Author: Milan

Struggling toward a shortened PolOps chapter

As an organizational and accountability mechanism, I am going to post more often about the progress of my work on the dissertation.

At present I am working on three immediate tasks:

  1. Producing a version of my 68-page political opportunities chapter that fits in 50 pages (maybe even shorter eventually because some much longer chapters also need to be cut to 50)
  2. Assembling all the outstanding comments from my two active committee members into a single document based on the latest draft (merging them from two Word documents and a set of written comments, taking into account how things have been altered and moved around since the comments were made)
  3. Moving my preliminary LaTeX draft of a new normative conclusions chapter into the Word file for the emerging 300 page draft, and developing it into more of a chapter, including by pulling normative conclusions from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters

I’m feeling acutely aware of being behind my promised timeline, but I have also been experiencing a great deal of mental difficulty finding and maintaining the focus necessary to do such complex tasks. The big challenge comes from how much needs to be simultaneously remembered. I need to not just edit the text at the sentence and paragraph levels, but work on shaping it into a new complete draft with the length and structure desired. That amounts to remembering not only the contents of the old draft and all the comments, but also how things are laid out in the new draft, what is in the background literature, and what is necessary to meet scholarly standards on surveying the extant literature and making an original contribution.

It’s a strange and painful time when my main task is to cut out material which I think is relevant and important, and which I have literally spent years researching and writing. At the same time, I knew all along that the document would need to be put into the format of a dissertation and, furthermore, that a 300 page text will get more attention and engagement than a 717 page one.

P.S. I am up to 2990 km of pandemic walks. The next significant meander I take will put me over the 3000 km mark.

Disallowing rent changes between tenants in Ontario

Along with fellow NDP MPP Bhutila Karpoche, my former Member of the Provincial Parliament Jessica Bell is proposing a Rent Stabilization Act, which would stop landlords from raising rents between tenants. It would also establish a rent registry with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

If passed, the law would help rationalize the incentives faced by landlords, who at present can accept the ~2% per year rent increases set by the province with existing tenants or who can try to get rid of their tenants to reset the rent at a much higher level. Making it more profitable to cycle through tenants than to retain them also contributes to landlords wanting informal tenants rather than tenants on a formal lease, since only the former have protection from the Landlord and Tenant Board.

With the present provincial legislature comprised of 70 Progressive Conservatives under Doug Ford, 40 NDP MPPs, plus seven Liberals and some minor parties there isn’t a realistic hope of the proposal becoming law.

Open thread: climate change relocation

Every community and all the infrastructure on Earth has been built with the expectation that past weather conditions will be broadly similar to future and present ones. Rapid climate change of the kind we are creating thus sets up a situation where what we have built in every place is less and less suited to the conditions that will exist there. In the most extreme cases, places where people have long inhabited will cease to be able to support a human population. An increased flow of individuals out of a territory as conditions worsen could give way to the need to relocate entire populations.

This is the starkest and most immediate concern for low-lying island states, such as the Marshall Islands:

The depressing long-term solution, as in Mr Tong’s last resort, may be to move. The Marshall Islands hopes to renegotiate its post-colonial ‘Compact of Free Association’ with America, which expires in 2023, to ensure a permanent right of residence in the United States for all Marshallese. Tuvalu has no such option. Maina Talia, a climate activist, thinks that the government should take Fiji up on its offer of a home where Tuvaluans could practise the same culture rather than ‘be dumped somewhere in Sydney.’

Vexingly, the same conservative political forces that champion fossil fuels and refuse to accept the dangerousness of climate change are perhaps most defined by a closed sense of nationalism and opposition to immigration. Among other motivations, they are going to need to learn that if you want the global human population to stay more or less where they are, you need to keep the climate within the bounds that have supported those societies.

Related:

Biden and the Democrats on climate

Facing total obstruction from Republicans, Democrats themselves are notably divided on whether and how to act on climate change:

However, these measures will have to garner the vote of every Democrat in the Senate to pass, with Joe Manchin, a centrist from West Virginia, skeptical of the size and scope of the $3.5tn spending proposal. Manchin, a major recipient of donations from the coal industry, has said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to phase in solar and wind power.

Manchin is reportedly set to block the clean electricity program, which forms the main muscle of the climate package. This could prove a hugely consequential blow to the effort to constrain dangerous global heating. “This is high on the list of most consequential actions ever taken by an individual senator,” tweeted the climate campaigner Bill McKibben. “You’ll be able to see the impact of this vain man in the geologic record.”

This internecine fight is just one manifestation of the persistent divide about how climate change might be tackled politically, with progressives taking it as a demonstration of how seeking the political middle ground is pointless and centrists drawing the opposite lesson that only climate policies with broad support will succeed.

Don’t ask about the dissertation

There’s a cliché that you should never ask a PhD student about their dissertation in conversation and, based on my experiences since my project officially began in June 2018, there are several reasons why this is sound advice. In short, the PhD and dissertation process is frustrating to hear described and, when a student is asked to do so, the predictable responses from the person inquiring are a small-scale rebellion about why the more vexing parts of the process are the way they are, followed by frustration from the listener toward the student because they dislike how they didn’t get the uplifting story they wanted about a useful project soon to be completed. Saying that you’re just expressing sympathy and sincere support for the completion of the project doesn’t help, because it still carries the implication that somehow if a student just behaves in the right way their problems will disappear, making them in a roundabout way the student’s own fault for not being able to apply the wisdom of a quick amateur analysis.

People without recent personal experience in a PhD program have little experiential basis for understanding what’s involved, often manifested as a view that special accommodation should be made for you or that the system ought to be promptly changed because of your suffering. That misses the bureaucracy of higher education, as well as suffering as a background condition of most graduate work. The only way out is to suffer through, and adding the second-hand frustrations of observers to your mental landscape will just exacerbate your own feelings of frustration and powerlessness.

Best to talk about something else.