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Space Whale posted:If the point is "Demand more, forever" eventually it's going to end up in an eternal tug-of-war. Sure, but that's basically politics in a nutshell is it not? hepatizon posted:What does it look like, policy-wise, to focus on issues faced by poor gay black trans women? I don't understand how that can be solved without breaking it down into single-axis problems. I honestly cannot say for sure, as I'm really no expert on how these theories are being used, but I'm guessing it means a more nuanced approach when inquiries are made in regards to inequality and a more diverse range of policy changes. It's probably more about the viewpoints that end up not being explored. By adding more context to the data used to inspire new policies they can address more diverse needs.
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Dec 10, 2014 19:19
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hepatizon posted:What does it look like, policy-wise, to focus on issues faced by poor gay black trans women? I don't understand how that can be solved without breaking it down into single-axis problems. One example is that well-meaning policymakers will sometimes create womens-only homeless shelters, because in mixed shelters women will be harassed and abused. But Women-idenitified transfolk also face the threat of discrimination and physical violence from homeless men, so if those people are excluded from the womens-only shelter then they could be left even worse off then before. And there's also the issue of violence against queer homeless youth, who may not be women but who still might need special treatment... From a policymaker's perspective it just means keeping an ear out for the concerns of all community members- e.g. if you're building a women's shelter don't just get input from the white middle-class feminists who are its primary backers, but also reach out to other vulnerable communities to ensure everyone's needs are being met. From an activist's perspective it means making sure that a black woman doesn't have to choose between a white-dominated feminist movement and a male-dominated POC movement, neither of which will properly represent her interests. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Dec 10, 2014 |
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Dec 10, 2014 19:28
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I know the consensus was that this thread derailed repeatedly and went to poo poo, but the last 5 posts have followed exactly what the article in the OP recommends - in activism, look for concrete policy recommendations which are informed by theory rather than political vaporware.
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Dec 10, 2014 19:42
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Mortley posted:I know the consensus was that this thread derailed repeatedly and went to poo poo, but the last 5 posts have followed exactly what the article in the OP recommends - in activism, look for concrete policy recommendations which are informed by theory rather than political vaporware. Yet, there are things that cannot be fixed by policy alone. People like to jump on body cameras as a way to fix these killings of minorities by police officers, yet we got one that was filmed on video and nothing happened. But Guy DeBorgore's point was reached simply by listening to those specific in the community and giving them a voice instead of insinuating that if you help a specific group, then all groups will be helped.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:39
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Dec 10, 2014 21:44
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Guy DeBorgore posted:One example is that well-meaning policymakers will sometimes create womens-only homeless shelters, because in mixed shelters women will be harassed and abused. But Women-idenitified transfolk also face the threat of discrimination and physical violence from homeless men, so if those people are excluded from the womens-only shelter then they could be left even worse off then before. And there's also the issue of violence against queer homeless youth, who may not be women but who still might need special treatment... This assuming your society even wants to have homeless shelters built, instead of seeing it as a waste of taxpayers money and preferring all the poor to lift themselves up by the bootstraps or die. I understand this is only an example, but it looks like this way of thinking is what makes the left powerless. Homeless shelters are already overcrowded and lovely places, full of desperate people, some of whom struggle with addiction and mental illness. Violence will naturally emerge in such conditions. People who are perpetually stressed frequently vent it on someone who looks weaker and more vulnerable - this is why minorities get the short end of the stick. Separating the homeless from each other ensures less violence of majorities against the minorities, that's sure. It's unlikely, however, to reduce the amount of violence in shelters overall. Lacking their usual victims, the men in shelters will find another way to discriminate and abuse others. Some other people will become pariahs, either because of other vulnerability than gender or sexual orientation, or just by virtue of being more submissive and meek. The same thing will happen in minority-only institution, because experiencing abuse doesn't usually make anyone more adjusted and empathetic. It may reduce stress as a sort of placebo effect - by not having your usual oppressor around, you don't have to expect to be abused that much. A better effect, however, could be probably achieved by making shelters less overcrowded and hopeless and actually addressing the causes of homelessness. Segregation does nothing against the violence, it merely redirects it to be less predictable. It looks like it solves the problem, because it's becomes harder to find a clear pattern between individual events. At least, until someone finds another way of connecting the dots and another source of privilege, which feeds the confirmation bias of privilege theory enthusiasts. The most weird thing in all this debacle is that the left considers most of these divisions artificial. Race, gender and sexual orientation are considered social constructs, frequently used as a convenient excuse to profit from another group of people. Why then use rhetorics that normalizes those divisions instead of deconstructing them? What exactly is the point of treating them as something natural and unavoidable, instead of as an unacceptable thing that decent people should strive to eliminate?
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Dec 10, 2014 22:47
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blackguy32 posted:Yet, there are things that cannot be fixed by policy alone. People like to jump on body cameras as a way to fix these killings of minorities by police officers, yet we got one that was filmed on video and nothing happened. Something did happen, though. The American people got to watch a cop kill a guy and get away with it. Even my hardcore conservative family members who had been crowing about "race baiters in Ferguson" were stunned by the decision not to indict Garner's killer. We need body cameras on every patrol officer and on every officer serving a warrant.
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Dec 11, 2014 00:00
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Typical Pubbie posted:Something did happen, though. The American people got to watch a cop kill a guy and get away with it. Even my hardcore conservative family members who had been crowing about "race baiters in Ferguson" were stunned by the decision not to indict Garner's killer. We need body cameras on every patrol officer and on every officer serving a warrant.  More than slightly nutty internet conservatives are even positioning themselves against it, to the point of apparently convincing themselves that liberals are okay with it.
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Dec 11, 2014 00:04
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Typical Pubbie posted:Something did happen, though. The American people got to watch a cop kill a guy and get away with it. Even my hardcore conservative family members who had been crowing about "race baiters in Ferguson" were stunned by the decision not to indict Garner's killer. We need body cameras on every patrol officer and on every officer serving a warrant. People do have a point when they say body cameras hardly matter if, when what is effectively a murder is caught on camera, the responsible parties are not made to answer. Eric Garner's death calls for greater reforms than that, it calls for an inquiry as to WHY his killer(s) were not indited and into all of the errors that led to this tragedy. It's one of the most valid causes for protest I have seen in some time.
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Dec 11, 2014 19:44
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The Snark posted:People do have a point when they say body cameras hardly matter if, when what is effectively a murder is caught on camera, the responsible parties are not made to answer. Eric Garner's death calls for greater reforms than that, it calls for an inquiry as to WHY his killer(s) were not indited and into all of the errors that led to this tragedy. It's one of the most valid causes for protest I have seen in some time. This isn't the point of cameras and I don't understand why people keep trying to claim that cameras are the answer all on their own. The first step to solving any problem is to understand and gather evidence that the problem exists in the first place. Run a bottling plant that underfills the bottles? How do you know? You measure the amount being poured into the bottles and then you take actions to fix it. Have a police department that indiscriminately kills people? How do you know? You film the cops and then take actions to fix it. Cameras are really no different than rulers or scales. So yes, cameras do matter even if they don't fix the problem all on their own.
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Dec 13, 2014 18:00
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Yeah, "there was once an instance of a problem after a policy was enacted to counteract that problem" is not exactly a reason not to focus on policy. I also used to really question the systems approach to politics, though. I don't want to give a bunch of details, but one of my friends works on energy policy in DC and went to an Ivy League school. I'm almost certain that he was trained by neoliberal technocrats, and when we argued, I had just read "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" by Harvey. My friend basically approaches a problem like "how do we set the price of electricity in a certain market?" as an issue of computer modeling. You set parameters - e.g. "don't let corporations exploit the system" - and the computer spits out a way to structure the costs that is ideal. "Policy as market efficiency" is of course one of the hallmarks of neoliberal thinking, and the point-by-point of his final policy recommendations were out of my wheelhouse. I had one point of disagreement with him - I said, "what you're doing is political, in the sense that it is an argument about the ideal way to run society. You should think of it as political, not only as an engineering problem." He disagreed, saying that there was simply a best way of doing things, like there's a best way to build a bridge. I guess what I'm thinking through here is - there's a distinction to be made between focusing on policy in discussing politics and disregarding entirely the core issues, right? My friend didn't want to consider economic justice in the creation of his model. edit: thanks for your input Guy; very interesting. Mortley fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 18:27
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That's totally standard for economics and public policy. We're taught that you can separate questions of efficiency and fairness- the job of policymakers is to find the most efficient solution, while voters and politicians worry about distributional equity. That's the whole reason Pareto optimality and the "fundamental theorems of welfare economics" are taught in undergrad econ. And it's not an entirely stupid idea. If *all* you want as a leftist is to make the poor richer and the rich poorer (that is, the distribution of wealth), then you can do that with income transfers while being a ruthless free-marketeer in every other respect. For the purposes of a civil servant (which is what I'm in school to be someday) this is a totally necessary distinction to make. Some things are for politicians to decide and some things are for experts to decide. You can't have bureaucrats sitting around a table trying to decide what's "fair" and what isn't, that's ultimately a value judgement. The problem is that a lot of the time policy ends up reproducing existing power structures...
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Dec 13, 2014 23:18
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wateroverfire posted:I know what it means but my post is pretty simple and you don't need to read any implications into it to get the point. In that case this argument is about as meaningful as me saying "wateroverfire is terrible, and exposing people to him is a great way to turn them off conservative politics." Also I find it hilarious and more than a little implausible that you're suggesting that you have ever actually been in a discussion with someone about politics and then sent them a link to D&D as a way of demonstrating why the left is dysfunctional. I'm pretty sure you're just describing your own partisan reaction to this forum and then assuming that any right thinking person would share this reaction because hey, surely whatever you think and feel is the same thing that any other rational person thinks and feels.
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Dec 13, 2014 23:35
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Mortley posted:"Policy as market efficiency" is of course one of the hallmarks of neoliberal thinking, and the point-by-point of his final policy recommendations were out of my wheelhouse. I had one point of disagreement with him - I said, "what you're doing is political, in the sense that it is an argument about the ideal way to run society. You should think of it as political, not only as an engineering problem." He disagreed, saying that there was simply a best way of doing things, like there's a best way to build a bridge. The idea that they stand in some sort of ideological privileged frame is, as you've experienced, pretty common to neoliberal thinking. You can't really argue with it directly, because it's a sort of circular reasoning. Economically optimal solutions are socially optimal because they're economically optimal. Short of convincing them of that, you can always point out that a distribution in which all wealth is held by a single individual is Pareto optimal, but so is one where all wealth is divided up completely equally among all the members of the group. I don't think there's anybody, neoliberals included, who is willing to admit they believe that both those distributions are socially optimal.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:19
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