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2005 excavation at the Danielson site, Worcester MA. Yuccacentric
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Changed Priorities Ahead
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10.12.05 Environmentalists, feminists, fat activists, and others have differing enemies who nevertheless share a key characteristic: a sense of entitlement. Entitlement to prestige. Entitlement to call the shots in society. Entitlement not to have to think about how the laundry will get done or where your hamburger comes from. Entitlement not to have to see or hear about anything you find aesthetically or sexually unappealing. Entitlement to have everyone affirm your choice of holiday. Entitlement to set the terms of the (employment or other) offer. Entitlement to have the world rearranged to suit you, to have other people make the sacrifices to keep you happy. And so on. This entitlement is bound up in the question of authority, since getting your own way requires being able to control others' behavior (ordering them around) and discourse (defining the terms of debate). The existence of an alternative power center not subordinate to you (or at least to a trusted compatriot). One of the most threatening such alternative power centers is a culture that you do not control, that you can't at least box in and define (for yourself and for its own members) as inferior. Speaking a language that the entitled elite don't understand is a brazen declaration of such an alternative power center. The question of surveillance comes in here too. Maintaining one's entitlement to power requires knowing what your subordinates are up to -- a process made difficult by a language barrier. Doubtless someone will try to defend the teacher and principal by pointing out that they need to be able to hear everything the students say, lest they be planning a gang initiation or conducting a drug deal in the hallway. The need for the authorities to eavesdrop is accomplished, however, not by the authorities learning Spanish (which would perhaps be a more robust solution from a purely social control point of view), but by enforcing their entitlement to choose the language. It's not surprising that so many of these stories of outrage come from schools. The structure of school administration, rooted in our (not unjustified) views of children's lesser status, makes it an appealing environment for someone with an overactive sense of entitlement. The job of principal thus attracts more than its share of petty despots. Stentor Danielson, 10:05, , 8.12.05 First, there's the implicit choice that we're considering. In comparing the fates of the children of single parents to the children of couples, we're assuming that this is the choice facing a woman who wants to be a mother. What's more likely, though, is that the choice is between single parenthood and non-parenthood. Thus it's not enough to say that donor children are worse off than other children. You have to argue that they're so bad off that they ought never to have been born. That's a pretty high hurdle for opponents of donor conception. Second, there's the policy option on the table. The way these writers tell it, the only real response we could make if donor children turned out to have worse lives on average would be to ban donor conception. This makes a certain sense from a socially conservative viewpoint, where fatherlessness is directly detrimental to a child's wellbeing. If that's the case, all you can do is to avoid getting into that situation in the first place. From a liberal point of view, however, it's far more likely that the negative effects of single parenthood operate through mediating variables -- the lack of resources brought about by having only half as many adults in the household, or the cultural pressures that say fatherlessness is weird, for example. This suggests that there are things that we can do to support single parent families once they exist. This would mean that donor children who are already born would not be abandoned to their fate. Stentor Danielson, 10:22, , 2.12.05
Make no mistake about the fact that Green's sermon is vile, unacceptable, and entirely false. But the boundaries of free speech must remain broad and strong. The battle against this form of homophobia can only be won on the cultural, not the legal, level. Stentor Danielson, 12:54, , 1.12.05 Historically, indigenous people have had a sort of catch-22 relationship with the nature-human divide. In the initial phase of colonization they were declared to be part of nature, and hence subject to the same type of ruthless exploitation as the soil and trees around them. With the rise of the conservation movement in the early 20th century, indigenous people were accepted as human -- only to have that used as a rationale for removing them from their lands, lest they destroy nature (or even just profane it by their mere presence in the wilderness)*. The latter viewpoint remains strong in the modern environmental movement:
Sanderson's statement is the height of hubris in two ways, ways which are racist in effect even if not in intent. First, the industrialized countries have crippled nature in their own backyards, and yet the environmental movement asks indigenous people to make the sacrifices to keep the biosphere alive. It's true that some (albeit far less than Sanderson thinks) of the practices of indigenous people are damaging to the environment -- but that damage would be negligible if indigenous territories weren't hemmed in by mines, roads, and industrial agriculture. To put it in the terminology of my previous post, industrial society has weighted indigenous peoples' choice set, and then punishes them for making a survival choice that it doesn't like. Second, Sanderson's statement about the difference between the indigenous and conservationist versions of the forest is surficially correct, but extremely anti-indigenous in its implications. Indigenous people and the Wildlife Conservation Society do have two different visions of how the forest should be. But what right does Sanderson have to declare the superiority of his own? Perhaps more to the point, since Sanderson has every right to argue for his own perspective, what right does he have to use his comparative financial might, the WCS's media megaphone, and the coercive power of the state to enforce his view? Lands inhabited by indigenous people belong to those indigenous people, and only in the case of egregious damage to others, or with their consent (neither of which pertain in most cases) can outsiders step in. Indigenous people are people. They have the same basic sort of rights to their environment that any other land owner does -- including the right to define the type of nature that they want, the right to a certain amount of exploitation of it, and the right to participation in environmental management decisions being made at a larger scale. Contra Sanderson, indigenous rights are a crucial concern for wildlife conservationists, because they put a check on conservationists' activities, and because truly recognizing indigenous rights will give conservationists a better foothold to resist the important enemy, the unsustainable industrial system. If the industrialized countries focus on getting the (unsustainably harvested on land obtained through cronyism) log out of their eye, I think indigenous people can handle monitoring their own eyes for motes. *Today many indigenous groups and their non-indigenous allies are trying to make indigenous people part of nature again, albeit this time saying it's a good thing -- the "angels in the ecosystem" ideal. I have my anthropological skepticism about how accurate much of the rhetoric is as a representation of traditional (pre-colonial) culture. However, there is nothing wrong with efforts to make one's identity into an "angels in the ecosystem" mold, and indeed it's a clever way for indigenous people practice some syncretism and beat the dominant culture using its own rules. Stentor Danielson, 17:30, , 30.11.05
The basic point is this: households do not exist in isolation. What Marcotte is getting at is basically Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration -- social systems perpetuate themselves by setting up the choices that people face in such a way that it makes sense for them to make choices that reproduce the system (in the worst cases, the choice is framed in such a way that *either* option perpetuates the system). Therefore, you can't just fix the internal relationships of your partnership and have the outcome be truly equal. Your household is still in a relationship to all the people and social structures around you, who exert various pressures (such as blaming only the woman for a messy house) that skew the outcome when measured in terms of the happiness and freedom of the household members. So even exhorting both men and women to work for equality in their own households is not enough to fix the situation. Neither naive "choice feminism" that validates any choice nor Hirshman's call to demand that people make a certain set of properly feminist choices really gets at the heart of the problem. This is not to say that within-household equality is a bad thing. An internally equal relationship subjected to antifeminist pressures is a good sight better than an internally unequal relationship. On the other hand, it's difficult to criticize many choices (particularly on the woman's part) that are what Marcotte calls "survival choices" that are rational within the system -- you can't demand that oppressed people make sacrifices for activism. We need to look beyond your own household domain for the other social structures that are placing unfair choices and pressures your household (just as Hirshman opens her article by looking beyond the workplace for the social structures that create workplace inequality). And we need to recognize that it's a change that has to be made society-wide, not under the naive classical-liberal conception that households can choose their level of feminist-ness all on their own. On a slight tangent, Marcotte links to this Bitch, PhD post that gives one of the best succinct and forceful responses to the last-name-changing dilemma (from a basically structurationist viewpoint) that I've seen:
Stentor Danielson, 20:07, , 25.11.05 Stentor Danielson, 11:24, , Cultural Theory argues that none of the four biases (Hierarchy, Egalitarianism, Individualism, and Fatalism) is entirely superior. All four are necessary, in some combination, for a functioning society. On the one hand, it's an appealing idea that seems to offer a useful direction for policymaking. But on the other hand, allowing this higher-order view seems to threaten to let Cultural Theorists transcend the basic theorem of Cultural Theory: that everyone is biased. But what actually happens is that the biases reappear at the meta level. The question of "how do we coordinate and balance the application of different biases?" is one that admits of four irreconcilable answers. The most obvious is a sort of meta-Hierarchy -- a set of clear rules specifying when and where each first-order bias is applicable. More popular in the Cultural Theory literature is meta-Egalitarianism, under which all four biases are invited to the table to share their perspective as equals. The idea of the complementarity of biases has been most deeply investigated by Michael Thompson, whose study area -- the Sherpas -- exhibits meta-Individualism, a practice of allowing the four biases to compete to see which is most effective at running each sphere of life in a given set of circumstances. And of course there's meta-Fatalism, in which we just hope for the best in our configuration of biases. Stentor Danielson, 11:05, , 24.11.05
Her eventual conclusion is that the nature of flu means that the benefits of a quarrantine are quite small, and hence not worth the costs. As a utilitarian, I think cost-benefit analysis of the type hilzoy proposes is certainly the way policy problems ought to be analyzed. However, as a pragmatist, I recognize that weighing the costs and benefits to society of a policy is somewhat tangential to the way policy is actually made. In real policymaking -- particularly when dealing with a Big Problem like bird flu or terrorism, the goal is not to reduce the costs and increase the benefits until the latter exceeds the former. Rather, it's to raise the cost until it's commensurate with the importance and scaryness of the problem (provided, of course, that somebody else is paying that cost). A cheap but effective solution is no good because its cheapness fails to do justice to the seriousness of the problem. We need to feel like we're making big sacrifices in order to preserve some important value and meet some pressing need. Quarrantining strangers is thus going to have great appeal as a response to an epidemic of bird flu. Consider, as another example, Obsidian Wings' favorite issue: torture. Various cost-benefit arguments have been made about torture -- pro-torture people raising "ticking time bomb" scenarios and anti-torture people presenting evidence that torture is a hugely ineffective way of getting reliable information. Unfortunately, both types of argument are usually beside the point. For the vast majority of torture supporters, what weighs in torture's favor is not the benefits it's likely to bring in terms of combatting terrorism. It's the costs that torture imposes. Torture is seen as good because it shows that we're willing to go to really great lengths* to do something about terrorism. The anti-torture side is a bit more complex. It's not that anti-torture people don't see terrorism as a big problem that we should demonstrate our resolve against. Rather, they don't see torture as something eligible to be counted as a cost, treated as causing a finite level of harm that can be weighed against other pros and cons in some sort of moral calculus. They take a deontological attitude that torture is wrong, period. This is why the ineffectiveness of torture is only brought up as an uncomfortable afterthought. To even think of torture as a cost, rather than as a sin, is for most anti-torture people a sin of improper moral reasoning. *Pun intended Stentor Danielson, 20:33, , |
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debitage 
Entitlement vs. Spanish