level of violence in both North and South Kivu is just incredible. There’s no more words to describe what’s going on. And we still, like—we all, like—like the international NGOs, the local, the national NGOs, all of them made reports to alert the world that there’s a tragedy going on with this operation. But they’re still continuing, and we don’t understand that.

I... have nothing else to say, really. This has sort of sapped the pithiness right outta me.

The Hell?

2009-08-12T15:52:00.002-05:00

There's an at least plausibly accurate survey out there showing that most Americans think women should be required to take their husband's name when they get married. The hell?

The J Continuum: Anekantavada has aspirations of doing some sort of Latin America-thingy with the future Mrs. J Continuum: Anekantavada where perhaps he adopts her last name as his middle and vice versa (making her prospectively more accurately named as the "Future Mrs. J Continuum: Anekantavada-Hyphen-Her-Name-Here") or some such other compromise; as a fan of some small amount of ritual and symbolism, I like the idea of reflection of a union of people in some sort of union of names. But a) I wouldn't even WANT her to simply replace her last name with mine, b) legally REQUIRED? c) the HELL?

Being a world-renowned professor while black

2009-07-22T10:26:00.004-05:00

Prof. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. -- Harvard University Professor, editor of the Root, etc. etc. -- was arrested on his own front porch after it was determined that he was, indeed, the legitimate homeowner as far as I can tell. Writer Samantha Henig of Slate and the Double X Factor comments on this and links to some other good commentaries:

Just as upsetting to me as the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest, Emily, is the way that so many people have been responding, including in our own comments section. There’s this reflexive defense mechanism that so often kicks in with white people (of which I am one) in situations like these; an urge to stand up for the white person accused of discrimination because hey, I’m white, and I’m not racist. I’ll admit, I feel that pull too at times—I cringe at people who fling around groundless accusations of racism [and other hot-button issues].

But this is not a case where people should get all smug about being “brave” and “honest” enough to question whether race was a factor; to suggest that maybe it was Gates who was out of line, not the cop. In all the steps of this story—the neighbor who called the cops, the way the officer spoke to Gates, the fact that the kerfuffle between them, no matter how much it was instigated by Gates, led to an actual arrest—it is just so hard to imagine that not one of them was influenced by Gates (and his driver) being black.

Blogger Kate Harding has a thorough explanation of why declarations that race isn’t a part of this arrest are coming from a position of white privilege. And to “people are trying to be all devil’s advocatey about it and suggest that Gates bears responsibility for making matters worse,” she offers this: “I’m sorry, who wouldn’t be a belligerent prick after getting off a long flight, coming home to a jammed door, then finding a cop in your living room accusing you of trying to steal your own shit? I sure would.” Ditto that.

Read the rest here.

Obama and Cheney, together in bed, giving H-E-A...

2009-07-22T09:26:00.003-05:00

With apologies to The Coup.

But; srsly?

The Obama administration asserted a legal argument that a federal judge called the Jon Stewart “Daily Show exemption,” as the Justice Department continued a court fight to protect ex-Vice President Dick Cheney from disclosures about his role in the leak of a CIA officer’s identity six years ago.

At a federal court hearing Tuesday, Jeffrey Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that the transcript of Cheney’s 2004 interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA leak should remain secret for as long as 10 more years.

Last month, Smith cited the possibility that the transcript’s release might discourage future vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigations because their words could become “fodder for The Daily Show.”

When Smith revived that argument on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan said, “You’re getting back to the Daily Show exemption. You’re not going back there, are you?”

Read the whole thing, "Obama Lawyers Shield Cheney on Leak" by Jason Leopold, at Consortium News.

It might be inaccurate, but at least it's fast

2009-07-20T10:42:00.003-05:00

An article today at Slate discussing Body Mass Index (BMI) and how it's actually a poor measure of obesity -- and why it's used so commonly to diagnose said obesity. Rather like many population measures -- time at menarche or onset of puberty, age at death, literacy, whatnot -- the overall averages won't tell you what's going on with any given individual. But alas, the almight BMI is convenient, so it's commonly used.

This reminds of the (related) phenomenon, back during the Atkins Diet craze, when I read an article talking about it and its actual relationship to healthy eating and longevity (questionable at best, negative at worst). It quoted some scientists as arguing that at least Atkins brought people's attention to dietary questions; in my experience, however, it was just another fad diet, and people adhered to it specifically. There was little spillover into more generalized health concerns, exercise, etc., just cutting down on carbs -- which as many scientists in that article and out pointed out, is not terribly related to long-term health, as the fats associated with much of the protein people ate instead did little for their cardiovascular health, and they missed out on the nutrients and micronutrients chiefly gleaned from eating complex carbs (i.e. the anti-Wonder Bread).

Anyway, like BMI or even worse our focus mainly on weight, the article expressed a point of view that I like to summarize as, "Things are so bad, we need a solution -- even if it's a wrong one that won't work."

Sigh.

Frank Ricci: Firefighter, Successful Supreme Court Litigant... Serial Suer?

2009-07-13T11:51:00.000-05:00

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate about Frank Ricci's penchant for filing suits over jobs. In what might be irrelevant background, a pattern of sour grapes, or a person "repeatedly victimized by a cruel cadre of employers, first for his dyslexia, then again for his role as a whistle-blower, and then a third time for just being white," the recent victor along with the others of Ricci v. DeStefano also just might be "a serial plaintiff—one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command." Ricci, who will testify during Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, is, as Lithwick says, thus "not the typical GOP heartthrob." The GOP's stance on discrimination lawsuits seems to be along the lines of J-Friend Dan's philosophy of complaining. As he once said: "I don't believe in complaining about things you can't do anything about. On the other hand, I don't really believe in complaining about all the other stuff either." Switch "complaining" with "lawsuits" and you have the Republican philosophy, or its seeming one, regarding lawsuits for rights infringements (see their repeated attacks on tort lawyers and all that rigmarole).

Lithwick's piece is little more than a trifle, though it certainly paints Ricci in a different light (whether or not that's a fair different light is a different conversation) and makes one wonder why this wasn't brought up before now? Surely, this wasn't just discovered. And like I say, it might be irrelevant, but it could've been a choice part of the discourse anyway, considering how much the focus was on "being fair" to Ricci and his colleagues, who "earned" their promotions based on the standards given, regardless of whether the standards were the best ones to evaluate people with or were discriminatory as such Title VII was heretofore determined.

So, 6 heads of state walk into a summit...

2009-07-08T10:07:00.003-05:00

What's wrong with this picture?

That's right: not only aren't half of the leaders women, none of the pictured leaders are women.

Oh, yes, and the failure to agree on a climate plan.

Though, black (male) head of state of a predominantly white country: check. We're still working on consistently representing the other (female) half of humanity, among other things.

New Haven's Firefighters: Race, White firefighters, and civil rights, Part the Nth

2009-07-02T14:22:00.003-05:00

A really fantastic piece, or seemingly from my quick readthrough, by Richard Thompson Ford again, Stanford scholar and previously linked-to commentator on the "New Haven Firefighter Case" of Ricci v. DeStefano.

Ford analyzes how the SCOTUS' finding for the white firefighters (and one Hispanic firefighter) in this promotion case overturns years of civil rights precedent, while going with more recent precedents of treating any attempt at addressing civil rights as creating their own racial (or sexual, in the case of homosexuality) preferences, "reverse discrimination" or "special privileges."

There are two interesting points here (well, many more than that, but two I will make right now.) One is that recent discussions with various J-friends have, unhappily, split pretty clearly along racial lines (though not with any racial overtext, that is, whether or not people agreed or disagreed with the SCOTUS decision fell quite racially within my very small subsample of my friends). BUT, the point of contention seemed to (mainly) fall into "Ricci et al. deserved to win because they played by the rules," that is, the test happened, and taking back what they'd "earned" by going along with the test as written would not be fair, regardless of the errors, biases, whatever of the test. (The "compromise" position found between J-fave D and J was that they were deserving of some recompense for the efforts they put into preparing for the test, even if they were not owed a promotion.) Essentially, as I discussed with J-Mom, it seemed to be a focus on the individual, individualism, and the rights of the individual not to be "harmed" for the good of the whole, or good of another group at least. (This is not at all how the J-friends phrased it, but my interpretation of their objections to my points of view). J-friend Sean felt that institutional racism was real, but of a lessor magnitude than perhaps I may think it was, a lessor magnitude than discrimination from poverty (which is hard, if not impossible, to parse, but suffice it to say I think institutional racism is a profound and not terribly diminished problem, something D seems to agree with to some degree.) Indeed, Sean argued (if I am restating it correctly) that essentially positive preferences for any group are essentially the same, such that discrimination "for" blacks was as bad as discrimination against them (and you can replace "black" with white or Hispanic or what have you here).

Thompson argues that this places many, many programs to address racial programs at risk, as in the end, they all hinge on treating one group differently than another or end up displacing some people who would otherwise have received a job, promotion, or college acceptance. (He uses the example of the 10% programs, where, for example, Texas admits the top 10% of students in their high school class, a supposedly "race-neutral" way of achieving the end of diversity and representation of minorities. As has been pointed out by others, this only works because Texas schools are segregated, thus, you get diverse representation because the top 10% of the class at predominantly black or Latino schools is itself predominantly black, so minorities get represented essentially because they are not integrated (or have lower relative average scores where they are more integrated). As Thompson says:

The university now admits any student in the top 10 percent of his or her public high-school class, and because so many of the public schools in Texas are racially segregated, this guarantees a racially diverse student body. Opponents of race-conscious affirmative action have pointed to this policy as an example of a viable, race-neutral alternative. But no one denies that the motivation for dropping the traditional admissions criteria in favor of the 10 percent plan is to achieve a better racial mix. Extending the logic of Ricci, this looks like impermissible race discrimination against the students who would have been admitted under the old criteria, just as dropping the firefighter promotion exam was impermissible race discrimination against the white firefighters who would have been promoted.

I think this poses a challenge to those who agree with the Ricci decision, unless they hold the very narrow stance that it is only because the test already happened that it was unfair discrimination. As Thompson points out, how would the case be (legally) different if, before the test, the city chose to use one test that they knew from previous data would tend to favor a more diverse mix (i.e. less whites and more minorities) rather than a test that would favor more whites. The intent there is almost exactly the same as throwing out the results for, as some of my friends posed it, "having too many white people". So if Ricci is unfairly discriminating against whites, using a test that you know would admit more minorities also should be, to be logically consistent.

The second point, which you may have forgotten I even supposedly had at this point, is that Ford reiterates that Ricci is a change in the status quo. As J-Mom AND the article by Bazelon I've prattled about here for the past week pointed out, the previous standard for a "discriminatory" test was just that the results were discriminatory. Governments typically used an "80% rule":

Title VII requires employers not just to inspect their hearts and not find any discriminatory intent, but to consider the racial impact of things like tests. And the EEOC, in interpreting this requirement, has given clear guidance about what impact counts as suspect:

"A selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths (4/5) (or eighty percent) of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact, while a greater than four-fifths rate will generally not be regarded by Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact."

The rates at which blacks and Hispanics passed the New Haven tests were well below 80% of the rate at which whites passed. That means that those tests were presumptively in violation of the law. (from Obsidian Wings)

Thus, the Court set aside the typical way things were done, where (as I have pointed out to J-friends), a test that has that much racial disparity is presumptively discriminatory, which seems to me a fine first pass at such things in a world of institutional discrimination, which I see as a very large on-going problem, contra J-friend EssEee.

As to the earlier point over the "fairness" to the individual, two other interesting bits:

Obsidian Wings: I have read many professions of outrage about this decision, but most of them focus on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that Frank Ricci didn't get his promotion, rather than what the law requires. This puzzled me.

And Walter Dellinger:

Given that no one had been promoted and no one had been denied promotion, it's very hard to see how the firefighters who brought suit were able to establish the very first element of a Title VII action: the existence of an "adverse employment action." In addition to satisfying the statute, it would have been far better for the process to judge New Haven actions after promotion decisions were actually made using whatever new standards the city chose to adopt. Completing the process would have shed light on the question of whether there were in fact equally good (or perhaps, better) criteria for determining promotions, and with far less racial disproportion... Which takes us to the fact that Justice Kennedy's opinion relies in part on a logically flawed, categorical error. He writes: "If an employer cannot rescore a test based on the candidates' race [citing the Title VII provision], then it follows a fortiori that it may not take the greater step of discarding the test altogether to achieve a more desirable racial distribution of promotion-eligible candidates..." This is wrong. There is a very powerful difference between setting aside the results of a test based on what you learn from general racial statistics about those who took the test, on the one hand, and adjusting individual test scores on the basis of race, on the other... Using race to identify a problem has never before been considered problematic. It is what necessarily happens before institutions adopt the most widely accepted race-neutral actions, like using admissions criteria for every applicant that have less of a racial impact (for example, accepting students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class, which, in states like Texas, would produce a racially diverse student body). Contrary to Kennedy's assertion, deciding not to use test results should be far less problematic than "rescoring based on race." ...Here, all New Haven did was set aside the results of a test. It seems to me that test would have been very hard to defend, given the other questionable employment rules that surrounded it. New Haven counts the multiple-choice test as 60 percent of what determines promotion. That places twice the weight on test-taking as the median for firefighter promotions around the country. How can that unusually great a weight be justified? Kennedy says only that it was insisted upon by the union. Yep. That was two decades ago, when the union was dominated by the white firefighters. That so great a weight should necessarily be given to a multiple-choice test used to pick leaders out of a group of qualified firefighters is hard to see.

Going back to Ford to wrap up, he asks:

And why stop there? Even recruitment efforts aimed at underrepresented minorities are designed to increase the representation of those groups in work forces and entering classes with a limited number of openings. If these outreach efforts are successful, some minorities will necessarily displace some whites who would otherwise have been hired or admitted. Are those efforts discriminatory, too?

Among other things, I see this case as reflecting a problem of where many want us to be, especially in white America, and where we actually are (or at least how we perceive it in black America, to speak in broad generalities). If you think racism is a significant and real, persistent still-present problem, interventions of a certain size, from affirmative action to throwing out the New Haven test (which depending on how you look at it, was unfair to those who would have been promoted based on how the test was set up before hand by taking away what they'd earned, or would have been permissible because it threw out results based on the heretofore legally correct presumption that such skewed results were de facto racist) seem reasonable. If you think, know, or wish that racism has receded to the point where a lot less aggressive, race-blind, and minor intervention is all that's needed, it seems understandable to take it from Ricci's side.

Argh. Ok, I have a headache now (unrelated to the post, I think). Até...

GoldFISHER... The Waste with the Supreme Court Touch

2009-07-02T10:41:00.003-05:00

Ok, that title is horrible.

BUT, so (seemingly) is the Supreme Court decision in Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. AND, the seeming complete LACK of analysis of this decision anywhere other than The Colbert Report. (If you can find some other good analyses, please let us at the Continuum know.)

From Colbert and quick skimming of other sources, it seems to be that a gold company in Alaska got permission from the Army Corps of Engineers to dispose of "tailings" from a gold mine but filling up a lake of a depth of 75 ft or so to a depth of 74 ft, killing (of course) everything in the lake, what with the lake becoming a "kiddie pool" and the toxic nature of the "tailings."

Apparently, the issue was: the gold mine waste is technically "fill" and "fill" is under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers, not the EPA, which only has jurisdiction of "waste". So the toxic fill could be used to fill up the lake because it wasn't toxic waste, but toxic fill. Somehow involved in this was a Bush Administration regulation (I believe they changed it so that "fill" was no longer covered by the EPA, but I could be off on that), and the Court ruled that it should give deference to the EPA's own interpretation of its regulations, such that apparently filling up a lake with toxic fill isn't the same as filling it up with toxic waste. (This seems to me to clash with Scalia's untenuous philosophy of using only the "plain sense meaning" of laws, but whatever.)

I'd really like to read more in depth analysis of this case, but it seems to be lacking. I guess we're too busy with celebrity deaths, strip-searching teenagers, and firefighters.

Actual SCOTUS decision is here.

Deforestation for Sustainable Development neither Develops nor is Sustainable

2009-07-01T16:21:00.002-05:00

A recent study by Rodrigues et al. finds that development projects in the Brazilian Amazon didn't really increase people's long-term quality of life (there was an increasing quality of life as deforestation began and then it decreased back to a similarly low point as it started at). Among other things, this sort of belies (yet again) what's been called the environmental Kuznet's curve, roughly speaking, the idea that the economy has to "develop" or expand before you can "afford" environmental protection. If you in the end neither provide measurable development nor protect the environment, well... Anyway. Bjorn Lomborg: 0; Reality: Many.

There's much more to be said about development, resource use, sustainability, and the economics, politics and forces at work encouraging deforestation and supposed development scheme, but they won't be said right now.

Once again, Ruth Bader Ginsberg proves to be the Voice of the J Continuum

2009-06-29T13:57:00.003-05:00

God love her. Though I still can't see how RBG and Scalia are supposedly personal friends; I guess they don't let politics get in the way, which in a way is admirable, and another way, kind of... blergh. I guess it's mostly admirable, but it's weird to me: "You have a fundamentally different view of justice, rights, appropriate behavior, and the roll of state than I do, to the point that where I see oppression, you see correctness, where I see sound reasoning you see soft-headedness, and where you see correctness, I see incorrect or wistful interpretation, and continuing of an oppressive system." I guess it's good -- and much needed -- to have friendship across political lines, but when it's someone like Scalia... It'd just be weird hanging with someone who not only differs with you on, say, whether or not the state should put people to death and what constitutes torture, but has and has used his position (quite correctly) to advance his views. (Like I say, it's of course correct for Scalia to do so, it just adds a creepy element to political disagreements, when you each have the power to make your stance part of the "correct" interpretation of the laws of the land.)

Anyway, Emily Bazelon returns to my good graces with this in her recent post on the recent Ricci decision:

Why all the competitive storytelling? The Supreme Court's ruling today will apply whenever cities try to base promotions (or, by extension, hirings) on a procedure that turns out to eliminate most or all of the minority candidates. This is called disparate impact, and Congress wrote it into Title VII in 1991. New Haven's test for promoting firefighters had such a disparate impact—that's one thing all the justices do agree on. The question is, What happens next? Can the city say, hey, we think there's another better way to make these promotions that won't leave us with a fire department led only or mostly by white people; now let us go figure that out? Until today, the answer seemed to be yes. Now the answer is clearly no. If a city in this position sees a disparate impact problem coming toward it like a right, it can only step out of the way if it has, as Linda explains, a "strong basis in evidence" for thinking that the test can't be defended—in other words, that the test it used is more job-related, and a better measure of performances, than the other measures of assessment it didn't use.

The city can't throw out its test even though the results allow for the promotions of no black firefighters because it would be making such a decision based on race or, as Kennedy writes, because "the City rejected the test results because the higher scoring candidates were white." He is treating the decision to throw out the test and start over as an absolute racial preference. Here is where the bad facts come in: Frank Ricci and the other white (and one Hispanic) firefighters who sued did what they were supposed to do. They studied for the test the city offered, and they scored the highest. But they didn't get the promotions they felt entitled to because no black firefighters scored as well. Justice Ginsburg points out that Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs "had no vested right to promotion." She's right. But to the majority, that doesn't really matter, because the majority focuses only on this test and this round of promotions in New Haven. And when you frame the case that way, Frank Ricci and his dashed hopes take up the whole screen. At which point, you think about justice for them and only them.

Ginsburg widens the lens. She goes back to the early 1970s, when African-Americans and Hispanics made up 30 percent of New Haven's population and only 3.6 of the city's 502 firefighters. This is when the black firefighters in New Haven started suing. Their efforts yielded much better representation among the rank-and-file in the department. But as Ginsburg says, not among the fire department's leadership: "The senior officer ranks (captain and higher) are nine percent African-American and nine percent Hispanic. Only one of the Departments' 21 fire captains is African American." (More from me about the history of New Haven's fire department here.) New Haven threw out the test results because it was trying to rectify that imbalance. To Ginsburg, this should surely be permissible—a city trying voluntarily to comply with Congress' 1991 mandate to address disparate impact.

And then, Ginsburg points out, the majority raises the bar for what New Haven must show to justify throwing out these test results. Kennedy dismisses as "stray facts" in the record the doubts raised about how the test was weighted—60 percent written, 40 percent oral—and the city's proposal to replace the test with an assessment center, which are designed to evaluate the particular skills needed for a job. But Ginsburg sees that the 60-40 weighting simply reflects the demands of the union—the same union that filed its own suit against the city in support of Frank Ricci. And she sees the merit of the assessment centers as an alternative measure. "Relying heavily on written tests to select fire officers is a questionable practice, to say the least," she writes. "Successful fire officers, the City's description of the position makes clear, must have the '[a]bility to lead personnel effectively, maintain discipline, promote harmony, exercise sound judgment, and cooperate with other officials.' These qualities are not well measured by written tests." No wonder, in Ginsburg's view, a 1996 study found that two-thirds of the cities surveyed were using assessment centers in making promotion decisions.

They make a good point that I've been (inadvertently) dancing around with my fellow discussants in other fora: the (reasonable) sympathy evinced for Ricci and his fellow white (and one hispanic) firefighters in this case is in conflict with the institutional history and less acute but nonetheless real plight of black firefighters in New Haven. And I would differ with my friend EssEee (Sean) who sees institutional racism as less of a problem than institutional discrimination against poverty; I guess part of my counterexample would be the various problems women have with equality of management positions, salary, and promotion (see i.e. Lilly Ledbetter), where the problems of disparity and inequality for women is, if not completely distinct from poverty, relatively so.

More on Ricci v. DeStefano from another forum

2009-06-29T12:58:00.003-05:00

J-Friend EssEee said:

Jumping in late here... Has it been demonstrated in any valid way that the test was, in fact, flawed. Or is it merely a case of the results pointing to the possibility of a flawed test?
From my limited knowledge, it appears that the city said "This is the criteria used to determine promotions." and when the results came back and too many people of ... Read Morethe "wrong" race met the criteria, the criteria were changed. Without demonstration that the original criteria were flawed, it seems to be flagrantly a matter of discrimination.

J responds:
(as often happens, I don't get to my point until I ramble through a lot of "thinking out loud." As I occasionally do, I'm reposting the conclusion at the top because I think it contains a brief summary of all the words I wander through to get there. So feel free to read the whole thing, but here's the gist:)
So I argue: can one have a test that discriminates along race but is not itself discrimination or resulting from the structures of racism? I think this is unlikely. And if it is possible to use an alternative but equally or more valid test of ability that doesn't divide along race, how does that compare to the original? If the original is fair does that make the alternative "hyper-fair"? Or if the alternative is equally or more valid, does that mean the original is discriminatory? I think this is an important question to ask. Some argue that looking at the result they got in terms of race and saying you will re-test is discriminatory in itself. I argue that looking at the result and not re-assessing the evaluation to see if there's a better way to do it is racist, because if there's a better way to do it that doesn't end up segregating racially, that seems to de facto mean the original way is flawed. I mean, they can't both be true, can they? If one test yields more racially balanced results, and is a reasonable test of ability, but another test yields racially segregatory results, can this other test also be considered a reasonable test? How can two reasonable tests give different results? And if two reasonable tests do give different results but one favors racial equality, is it racist to demand that test be used (or at least such industry-common alternatives tried)? How do we analyze a situation like this (which seems likely to be what would happen)?

I will say that I'm somewhat rather swayed that those who prepped for the test extensively are owed some kind of recompense, because institutional racism is not their fault, but I don't know that they're owed a promotion. (And if I were ruling the world, the way they'd get recompense would likely be cuts in everyone's salary to pay for a proportional compensation for them, since it is everyone's responsibility in society to agitate for racial equality, though of course in real life, this would just make everyone hate everyone... though that seems to be likely in this case anyway.)

Well I'd challenge you on that EssEee, though I'm fairly sure you'll still disagree. The criteria for discrimination is "disparate impacts", that is, if different races are affected differently, there's a prima facie reason (to my understanding) for assuming discrimination. This was instituted such that people couldn't (consciously or unconsciously) ... Read Morediscriminate after Jim Crow was struck down by trying to tailor tests towards one race. It seems fairly clear, in this case, it *was* tailored towards whites, completely inadvertently, given that it tested (seemingly) esoteric knowledge of the characteristics of fire over practical experience, and the whites were MUCH more likely to be nth generation firefighters, and therefore to possess (or have easy access to) such knowledge.

To me the question I suppose is what do you count as discrimination? The biggest problem this day & age is institutional racism, imho, which is racism inherent in the structures of the society we've built today. You don't have 300+ years of de jure racism without a lot of de facto racism becoming part of the culture and its institutions. To me, there's a good argument for looking at all institutions critically from the standpoint of race & sex, because they were founded on assumptions of inequality, and getting rid of the *rules* of inequality doesn't ... Read Morechange that the institution was founded in it and therefore is likely to have understructures of power favoring one race or sex. In any case, the argument is that if a test affects one race completely differently than another (as seems the case here), it's likely there's a discriminatory factor. After all, there are 3 Occam's Razor type conclusions to be drawn: 1) The white firefighters are inherently more qualified (as measured by the test); 2) they worked harder as a group than Latinos and Blacks; 3) the test (likely unintentionally) exploited factors that aligned racially. The fourth, that it's random chance, seems unlikely given the numbers.

And one has to admit, I think, it's quite possible that the test did discriminate based on racially-aligned factors that are non-obvious . (I guess one of a more libertarian ilk might argue that's tough crap, that society is only responsible for intentional racism and inadvertently racially-aligned factors are not germane, but I could go on for two... Read More pages on why I think that's completely faulty reasoning.)
I guess I'd pose a couple questions on this basis: 1) Is it possible for the city to want to redo the test, purely based on race, because the test *in its results* seemingly discriminated? Aren't results that break too-neatly on racial lines automatically suspect, whatever the cause? In effect, is wanting to redo it simply because not too many of the "wrong" race met the criteria but because only ONE of the non-white races qualified? After all, that's the issue -it's not that the wrong people won, it's that one race all but COMPLETELY dominated promotions. 2) If it is automatically racist to want to redo it just because the test broke down (I would bet) non-randomly along the lines of race? (That is, I bet the chances of getting these results at random from a fair test is very low, so one must assume systematically lower qualifications among the blacks and hispanics or assume the test is inherently unfair.) If this is true, that it is racist to redo the test simply because a not representative enough x-section was promoted, in otherwise, racism can happen in advancement of a fair goal (equality in promotion), then it seems to me it must be equally true that it is inadvertent racism to presume a test is fair and that blacks and hispanics were systematically under-qualified. That is, if it's racist in the pursuit of diversity to re-do a test that, unintentionally or not, strictly divivded on racial lines, then to me it is equally (if not more) tenable to argue that a test that strictly divides along racial lines is de facto racist, unless it can be shown that there's not a different, equally or more valid way to conduct the test that does not break down on racial lines.

In the end, that is my understanding from Richard Thompson Ford of the law -- if there is a way to do it that does not break down racially that is equally or more valid, then it is discriminatory to use the method that does break down along racial lines, even if unintentionally. To me, there are two burdens of proof, a different one for each side: for those who want to redo the test, that the test is unfair in some way; for those that want to follow the results, to prove that the reason it broke down racial lines is skill-related. If both sides fail to prove their contention, I'd argue that the compelling interest of society in having its services reflect its own diversity carries the day. All this is to say, I would (I have to admit, at least now that I've considered all the factors) have to say it would be equally racist if only blacks passed and the test wasn't reconsidered. I mean, think of that -- would you assume the test was fair if only blacks and hispanics succeeded in promotions and only one, or no, white people succeeded? I would think that's suspicious on its face as well.

In the end, I think it is simply wishful thinking to equate "discriminating" in order to achieve racial balance the same as doing so to achieve segregation. One cannot correct a society that was biased along color lines through a color blind approach. You cannot expect all social starting points to be equal while Jim Crow (legal segregation) is still within easily living memory. MLK, often quoted for his "dream" of all living in harmony, did not seem to believe this would be achieved through colorblindness:

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness — justice.
o Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967), p. 109

Can it be this "debt of justice" can be paid simply by ignoring race? That doesn't sound like in any way paying a debt to me. He further said:

If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.
o from a 1968 Playboy magazine interview

This is certainly an "argument from authority," but I use it because MLK is so often used to argue for a race-blind society. Can anyone doubt from those two quotes alone that he meant for an equal society to come about by not challenging any institution that has, say, a 30% black population but not 30% blacks at all levels? That he would say the solution to that is not action and re-examination of the method of determining it, but simply, I don't know, hard work and better luck next time?

have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

So I argue: can one have a test that discriminates along race but is not itself discrimination or resulting from the structures of racism? I think this is unlikely. And if it is possible to use an alternative but equally or more valid test of ability that doesn't divide along race, how does that compare to the original? If the original is fair does that make the alternative "hyper-fair"? Or if the alternative is equally or more valid, does that mean the original is discriminatory? I think this is an important question to ask. Some argue that looking at the result they got in terms of race and saying you will re-test is discriminatory in itself. I argue that looking at the result and not re-assessing the evaluation to see if there's a better way to do it is racist, because if there's a better way to do it that doesn't end up segregating racially, that seems to de facto mean the original way is flawed. I mean, they can't both be true, can they? If one test yields more racially balanced results, and is a reasonable test of ability, but another test yields racially segregatory results, can this other test also be considered a reasonable test? How can two reasonable tests give different results? And if two reasonable tests do give different results but one favors racial equality, is it racist to demand that test be used (or at least such industry-common alternatives tried)? How do we analyze a situation like this (which seems likely to be what would happen)?

I will say that I'm somewhat rather swayed that those who prepped for the test extensively are owed some kind of recompense, because institutional racism is not their fault, but I don't know that they're owed a promotion. (And if I were ruling the world, the way they'd get recompense would likely be cuts in everyone's salary to pay for a proportional compensation for them, since it is everyone's responsibility in society to agitate for racial equality, though of course in real life, this would just make everyone hate everyone... though that seems to be likely in this case anyway.)

Daktari & J continued: Ricci v. DeStefano and I get errors when I try to post this in comments

2009-06-26T01:54:00.003-05:00

Previously on this same Bat-Channel, D said:

OK, I'm having a problem following your logic here. So maybe you can try following mine for a minute. Black and Hispanic test takers did not score proportionately as well given their representation in the test taking pool as white test takers so the test was thrown out. (I assume that the single Hispanic plaintiff is the one who passed the exam.)

It seems to me that the racial imbalanced results have two possible origins: 1) the test was racially biased against black and hispanic test takers, or 2) it is the product of chance. Now, to the best of my knowledge, no black or hispanic test takers claimed that the test was biased at the time of the test. So any bias wasn't apparent to any of the test takers, regardless of race. All test takers were willing to wait on the results, presuming that it was a fair and balanced exam. Also to the best of my knowledge, no post-test analysis has been performed on the actual test taken to see if there is support for the claim of racial bias in the test.

Other than perfomance, there is no evidence to support the claim that the test was racially biased. So it must stand to reason that it IS the fact that no blacks made it to the "promotion level" that the test was thrown out. The city did not get the results they desired. What the hell? This case is going to go to the Supremes without the test in question even getting a once over by the people in a position to evaluate such tests?

I am sure you are right that there is residual institutional racism in the New Haven fire department. But it seems to me that the problem lies within the department's flawed policies. Change the policies if they don't give you what you want.

I for one cannot see the problem with saying that gender and racial representation should reflect that of the broader community. Therefore, half the firefighters should be men, x% should be black, x% white, x% hispanic. If you don't like that idea, then take a job somewhere else.

BUT, a handful of firefighters have been denied promotion based on the criteria that the city said it would use to promote firefighters. I hate the idea of an all white supervisory staff there, especially given the community's racial composition, but you can't switch boats mid-stream. I think these guys have a legitimate case.

The real issue for New Haven will be how to design a promotion policy that allows more equitable representation without being discriminatory against minority (for their community) ethic or racial groups.

Finally, didn't Ricci take 6 months off work to study for this test? Surely he, and anyone else who did similarly, must be seen as outliers. What happens to test results when you take these couple of fellows out of the analysis? Who know? Maybe the playing field does seem more level. There is too much unknown here to presume anything about the fairness of that test. However, it seems incredibly unfair to me that the criteria were established and agreed upon by all participants and then the rules change because the right people didn't win the game.

Will be interesting to see what the Supremes say.

J responded, here in a post body because his comments post refused to work:

Don't know that I entirely misunderstood you. I'm only half awake, but I don't think this particular policy constitutes a contract with its employees. I'm not sure how often supervisory positions come up, but seemingly not very. Besides which, promotions are (I would think) discretionary; sort of like tenure -- there doesn't have to be a particularly great reason to deny someone tenure. It can't be a purely discriminatory one, but it can be as simple as "you don't fit where we thought we were going when we hired you/when we told you that typically people with your track record of crazy hard work get tenure yesterday before the review". I mean, especially if this test is unrelated to the skills needed for the position, which is a quite arguable position (and one of the positions the black firefighters have taken). Clearly, it is not a "contract" in any absolute sense, as no one would say they were required to promote them if the deal were "we draw straws and whoever gets the longest straw gets promoted." If you then (rightly) decided that pure chance was a horrible reason to promote someone, I don't think you are breaching contract to refuse. (It may be "unfair" but again it depends on your perspective; in this case, it would be "unfair" to the supervisees and the city to have firefighters chosen by raffle when a better method could be devised to gauge quality.) Further, if the test does depend on white privilege, it could therefore be called discriminatory even if it were fair in the way I outlined earlier, that is, given sufficient backgrounding in the facts and culture, you could excel. Of course, that's the further problem -- the "contract" was that the top scorers absolutely get the promotions, not all those who passed any arbitrary cut-off. Most would agree that a written test cannot be the most effective way to determine a manager and firefighting supervisor. The agreement was for the written test to be everything -- and for having the highest relative scores being as important as high absolute scores. If the scores had been 99.9, 99.8, 99.7, 99.6, etc. and those first several were white, under the agreement as it was, they still would have to be the ones promoted -- even if those differences were within the margin of error and any number of other factors (20 years on the force vs. a well-testing greenhorn to make an extreme example) said that Mr. or Mrs. 99.2 should get promoted.

The problem is, you're of course right that if the test is "fair" then the employer shouldn't change midstream just because the results weren't what they wanted. But the law defines unfair as "ending up with a result affecting minorities differently when an alternative would work as well or better." That is, unfair for that exact circumstance, i.e. the test the white firefighters did better on is by default unfair if there is a difference in race and it can be shown that better practices could've been used for the test. Hence the tough spot the city is in -- the black firefighters may've had the law on their side had the city gone with the test because discriminatory results apparently automatically raise the possibility if not plausibility of a discriminatory test.

The problem to me is not whether or not you can change requirements mid-stream; if tomorrow the test were found to be a horrible predictor of skill, you aren't going to risk firefighters & civilians lives because of a tacit agreement with the test-takers. And if the test were obviously discriminatory, then the city would be within its rights you seem to be saying. The problem is, it's easy to (to me) to argue both sides, and no matter how you decide you may be "unfair" to one group. Fairness depends on where you stand, as does the test's discriminatory nature. In the end, the test is an attempt to make a qualitative process strictly quantitative, and that underlies the whole problem -- we can't reduce any of this to "facts" because almost every bit of it but the most basic elements are subject to interpretation.

D & J Discuss Firefighting Institutional Racism

2009-06-25T18:14:00.002-05:00

Daktari (from this post's comments):

OK, I'm having a problem following your logic here. So maybe you can try following mine for a minute. Black and Hispanic test takers did not score proportionately as well given their representation in the test taking pool as white test takers so the test was thrown out. (I assume that the single Hispanic plaintiff is the one who passed the exam.)

It seems to me that the racial imbalanced results have two possible origins: 1) the test was racially biased against black and hispanic test takers, or 2) it is the product of chance. Now, to the best of my knowledge, no black or hispanic test takers claimed that the test was biased at the time of the test. So any bias wasn't apparent to any of the test takers, regardless of race. All test takers were willing to wait on the results, presuming that it was a fair and balanced exam. Also to the best of my knowledge, no post-test analysis has been performed on the actual test taken to see if there is support for the claim of racial bias in the test.

Other than perfomance, there is no evidence to support the claim that the test was racially biased. So it must stand to reason that it IS the fact that no blacks made it to the "promotion level" that the test was thrown out. The city did not get the results they desired. What the hell? This case is going to go to the Supremes without the test in question even getting a once over by the people in a position to evaluate such tests?

I am sure you are right that there is residual institutional racism in the New Haven fire department. But it seems to me that the problem lies within the department's flawed policies. Change the policies if they don't give you what you want.

I for one cannot see the problem with saying that gender and racial representation should reflect that of the broader community. Therefore, half the firefighters should be men, x% should be black, x% white, x% hispanic. If you don't like that idea, then take a job somewhere else.

BUT, a handful of firefighters have been denied promotion based on the criteria that the city said it would use to promote firefighters. I hate the idea of an all white supervisory staff there, especially given the community's racial composition, but you can't switch boats mid-stream. I think these guys have a legitimate case.

The real issue for New Haven will be how to design a promotion policy that allows more equitable representation without being discriminatory against minority (for their community) ethic or racial groups.

Finally, didn't Ricci take 6 months off work to study for this test? Surely he, and anyone else who did similarly, must be seen as outliers. What happens to test results when you take these couple of fellows out of the analysis? Who know? Maybe the playing field does seem more level. There is too much unknown here to presume anything about the fairness of that test. However, it seems incredibly unfair to me that the criteria were established and agreed upon by all participants and then the rules change because the right people didn't win the game.

Will be interesting to see what the Supremes say.

J responds:
Don't know if you read my prior post and the linked piece by Richard Thompson Ford. But the choice between "it's racially biased" and "it's random chance" isn't so easy as it appears. That is, it doesn't have to be racially biased in a way most would recognize ("these are questions black people somehow are less likely to know the answers to") but rather "the test (possibly inadvertently) gives advantage to whites based on greater access to certain types of knowledge -- the institutional history of most of them being nth generation firefighters whereas almost none of the blacks are anything but 1st gen. firefighters". It also -- the linked article makes this point -- relies strongly on "book learning" of (almost seemingly esoteric) knowledge of fires that doesn't apply to the job at hand to a high degree.

"Switching horses in midstream" is really not a concern to me. After all, fighting discrimination is by definition switching midstream. You don't get to benefit from it just because it seemed fair at the time.

It rather seems that the test was "fair" in that given the same amount of studying and background in firefighting, anyone could do as well. There are two parts to unpack here: one is that the white firefighters seemed to have a greater interest (due to family history and culture seemingly) and greater background in the "book aspects" of firefighting and thus did better on a test of such aspects; two, even presuming it was "fair", the law around discrimination (as I understand it from R. T. Ford) is that, if there is an equal or better way to test for skills related to promotion that would be less likely to result in disparate impacts, it is essentially a discriminatory act to use the test that ends up with disparate results.

That is to say, no one (except the firefighters who passed) argues that this test was the best way to determine their suitability for promotion. If there is a test that would better test such suitability, it should be used and this test should be thrown out. Since the test was not based on actual comportment in the field, people skills, or operational knowledge rather than memorized knowledge, one can easily (in my opinion) argue that it's not the best way to test for promotions. Whether or not discrimination was intended, if there is a better way to test for suitability that would end up with less disparate results, it should be used and this thrown out.

don't know if you read the articles linked in *this* post, but the test hasn't been publicly examined because it's proprietary and the company and city's contract doesn't allow it to be released. But the description makes it quite seem to me that the test is fair in the ways I described. But, that's the point of institutional racism -- you can set things up that are nominally "fair" and use them, inadvertently or purposefully, to end up with disproportionate results. Such disproportionate results are inherently suspect, and if there is a different and plausibly better way to do things, then they should be done that way, whether or not the intention was to discriminate.

It seems to me like this test was a case of "white privilege" -- the white firefighters in this case benefited from culture and history in a way they had no control over, but in a way that would tend to maintain a discriminatory status quo. As I said to my white colleagues at Procter & Gamble -- if you reasonably believe in equality, then in certain zero-sum situations like promotion, you *have* to believe that whites will be promoted less often then now. you can't both maintain the status quo of disproportionate power and achieve equality. And like the original SATs, which appear fair but which were explicitly instituted for discriminatory purposes (originally to keep out Jews, though it didn't work very well), you can't argue to maintain a seemingly fair solution if there are better solutions, especially when the present one, even unintentionally, holds people back.

And I completely agree with you on making things reflect community %ages, but people argue that a) this is a quota (which it is) and quotas per se have been illegal for a while now, and b) that this means "unqualified" people (minorities) will get in, and if you require some "basic" competence, then you return to defining what this competence is, and you almost never end up with a "basic" test favoring minorities (historically speaking, and if you do, you get lawsuits like this).

I guess this is one of the reasons I feel so strongly -- this to me is a case of white privilege, where the racism is not intentional or obvious, yet to leave things status quo means perpetuating "hidden advantages." I would propose that everyone taking the test get equal access to studying resources, but even then, the nth generation firefighters have an advantage, and since almost all several-generation firefighting families are white... well, there you go.

It's prickly, and hard to explain in writing for me, but by your definition, essentially, the white firefighters are as a group outliers (which is statistically an inviable proposition I'd say). Of course, the criteria established and agreed upon were not by "all participants" but rather by the union, on behalf of "all participants," but then, the union is majority white and split on racial lines and supporting the white firefighters. Hardly a good way to establish "criteria agreed upon by all participants."

If it only turns out after the fact that the "right people" didn't win the game, when the game doesn't necessarily test the most pertinent skills, then it seems to me that changing the rules is not unfair. There is no right to a promotion, and fairness is not "holding the rules steady" per se; like I said, if fairness were simply constancy of rules, then rules couldn't be changed in the face of discriminatory results. There is more to fairness than constancy, and not all institutional barriers are obvious before they are smacked right into.

Firefighting in black and white: More on Ricci v. DeStefano (aka the New Haven Firefighter Case)

2009-06-25T13:12:00.006-05:00

This continues an earlier J-Continuum/Anekantavada discussion about the discrimination case before the Supreme Court of Ricci v. DeStefano. Again on Slate, an article does a pretty good job covering a lot of the relevant territory. Although I won't get into it now in any depth, a couple of facts together seem to me to point to why the city got it right in throwing out test results and denying promotions to everyone from that round of testing (i.e. mostly white, one Hispanic, and no Black promotions would have resulted):

a) In their entries, Allan and Bazelon lay out a still-common history and present of discrimination against minority firefighters, such that majority Hispanic and Black neighborhoods have had and often still have majority white firefighting forces, and even further, have stratification such that the supervisory levels are quite disproportionately white, along with

b) In this case, the white firefighters are predominantly from almost-totally white neighborhoods (~95% white) outside of the city they serve, New Haven, while the minority firefighters are mostly residents of the city. In entry exams, city residents get a slight (5%) advantage, on supervisory applications, there is no preference for those who live in-city. (It seems to me that living in the place you serve as a civil servant is a logical thing to preference for, if not require or distinctly advantage -- there's something to debate here, but I think you should be an explicit member of the civic community you supposedly serve for a variety of reasons, and the very least, this should likely be preferenced/encouraged in perhaps positive-incentive ways if it were not to be required). Further, in this specific case, allegedly some of the white firefighters "joke on the phone about 'working in the ghetto.' [Black, female New Haven Firefighter Erika Bogan asked] 'How dare you, when you live in Madison or Guilford, come in here and take our money and go back to your communities and talk shit about New Haven?'" I don't know that this has entered the case, but such casual disdain -- even as a joke -- speaks poorly of a white "civil servant" who doesn't even live in the place he's "serving." (It just compounds the problematicness of the whole thing -- at least if he lived in the "ghetto" he'd have the social "right to speak" ill of it by being a part of the community, rather than an "outsider" ridiculing it.)

c) The tests were based almost wholly on memorization and technical details of firefighting, items which don't even (apparently) apply to the majority of cases faced by the New Haven dept. (which are emergency calls, often medical in nature, according to the article). In other words, the tests don't have an apparent relationship with the actual on-the-job performances and requirements of firefighting in New Haven.

d) The firefighter's union chose to support Ricci (the white firefighter), despite accepting dues from all the firefighters, of all races; when a court ruled they couldn't back Ricci in court, they still spent union funds supporting his case, despite protestations (and an impending suit) from Black firefighters. This seems to me to constitute another form of institutional bias; it clearly should've sat out of this case in this manner, attempting to see the interests of all of its members. (One could argue it sees this supposedly "neutral" test to be in the interest of all of its members, but when the vote went straight down racial lines, it seems to me paternalistic and institutionally (i.e. not individually or purposefully) racist to then honor the requests of the majority-white vote.

e) The way the test was designed and conducted -- little input or review by outside experts (to avoid potential cheating, apparently) and out of step with what appears to be best practices in many other municipalities -- seems to me to further indicate the possibility of systematic unfairness and, importantly, to indicate that it is not necessarily the best way to determine promotability. This is one of the cornerstones of the "disparate impacts" bit of discrimination law -- if there's a better way to assess ability that is less likely to affect races differently, then (from my lay interpretation) it appears the city did the right thing in vacating the test.

f) Scalia apparently said at oral argument that he doubts the city would've done the same thing had the situation been reversed and almost exclusively black firefighters got promoted. ARGH. That just sounds so FUCKING ignorant to me. For one thing, that seems unlikely -- actually, if someone can point out an example of that happening, I'd like to know, because the very fact that all blacks doing better than all whites on a job exam seems to be rare if not non-existent points to me to the persistent and lingering problems of institutional racism, which is the very spur for the city's interpretation of the law that Ricci is challenging. Besides which, if that happened, wouldn't the white firefighters seem likely to challenge it? And wouldn't they, perhaps, have a point? One cannot simultaneously maintain that the white firefighters would be right to challenge the results in that case, and that they are right to challenge it in this case, without the logical implication that the point is that the white firefighters are entitled to do better automatically. And the white firefighters would likely be right to challenge it should the results have been nearly all-black. And if the city's behavior in THAT case would possibly be illegal, it is possibly illegal in this case. To be logically consistent, if he's going to find for Ricci in this case, Scalia would have to think that a case where only blacks were promoted would be prima facie legal, I think. (Despite the Latin, I'm not making a specific legal claim since I know nothing about the practice of law.) Bottom line: that sounds potentially discriminatory to me. In the end, this objection sounds suspiciously like "Oh, the city is just too obsessed with promoting BLACK PEOPLE," which is a stone's throw from "Political Correctness is ruining us all" and a good ways down the road, but on the same road, as calling them "Nigger lovers." Really, Scalia just disgusts me with that (though I know that's in part visceral and not logical, but it still, to me, trades on racial anxiety in a deceitful way.)

Anyway, I actually did talk at length about all that. Ooops. Time for showering and eating and writing actual academic work.

So, I'll leave off here with a quote from what seems to me to be a (rare) exceptional bit of writing from Slate (and an exception to much of Bazelon's recent production, despite my overall fondness for her as a writer based on memories of articles I liked long ago):

To young black firefighters like Mike Neal and Erika Bogan, that sounds like a solution. "We want to be on a level playing field," Neal says. "We want everything to be given to us on our merits." Ricci's group, on the other hand, feel as if they've already earned their promotions based on merit. They did what the city told them to. It's hard to imagine how they'll feel right about starting all over again.

Neal and Bogan's conception of merit is different from Frank Ricci's. It's easy to see why. Ever since the test results came out, the black Firebirds and the white plaintiffs have had opposing interests. Stretching back further in time, back over the decades, the two groups also see the history of the department through a different lens. For Frank Ricci, the past is a story of ethnic heritage and family pride. For Mike Neal and Erika Bogan, it's a story about breaking the lock on hiring that kept their people out.

Maybe promotions based on an assessment center would serve the city better, in the long-run, by testing for the abilities fire captains and lieutenants most need. Or maybe there are just a lot of firefighters well-qualified to do these jobs and a scant number of openings. "It seems like guys on both sides of the line feel like they've been cheated, like there just aren't enough positions to go around," says William Gould, the white captain. He supports Frank Ricci. But he can see what this fight looks like from the other side. If New Haven could start over, maybe it could also admit outright that it has more deserving firefighters than it has rewards. The city could come up with a measure for who is qualified for the promotions, rather than who is somehow best. And then it could choose from that pool by lottery. That might not exactly be fair, either. But it would recognize that sometimes there may be no such thing.

Point, Counter-punch

2009-06-15T08:34:00.004-05:00

An interesting contrast of two articles on Counterpunch recently.

Nadia Hijab writes in "Small Changes Within the Confines of the Establishment: The Obama Difference:

Many have read much into Obama's speech - that was part of its genius - but it contained no policy announcements. That does not mean there are no policies. The Obama administration works differently from its predecessors in at least three ways... it doesn't do business on the basis of public pronouncements, the Obama administration speaks with one voice (the same tough line - settlements must stop, peace must start - is delivered by Mr. Obama; Vice President Joe Biden, who used to call himself a Zionist; Hillary Clinton, the former stridently pro-Israel junior senator from New York; Rahm Emanuel, who twice volunteered for the Israeli Army; the national security adviser, General James Jones; and the special envoy, George Mitchell), and this is an administration that does its homework. So, yes, nothing has changed on the ground yet. But because of the way it works, the Obama administration has a much better chance of bringing peace to the Middle East than its predecessors. Still, before breaking out the champagne, remember that Mr. Obama works within the boundaries of the American establishment. Within those narrow confines and given the present Israeli-Palestinian power imbalance, the Palestinians are likely to secure a bare minimum of rights while Israel walks off with the rest. Unless, that is, the Palestinians can rapidly tilt the balance in their favor - or unless Israel's intransigence does it for them.

In contrast, (though not strictly speaking, in complete opposition), Jennifer Loewenstein writes in "New Rhetoric for the Coloner-Settler Project: How Much Really Separates Obama and Netanyahu?":

Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama have one thing very much in common: both of them have nearly the same vision for the future of “Palestine”. They may not recognize it yet, but sooner or later, whether Netanyahu remains in power or is replaced by someone who speaks Dove-Liberalese better, they will shake hands and agree that the only thing that really separated them in the early months of President Obama’s administration was semantics: the language each man used to describe what he saw for the future of Palestine, or “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” –a phrase that suggests there are two sides each with a grievance that equals or cancels out the other’s and that makes a just resolution so difficult to formulate. How deeply have we been indoctrinated. If President Obama’s speech in Cairo signified anything, it was that the likelihood of a dramatic shift in United States’ policy toward Israel in the coming years is almost nil... Barack Obama has sent Benjamin Netanyahu the message he most seeks, whether Netanyahu recognizes it or not: continue your colonial-settler project as you have been doing; just change the vocabulary you use to describe it. Then nobody will get upset or notice that the status quo will persists. In the meantime Nasrallah and his followers in Lebanon will be shaking their heads in disbelief at the service Obama has just performed on Hizbullah’s behalf.

Loewenstein lays out the numerous problems Obama didn't address (such as the "illegal use of white phosphorous on the densely populated neighborhoods of Gaza City and beyond? The cluster bombs and fleschettes? The rocketing, fire-bombing and bulldozing of entire neighborhoods? ...[Israeli Defense Forces'] attack on hospitals, schools, ambulances, UN buildings and shelters, food warehouses, businesses, factories and family homes... [Israeli opposition to] the UN fact-finding mission on the commission of war crimes during its relentless assault... [the] planning [of] Operation “Cast Lead” six months prior to its beginning, or when the ceasefire was still in effect... the cantonization of the West Bank into a series of disconnected ‘island’ villages and towns; the de facto annexation and militarization of the Jordan Valley; the encirclement of the economy-stripped Palestinian enclaves by the annexation wall whose boundaries incorporate the theft of the best agricultural land and resources in Palestine for Israeli use only; The status quo grid of interstate, “Jewish only” highways connecting the settlement blocs to Israel so that they are inseparable and indeed indistinguishable from the Jewish state itself..."), and an allusion to the Palestinian casualties during Operation "Cast Lead", estimated to 1400, 85% of which were reportedly civilians. In contrast, I remember hearing on NPR casualties among the Israelis from rocket attacks; I feel like it was around 100-200 max. This references the one other thing I wanted to bring up: to me, there comes a line, a line VERY SOON, where the number of people you're killing as "collateral damage" (nominally untargeted civilians) becomes an equal horror to the number of civilians the other side may kill intentionally ("terrorism"). Chomsky discusses this a lot in other contexts (as well as in this one), calling the civilian casualties of (often "just" wars) "state terrorism". Call it what you will, I don't excuse it. A life is a life is a life to me -- especially in the case where the life snuffed out is not the one who attacked you. That it is a countryman or countrywoman of the person who attacked you is as immaterial as when civilians are intentionally killed and it's justified by pointing out their collusion or support of attacks on another aggrieved party in turn. If we claim only military targets are justifiable targets, we cannot simultaneously claim that military attacks killing large amounts of non-military citizenry is justifiable.

But of course, we do. Hiroshima and Nagasaki nominally had military value, but were entire cities. But the justification to this day is that it prevented later heavy casualties. So how come it's ok to kill civilians when the cause is important enough to us but it's not ok when the cause is important enough to others? (Not that I think it's ok in either case, but I'm asking for moral consistency on our part. Silly, perhaps -- but hypocrisy, to me, cannot be morality.)

I've wondered afield here. Go read the Counterpunch articles.

Um... Happy Monday?

Silence is the enemy: Marching orders from Comrade PhysioProf

2009-06-01T09:25:00.004-05:00

From Comrade PhysioProf this morning:

This morning begins a coordinated blogospheric effort to draw attention to the ongoing horror of mass rape of women and girls in Liberia, which continues despite the end of civil war:

Jackie is too young to remember the 14-year civil war in Liberia, from 1989 to 2003, when as many as three-fourths of women were raped. Jackie’s world is one of a bustling, recovering Liberia with a free press and democratically elected leaders.

Yet somehow mass rape survived the end of the war; it has been easier to get men to relinquish their guns than their sense of sexual entitlement. So the security guard at Jackie’s school, a man in his 50s, took the little girl to the beach where, she said, he stripped her and raped her. Finally, he ran off as she lay bleeding and sobbing on the sand.

Mass rape and torture of women and girls also continues in the Congo:

Nothing I have heard or seen compares with what is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where corporate greed, fueled by capitalist consumption, and the rape of women have merged into a single nightmare. Femicide, the systematic and planned destruction of the female population, is being used as a tactic of war to clear villages, pillage mines and destroy the fabric of Congolese society.

In 12 years, there have been 6 million dead men and women in Congo and 1.4 million people displaced. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured. Babies as young as 6 months, women as old as 80, their insides torn apart. What I witnessed in Congo has shattered and changed me forever. I will never be the same. None of us should ever be the same.

A number of bloggers are coordinating our efforts to call attention to this horrible situation and mobilize activism and financial support to end systematic mass rape in Africa. Here are some things you can do:

(1) Visit the blogs of Isis the Scientist, Tara Smith’s Aetiology, and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s The Intersection. They will be donating their revenues for page views to Doctors Without Borders, and they will be posting on an ongoing basis about this situation.

(2) Donate to Doctors Without Borders, who are leading the effort to provide medical treatment to women and girls who have been grievously harmed.

(3) Write to your representatives and senators in Congress to urge them to use the diplomatic power of the United States to end this horrible situation. You can use this directory to obtain the contact information for your representative and senators by typing in your zip code.

(4) You can blog about this yourself to call attention to our efforts.

Original post here.

Doctors Without Borders

Congressional Directory

I almost feel like this shouldn't be necessary, but it seems like all the news Americans ever hear out of Africa is about victimhood and horror. So a couple of bits of news to remind us all that, there are many troubles in Africa, but that she is diverse and vibrant and evolving, like everywhere else, despite the difficult history, and present, of the continent:

S. Africa's 'Breakthrough' Succession Case
Ruling in Favor of Woman in Chieftaincy Dispute Seen as Victory Over Patriarchal Tribal Traditions

Phyllia Tinyiko Nwamitwa is one of the very few women among South Africa's 750 or so traditional leaders. (Photo By Karin Brulliard -- The Washington Post): Buy Photo

Togo institutes truth and reconciliation commission

Burundi senators reject bill criminalizing homosexuality
The government of Burundi's latest move comes in the context of considerable hostility to homosexuality in the East African region. Two-thirds of African nations maintain criminal penalties for consensual same-sex behaviour.

Tributes to a fallen giant
'He was a giant by any measure. He was genuinely committed to the liberation of our continent. Maybe after all, it was no coincidence he passed away on Africa's liberation day! Tajudeen kept the universal torch of Pan-Africanism alive.'

To be certain, not all good news -- but a more diverse look at news and an Africa on the ground that is similar and different to our world in ways we don't commonly appreciate. A last sample: although there is the "good news" of a program of activism against gender violence in South Africa, a variety of other stories of struggle, success, survival, hope and despair is available on Pambazuka News, "A weekly forum for social justice news in Africa".

Homework:
(a) Take action on the persecution, rape and torture of women in Africa.
(b) Find your own source of news about Africa that gives a holistic picture, positive and negative, everyday life and quotidian problems as well as the grand divides and challenges. It's harder than it seems! Report back, and show your work.

The Tragedy of the Hardin

2009-05-31T21:24:00.003-05:00

Odds are, you've heard of the "tragedy of the commons." (If not: Let Google be your guide.) The (contemporary) source of the idea is an article written by ecologist Garret Hardin some time ago, laying out the seemingly logical proposition that (at base) -- people in a community will inevitably abuse a shared resource in order to try and maximize their personal use of it, such that the shared resource will eventually run out or be otherwise denuded.

Although in my own research, I've certainly read of cases where that did happen, it certainly is far from true that that always happens, or that the only ways to prevent it are: a) government coercion/restricted access, or b) complete privatization. He argues that one cannot rely on conscience or cooperation to regulate the wise use of a commons, as selfish people will inevitably exploit it.

We all know cases where such exploitation does happen, again, but it certainly isn't an "inevitable consequence" as Hardin implies. (A mentor of mine has re-phrased Hardin's proposition as "The tragedy of the privately owned sheep" -- based on the case Hardin used as an example, that of English peasants herding sheep with a commons providing forage for the sheep. Of course, if the sheep were raised in common for the village, it would again not be in their interest to denude the commons, theoretically bringing the system back in balance -- and certainly, it's easier to tell who is eating extra sheep and thus "conscience" and social pressure seem more likely to rule in that case. But I digress.)

Although the argument has grown considerably more complicated since Hardin (and I suspect before as well -- he was hardly the first to think of this), the raison d'etre of this blog post is this article here, pointing out that as written, Hardin's piece offered no actual proof, real-life context, or other essential elements of scientific reasoning, yet it has been hugely influential and widely quoted. The author implies that this is because it could be used to justify pre-existing prejudices, which it certainly did so for Hardin, who himself was something of a eugenicist and rather worried about the population growth of the poor masses (rather than the population growth of the huge, resource-chomping-like-it's-candy wealthy few). Anyway. Read. Tchau.

Palestine-Israel Peace prospects: Or not.

2009-05-28T22:05:00.004-05:00

Perhaps Middle East Peace is farther away than ever -- due as much to past actions and "ground truths" ("For all intents and purposes, every Israeli under the age of 50 has grown up with the doctrine that the Green Line does not exist, that the West Bank is in fact Judea and Samaria... Currently, almost 10 per cent of Israel's Jewish population lives in settlements beyond the green line") as to present political figures and their attitudes:

The continued acceleration of Israeli settlement activity and the concomitant fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement have led many analysts and commentators to declare the impending demise of the two-state solution. Judging the point at which two states can no longer be carved out of the present reality is not an exact science, but it seems inconceivable that a realistic prospect for partition still exists... In this respect, it has become increasingly common to argue that a one-state solution (whether a binational entity or unitary democracy) is the logical alternative to the disappearing two-state paradigm. Yet this outcome - while admittedly the closest approximation of a just peace - is even less likely to materialise than a two-state settlement.

Unlike white South Africans, Jewish Israelis are not a small minority who can be expected to conclude that providing equal rights to the indigenous population within a democratic framework represents their only salvation...

The status quo is also increasingly untenable, and the more likely scenario for the coming decade, if not longer, is that Israel's determined efforts to perpetuate it will produce increasing - and increasingly existential, regionalised and bloody - conflict.

Read the whole article at Counterpunch.

More on Sotomayor

2009-05-28T18:56:00.003-05:00

She's hardly a die-hard fan of the little guy.

In the linked Slate article by Emily Bazelon, Bazelon lays out how Sotomayor can be very convincing; in the cited case, she convinced a conservative and liberal judge, both of who started out opposed to her view, to switch sides and sign on to her decision in a case where "empathy" would lead you to believe one might side for the trucker in this case over the off-duty cop:

But what's striking, of course, is that she persuaded them to undo a verdict in a case that a jury saw as rife with police abuse of power. "You read this unanimous opinion, and it would seem to be the Republican judge who is driving this decision that she just signed on to. When in fact it was exactly the opposite," one observer said.

The other two judges had decided to rule to uphold a jury verdict and a $600,000 award for damages for a trucker who, whatever the merits of his suit (he was found not guilty of assault against the officer, who he got into an altercation with over a payphone, back in the 90s, where trucker Jocks claimed he explained he had an emergency with his truck broken down further up the highway and the cop refused to reliquish the payphone; fight ensues; the cop claims Jocks made no mention of an emergency and started a fight for the phone) seems to have been quite thoroughly punished for a crime it was ultimately determined he didn't commit:

fter his arrest, Jocks was held for 24 hours and ended up having to make 28 court appearances before he was found not guilty of felony assault. He spent $20,000 on legal fees, lost his truck driving job, and had to give up full custody of his daughter, who went to live with her mother, his ex-wife. That dire, black moment on the LIE truly cost him.

Frayster Joe_JP observes that this actually fits in with what we know of Obama, like his upholding of some Bush era atrocities:

Given the mixed feelings some have with recent actions by President Obama (e.g., preventive detention), this should not surprise. In fact, though he was specifically talking about his views on a "living Constitution," Obama in Audacity of Hope suggested his model is Justice Breyer. Someone Rachel Maddow recently suggested was more centrist than liberal (and at times tecnocrat), and various of his opinions can be used to back that up. But, the game has to be played, so she is tarred by the likely subjects when they should be quite happy she was chosen.

Dionne appears to have it quite right. And the last thing we need on the court in this J's opinion is another "law-and-order" type, inclined to "[use her] formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak". Where did you hear those words before? They were Obama's objection to the nomination of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Although O may have been talking about minorities and plaintiffs in cases against large commercial interests, it's worth remembering that the police very much are often the ones who are the strong (such as in the trucker case where, when the off-duty cop had enough, he pulled his gun and put it to Jocks' head), and Sotomayor appeared to have used her formidable skills on his behalf.

Dionne: "And even though they should support her confirmation, liberals would be foolish to embrace Sotomayor as one of their own because her record is clearly that of a moderate. It is highly unlikely that she will push the court to the left."

Zogby on Obama, Israel, Netanyahu, and Middle East Peace

2009-05-28T16:53:00.003-05:00

A nice piece on Truthout here by James Zogby on, well, on Obama, Israel, Netanyahu, Middle East Peace, and the US Congress.

I'm out of the loop on recent events on this front, but Zogby writes:

At their White House press briefing last week, Netanyahu may have been stubborn, but Obama, too, held his ground. Addressing his remarks directly to the cameras, the US president lectured Netanyahu about the steps that must be taken: "all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations they previously agreed to"; "settlements have to be stopped"; "if the people of Gaza have no hope, if they can't even get clean water É if the border closures are so tight it is impossible for reconstruction or humanitarian efforts to take place, then that is not going to be a recipe for [the] peace track to move forward," and much more.

Further,

A recent poll of American Jews commissioned by J Street, the Jewish pro-peace lobby, found that substantial majorities of American Jews (in the 70 percent range) support President Obama and support a two-state solution that includes a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem and some limited "right to return." In addition, a strong majority opposes settlement construction and opinion is split down the middle on whether or not to cut aid to Israel if it becomes an obstacle to achieving peace!

Progress in the Palestine-Israel conflict always seems far away. But, as I feel silly saying but many people seem to forget, no conflict lasts forever. History shows us that sooner or later, this conflict will end -- though history also shows that it may end peacefully, but also may end by the dissolution of the present-day states in the area or brokering as the result of another World War (heaven forbid). But it will end, and this rhetoric and polling at least seems to point to the continued possibility of it being the first scenario (well, relatively close, it's already too late for it to be "peaceful" in the full sense of the word, but you know what I mean, a resolution without significant further violence or another change in the scale of violence).

Of course, my very informal recent research made it appear that our aid to Israel has already significantly decreased in real terms (~90%!) as well, of course, as a proportion of total aid, though my conjecture remains, as it was before, that perhaps our aid to Israel has shifted to less direct forms because it seems like a 90% scale-back of all aid to Israel would have elicited some kind of notice in the MSM. Of course, you never know just exactly what new low in competence the MSM will reach for, so... ??

Rebuffs for conservative attacks on Sotomayor: Liberal Talking Points for the day

2009-05-28T15:40:00.003-05:00

If you're so inclined as to come to the defense of the "most conservative Supreme Court pick Obama could have made", HuffPo blogger-reporter Jason Linkins reviews how (arch-conservative) Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has argued that "courts make law" (as conservatives are accusing Sotomayor of saying as a reference to "activist judging") and empathy and the racial background/history/experiences of a candidate were brought to bear in the nominations of Alito and Clarence Thomas:

This all comes courtesy of HuffPost reader Doug Schafer, who is of the opinion that journalists ought to avail themselves of this citation from Scalia whenever the "judges don't make law" canard arises. I agree!

Additionally, Sotomayor's critics are up in arms over the fact that she has admitted that her ethnic background has an affect on her decision making process. Who does she think she is? Well, as it turns out, she probably thinks she's being very similar to Justice Sam Alito:

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point. ... And that's why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant -- and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases -- I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position. [...]

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

[WATCH.]

And, in a related way, the criticism over "empathy" fits the same "this-was-once-deemed-okay" mold. My experience teaches me that only robots lack empathy, and that most people value it. Yet, ever since President Barack Obama cited it as a focus of his, in his search for a replacement for Justice David Souter, the whole notion of "empathy" has been treated as an alien thing that threatens the sanctity of court decisions.

That's weird! In July of 1991, "empathy" was one of the major selling points presented at the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas...

And speaking of Supreme Court ~~Joke~~ ~~Justice~~ Joke Clarence Thomas, HuffPo's Trey Ellis writes:

When a middling black student from Holy Cross goes on to Yale Law School, graduates in the middle of his class and is rated by the American Bar Association between "qualified" and "not qualified," the right festoons him with laurels. Clarence Thomas, you see, reaffirmed the comforting notions many in the right have about the supremacy of white maleness. George the First nominated him clearly because any black jurist would do and there he stands today, a reassuring beacon of black inferiority.

(I'm not saying that the first George Bush wouldn't have picked a more qualified black arch conservative if there had been one laying around. In matters of race the first George Bush wasn't such a bad egg.)

Nevertheless, for the far right his nomination was a wet dream and the humiliating effect on competent black folks is the same.

Sotomayor's been dealing with this crap for years. The LA Times reports today that in law school she sued a white-shoe Washington law firm for the exact same kind of white-male- supremacist attitudes the right is regurgitating her way right now...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Hypocrisy's ok when I do it.

Circling the Center: Recommended readings

2009-05-28T14:44:00.002-05:00

I hope to get to more commentary on yesterday's post at some point, but for the time being, the Continuum's recommended reading for today consists of two articles by the WaPo's E. J. Dionne, Jr:

Obama's Center-Left two-step

Obama's Anti-Roberts

In the first, Dionne (I keep wanting to add "Warwick") analyzes Obama's governing style, and finds it to (thus far) be an updating of Bill Clinton's triangulation (though I think Dionne implies, but does not say, that Obama's strategic compromises more authentically represent his political philosophy compared to what was widely seen as Clinton's more calculating political, well, triangulation). Obama is trying to tack to the Left, in Dionne's estimation, but only just:

He is out to build a new and enduring political establishment, located slightly to the left of center but including everyone except the far right.

The problem Dionne finds with this is that the ObamAdministration is trying to do this in part through only slightly sub rosa message control, pitching different messages to different audiences, but in a sort of blatant way that I think took Dionne slightly aback:

Last Thursday afternoon, for example, the White House invited in journalists, mostly opinion writers, to sell them on the substance of the president's big speech on Guantanamo and the treatment of detainees.

Unbeknown to the writers until afterward, they had been divided into two groups, one more centrist with a sprinkling of moderate conservatives, the other more liberal. (I was in the liberal group.) The president made an unscheduled appearance at each briefing. As is his way, he charmed both groups.

The idea, as far as I can determine, was to sell the liberal group on those aspects of Obama's plan that are a break from George W. Bush's policies, and to sell the centrist group on the toughness of the president's approach and the fact that it squares with Bush's more moderate moves later in his second term[...]

[...] The disturbing aspect of Obama's effort to create his new political alignment is that building it requires him to send rather different messages to its component parts. Playing to several audiences at once can lead to awkward moments.

Besides to playing to different audiences leading to potential awkwardness, there's the possibility of trying to please everyone and instead pleasing no one (apparently not yet the issue, at least in the meetings Dionne discusses), as well as the vague dishonesty of it. My concern, at the least, is that Obama isn't and never has been particularly left-liberal. He really has kept much more of the Bush Admin era extra-legal Constitution-busting executive apparatus than I'd like (or, you know, would argue is right, just, constitutional, or in keeping with his promises). In short, I'm afraid not just of his pitching his message to different audiences, but in his triangulating to towards the Right of not just where his critics claim he is (Far Left), from where he's perceived to be (Leftist Wing), but from where he actually is (Center Left); when you start your position in the middle, your only direction to compromise to farther towards the right (since the liberal-left can be taken for granted, usually).

Anyway.

Dionne (not Warwick)'s other article talks about how Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is the most conservative choice Obama could have made, pointing out that conservatives should be pleased instead of fighting, and liberals should be vigilant, and while they (we) shouldn't oppose her nomination, nor should we be glad for it:

News accounts from the 1990s consistently described her as a "centrist" in her politics. Her lead sponsor when she was first named as a judge, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was hardly a conventional liberal. Obama may have found himself an empathetic judge, but she practices her empathy from the middle of the road.

A careful analysis of her record by Business Week, for example, concluded that she is a "moderate on business issues" and would fit the court's current alignment on such questions.

She also upheld a ban on federal funds going to family planning groups that provided abortions overseas. Sotomayor wrote that "the Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."

Dan Gilgoff, on his excellent "God and Country" blog, points out that Sotomayor also ruled in favor of a group of Connecticut antiabortion protesters who asserted that police "used excessive force against them at a demonstration." He concludes that her "thin record on abortion is most likely a relief" to pro-life groups. In picking her, Obama sent another signal that he is serious about seeking common ground on abortion.

On how we should see this nomination, he continues

Liberals should not take the bait of the right-wingers by allowing the debate over Sotomayor to be premised on the idea that she is a bold ideological choice. She's not. But if conservatives succeed in painting this moderate as a radical, they will skew future arguments over the court. In fact, liberals should press Sotomayor on her more conservative decisions on business issues, an area in which the current court already tilts too far right.

Go read the whole thing.

*EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS EXCELLENT DIONNE ~~WARWICK~~ QUOTE ON EMPATHY:

Conservatives -- particularly those who run direct-mail outfits and want a big court fight -- would love the decision over Sotomayor to hang on Obama's call for judges who show "empathy." They would cast her as a dangerous activist willing to bend the law to produce the results she wants.

They want to turn Obama's argument on its head and claim that Sotomayor would show bias in favor of those who share her background -- and never mind that they dismiss such assertions when they are raised with respect to white, conservative, male nominees.

(emphasis added)
Three words for that observation: AMEN and DAMN STRAIGHT.

Racial discrimination: Flip it and reverse it?

2009-05-27T15:52:00.003-05:00

Excellent article by Richard Thompson Ford on Slate about the Supreme Court case Ricci v. DeStefano. You may have heard of this case as "the case of the New Haven Firefighters" or "the case of discriminating against whites":

In 2003, the New Haven Fire Department decided to base promotions to the positions of captain and lieutenant primarily on a written exam. But the next year the city threw out the test results when all but one of the eligible candidates for promotion proved to be white. New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci, a high scorer on the test who is white, sued for reverse discrimination.

It really takes reading all of Ford's article to fully get the sweep of his argument, I would say, but it breaks down to: Ricci, who apparently took 6 months off work to prepare for the exam and spent $1,000 on tutoring, maintains that the city threw out the test after the Hispanic and Black firefighters taking it didn't do well in order to discriminate against the white firefighters who (like him) did better on the exam (though it's important to note that a number of black and Hispanic firefighters did also pass the test, but the way the evaluations were set up, only the top three scorers are eligible for promotion).

Ford makes the point that other legal experts have made, namely, that the way Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has commonly been interpreted is that what it calls "disparate impacts" on different racial groups are legally questionable in and of themselves. That is, it is quite possible that the black and Hispanic firefighters could have sued New Haven had it not thrown out the test, on the (precedent-abiding) rationale that the fact that no blacks and only one Hispanic qualified for promotion (out of over 40 blacks and Hispanics). (And yes, I know blacks can be Hispanics and Hispanics can be blacks, but let's not get into the complicated US parsing of race -- or the fact that USA'ers don't seem to realize that there are a lot of Black Hispanics/Latinos -- here) is evidence of disparate impacts and possible discrimination.

Where Ford makes an important addition to the discussion is where he discusses why this is not necessarily "reverse discrimination" against the whites, and exactly why the disparate impacts rationale holds up. That is, as we've talked about here on Anekantavada/the Continuum, institutional racism is a pernicious going concern in the US, and non-obvious. Title VII was designed to thwart not just purposeful discrimination ("No blacks or Hispanics") AND inadvertent discrimination. And when only 1 or so out of 40 minorities qualifies for a job, it's quite certainly possible if not likely that there was inadvertent discrimination.

But let me quote Ford, who says it better (if not any more succinctly):

Conservatives think the law against disparate impact discrimination does more harm than good. [John] McWhorter decries the "rhetorical contortions that excuse black people from challenging examinations." And Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom insist in the Wall Street Journal that even "sharp racial disparities" in testing results "are not an argument for racial quotas." Both McWhorter and the Thernstroms worry that a law that is premised on lower performance by racial minorities has become self-fulfilling: Such racial disparities, the Thernstroms admonish, "should not be regarded as a permanent fact of life."

But, properly applied, disparate impact law doesn't excuse poor performance, nor does it require quotas. Instead it smokes out hidden bigotry and requires employers to avoid unnecessary segregation of the work force. Suppose an employer wants to keep women out. Knowing that he can't just put a "women need not apply" sign in his window, he might use a proxy, such as a weightlifting test, knowing that women on average have less upper body strength than men. The law against disparate impact discrimination is designed to reveal such hidden bias. Now, suppose an employer has no desire to discriminate against women but uses a weightlifting test simply because he thinks, all other things equal, stronger employees are better than weaker ones. Disparate impact law also prohibits this: It requires the employer to reconsider job qualifications that favor one race or sex, unjustifiably.

Of course, there might be a good reason to prefer people who are physically stronger—or who score higher on a written exam. The law gives employers a chance to prove that the discriminatory criteria are job-related. The idea, then, isn't to make an employer hire less qualified women or minorities over more qualified men or whites. It's to make sure the employer is testing for job qualifications, not unrelated ones.

Race discrimination has locked minorities into poor neighborhoods with failing schools for generations: As a result, blacks, as a group, continue to perform less well on written exams than other races. Perhaps New Haven's black candidates could overcome these disadvantages by studying harder, like Frank Ricci did. But Ricci took extraordinary steps to ace the test—six months off work to prepare and $1,000 on tutoring. An equal-opportunity law that's premised on everyone taking such steps isn't likely to do much good in the real world of scarce time and money. And would encouraging the equivalent of intense cramming for the final really help employers select the best firefighter for the job?

One of the things those who side with Ricci in this case say is that if a test was thrown out because only minorities were promoted as a result, it would be "an open-and-shut case of discrimination." Assumedly, they mean against the black test takers. But quite certainly, if the situation were reversed, people all over would look askance at the results? I mean, there may be some or many blacks proud of the achievement, but it certainly would be weird, right? And I can only imagine the kind of commentary conservatives would put on such a result, where only blacks qualified for promotion. Indeed, they would almost certainly by calling that reverse racism. And it would seem to me that under Title VII, they would have an equally strong case as the City does in this case. It would be statistically unlikely for that to happen by chance. Now, I can't say I would see it this way for sure if it were reversed, but I think we also all know it would be a surprising result that many would decry as being somehow discriminatory expressly because we don't expect blacks to uniformly outperform whites. This puts the institutional racism into somewhat more relief: whites have scored on average higher than blacks in any number of areas for America immemorial, and whether you think this continues because of institutional racism and unequal legacies from history (as I do) or because of some sociocultural or biological flaw, either way it would be surprising to see only blacks and Hispanics get promoted, even if in a majority-minority example (assuming it's not the kind of 98% black & Hispanic type disparity but rather say 60 or 70%). So what I'm saying is, I think many in our society would be MUCH more comfortable assuming a test which produced those results were flawed than they would be with a test producing complete over-representation by white test takers. But because we're used to whites doing better, it seems all the more galling that what Ricci supporters seem to assume is self-evidently a fair and applicable test would be thrown out.

If the situations were reversed, it might very well be open-and-shut discrimination case -- discrimination against the white employees in that case.

Two more things: if Ricci took 6 mos. off and spent $1,000 on tutoring, it also seems obvious that either the job training for the firefighters is deficient (if it takes that much effort -- so much that you stop fire-fighting for 6 mos. -- in order to qualify for advancement as a firefighter, then it would apparently seem like you can't learn enough about firefighting by actually doing it to be promoted), or that the testing is off. I mean, you can't (or at least, shouldn't) have to go through such extreme measures to advance within such a job -- we certainly wouldn't have wanted all of Ricci's colleagues to all take 6 months off at the same time to study! (Though I do believe I read he's dyslexic, so that might explain some or even all of the extreme effort he put in, now that I think of it.) In any case, it would seem like the only fair way to have advancement in such a case would be to have low-cost additional training available for everyone, so that being promoted didn't require that you have so much job flexibility and money. Second thing, though, is that people talk about it as if the blacks and Hispanics would have been blatantly unqualified to receive promotions -- but a number of them passed the damned test. Whether or not it's significantly important to take the 3 highest scorers depends on the content of the test -- which weirdly I have seen ZERO discussion of, so the question of whether or not it's completely and fairly job-relevant is unresolved -- but getting the highest score may or may not be relevant based on the content of the test itself, and on the other scores. If they were 95, 94, 93.5, 92, 92, 91 etc. and 70 was passing, the difference between the top scorers and the next several could be not practically meaningful.

Sigh. In my head, I'm hearing and thinking about various counter-arguments that I would expect from various friends of mine, so I could keep going on and on -- I was kind of trying to anticipate all the counterarguments ahead of time -- but that would go on even lONGER and I think that's unwise. So, yeah. Read Ford's piece -- I would in fact recommend it over reading all of the above (hah, too late) -- and think about institutional racism, and then, comment. Let's talk.

Torture and the Lying Liars Who Lie

2009-05-26T21:22:00.004-05:00

Of course, the lying liars who lie aren't just our own former adminsitrationistas like Dick "Dick" Cheney but also likely those we tortured with techniques taken from Cold War-era Soviet and Chinese tactics:

Seeing as how these tactics have been said to have been used to elicit false confessions and/or evaluated by a number of notable military professionals as not reliable, you'd think this conversation could be wrapped up in short order.

Let's review the two key points again:
a) We called these same tactics torture when our enemies did them.
b) Our enemies used them to extract confessions which were likely to be, known to be, or intentionally elicited as false confessions.

Do we really need to argue more beyond those two points?

Apparently we do as long as Dick Cheney's grip on the Dark Side stays as strong as it is. He's more Dick now, than man... twisted and evil.

Words that make it unlikely I will see a movie

2009-05-26T10:29:00.002-05:00

Preview of the must-not-see-movie of 2009:

Bloody genital mutilation scene.

(No worries: the link is just to an article talking about it, no surprise pics.)

I do not think your Iran means what you think it means

2009-05-25T11:08:00.003-05:00

(ok, yes, I know, I've used that gag before, but, um, luckily, I have very few regular readers, so who'm I hurting?)

Nice article in Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria here briefly highlighting the political structure of Iran (in brief: complicated) and why it might indeed not be developing nuclear weapons. (I've discussed this topic here, here, and here.) As I've said before and am saying again, and Zakaria backs me up on this, think the Mullahs and Ahmedinejad are crazy all you want, but they're not MAD; that is, they're not immune to the salient guiding ideas of nuclear weapons, Mutually Assured Destruction. Zakaria elaborates on the plans and aspirations of some within the Iranian regime, as well as the declarations of the present-day Iranian regime's founding father and other, um, luminaries that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic:

The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam." Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini's statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Happily, most of the rhetoric seeming to be on a path to war with Iran has ceased, though the conclusion that they are developing nuclear weapons seems to continue unabated (and disbelief of the last time our own intelligence said they weren't developing weapons anymore and were less determined to do so than before is so high that it doesn't warrant a mention, seemingly).

(Hmm, immediate postscript: naturally, the debate on Iran's nuclear weapons development is more complicated than it appears, though I still tend to agree with Zakaria. But from Foreign Policy:

"This is another reflection of the grossly mistaken reaction to the intelligence estimate on this subject in late 2007, a reaction that stemmed in large part from some infelicitous and misleading formulations in the estimate itself," says former senior CIA official Paul Pillar. "The only thing reportedly halted in 2003 was weapons design work. More important is what [the LAT] mentions in the latter half of his piece, the continuation of uranium enrichment -- which, as the Bush administration correctly pointed out, is the long pole in the tent that will determine when Iran would have the capability to build a nuclear weapon.

Of course, developing nuclear power is well within Iran's international rights, it scares everyone to think that they could get close to a weapon. Suffice it to say, I'm scared of ANYONE having nuclear weapons, as everyone should be:

Surely no sane person wants Iran (or any nation) to develop nuclear weapons. A reasonable resolution of the present crisis would permit Iran to develop nuclear energy, in accord with its rights under the Non- Proliferation Treaty, but not nuclear weapons. Is that outcome feasible? It would be, given one condition: that the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies in which public opinion had a significant impact on public policy.

As it happens, this solution has overwhelming support among Iranians and Americans, who generally are in agreement on nuclear issues. The Iranian-American consensus includes the complete elimination of nuclear weapons everywhere (82% of Americans); if that cannot yet be achieved because of elite opposition, then at least a "nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that would include both Islamic countries and Israel" (71% of Americans). Seventy-five percent of Americans prefer building better relations with Iran to threats of force. In brief, if public opinion were to have a significant influence on state policy in the U.S. and Iran, resolution of the crisis might be at hand, along with much more far-reaching solutions to the global nuclear conundrum.

--(from a piece by Noam Chomsky, re-posted in part in the J Continuum here).

And as I said in "Iran: Can't get fooled again?":

been used by... us, the US. We had our reasons (whose conclusions I question, but that's a different story). But nonetheless, in the issue of the insanity of destroying millions of people, only we have enaged in that. In the insanity of mutually assured destruction, well -- no one has ever engaged on that with nukes, and need we say that WE had the same posture on that as the USSR? Dr. Strangelove notwithstanding, we've not proved we're necessarily saner than self-concerned despots with nukes who refuse to use them so as to save their own hides. SO -- I'm just sayin', while it's too early to assume Ahmadinejad doesn't mean us harm and indeed is not the "Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who has threatened to 'wipe Israel off the map'" he's been said to be, it's also way too early to determine he IS, barring the "truthiness" we feel of an Iranian head of state being antagonistic, messianic, anti-semitic, and dangerous. Just because we looked Iran up in our gut and found it under "danger" doesn't mean that we're on our path to not being fooled again...

So... can we get fooled again?

--J

Ending anti-racism?

2009-05-24T16:07:00.004-05:00

J-truly is not going to get into this right now, but all should go read this post by Guerrilla Mama (h/t Quin on PunkAssBlog h/t Field Negro h/t Daktari II) on how she's decided she's not teaching anti-racism workshops any more. Her basic point(s) seem to be that, from her point of view, "anti-racism" education isn't achieving its goals, because those who seek to take it are either seeking to avoid a pending racial lawsuit or to build radical/racial cred without changing, acknowledging, or challenging white privilege. That many in her experience learn the language of anti-racism and use the language more towards being hip than towards changing their way of being -- understandable because of how hard it is to challenge yourself on a deep level, but completely antithetical towards the actual content and message of anti-racism. The commenters are fantastic and explore a lot of expansions, variations, and critiques on her point, with a discussion of how/whether normative white culture encourages/allows for a separation of words and deeds, intent and action, such that it matters more that you say your consciousness is changed or raised to understand racial issues than whether or not you change your behavior and how you conduct yourself day-to-day to reflect such a thing. And beyond that, how, in the G-Mama's mind, those who do earnestly wish to learn and challenge have such a wealth of material written about race, racism, privilege, anti-racism, etc. that a workshop is not just unnecessary but a crutch to avoid doing the hard work it does and will require to make changes to oneself and the world, and how all that material anyway is secondary to what someone on there calls radical honesty, and the ability to be aware of and try to address other people's perspectives. The point is, she says, everyone gets it wrong, but so many (white) people with no "training" achieve a more or less radical understanding by learning and only making new mistakes. When you find out a certain term or tone or approach is alienating or preserving systematic racism, you try a new term, tone, or approach, and also, you talk to those affected, learning from them and with them, with an openness and desire for understanding and change that is an important pre-condition for effectively learning what she might teach in anti-racism, but is a prereq that is (apparently) only rarely met in her experiences for such training.

So apparently, I actually am going to comment on this.

My quick dois centavos is that during my brief time at a Fortune 500 company making consumer products, we had Diversity Training, and its been one of the single most useful things I've experienced. Prime among the important lessons is something referred to obliquely, and in a different manner, on G-Mama's comment board: The Golden Rule is wrong. That is, don't treat others as you want to be treated, because that assumes everyone is like you, and they aren't -- whether they share your race, gender, religion, culture, or not. (But it especially may be true if they don't.) Treat others, get this, as THEY want to be treated. And how do you know how that is? Only through dialogue, by asking and by understanding and learning, through trial and error, will you know how that is -- but it is more likely to work and generate a good and healthy relationship than assuming they want to be treated as you do. (I've found this IN.VAL.U.ABLE. in personal relationships.)

Speaking of healthy relationships, G-Mama has a rather good post highlighting and praising this excellent entry on IllDoctrine, the Hip-Hop video blog (which I believe in turn I found a while back via EpicFu, meant to start following, and never did). I have no idea who this "Aster Roth" kid is, but J Smooth's smoothly produced vlog is a fantastic commentary (Aster Roth apparently played at Rutgers and joked "ironically" that he was hanging with "nappy headed hos", apparently not with malice but as a joke that, um, didn't work.) J Smooth:

[This] illustrates where a lot of us are at right now with race in america. We're in a new place right now. We're not in The Promised Land, but we're a few steps further down that road than we've ever been before. And as we make progress, we get more comfortable. And as we get more comfortable some of us get a little... extra comfortable. We start acting as if coming closer together means not having to care how our words affect each other. We start assuming we can make any kinda joke or use any kind of epithet without any kind of second thought because now that we've made all this progress - everyone's always gonna know we don't mean it like that.

Right?

Nooooooooo! That is not how this thing is gonna work!

...In any healthy relationship, the closer you get, the more you care about how you affect each other...and yet, somehow, in our racial interactions, we tend to forget that. And start thinking coming closer together means we can care less about how we affect each other.

See the whole thing here.

J Smooth couldn't be more right about relationships, racial or otherwise. Something we've said in my family is that being close to someone doesn't mean you get to treat them however you want because they already know that you love them; it means taking *extra* care to treat them right. It does mean that they will see you at your best and worst, and sometimes, it's all you can do to behave decently, or even sub-decently. But all the more because those times are going to happen, whenever you can, you should put out the extra effort, not the lower or below-average one. You appreciate them because you love them, you don't love them so you can depreciate them. J-Smooth:

The whole process of getting closer is becoming more aware of [the] constantly evolving boundaries [in the relationship], and getting better at respecting them... In any healthy relationship, the closer you get the more you care about how you affect each other... somehow in our racial interactions we tend to forget that, and tend to think that as we get closer to together, we can care LESS about each other's boundaries... 'Respecting each other's humanity is such a PAIN in the ASS, do we really have to do this FOREVER? Can't you guys just lighten up so I don't have to respect you anymore? Isn't the whole process of Coming Together As One so that I don't have to care what YOU think?

Anyway. J Smooth's points are good ones, and echoes something I posted before by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

"I never thought the fact that there was a magazine called Heeb gave me the right to address my Jewish buddies as such. More to the point--I never wanted to. ...What's the big beef? ...I don't get white people who have a hard time with this--you call your mother "Mom," I call her Ms. Phillips--same deal here. Nigger means one thing when used amongst a group of people with similar experiences, and something else when used by people outside of that experience.

So yeah. Go read, learn, see this good shit that I found by going down the rabbit whole of following the damn links on people's damn blogs. (How DARE they be so good, make me spend all this time reading them? =p

Links:
D-Constructing-D (General goodness)

Quin on PunkAssBlog (wherein the author, a white male, decides he needs to reconsider and start to take seriously the issue of "white male privilege", including the privilege he previously exercised of avoiding all discussions of gender or race)

Field Negro

Guerrilla Mama Medicine

Ill Doctrine

Cuba: Feast or famine?

2009-05-22T20:41:00.005-05:00

Okay, the title is expressly over-the-top, but the topic of this post is the situation regarding food security in Cuba. As I've written elsewhere, as have a number of others, Cuba has had some amazing successes, among them innovation with alternative agriculture and food security. One of the Averii (Dennis & Alex), "prominent" (by which I mean, often-quoted at the very least) critics of organic/alternative agriculture recently wrote a critique of Cuba's system, saying that over-eager leftists had willfully or credulously parroted stories of Cuba's successes, when in fact, Cuba is presently importing 84% of its food. Well, respected (by which I mean, I personally and a number of others in and out of academia respect their work) students of food security Miguel Altieri, Peter Rosset, and Cuban Fernando Funes (who is the first author) responded, (with the full version pdf to be found here), finding (you know, with research, actual visits to Cuba, empiricism, all those pesky details) that Avery perhaps reversed his numbers, as 2003 FAO data show that Cuba imported 16% of its food, or the exact inverse of Avery's number (which came from a supposed quote from a Cuban minister, possibly true, the three note, but nonetheless uncited and uncheckable in Avery's article). The three do admit that Cuba has had recent setbacks:

To be fair to him, anecdotal evidence gleaned by the authors on recent trips to Cuba does reveal a probable deterioration of this situation. To the best of our knowledge, after being hit by three hurricanes last year, Cuba imported 55% of the total food that it consumes (unofficial figures). There is also the more insidious effect of food imports from the U.S. under the humanitarian food purchase loophole in the trade embargo. It seems that the Cuban government at some point made a political decision to try to enlist support in the U.S. against the trade embargo and against possible military actions toward the island, by purchasing increasingly large and expensive amounts of essentially unneeded food products from American corporations. These growing imports have in recent years depressed national production in Cuba, something which President Raul Castro has stated that he is determined to address.

As for its agroecological/organic/alternative ag programs, Altieri recently expressed to me concern that there is some conflict within Cuba as to whether to continue or expand the alternative programs, as some apparently viewed low-(synthetic)input agriculture as a necessity of the "Special Period" following the collapse of Cuban patron state, the USSR, a necessity now no longer, er, necessary. Nonetheless, much has been written on the Cuban system, which remains a singular and powerful example of the potentials of alternative agriculture:

Cuba’s achievements in urban agriculture have also grown and are truly remarkable: 383,000 urban farms, covering 50 thousand hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables (top urban farms reach a yield of 20 kgs per square meter of edible plant material using no synthetic chemicals) enough to supply 70% or more of all the fresh vegetables in cities such as Havana, Villa Clara and others. No other country in the world has achieved this level of success with a form of agriculture that reduces food miles, energy use, and effectively closes local production and consumption cycles.

In the general sense that all systems are vulnerable to valid critiques, and the specific critiques possible of Cuba more generally (which I won't review extensively here, except to say that I find the typical American critiques wildly overblown but still acknowledge, as do all Cubans, pro-Castro or not, that there remains much to improve about their democracy; Cubans acknowledge this and point out that that should always be the case and that viewing democracy as a static, achieved ideal as we do in the US is actually inimical to real democracy) Avery has a point. But in the specifics -- the lack of productivity of Cuba's system, the evidence from its imports that its experiment has failed (indeed, Funes et. al point out that even such countries as, say, ours, the US, has recently imported around half of its agricultural supply, going into an agricultural trade deficit in the months of June and August of 2008) -- the senior Averii remains incorrect, as he has often been.

(Nota bene on the last link: some have maintained that Avery is correctly quoting Tauxe; I did once find the original source, a letter to a journal that quoted epidemiologist Dr. Tauxe, but having read extensively on the incident, plus having seen Dr. Tauxe present personally at a recent conference, I can personally guaruntee you that he does not presently, at least, view organic agriculture as having any systematically differing epidemiological risks as compared to conventional ag, him having specifically answered this question at the con.)

Feel-Good Feel-bad clips of the year

2009-05-21T15:33:00.002-05:00

HuffPo links to Media Matter's examples of good journalism, including several outbreaks of sense at Fox News. A good watch, to see that some people occasionally do show some sense, even on cable news. I call it feel-good feel-bad clips, because even though it's kind of heart-warming, most of the clips are journos correcting distorted perceptions of reality that are likely attributable to their own rather egregious reporting in the first place, indeed, sometimes reporting by the self-same people who are flagrantly conducting decent journalism within the clips (a la Bill O'Reilly, correcting misconceptions about ACORN, even while re-raising the canard about their "dubious" operations and honesty).

Also, read this, an old post critiquing Richard Cohen's complaints about Stewart & Colbert, especially in regards to the financial media. A post with the rare distinction of having commenters who make good points as well.

Obama and Fools' Gold Environmentalism

2009-05-21T15:04:00.004-05:00

Read today's CounterPunch story by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank on how the ObamAdministration is letting us down on the environment.

From quietly continuing Bush Administration policies to drill offshore, support nuclear energy, de-list wolves from the Endangered Species Act, continue flawed market-based policies towards pollution that haven't worked for sulfur and likely will not work for carbon/Global Climate Change, it's a sad, poor bag, not really compensated for by his rather more admirable stance on Guantanamo Bay.

Excerpts from St. Clair & Frank:

It’s not just the wolf that’s been hung out to dry. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced they were revoking an 11th hour Bush directive that weakened the ESA listing process. However, shortly thereafter the Dept. of the Interior refused to repeal a special rule that would have granted the polar bear protection from the impacts of global warming. Salazar said his agency does not believe the law was intended to address climate change, even though many policy analysts believe the ESA could be used to limit the issuing of permits for development projects that would potentially threaten the polar bear by emitting additional greenhouse gases. "The Endangered Species Act is not the proper tool to deal with a global issue - global warming," Salazar said... The Obama administration, under Salazar’s watch, is refusing to lead the way in protecting the bear’s dwindling populations. Of course the oil and gas cartels were unabashedly pleased with the decision. So much for thinking globally and acting locally.

'We welcome the administration's decision because we, like Secretary Ken Salazar, recognize that the Endangered Species Act is not the proper mechanism for controlling our nation's carbon emissions,' said American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard...

Off-shore oil drilling and a new generation of nuclear power plants represented the sum total of the McCain/Palin energy plan. Though it seemed like political comedy at the time, this strategy has now been at least partially embraced by the Obama administration. As the clock approached midnight on the final eve of the Bush administration, his Interior Department put forward a rule opening 300 million acres of coastal waters to oil drilling. According to the hastily prepared decree, the leasing was to begin by March 23. Enter Salazar with a maneuver that is typical of the Obama approach to environmental politics. Instead of killing the drilling plan outright, Salazar merely extended the analysis period for an additional six months. The environmental lobby was given a procedural crumb, while the oil hounds still had its long-sought prize on the table for the taking... Ken Salazar, accompanied by a consort of oil lobbyists, held four town hall forums this spring on off-shore drilling and left that distinct impression that he was leaning toward what he called a “comprehensive approach” to energy development, in which the oceans will be mined for off-shore wind, wave power and, yes, oil. This is proving to be an administration that doesn’t know the meaning of the word “no”...

Down in Appalachia things are not much better, where the coal extraction industry was recently given the green light to proceed with 42 of its 48 pending mountaintop removal permits. While Obama speaks out about the negative impact of the aptly named mountaintop removal, where whole mountains are blown apart to expose thin lines of coal, he is not willing to take on an industry that continually pollutes rivers and threatens public health. 'If you still have an Obama sticker on your car, maybe think about scraping it off and sending it to the White House with your objections,” says Mike Roselle of Climate Ground Zero, who is working hard to stop mountaintop removal in West Virginia and elsewhere...

When it comes to CO2 emissions, the EPA has also been more bark than bite. While admitting that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health, the agency will not necessarily move to regulate industry emissions. White House climate czar Carol Browner and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson initially said that such a declaration would 'indeed trigger the beginning of regulation of CO2,' but only weeks later Jackson reversed her belief that industry would be affected by the White House’s admission. Speaking before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Jackson said on May 12: 'The endangerment finding is a scientific finding mandated by law ... It does not mean regulation.'

Read the whole thing here.

(And by the by: a big FUCK YOU to the numerous Senate Democrats who voted to block spending on closing Guantanamo Bay. Jason Linkins on the HuffPo says it nicely:

...it is nonsensical to be told by the grown-ups who preside in the House and Senate, as well as those who pundit for a living on the teevee that American prisons -- sufficient to house all manner of depraved criminals -- were not up to the task of also housing the terrorists currently at Gitmo. Apparently, these grown-ups are unaware of America's awesome and terrifying ability to incarcerate people while simultaneously possessed by the belief that these detainees have MAGIC POWERS. Last week, the House GOP crafted a dumb bill called the Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act, sculpted from pure angel feces. And this week, the Senate Democrats caved in to the nonsense, removing the funding that President Barack Obama requested in the war spending bill to close the prison.

Read his takedown of this moronitude here, where he also links to Jon Stewart's excellent takedown, where, "in just six minutes time, delivered what should be considered the most comprehensive mocking of this cavalcade of poor reasoning, bad decisions and unadulterated stupidity.")

Blood From a Stone: The Compassion of a Conservative Heart

2009-05-15T21:44:00.004-05:00

Read this Slate column by Doug Kendall and Dahlia Lithwick, discussing how the Republican outcry over the "empathy" Obama wants his Supreme Court Nominee to have is kind of fake, full of stickum, considering the way they too (not unfairly, if for underhanded purposes from a liberal perspective) play up empathy for those they consider to be "model plaintiffs" for Supreme Court cases they care about (i.e. "white 'victims' of affirmative action").

So despite this clever snippet from an earlier Slate article by Lithwick

And in a delicious Freudian slip, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama snorted: "I don't know what empathy means." You don't say.

apparently, they (conservatives) do. They just don't empathize with our Obama's desire for empathy because the empathy may not go the way they want it to. (And they'd likely be right, of course, in that an Obama nominee's sympathies wouldn't necessarily be with "victims" of affirmative action or those who want to keep handguns at home. Of course, you never know.)

Hypocrisy: It's ok when I do it.

Jim Cramer = Tim Russert = Bad Journalism?

2009-05-15T13:52:00.005-05:00

Read this excellent Salon article by Glenn Greenwald comparing Jon Stewart's take-down of Jim Cramer a bit back to the general failures of (US?) journalism. Specifically using Tim Russert as an example, from when he interviewed Cheney on the "Saddam had aluminum tubes for centrifuges to make nukes" leak that had come from within the White House itself (which, this example in turn came from Bill Moyers):

BOB SIMON: Remarkable. You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that's a remarkable thing to do. . . .

TIM RUSSERT (MEET THE PRESS), TO CHENEY: What specifically has [Saddam] obtained that you believe will enhance his nuclear development program?

BILL MOYERS: Was it just a coincidence in your mind that Cheney came on your show and others went on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that story appeared?

TIM RUSSERT: I don't know. The NEW YORK TIMES is a better judge of that than I am.

BILL MOYERS: No one tipped you that it was going to happen?

TIM RUSSERT: No, no. I mean-

BILL MOYERS: The Cheney office didn't leak to you that there's gonna be a big story?

TIM RUSSERT: No. No. I mean, I don't have the-- This is, you know-- on MEET THE PRESS, people come on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any question we want. I did not know about the aluminum tubes story until I read it in the NEW YORK TIMES.

BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September Eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable. Someone in the Administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES. And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It's a circular, self-confirming leak.

TIM RUSSERT: I don't know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

BILL MOYERS: Bob Simon didn't wait for the phone to ring.

Point being, Russert didn't have to, or shouldn't, "wait for the phone to ring" to do research verifying or disputing his interviewees' stories:

I'm under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out.

What's interesting, among other things, is that Stewart never promotes himself as an arbiter of truth, he always says he's an entertainer and comedian, and I can't think of a single time when he implied, much less said, that getting information or informed comment from him was a good idea -- despite the fact that it is, especially in comparison to actual "journalists". Tucker Carlson, whose show Crossfire got canceled shortly after Jon Stewart made a mockery of it and Carlson (and Begala: "You guys are hurting America"), complained that Stewart "wanted to have it both ways", by having people take his concerns seriously, but also to say "he's just a comedian"; Carlson urged Stewart to stop criticizing them and just be funny, as if being a comedian means by default that he also can never say something serious. Here's the thing: even though Stewart is smarter than the average bear, his modesty, false or not, is the direct opposite of the Messianic or infallible impartial arbiters of news motifs of mainstream journalism. Stewart, in essence, ALWAYS implies, "check it out for yourself," because he never encourages the audience to take something on his authority (or, usually, his guest's either, since he usually asks -- *usually* asks -- questions that are intellectually critical focused on the author's work, and then of course, shills the book, but in Stewart's case, I feel like he himself actually read and processed the information in the book, so his shilling it rings much less hollow than, say, someone on The Today Show or Jay Leno would sound if he was hawking a book written by a think-tanker).

Intentional or not, Stewart's combination of intellectual analysis, critical thinking, and abject over-the-top "no, seriously, I am not that smart" comes close to the stance real journalists should have. And yet, it seems almost as if his protestations of not being a journalist in way is exactly what allows him the liberty to be as tough, intellectual, and thorough as he is... I mean, seriously, the world (or at least Sunday news) would be infinitely better with him as the interviewer on Meet the Press. With my admiration for him kept in mind, believe me when I say that I think that speaks much more negatively of the press than it speaks positively for him -- simply because the fact that he's doing a better job than they are is laudable, but the fact they do so poorly is simply inexcusable.

The Daily Show: Fuck Yeah. (Coming again to save the motherfucking day, yeah.)

2009-05-13T22:22:00.003-05:00

Satire is the only way!

I'm just reminded for the eleventieth time why Jon Stewart is so FUCKING awesome, and that those who've bemoaned the rise of The Daily Show as some kind of rise of political unawareness don't know their ass from a hat.

A) He is interviewing the ambassador from Pakistan, Husain Haqqani. He does this shit all the time -- he's had foreign dignitaries, like Bolivian president Evo Morales and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to Obama officials like Peter Orszag (director of the Office of Management and Budget) and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, to important and (or?) thoughtful authors and thinkers, some with viewpoints he very much disagrees with, like Cliff May, and others like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Philip Alcabes. Don't recognize some or all of these names? Good. You see, that's called learning, baby. It feels real good, don't it?
B) He's fucking PREPARED for these interviews, asking Haqqani, for example, various detailed questions based in Stewart's studying of the issues and previous writings of his guest and others ("As you yourself has written sir..." is a phrase intimating research to a degree you don't often hear on late night shows like Leno or Letterman, or even to some extent on Lehrer, when the guest is neither promoting a book nor is a columnist.) He debated Cliff May on torture, and even though they disagreed on it (if I may grossly distort Cliff May's viewpoint, he's all for it), with May actually saying that it was probably the best discussion he'd had of the issue on TV. And I don't think he was bullshiting, either. All in all, Stewart's combination of thorough research, thoughtful analysis, and a (somewhat over-stated but, I think, genuinely felt) "everyperson" (aka "everyman") approach that keeps even hostile guests mostly open to continue the discussion.
C) Given his place (and Colbert's) as a cultural phenomenon in the space between late-nighters like Leno or Conan and earnest news magazines and interview segments on NewsHour, CNN, 60 Minutes, or what have you, his popularity with "the kids" is actually a fantastic thing. He not only invites thinkers, politicians, and authors (and also comedians, actors, musicians, and other people with less urgent effects on global politics), but he interviews them premised on a pretty high level of understanding from his audience. One might surmise that they're simply sitting through this but really there for the rest of the show, though I think one would miss about half the humor without a working knowledge of current events and politics (the other half the humor is a melange of puns, self-referential and self-mocking humor, and graphical puns). And in a way, that's the genius -- whatever the audience is "there for", the relatively high level of discourse in his political interviews might get some learnin' in for him and the audience, intended or not.

From the Colbert/Stewart approach, I feel you get a much more working understanding of global events and ideas than the drier approach of the Lehrer et. als (that tend to AVOID challenging guests on equivocation or directly contradicting them when they spin, and thus remain on a superficial level alarmingly akin to a typical late-night interview like Leno) and yet also keeps the fun of a Leno, Letterman-type interview with jokes, sarcasm, etc. while maintaining nuance and in-depth probing of ideas.

The only other person with comparable deftness and intellectual rigor as a pop figure is Bill Maher, who evinces a similar level of intellectual curiousity as Stewart. With both of them, you don't just get topical thinkers, but also challenging ones that you just don't see on any other channels or shows, news or entertainment, from authors and scientists that simply interest them or whom they find insightful to the dignitaries I mentioned earlier, who I haven't seen on any of the mainstream news shows -- but that could be because I don't typical watch them. (Still, I challenge you to show me an interview of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of similar length on TV -- which there may very well be, but I again doubt it had either the good-natured humor and non-forced light-heartedness of Stewart nor implied the depth of research he did.)

Ok, I'm done flogging TDS. I'm just saying -- at it's best, it's a TV show without parallel or competitor (well, except Bill Maher and sometimes Stewart's own protegé Colbert), and at its worst, it's probably a step or so ahead of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, the light-hearted NPR news quiz show focused on weird currents events to a greater extent than it is to any kind of education about the topics discussed.

Fuck yeah.

Killing Them (Minorities) Softly

2009-05-12T09:27:00.005-05:00

Gotta call attention to this post at Feministing, which is in turn calling attention to this op-ed from NYT columnist Bob Herbert. F-ing makes additional great points on top of Herbert's -- that point being that the murders of minorities, especially non-white children, is wildly unequal, with a number of murders having taken place in Chicago this year, around 36 children apparently, a grim statistic pretty much unremarked upon in comparison to school and university shootings in majority-white schools. Feministing's Samhita says

"I actually think that Herbert is giving them an easy way out suggesting that it is just that mainstream media frequently overlooks the deaths and murders of people of color. When people of color are involved in the death or murder of a white person, that is definitely headline news..."

and

while Herbert is suggesting that the stories that cover the murder of women of color, poor people and other disenfranchised communities, it is not just that they are overlooked, it is that they are strategically woven into the narrative of good verse evil. White women are pitted against communities of color, contrasting innocent verses guilty.

Go and read both, and ask yourself how much you heard about this case, where in West Virginia a black woman's kidnappers

"forced her to eat rat droppings, choked her with a cable cord and stabbed her in the leg while calling her a racial slur, according to criminal complaints. They also poured hot water over her, made her drink from a toilet, and beat and sexually assaulted her during a span of about a week, the documents say."

I myself didn't know anything about this, that it had even ever occurred, until I listened to an old Democracy Now! podcast. Hopefully, I was just intensely in dissertation mode and it really was big news, hopefully I was in a bubble and missed the huge national attention turned to this horrific incident, the public questioning of ourselves as a country and what could be done to prevent this, and the deaths in Chicago, and the deaths and injustices heaped on everyone of every color, no less against blacks or Latinos or Asians or gays and lesbians or transgender or anyone else than against white heterosexuals, because riddle me this -- can you imagine a white woman being kidnapped by six black people, tortured by them, called racial epithets, and raped, and her story not becoming a lasting national memory? Certainly, part of it would be its memorability as "man bites dog" (or "black supremacists attack whites"), that is, because it is a less familiar story, but doesn't the familiarity of black-on-white crime, its quasi-quotidian quality, disturb one in and of itself?....