First, Measure 49 passed. That’s not a surprise, given that Measure 37 passed resoundingly, and the advocates of both measures promised basically the same thing.
Sure, the conventional wisdom is the two are diametric opposites. And, yes, they are very different. But if you step back, Measure 37 was touted by its promoters as a way to insert a measure of fairness into a system that was crucifying people on an iron cross of bureaucracy. Its ad campaign featured sad stories from small-time landowners whose retirement had been sabotaged by an inability to build a house or two on some land. Concerns that the measure would represent a wholesale scrapping of Oregon’s land use planning system were waved off as alarmist.
Measure 37 passed, and immediately big landowners started proposing schemes to build huge amounts of sprawl on rural land. Meanwhile, the measure was vaguely and poorly-written enough that no scheme — big or small — got anywhere fast; everything was tied up in the courts. It was obvious even to the apolitical middle that the measure had failed to achieve its advertised goal while at the same time had opened the door to realizing the worst scenarios laid out by its naysayers.
Enter Measure 49. It reinstates most limits on how much development can be allowed outside urban growth boundaries, while still allowing some new exceptions to take place. The exceptions address precisely the sort of mom-and-pop hardship stories that were used to sell Measure 37 to the voters. It even provides the most modest of these a clearly-defined fast track process. Its backers promise, in other words, exactly what the backers of the popular Measure 37 promised.
Those who today howl at the defeat for an absolutist concept of property rights simply belie their dishonesty in selling Measure 37 to the public.
As for Measure 50, its biggest enemy was itself. Look, I probably hate both Big Tobacco and social inequality more than 99% of Oregonians do, and even I had a hard time voting for the thing. I ended up voting for it, but it was hardly an enthusiastic vote. The whole idea of making smokers alone pay for a new social program just reeks of “don’t tax me, don’t tax thee, tax that fellow by the yonder tree.” I would have felt much better about voting for the thing if it had been mostly funded by, say, an income tax surcharge.
I’m writing this on the first Laughing Horse Books shift I’ve had occasion to do in several years.
I noticed Derrick Jensen’s book Welcome to the Machine and decided to read the first chapter. It is concerned with (amongst other things) modern electronic technology and surveillance. Since I know a thing or two about electronics, it’s been very enlightening, allowing me to pin down why Jensen alternately attracts and repels me.
He attracts me because he’s an original thinker unafraid to pursue ideas where few are willing to go. He questions things, such as technological “progress” and even civilization itself, that most folks are willing to let ride as unquestionable positives.
What became obvious for the first time, however, is precisely why, despite that, I really can’t count myself as a big fan of the guy: he seems to have difficulty distinguishing between things he wants to be true and things that actually are true. If something dovetails nicely with his anarcho-primitivist weltanschuung, he seems inclined to believe it wholeheartedly, evidence (or lack thereof) be damned.
You only have to get to the fifth paragraph for a textbook example:
…[civilization] has deforested more than 90 percent of the world, depleted more than 90 percent of the world’s fisheries…Ninety percent? Look, I’m painfully aware of how much civilization has been an ecological disaster, but I’ve never seen figures that high. Thankfully, there’s a footnote at the end of that paragraph to follow. A reference, perhaps? No:
The “debates” rage around whether or not it’s a problem, whether the loot is being fairly distributed, whether the benefits have been worth the destruction, and what if anything can or should be done to mitigate the damage.Did I mention yet the footnote comes after the final sentence, which states about these claims “They are beyond dispute.”?
Pure intellectual bullying, followed by a bait-and-switch. Suffice to say I am not impressed.
Then there’s the frightening future scenario that starts near the bottom of page 2 and runs through the end of page 4. It details such things as mind-reading MRI machines and RFID chips the size of sand grains embedded in every consumer product. There’s two big problems here.
First, the section is very poorly delimited from the rest of the text. The only indication at its start is a larger-than-normal gap of vertical white space setting off the lead paragraph. The trailing paragraph happens to conclude at a page break, meaning there’s nothing setting it off from the text that follows. Couple that with how it’s worded in the present tense and you have an extremely misleading couple of pages.
Second, Jensen vastly overstates the nefariousness of the technology. Consider RFID chips. While they indeed can be made very small, they need to be attached to antennas in order to work. (The “RF” in “RFID” stands for “radio frequency.” The chips operate on radio waves.) The size of these antennas is governed by fundamental laws of physics. They can’t, in other words, be miniaturized easily. This makes the chips considerably harder to conceal then Jensen would have us believe.
That’s not to say the chips present no threat. Quite the contrary: they do pose a threat. It’s certainly possible to conceal chip and antenna in, say, the sole of a shoe — and then to take advantage of that to track people. But the presence of such a chip is hardly undetectable (the antennas show up readily on X-rays, and are large enough that a “dissection” of the product would readily reveal the antenna and its associated RFID chip). Moreover, there’s a number of strategies for destroying or disabling the things.
Thanks to Jensen’s inaccuracies, however, those on the side of a technofascist future have an easy avenue of counterattack: simply enumerate the flaws in his work and make him look like a completely untrustworthy source. Which brings me to the biggest issue I have with Jensen: in consistently overplaying his hand, he ends up delegitimizing the very concerns he’s trying to legitimize.
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