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Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Friday, August 11, 2017 OTHER VIEWS Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW Tip of the hat; kick in the pants Tip of the hat to the many different volunteer and professional fire crews who responded to the blazes Wednesday on Weston Mountain. There were at least two different fire starts (perhaps more) and those fires behaved erratically, due to the variety of vegetation (stubble field, standing wheat, scrub grass, forest) along the unique slope of that country. The fires closed Highway 204 toward Tollgate for hours, and brought fire crews from as far away as Hermiston to control and mop up the blaze, which grew to 250 acres at its peak. Oregon Department of Forestry crews even stayed at the scene overnight to make sure it didn’t relight. The small city of Weston, where you could watch the fire creeping down the hill toward Main Street, sure are happy for the quick response. As are the rest of us. A kick in the pants, though, to the smoke kicked up by that fire. It mixed in with all the Canadian soot that jumped the border from British Columbia to really do a number on local air quality. The weather report shows a front may blow out this smoky, stagnant air Friday and Saturday, hopefully keeping the sky clear going into the total solar eclipse on August 21. But the odds of Eastern Oregon going without a wildfire for a week — fresh off a steady stream of 100-degree temperatures — doesn’t seem too great. Especially as those eclipse crowds start making their way into the forests, on foot and behind the wheel, in record numbers. We can hope for a bit of wind to blow out the smoke. But for the time being, we can look at the bright side: The beautiful sunrises and sunsets, scorching through the thick air. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. OTHER VIEWS OHA reveals lack of ethics The Bend Bulletin H ow does a state agency influence proposed legislation? The Oregon Health Authority came up with a shocking approach: Try to plant negative news stories about a nonprofit that would benefit from the legislation. The Portland Tribune’s Nick Budnick reported Friday that the OHA plotted to find a disgruntled patient and anonymously connect that patient with a newspaper. The goal was to have the newspaper publish a story that would damage FamilyCare’s credibility. The OHA plan involved identifying friendly legislators and getting them to plant the stories so the OHA could appear neutral. FamilyCare is a Portland-area nonprofit that provides care to low-income Medicaid patients under the OHA’s supervision. The two were in a court dispute because FamilyCare said OHA set reimbursement rates too low. No newspaper stories resulted, but a bill that would have helped FamilyCare died in committee in the recent session of the Legislature. The plan came from OHA’s communications staff and was not formally approved, but Budnick found evidence that OHA Director Lynne Saxton signaled her approval in an email, saying some new developments “will build on the already good start you have outlined.” (Saxton resigned Monday.) FamilyCare is one of the state’s 16 coordinated care organizations. It has been a vehement critic of the OHA, Budnick reported, accusing the agency of incompetence and trying to damage the nonprofit. FamilyCare had a lower rate of reimbursement than other CCOs because it had a healthier population, Budnick reported. The agency also said FamilyCare was “taking advantage of taxpayer money” by paying providers more than Medicaid required. FamilyCare said it did so to make sure patients could get appointments and to focus on prevention. Whatever the merits of the rate argument, the notion of a state agency seeking to influence the Legislature by secretly planting negative stories reveals an appalling lack of ethical standards. Budnick found numerous references to the OHA’s interest in maintaining its reputation. Clearly, the agency has done exactly the opposite with its underhanded tactics. YOUR VIEWS Renewable fuel standard supports Oregon jobs Oregon is home to vast renewable resources, providing new and exciting opportunities to lead the way in the fight against climate change. We produce 13 percent of the nation’s hydroelectric power and our geothermal potential is rivaled only by Nevada and California. We are also home to some of the West Coast’s premier biofuel facilities, producing cleaner liquid fuels from agricultural feedstocks, supporting nearly 16,000 Oregon jobs. A lot of this progress has been driven by state and local efforts. But federal policies play an important role. That’s why we need our lawmakers in Congress to stand up for the renewable fuel standard, which ensures that renewable fuel can compete at the gas pump. Oil companies are looking for any opportunity to hold back competition, and biofuels are a top target. They displaced 500 million barrels of oil in 2016, cutting emissions and protecting consumers from price manipulation. More importantly, thanks to the increasingly sustainable agricultural practices, those biofuels cut emissions by an average of 43 percent, according to federal reports. Conventional ethanol production also leaves behind processed grain that is repurposed as low-cost animal feed. The next generation of ethanol, produced from material like wood waste and corn cobs, is even more promising, with some varieties reducing the total carbon in the atmosphere over their full lifecycle. Thanks to smart policies like the renewable fuels standard, the future is bright for Oregon. Lawmakers like Congressman Greg Walden, who chairs the energy committee, should take note, and protect that progress. Bobby Levy Echo Google’s war over the sexes M in which self-selection and sexism en and women are different. can shape an industry. Even if more On this, almost everyone men than women are attracted to a acquainted with reality particular field, a male-dominated agrees. How different is the more controversial question, to which there profession can be distinctly unpleasant is one particularly interesting answer: for the women who work in it, in A little more different than they used ways that can justify special scrutiny, to be. recruitment and redress. This growing difference seems But Damore also made reasonable Ross to be a striking aspect of modern Douthat points about different ways to pursue Western life. In societies where both diversity and the costs and benefits Comment sexes have greater freedom — and thereof, in an earnest and dialogic style women have more educational and that a healthy corporate culture would professional opportunities relative to men than have found a way to answer without swiftly in the past — the sexes’ academic interests giving him the ax. At the same time, there was a sense in tend to diverge relative to more traditional societies. And not only their interests but their which Damore had to be fired, precisely because of the intertwined realities that he personalities as well: The more officially described. Silicon Valley is a very male egalitarian a society, a credible body of environment, a land of nerd kings and research suggests, the stronger the differences in stereotypically male and female personality brogrammers whose deepest beliefs tend to be the sort that men come traits. up with when they don’t Conservatives sometimes have very many women worry that our society around — arch-libertarian, features an unhealthy irreligious, utopian in a blurring of sexual identities, mechanistic style. an androgyne confusion. But the internet industry The left tends to be more is also part of a wider elite optimistic about such culture that is trending blurring, seeing it as a in the opposite direction, liberation from the rule of becoming more feminized patriarchy and the prison of and feminist, and inclined heteronormativity. to view male-dominated enclaves with great But the opposite trend, the divergence suspicion. So Silicon Valley’s leaders use of the sexes, might be more important. corporate wokeness, diversity initiatives and Some of our present difficulties may flow progressive virtue signaling as a kind of self- from an excess of feminine and masculine protection, a way of promising that they’re differentiation, from the sexes growing apart mostly men but they’re the good kind of men, and losing common ground, from the decline so that discrimination lawsuits and antitrust of marriage’s male-female partnership and actions and other forms of regulation are less the rise of a singlehood that’s often more attractive to their critics. sex-segregated than family life. I strongly suspect that more than a few Certainly the frontiers of sexual Silicon Valley higher-ups agreed with the license often feature strong male-female broad themes of Damore’s memo. But just differentiation rather than androgyny or as tech titans accept some censorship and gender-neutrality. oppression as the price of doing business in Think of the clichés that prevail in internet China, they accept performative progressivism pornography, or the gendered kinks of as the price of having nice campuses in the “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Even our culture’s most liberal state in the union and recruiting highest-profile gender transition had a highly sex-specific presentation — Bruce Jenner was their employees from its most elite and liberal schools. And for questioning that the ultimate male Olympian; Caitlyn Jenner, political performance while defending the a busty, hyper-feminized Vanity Fair cover disproportionate maleness that makes it model. necessary, the Google memo-writer simply So too with political trends. The idea of a had to go. “Mommy Party” and a “Daddy Party” goes This is not a healthy dynamic, obviously. way back, but the Trump-Clinton election Indeed, part of why the alt-right has such made the increasingly gendered nature of the a strong (if sub rosa) presence in Northern parties seem ridiculously stark. As Ed West, California is because it’s a predictable kind a columnist for The Week, pointed out last of male response to professional life under week, the social justice left and the alt-right the rule of political correctness — a response are among the most gendered movements that the Damore firing will only make more imaginable — “the political equivalent of the Lego Friends Heartlake Cupcake Cafe and the attractive. Meanwhile, the real truth — which the Lego Nexo Knight’s Clay’s Falcon Fighter Blaster, examples of where greater freedom of memo at its most sensible almost grasped — is that Silicon Valley might benefit from association and self-actualization has led men having a more female-friendly culture because and women.” of the differences between men and women, Consider it this way: If you asked a right- wing misogynist to craft a sexist parody of his not because those differences are all somehow a misogynist invention. The fact that the political opponents, you might get something like the highly neurotic, fainting-couch politics brave new online world of social media may be particularly psychologically unhealthy of recent campus and online progressivism, for young women, for instance, seems like a whose acolytes oscillate between soft telling indicator of what can go wrong with therapeutic language and maenad-like frenzy. a virtual architecture built by brilliant and If you then asked a left-wing misandrist obtuse males. to do the same sort of parody in reverse, But since the usual way to reintegrate you’d end up with something like the online the sexes is to have them marry one another far-right — nerds and autodidacts obsessed and raise kids, what Silicon Valley probably with cuckoldry, fascist cosplayers eager for needs right now more than either workplace evidence of their own racial superiority, anti-microaggression training or an alt-right would-be lotharios furious at feminism, underground is a basic friendliness to family, libertarians with a ten-point case for pregnancy and child rearing. despotism. This is why the new Apple headquarters, The divergence of the sexes also provides a useful context for thinking about this week’s which has a 100,000-square-foot fitness and culture-war controversy, the high-profile firing wellness center but no child care center, is a of a Google software engineer, James Damore, more telling indicator of what really matters for a memo he wrote criticizing the company’s to Silicon Valley than all the professions of gender-egalitarianism that have followed diversity policies. James Damore’s heretical comments about sex Damore’s memo argued, roughly, that the differences. tech world’s conspicuous dearth of women is Those differences, the real ones, have quite possibly a consequence of the trend I’ve one common root: Women bear children; just described — that more men than women men do not. Figuring out how to respect that are attracted to the kind of work that’s done essential fact and all its implications, while by programmers and software engineers, and also respecting the equality of the sexes, is that it’s a mistake to assume discrimination one of the great challenges of our age. And it’s when self-selection might be at work. He also because we are failing at it that the sexes have questioned why Google’s official rhetoric and begun to go their separate ways. internal propaganda focus on the diversity ■ of sex and race while ignoring the value of Ross Douthat joined The New York political or ideological diversity. Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. The memo was sometimes tone deaf, Previously, he was a senior editor at the clinical, insensitive (in, well, a stereotypically Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. male sort of way), understating the ways Silicon Valley might benefit from having a more female- friendly culture. LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
