debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

25.2.06

T-shirts Now Available In Fetus Size

Feministing points out that some Christians are trying to "take back the rainbow" from the gay rights movement. Personally, I think the post-flood covenant is an episode that Christians ought not to draw attention to -- it doesn't say much for God's love that he was only willing to promise to never totally destroy the earth by flood again.

Poking around the site, I ran into another Christian T-shirt that I found rather bizarre. It reads "Support pro-life judges: someday your life may depend on it." Now, I admittedly try to stay as far away from the abortion debate as possible, but I think I know enough to say that if you're old enough to be wearing a T-shirt, you're too old to be saved by banning abortion.

Stentor Danielson, 11:17, ,

23.2.06

It's Easy To Defend The KKK

It's long been fashionable, particularly for Americans, to make grandiose claims about one's commitment to freedom of speech. Such claims typically take the form of defending the KKK, although Naziism is a popular form of bad-but-should-be-defended speech as well -- Abiola Lapite's statement that "It's cases like the one of Holocaust denier David Irving which provide the strongest tests of how truly committed one is to freedom of speech" is typical. But I think these examples miss the mark a bit by confusing extremeness with unacceptability.

Everyone has a limit to what speech they will allow (if not in society as a whole, at least in certain contexts). The KKK and Holocaust denial examples assume that that limit is defined by extremeness -- that everyone will accept speech that they agree with and speech that's close or sounds reasonable, but moving away from your own beliefs you eventually hit some speech that's so wrong and so contrary to your moral ideals that you can no longer handle it. Lynching black people is so wrong in the minds of most Americans that it provides a good example of extreme speech. If you'd even defend the KKK's right to speak, then it seems to follow that you'd defend any more "reasonable" ideas.

But what actually makes speech potentially ban-worthy is not its extremeness, it's how threatening it is. Take the classic example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Saying that the theater is on fire is not a particularly extreme viewpoint -- theaters do catch on fire from time to time, and there's nothing particularly immoral about believing that a building is burning (or the implicit claim that we ought therefore to evacuate). But it is threatening, because were the other theatergoers to hear this speech, they would believe it and cause a dangerous stampede.

Thus, it's easy for the average American -- particularly white northerners -- to defend the KKK's right to speak. The possibility of lots of people signing on to the KKK's brand of extreme racism seems so remote that a few guys in white hoods ranting about the evils of equality doesn't feel like a threat. And even if the KKK did win some converts, most of the noble defenders of their speech would not be among those in line to be lynched. Indeed, it's the very extremeness of the KKK's views that makes it easy to defend them, since extreme views are unlikely to win adherents. This, then, is why Europe has more restrictive Holocaust denial laws than the US -- since the Nazis came from Europe, the threat posed by Holocaust denial feels much more real to them than it does on this side of the Atlantic.

This is not necessarily to say that Europe's laws are right, as there is room for much debate about how likely a Nazi revival really is, and how threatening speech must be before it can be banned. I'll close with an interesting quote from Sebastian Holsclaw. I'm not sure how accurate the empirical claim in it is, but it does illustrate my point about the threatening-ness of speech being the grounds for wanting to ban speech.

This reminds me of an interesting discussion I read a few years ago--I regret that I can't remember exactly where. The gist was that one of the practical reasons European countries have more restrictive speech laws than the US is that their political systems allow small group extremists to wield more electoral power. Our system tends toward only allowing two successful parties at a time. This is reinforced by first-past-the-post vote counting and by the fact that the administrative branch is elected apart from the legislative body. The parliamentary system of many European democracies and the voting schemes tend to make small parties very powerful when coalition governments are required. As a result, a party which is popular in only a very few areas can have enormous power from time to time. The US system tends to filter out small extremist parties. As a result we can tolerate a somewhat larger range of outrageous speech because the speaker can rarely gain the leverage needed for real power without appealing to a broad spectrum of people. I don't know if there is something to that, but it struck me as an interesting conjecture.

Stentor Danielson, 12:33, ,

19.2.06

Trust Versus Information in the GE Food Debate

A recent review of survey data has found that Americans are still pretty evenly split over their acceptance of genetically engineered (GE) food. What struck me, though, was this sociologically naive explanation of one difference between supporters and opponents:

The researchers also found that people who pay more attention to the news tend to support GE food more than those who don't.

"Overall, research shows that GE foods are safe and effective, though some people still harbor reservations about it," said Shanahan. "I suspect that the more people are exposed to the news, the more aware they are of biotechnology and, therefore, more supportive of it."

I call Shanahan's explanation naive because it flies in the face of decades of environmental sociology. One of the most robust findings is that providing information has very little effect on people's thinking about an issue. The idea that if we just got the facts out to people they'd change their minds is powerfully appealing, but also wrong.

Let me propose an alternative hypothesis to explain the correlation between GE support and newspaper readership that is more consistent with environmental sociology and psychology. (It's an explanation couched in two extreme "ideal types," with the obvious caveat that the population is actually made up of people on a gradient in between them.) Newspaper readers and GE supporters tend to be middle-class white men. They're people who buy in to the system -- they feel like government and corporations do, or at least can, understand and listen to them. They feel competent in interacting with the system and trying to get what they want from it. They read newspapers because they basically trust information that has been endorsed by prestigious publications, and feel that information written by the system about the system is reliable and useful to them. They trust the results of science to be basically competent and to ask the right questions. And they trust that a combination of the invisible hand and government oversight would keep really bad products off the shelves.

Opponents of GE are just the opposite. They come disproportionately from among women, the poor, and non-whites -- people who have been abused by the system. They have learned to distrust the system because they have seen it ignore or even undercut their values and interests. They don't feel efficacious in their dealings with the system, or even confident in their understanding of it. They don't bother reading the news because it doesn't contain information that's relevant to their lives or their struggle for survival. And they don't trust science, or the government and corporate decision-makers using it. From their perspective, even when science is done rigorously and honestly (which is not always the case), it doesn't ask the right questsions -- scientists' pro-system values critically shape the framing of the questions. So it's no wonder they're suspicious of GE food.

In summary, people's feelings toward GE and their news reading habits are both effects of their trust in the political-economic system. Just showing the "facts" produced by the system* to people who distrust the system is unlikely to change any minds.

*Whether or not the system's facts are true ones is irrelevant here.

Stentor Danielson, 17:04, ,

The Log Cabin Strategy

The Log Cabin Republicans get a lot of crap from people who think that the votes of all disadvantaged groups rightfully belong to the Democratic party. This is particularly ridiculous on the gay rights issue, where the major parties present us with the choice between "same sex marriage should be illegal" and "same sex marriage should be super double illegal." But I actually think the Log Cabin Republicans are on the right track as far as making political progress on gay rights. I've come to believe that the only thing that will ever make the Democrats come out in favor of gay rights would be if the Republicans came out in favor of gay rights.

Stentor Danielson, 11:05, ,