What Does Illegal Look Like? June 10, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Arizona immigration law
7 comments
I have heard and seen countless commentaries in the media and the Internet (including comments on this blog) that claim that because the Arizona immigration law explicitly forbids racial profiling, it will not unfairly target latino and latina citizens.
This argument is either disingenuous or just naive.
Here is Adam Serwer on the so-called “color-blindness” of Arizona’s law:
{…} This is basically an extension of colorblind racist philosophy into law — namely the text of the bill outlaws racial profiling, despite the fact that it is clearly aimed at the state’s Latino population. The reason you can pass a law that encourages racial profiling in spirit while prohibiting it in letter is that everyone has a concept in their head of what an “illegal immigrant” looks and sounds like. A police officer wouldn’t have to make a judgment based on race alone; as the civil-rights groups’ lawsuit points out, they could make such decisions based on racialized factors such as “language, accent, clothing, English-word selection” or “failure to communicate in English.”
“Driving while black” has always been probable cause for a traffic stop in this country. Arizona has now added driving while brown, speaking Spanish, or eating tacos.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Democracy vs. Plutocracy June 9, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Governor, democracy
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The battle for California Governor has now been joined. One way or the other we will be rid of the odious Schwartzenegger. But there is no guarantee the next Governor will be better.
As Robert Cruikshank wrote today:
Republicans will do what they are told by their corporate masters. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina won their primaries because they spent an enormous amount of money to tell Republicans that they should vote for CEOs because they’re smarter than everyone else and more likely to beat the Democrat this fall. That’s it. […]
Thus, the issue in California this fall will be clear. It is a battle between corporate wealth and democracy; between tax cuts for the wealthy or better schools and roads.
Jonathan Taplin is fed up with this:
In the good old days of Tamany Hall politics, an enterprising politician could buy a vote for a 50 cent beer. Meg Whitman’s 1,101,528 votes in the California Republican Governor Primary came at the cost of $77 per vote, most of the money coming from her own fortune.
So what is she willing to spend in the general election? $150 per vote?
This is either an obscene indulgence of a bored woman’s egomania or some kind of dystopian vision of the future of American politics in the post Citizen’s United era, where money really does equal speech.
I have a modest proposal. As a part of their obligation under the Federal Communications Act and in return for their free use of the nation’s airwaves, all broadcast stations should be obligated to give an equal number of free 1 minute advertising slots in the 30 days before a general election to the candidates of any party that garnered more than 10% of the vote in the previous election. This would apply to all statewide offices (Senator, Governor, etc).
Otherwise, any pretense that America is a democracy and not a plutocracy is a sham.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Ironies of Capitalism June 8, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: capitalism, Gulf Coast Oil spill
6 comments
The oil spill disaster in the Gulf is bound to make it more difficult to secure offshore drilling permits. In the future, eEnvironmental assessments will take much longer and require more rigor and thus will be much more costly.
I don’t know much about the oil drilling business, but I suspect this means it will probably not be cost effective for small and mid-size oil companies to explore for and drill new oil fields.
So, the big oil companies will have managed through their own carelessness to exclude competition.
The people who caused the accident will reap the rewards.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
A Slow Motion Disaster Caused by Centrists June 7, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: stimulus package and centrists, unemployment
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Economists estimate that consumer spending is 70 percent of the American economy. So when consumers slow down their spending, the economy inevitably lags and unemployment persists.
And a variety of recent economic reports suggest consumer spending remains sluggish and unemployment stubbornly high.
Yet Congress and the administration are doing nothing to reverse this situation. Jobs bills in the House and Senate are too small to do much good, extensions on unemployment insurance are running out, and many centrist Democrats seem to agree with Republicans that government spending is the problem rather than the solution. To see what is wrong with that read this post by Brad Delong. The idea of another stimulus package is not being seriously considered.
Meanwhile, state and local governments are laying off teachers, social workers, and police and canceling programs for the poor, all of which will have the effect of reducing consumer spending even more.
When consumers won’t spend, government has to make up the difference. The alternative is another recession. Of course, more government spending means a minor increase in the budget deficit. But budget deficits are a problem only if they increase interest rates (too much debt to finance means you have to raise the cost of that financing) or they stoke inflation (all that money sloshing around means producers can raise prices).
What is puzzling about all the hand-wringing about deficits is that there is no sign of inflation or increasing interest rates. So why is everyone (including Democrats) clamoring for deficit reduction?
It is interesting that people who trusted the market too much when housing prices were skyrocketing, now don’t trust the market when it is telling us that our budget deficit is not too high.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Reporting the Flotilla Massacre June 6, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics, Uncategorized.Tags: Israeli Palestinian Conflict, Media Bias
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If you listen to the mainstream media narrative regarding the attack on the Gaza aid flotilla by Israeli forces, you would think that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip is a necessary policy for protecting Israeli security aimed at disrupting the flow of weapons to Hamas, a benevolent Israel supplies all the aid Gazans need, and the killing of nine aid activists a legitimate defensive response to unprovoked attacks by the activists. In other words, the mainstream media simply repeats Israeli propaganda.
The reality is a lot more complicated. While the blockade may be a security measure, it is much more as well. It is an attempt to undermine Hamas with the hope that a more moderate leadership might then take power. Meanwhile Gazans are starved of basic necessities of life and the massacre of nine activists a war crime. Via M.J. Rosenberg
Here are the facts about life in Gaza today — facts that only can be changed by breaking the blockade. These data come from the American Near East Relief Association (ANERA), which provides relief to Gazans to the extent permitted by the Israeli (and American) authorities. ANERA is neither “pro-Israel” nor “pro-Palestinian.” It has no political agenda at all. It merely determines what human needs are and tries to respond to them.
8 out of 10 Gazans depend on foreign aid to survive.
The World Food Program says Gaza requires a minimum of 400 trucks a day to meet basic nutritional needs – yet an average of just 171 trucks worth of supplies enters Gaza every week,
Clothes that were held in the port of Ashdod for over a year were released into Gaza but arrived covered with mold and mildew, unusable.
95% of Gaza’s water fails World Health Organization standards leaving thousands of newborns at risk of poisoning.
Anemia for children under the age of 5 is estimated at 48%.
75 million liters of untreated sewage are pumped into the Mediterranean Sea every day – because piping and spare parts are not permitted.
During the 2009 bombing:
More than 120,000 jobs were lost as Gaza’s industrial zone was destroyed… 15,000 homes and apartments were damaged or destroyed… 1/3 of all schools were destroyed.
None of these can be rebuilt, because construction supplies are kept out by the Israeli authorities.
As to the attack on the flotilla, eye witness supports suggest it was nothing but premeditated murder. Via Juan Cole,
As The Lede points out, the more Mavi Marmara passengers who talk to the press, the more the Israeli official narrative about their landing on the deck of the ship is challenged.
Accounts of Israeli troops shooting passengers between the eyes are particularly chilling.
Aljazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal ElShayyal , a journalist aboard the Mavi Marmara. In it, he asserted that the Israelis opened fire as they were boarding the vessel, and that one passenger took a bullet through the top of his head. Many passengers have now confirmed that they were fired on even before the commandos had boots on the deck. Presumably it is this suppressive fire that killed or wounded some passengers and which provoked an angry reaction and an attack on the commandos.
And here are more eyewitness accounts:
Abbas al-Lawati says that Monday’s attack on the Mavi Marmara came in three stages– first stun grenades were tosed on deck; then an attempt was made to board from the sea, which failed. And then rubber bullets were deployed from above, which, however, killed or injured aid workers, enraging some of them…
Shane Dillon of Ireland, who was on one of the other ships, “said the Israelis had used stun guns, assaulted people with the butt ends of rifles, pushed people to the ground and stood on them.”
There has been world-wide condemnation of Israel for its intransigence and violence. And in Israel, there is actually a robust debate about the policies that led to the massacre.
But in the United States, discussion of our support for Israeli policy is muted by a press corps uninterested in publishing facts.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Where is the Crime Wave? June 3, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Criminal Justice, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Arizona immigration law, crime
10 comments
One of the conservative justifications for Arizona’s new immigration law, which enables the police to roust undocumented immigrants just for being undocumented, is that Arizona is suffering under a crushing crime wave instigated by the influx from Mexico. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) called these crimes “terrorist attacks.”
last week, the FBI released its preliminary Uniform Crime Report for 2009; it is hard to find evidence of a crime wave. As reported in the Wall St. Journal:
Violent crime fell significantly last year in cities across the U.S., according to preliminary federal statistics, challenging the widely held belief that recessions drive up crime rates.
The incidence of violent crimes such as murder, rape and aggravated assault was down 5.5% from 2008, and 6.9% in big cities. It fell 2.4% in long-troubled Detroit and plunged 16.6% in Phoenix, despite a perception of rising crime that has fueled an immigration backlash.
The early figures, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, indicate a third straight year of decreases, along with a sharply accelerating rate of decline.
And the report shows many other cities in the Southwest have seen similar reductions, including El Paso Texas which is just across the border from the drug war in Juarez.
Last week, The Arizona Department of Public Safety released its crime report as well. The trend toward decreasing crime rates includes 3 of the 4 counties that border Mexico. The trend holds even along the border: three of Arizona’s four border counties reported less violent crime in 2009 than they did in 2002, when crime statistics were first made available on the Internet.
One exception is Maricopa County where Joe Arpaio “America’s Toughest Sheriff” resides. Arpaio is famous for making immigration enforcement a priority and using violence and intimidation to get results.
Some results. Via Dara Lind, although crime in Maricopa dropped from 2008 levels, since 2002 it has increased 58%!
One of the arguments against Arizona’s new immigration law is that making immigration enforcement a priority will actually increase crime because anyone who looks Latino (or Latina) will avoid cooperating with police. In fact, many police chiefs and sheriffs in Arizona were opposed to the law for that reason.
Sheriff Joe may be making their argument for them. And if crime goes up subsequent to the law being enforced, what conclusion should we draw?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Artificial Life June 1, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Philosophy, Science, Technology.Tags: Craig Venter
2 comments
An article in a recent issue of Science reported that Craig Venter (the leader of one team of researchers that successfully mapped the human genome) has made a synthetic cell by inserting a fabricated genome into a bacterium. The press has been reporting this as the first successful attempt to create artificial life. But the paper has created a good deal of controversy, not only regarding the ethical issues, but whether this is really artificial life or not.
Sune Holm has an excellent summary of the debate:
In an interview with the BBC Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Nurse points out that not just the genome but the entire cell would have to be synthesized for it to be properly artificial. What Venter has produced is the first living cell which is entirely controlled by synthesized DNA, not artificial life.
George Church, geneticist at Harvard Medical School, doesn’t think that Venter has really created new life either. Commenting in Nature, Church says that the bacterium made by Venter “is not changed from the wild state in any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the same as understanding the language.”
Also commenting in Nature, Jim Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, points out that “The microorganism reported by the Venter team is synthetic in the sense that its DNA is synthesized, not in that a new life form has been created. Its genome is a stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature, with a few small tweaks thrown in.
Holm argues that all of these skeptical comments assume a particular conception of what artificial life should be:
These comments seem to me to suggest the following requirement: In order to create an artificial organism one must build it in a way analogous to the way we build other complex artifacts such as watches and washing machines. This involves making the different parts that compose the machine and put them together according to a design plan. Furthermore, it is by being able to create artificial life in this sense that we satisfy the necessary condition for understanding life expressed in Feynman’s dictum, “What I cannot create I do not understand,” so often referred to in synthetic biology. If some day we become able to design and build a living thing from scratch by fabricating all its parts out of nonliving matter and assemble them according to a plan of our own design, then we may be said to understand life.
Holm suggests that some of the ethical worries many people have regarding this technology is the result, not of potential harmful effects, but of our uncertainty about how to classify such “organisms” and our inability to know what is “right or wrong with respect to these entities.”
The products of synthetic biology are typically presented in terms of rather vague but highly connotative hybrid notions such as “living machine” and “synthetic organism.” Dealing with ethical concerns arising from synthetic biology research it is important that we don’t neglect the need to investigate how to conceptualize the products we expect synthetic biology to result in. This task will involve investigation of our notions of organism, machine, artifact, and life. Venter’s achievement has made the need for philosophical exploration of these categories even more pressing.
Holm may be right that “ontological uncertainty” breeds ethical uncertainty. But this is uncertainty we will have to live with. I doubt that any of these new entities will fall neatly into the ontological categories we have available today. The question of whether they are “really artificial” or not may have no answer. And we may have to invent new categories to make sense of scientific innovation.
So it is probably best, at this point, not to get too hung up on definitions, which will likely be quite fluid.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Gaze of Empathy June 1, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Human Nature, Teaching.Tags: college students, empathy, Levinas, Vermeer
3 comments
In the midst of scientific reports that humans in general are far more empathetic than selfish (at least by nature) we all of a sudden hear that college students are less empathetic now than in generations past.
Researchers analyzed data from studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, and found the sharpest drop in empathy occurred in the last nine years.
For instance, today’s students are less likely to agree with statements like, “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”
According to one of the lead researchers, Ed O’Brien, “It’s harder for today’s college student to empathize with others because so much of their social lives is done through a computer and not through real life interaction.”
So some researchers blame computers and the social sites like, yes, Facebook. You can communicate about yourself endlessly, without being expected to reciprocate (“Thanks for asking about my day—how was yours?”). But one comment, from “Cricket,” on the article quoted above really adds something to the discussion:
A fellow storyteller noticed that this year’s Master of Library Science class in storytelling (don’t laugh — good storytelling and story collecting involves a huge amount of research) didn’t make eye contact. This is an affluent group of white females — a culture in which eye contact has always been considered appropriate. (In some cultures it’s an invasion of privacy.) After discussing it with them, she learned they didn’t realize eye contact was appropriate. I remember parents and teachers used to insist on it: “Look at me when I’m talking to you / when you’re talking to me.” Since then, they have said that her class is more friendly than others, and it’s the only class where they socialize together after class.
That comment triggered a veritable Aha-moment for me, because I have observed the same phenomenon in my classes, increasingly, over the past decade: there are some students who hide and avoid eye contact because they haven’t studied the material. That’s nothing new—we’ve all done that when we were in school. And then there are students from some non-Western cultures who may have been taught that it is rude to look a person of authority straight in the eye. So cultural differences can account for some incidents. But when good students with a Western cultural background are avoiding eye contact, it gets interesting. Increasingly I have students who bring their laptops or their Kindle devices to class. Some instructors prohibit such devices, I don’t—yet. I just ban non-class-related activity. And what I see is those students—the good ones— being utterly absorbed by what it is they’re watching, or doing, on the screen. Usually it’s note taking, and not game-playing (and I check!)…. But even when you take notes, you’re supposed to look up once in a while and look at the instructor performing his or her stand-up routine there in front of you. We’re not just standing up there at the whiteboard to repeat a lesson, like Tivo on a 3-D TV—we’re actually there to create a teaching moment from scratch every day, and some of it is improv! What creates the most significant difference between a classroom experience and an online course is the face-to-face encounter with questions and ideas. But without the basic eye contact participation you might as well be at home behind your screen, taking an online course (which has its merits, but the face-to-face learning moment isn’t one of them). When I have told my students that I expect eye contact from them, they have—to my enormous consternation—been surprised. And now I realize that they simply may not be accustomed to eye contact being appropriate, because of having grown up frequently—maybe even primarily— communicating electronically with peers. The first generation in the history of humanity where eye contact is no longer the first clear human outreach? Now that is fundamentally frightening. The gaze of The Other is fundamental to many 20th century philosophies, in particular Sartre’s, who sees it as (by and large) a competition, and Levinas’s, who sees it as humanity looking right at you, asking for your empathy. Look at Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” the picture I use for my “Gravatar,” as well as for the cover of my book, The Human Condition:
This is the face of the Other. She is looking right at you, with the gaze of a human being, real and timeless. She expects a response. But if we withhold our gaze and think that’s normal, well, then there is no empathy coming forth.
