Letters to the Editor
bmcgrane
Published Letters: 14 Editor's Choice: 2
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Syriana had a valid message
[Read the article: "Syriana"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If that list is correct, then those are only the top 5 countries that we import oil from today. As they said in the movie, in a few decades 90% of what is left will be in the middle east. Besides, there are more reasons to maintain American domination over those oil fields than just the raw amount of oil imports going back to the U.S. Preserving American control over the oil as insurance for the future and limiting Chinese economic growth are two that I can think of and that the movie alluded to. Leave it to a conservative to think that a single five-point list can refute the entire other side of a very complicated issue.
The movie certainly had a distinctly one-sided message, but from the way the government has handled things in Iraq, it rang disturbingly true in my judgment. Ms. Zacharek's criticisms of Gaghan's overcomplication are accurate, but the film paints a rich tapestry of the biggest issue our country faces today, and should be commended just for trying to tie together the intricacies of the issue for the audience in only a few hours. I thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in these dealings and conflicts that I've spent so much time thinking about in the past few years.
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There is hope for this relationship
[Read the article: My wife-to-be attacks me with her fists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I checked these letters to see what kinds of remarks people made about how thoughtful and productive that column was. I was very surprised.
I wish that my fellow Salon readers would sit back and think rationally about the situation; as liberals that is what we believe in. Cary Tennis is not about snap judgements or truisms like "physical violence of any kind is inexcusable." He recognized that physical violence is inexcusable, and that the victim of such an attack is blameless, and then he gave thoughtful advice about how the dynamic that is unacceptable might be changed into a dynamic that is healthier and that could work. This is not the typical abusive relationship where a deeply insecure man habitually keeps a woman physically and emotionally subjugated. When that happens, the woman is a victim of a serious wrong and she needs help to get out, and the man needs to be taken away, and hopefully given therapy though I'm sure that almost never happens. I speak of this situation with the man as the abuser because let's be honest, over 90% of the time that is the case. If a man is similarly subjugated, I hope he receives similar help to escape his abuser.
In the situation mentioned in this article, there had only been 3 attacks in two years. I think that if a man had a fit of anger and hit his girlfriend, stopping before he hurt her seriously, it would be similarly inexcusable but similarly not hopeless: he doesn't attack out of a need to constantly control his partner, he attacks out of a need to control a situation that comes up from time to time. That's what this woman did. There is hope that she can learn to handle the situation differently. A frequently abusive relationship is too broken from the start to ever be fixed. I can imagine that this situation could be resolved and the relationship could be improved because of it, if they sit down and honestly communicate their feelings and make plans for how to do things differently so that the man doesn't shut her out emotionally and so that the woman doesn't end up feeling so powerless that she thinks violence is the only power she has. And she owes him a nice dinner and a promise to never resort to violence against him again.
Cary wasn't definite about the prospects for the future. He just said "Maybe, if you do all that, you can make a go of it." It's a scary place to be, teetering on the brink of an abusive relationship, with a girlfriend who tries to get her way by hitting you and blaming you for it, implying that the threat of violence will hang over everything you do. It's possible she won't want to listen to any of this, won't want to talk about their relationship evenhandedly, won't accept blame, and the relationship will be broken. But Cary thinks there's still hope, and I do too.
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I don't see the problem
[Read the article: Idiot vos Savant]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think either the letter-writer or vos Savant specifically call out girls as being innately prone to underachievement. In the letter, the phrase "I work hard at not calling primarily on boys" can simply be another way to say "I try to call on boys and girls with equal frequency."
Similarly, vos Savant uses only gender-neutral terms like kids and people. She is pointing out a potential inequality in the attention given to children, but she doesn't claim that it's the only possible inequality. She'd probably say that calling on all ethnicities equally is a good idea too.
I think teachers can tend to have a bias towards calling on one gender or the other, if they don't think about what they're doing. A heterosexual woman who would habitually pay more attention to the men in a bar or a restaurant might find herself subconsciously paying more attention to the boys in her class rather than the girls. A male teacher who has a young son he's accustomed to looking after might find himself paying more attention to the boys as well. A gender bias in attention can happen without it being prejudice.
Ms. Traister's work has seemed spot-on in the past so maybe she was just in a bad mood when she came across that article, and saw a sexist slight when it was really a matter of semantics.