RIP Al Weisel

Weisel, better known to the blogging world as Jon Swift, reasonable conservative, apparently died on February 27th.  This is a sad loss to the liberal blagoweb, who will miss his wit and satire, but obviously a much greater loss to his family, to whom I offer my sincere condolences.

Thanks to Kate Harding, Jill Filipovic, and Jeff Fecke for the news.

I wasn’t really an active reader or commenter, let alone a blogger myself (though I can’t really claim to be very “active” now, either) when the legendary Steve Gilliard died, so my experience of the collective heartbreak of the lefty blogosphere at the time was only third-hand and at some remove of time; a web without Gilliard wasn’t a shock to me, as I hadn’t really known one with him.  I didn’t know Weisel personally either, of course, but the difference between the blogosphere with him, and the blogosphere without, is stark.

Update: Shakesville now has a post up as well.

Quick Hit: I've Got My Story and I'm Sticking To It!

Yesterday on my way to work I was listening, as is often the case, to the BBC World Service NewsHour program on my local NPR station, and one segment in particular caught my ear.  They were discussing the aftermath of the Chile earthquake, including President Bachelet sending thousands of troops into Concepción to “restore order.”  Starting at minute 39, presenter Robin Lustig talks with Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, about “the morality of looting.”

What struck me about this was Lustig’s dogged insistence on established narrative — people who take food and supplies from stores in the aftermath of a disaster are “looters,” selfish criminals out for their own benefit who don’t care about anyone else; post-disaster urban areas (especially those populated by non-white people) devolve into Hobbesian nightmares; it’s correct for governments’ primary response to be “restoring order” by sending in police or troops — in the face of Furedi’s patient explanation that the evidence doesn’t support that narrative.  People act more altruistically after a disaster, crime rates are lower, and those who “loot” food and supplies tend to then distribute them among the population.  But Lustig would be damned if he’d let silly little things like facts interfere with the preferred story.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006czxs#p006q1fw

On Not Getting Fooled Again

(Update: apparently I forgot to linkify things that were supposed to be links!  I was sure I had done.  That’s what I get for posting on only one cup of coffee.  Fixed now.)

As most people probably know by now, on Friday President Obama accepted an invitation to speak to and answer questions from the Republican caucus at their annual retreat — on the condition that the news media be allowed and the speech and Q&A session be broadcast live.

And as most people probably know by now, the Republicans are almost certainly thinking to themselves, “how could we have been so stupid?”  (The answer, I think, is that they got so used to the lies they use to keep the rubes voting for them that they kind of forgot they were lies, and they honestly believed their sad little talking-points recital would leave Obama transfixed and tongue-tied, and he’d eventually have to break down and admit they were right about everything.)

If you haven’t seen the video, you should try to find time to do so — it’s a bit over an hour, but it’s pretty remarkable.  Each time someone asks a question, it’s clear they think they’re scoring a major point, and that there’s just no way the President can refute their argument.  And each time, he calmly, reasonably, cuts their head off.  You can see the whole thing at Shakesville (with links to more discussion), and TNC provides the soundtrack, but I’ve provided some highlights below the fold.

Quick Hit: Spending Freeze

So apparently President Obama is planning a freeze on all new non-defense discretionary spending.  That leaves out, as far as I can tell, current funding levels, additional DoD funding, and anything to do with Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.

The left-wing/liberal/progressive blagoweb pretty much thinks this is stupid.  Jeff Fecke provides a partial defense, which to Fecke’s credit doesn’t descend into “he’s playing 37-dimensional chess, you just have to trust him!” but still rests on too many hypotheticals for my comfort.  Krugman takes a gloomier view.

Here’s my thing.

Politically, I don’t see this working well.  Liberals think the last thing we should do is freeze spending on “discretionary” domestic programs like, oh, say, education.  Conservatives, and moderates who have been bombarded for generations with conservative messages about how government deficits are terrible things, will find plenty of ground to accuse the administration of flim-flammery if Fecke is right and the freeze is aimed at providing deficit-hawk-ish cover for passing health care and jobs bills, and if not they’ll just hang the failing-to-substantially-improve economy around his neck (actually, they’ll probably do that no matter what).

And as policy, to be blunt, it’s shit.  It has no significant impact on actual deficits — according to tonight’s Marketplace report, it will cut “only $250 billion over 10 years, but that’s out of a $3.5 trillion budget every year,” — but it cuts funding from areas where we really need more investment (like education and environmental programs), hurting people who need help.  (And, cf. LGM, ignores the areas of real waste.)

So, I mean, maybe tomorrow night’s State of the Union turns it all around — maybe President Obama lays out a bold new liberal vision for the country, inspires the people to rally behind it, and shames recalcitrant Democrats into pushing forward a progressive agenda; or if that’s too fanciful a dream, maybe at least he proposes policy initiatives that make the current situation look less dire.  Maybe.  I’ll wait and see.  But it doesn’t seem likely.

Update: I just got an email from the Washington Post with the subject line “Breaking News: Obama to promote more education spending in State of Union speech” — how does that square with this “spending freeze”?  I don’t know.  FWIW, here’s their story on the subject.

"Gender Junkies": The Post That Wasn’t (Yet?)

For a long time I’ve had a partly-finished post sitting in my draft queue.  It’s entitled (as you might have guessed by this point) “Gender Junkies,” and it’s an attempt to argue that, roughly,

1. Gender is a social construct
2. It’s a necessarily hierarchical and therefore unjust social construct
3. True human liberation requires the end of our belief in this social construct
4. But it’s so embedded in our thinking that we genuinely cannot conceive of what a society without it would look like
5. So the best we can do is try to make gender matter less, bit-by-bit.

(But using nerdy analogies like Dune and The Matrix.)

But as I say, I started the post a long time ago, and have been having a hard time finishing it, and in the meantime I’ve been reading various blogs and interacting with various people, and various things have happened; part of the reason, then, that I’ve had difficulty finishing the post is that I’m no longer sure I’m arguing well.  I’ve learned much that I didn’t previously know, for example, about the problematic history of links to transphobia the idea of gender-as-social-construct has.  And I want to avoid, if possible, saying something hurtful because I haven’t thought things through enough or because I’m working from faulty ideas.

So, since I’ve been getting a lot more visitors in the past week or so, thanks to generous links from several other blogs, I thought maybe now would be a good time to try opening a discussion thread.

How do you define “gender”?  Do you see it as a social construct, or a function of biology (including brain biology, mind), or some mix of factors?  Do you think it’s inherently hierarchical, or is a system of gender classification which is also egalitarian conceivable to you?

(Note: I realize that this is a very fraught topic, and what seems like a relatively abstract philosophical opinion to one person may seem to another like an outright attack on their right to exist.  If you join the discussion, please be sensitive to the complexities of the subject, treat others kindly, and assume good faith in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary.)

…

No snappy title for this one.

The AP has called the race, and AG Martha Coakley has conceded.

The Democrats fielded a lackluster candidate against a background of growing dissatisfaction with a Democratic Congress and Presidency, and ran a weak, halfassed campaign.  That should have meant a close race — but it took a really spectacular failure of tactics and strategy to produce this outcome.

State Senator Scott Brown is an anti-choice, pro-torture, pro-war, teabagger and proto-Birther, who promised from the beginning of his campaign to be “the 41st vote” in the Senate, i.e. to march in lockstep with the Republican party leadership no matter what’s right, what’s good for the country, or what the voters of Massachusetts actually want, just like every Republican (excluding Arlen Specter and including Joe Lieberman) does.

And now he’s the next United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Now he holds the seat that Ted Kennedy held for nearly half a century.

I can only assume that Senator-Elect Brown’s first order of business, after delivering what I fear will be a smug, gloating victory speech tonight, will be to rush to DC, visit Arlington National Cemetery, and there, twice — once for himself, and once carrying out the will of the majority of Massachusetts voters as expressed at the polls — spit on Teddy’s grave.

I’m sorry, Senator Kennedy.  It’s a disgrace to your memory, and will inevitably redound to the misfortune of our state and our country.

Massachusetts Democrats, AG Coakley, assorted strategists — this was your race to lose, and lose it you did.  A wet paper bag should have been able to beat Scott Brown (Scott Brown of all people!) in this race by at least ten points, so long as that bag had a “D” after its name.  You are a disgrace.

To the rest of the country, I am sorry.  The Democratic supermajority in the Senate wasn’t really doing a lot of good, but I suspect Brown — new whizkid celebrity for the Republicans that he’s certain to be — will be able to do a lot of harm.

Mr. Brown, you’ve won the election: you’ll be my Senator.  I accept that, but I sure don’t have to like it, and I will fight like hell to see you ousted in 2012.  You do not deserve that seat.

And now, if you’ll all excuse me, I have an appointment with a gentleman from Knob Creek.

I Don’t Care If You’re Offended

Updated below to address a criticism.

A little while ago, I got into an argument with a friend.  In the course of objecting to a joke that disparaged women, I said something snide about religion (in this particular case the religion in question was Christianity, but it was a remark about religion in general).  My friend asked whether a Christian might not be just as offended by what I’d said, as a feminist¹ would be by the sexist joke.  I pointed out that our society privileges Christianity and accords more power and respect to Christians, while it marginalizes women and feminism, and seeks to prevent their access to power, so the ceteris isn’t paribus, but he insisted that how offended someone is, is something that’s determined solely by that person and how they feel about what was said, and doesn’t get scaled according to the person’s social status.  My position, he argued, was really that I just cared less whether certain groups were offended, than I did about others.

It was an interesting discussion, and it led me to conclude this:

I actually don’t care whether anyone is offended². Offense is a vague, amorphous concept, and it is completely subjective, as my friend pointed out.  Anyone can claim to be deeply, mortally offended by anything, and it may very well be true; even if it’s not, there’s no way to dispute it.  “You don’t really feel what you claim you feel,” is a line of argumentation that doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

What I care about is harm. What I ultimately said in this other argument was:

The problem with sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist, etc., remarks and “jokes” is not that they’re offensive, but that by relying for their meaning on harmful cultural narratives about privileged and marginalized groups they reinforce those narratives, and the stronger those narratives are, the stronger the implicit biases with which people are indoctrinated are. That’s real harm, not just “offense.”

Now, I think many people who write about and try to fight structural bias are just accustomed to using “offensive” as something of a shorthand for this notion of harmful-because-it-reinforces-pernicious-memes; I know I generally have.  But offense is only defined in terms of how the offended person feels, which means it’s an insufficient concept.  It actually obscures the real problem.  As my friend argued, a Christian may be very genuinely offended if an atheist mocks one tenet or another of their religion, and there’s no way to say that that feeling of offense is less real or less valid than any other.  And to mock another person is certainly not a nice thing — or more to the point, not a kind thing — to do, so one can argue that the atheist shouldn’t do it for that reason.  People are unkind to each other all the time, however, and it doesn’t always do the same degree of harm.  If I make a snide joke which hinges on the scientific impossibility of a dead person returning to life after three days, I don’t cause significant harm.  There is not a widespread perception in US society that people who do believe such an event happened once, a couple thousand years ago, are so out of touch with reality that they should never be taken seriously, or should be kept away from positions of power, or are automatically stupid; there is not a long history of atheists oppressing Christians and denying them their basic human rights³.

Mocking the powerful and privileged for those characteristics society arbitrarily uses as a basis for according that power and privilege reverses, rather than participating in and reinforcing, the cultural narrative that justifies their privilege (and that in so doing necessarily justifies the marginalization and oppression of the powerless and unprivileged).  Mocking the powerless and unprivileged for those characteristics society arbitrarily uses as a basis for their marginalization does participate in and reinforce the narratives that justify that marginalization.

These things build up.  Over a lifetime, they build up a great deal: these usually-unspoken cultural narratives are precisely the stuff of implicit bias, and we’re soaking in them.  It’s a mistake to object to them as merely “offensive” — tacitly accepting that the inherently subjective idea of offense is of primary importance, which enables the privileged in claiming, confident it can’t be disproved or even argued against, that they’re “offended” by challenges to their privilege: or as Fred Clark has it, empowers the cult of offendedness — instead of pointing out that they do real harm.  They offend too, to be sure; and it’s unkind to offend on  purpose, or to fail to apologize for giving offense.  But the much greater harm lies in strengthening, even though it’s only a little bit at a time, the negative stories about marginalized groups that are woven into our society, both in the minds of the privileged, and of the marginalized people themselves.

That’s what I care about.

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¹ I’m reporting this more or less as he argued it — I remain opposed to the use of terms like “feminist” as nouns.

 

² This is not strictly true, of course. All other things being equal, I prefer for people not to offend each other; and I especially prefer that no one offend me or people I care about.  Not saying or doing offensive things is a reasonably worthwhile goal, as is pointing out when others say or do offensive things and asking them not to.  But prevention and mitigation of harm should always take priority over concern about offense.

³ [Update 2010-01-19]: colormonochrome correctly noted that there is a significant history of oppression against Christians, for example from (speaking very roughly and varying in different parts of the world) about two thousand years ago to, say [note that I am not a historian by trade!] 500-1000 years ago in most of Europe, more recently in some places, and ongoing in others, and I’m sorry that I essentially disregarded that. However, given that in my specific examples I’m talking primarily about US society, I believe my claims hold up in that context. Christians have never been a persecuted or marginalized group in the United States, especially not at the hands of atheists.

A* Thing You** Should*** Buy

I don’t usually post stuff like this (though, I suppose, lately I don’t usually post much of anything, so it’s probably good to get back in the habit), but it’s a good enough deal to warrant bringing to folks’ attention, on the off chance I have any readers (let alone any to whom it applies).

For the next 23-odd hours, as part of their year-end sale, you can buy the Morrowind Game of the Year edition (which includes the two expansions) on Steam for $5.  If you haven’t played Morrowind, you really owe it to yourself to grab it.  There’s still a huge, thriving mod community despite the game being eight years old, and it’s easy to spend hours browsing TESNexus, Planet Elder Scrolls, and UESP — not to mention the incredibly ambitious Tamriel Rebuilt project — working out exactly what you want your gameplay experience to be like.  The game world is immense, the plot interesting but entirely optional, and it (and its predecessor Daggerfall and successor Oblivion) is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a genuine roleplaying experience in a video game.  It still imposes artificial constraints, of course — there are things that simply aren’t possible, because the engine isn’t programmed that way; dialogue seems virtually unrestricted at first because Bethesda just put so much time into writing text for the game, but is really just the same old branching trees of question and response we’ve had since the first adventure games; there are a limited number of ways of interacting with objects in the world; and there’s no physics engine, so you can’t knock things over — so you haven’t got the kind of freedom a genuine (i.e. pencil-and-paper) RPG affords, but especially with some well-chosen mods it’s a remarkably immersive and enjoyable game.

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* Well, two things. The masterful Indigo Prophecy is available through tomorrow for $3.40, and it’s well worth your time.
** Assuming you play video games and have a Windows machine.
*** If you don’t already own it.

2010

Happy new year!  It’s officially 2010 on the US’s east coast, and here’s hoping the final year of the first decade of the 21st century will be better than the penultimate was.

I Guess That’s What.

Asked and answered.

Bye-bye, Loud Obbs.  Don’t bother to write.  And congratulations to CNN on finally deciding that middle “N” might mean something after all.