debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

9.6.06

1/Christianity

Ampersand has some beautiful snark at a pastor who claims God told him He would smite Oregon for its gayness. In the introduction, he manages to express the exact opposite of what I find valuable in the Christian tradition:

I was struggling with praying for the hurricane victims. I certainly want to pray for those who are suffering through this ordeal but at the same time I see all these things as judgments from God. My real prayer is that this country will wake up and realize that this is a judgment from God and repent of their evil ways.

How can a pastor gloat over God's judgment against Other People when the Bible says over and over again that Jesus came to save everyone from God's judgment? Boy won't his face be red when he gets to heaven and finds those Katrina victims and gay Oregonians are there too.

Stentor Danielson, 19:57, |

People of Color and Animals

I'm still swamped with work, but I don't want to lose the link to this brownfemipower post about race and animal liberation, which highlights some of the complexities of environmental justice.

Stentor Danielson, 03:05, |

5.6.06

"Discourses About Wildfire in New Jersey and New South Wales"

I'm about to leave for Brisbane for a few days to present the results of the first half of my dissertation research. You can see a summary here, and if you're really ambitious there's a link on that page to the detailed report.

Stentor Danielson, 23:12, |

Egalitarian Geeks

This Geek Social Fallacies list is very interesting -- it's practically a field guide to the pathologies of the Egalitarian (in the GGCT sense) way of life. Just as GGCT would predict, geeks -- feeling oppressed and shut out by the system -- take refuge in an Egalitarian form of organization. Yet any form of organization can, when taken to extremes, go bad. The fallacies identified by the article are:

1. Ostracizers Are Evil
2. Friends Accept Me As I Am
3. Friendship Before All
4. Friendship Is Transitive
5. Friends Do Everything Together

Fallacies 3, 4, and 5 are straightforward manifestations of the "high group" character of Egalitarianism, in which solidarity with the group takes precedence over forming outside connections and individual choices. Fallacy 2, and to an extent Fallacy 1, reflect the tendency for Egalitarian groups to be highly conflict-averse, lest disagreements jeopardize the equality of all members, and because no clear decision-making structure exists for resolving a conflict once it boils over. (Note that Egalitarians are also prone to the reverse pathology -- getting bogged down in endless discussion in search of an elusive non-coercive consensus.)

Fallacy 1 is especially interesting to me, and not only because it's the one I'm most prone to*. There's a tendency in theoretical discussions for descriptions of Egalitarianism to focus on the boundedness of Egalitarian groups -- the way they draw a sharp, and restrictive, line between the select few insiders and the heathen outside. There are some tendencies toward this in the Fallacies list, as the other fallacies are described as leading to schisms when commitment to shared group solidarity is not total. But Fallacy 1 represents the opposite tendency -- a universalizing impulse that insists on bringing everyone into the group.

*In my case, I think it's more a function of being less bothered by offensive people than others are, rather than a moral compunction about ostracizing those who are truly offensive.

Stentor Danielson, 18:18, |