Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1358 Editor's Choice: 75
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What if NOBODY "messed up their lives"?
[Read the article: I'm so damned judgmental!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Then who the hell would serve you breakfast when you went to Denny's? You'd all have to serve yourselves.
All of you depend every day on people who have "messed up their lives."
Those are often the people who occupy the lower tier of the employment hierarchy that the people in the upper tier depend on so they have the kind of time it takes to perform in an upper tier occupation.
This is one reason why the Bible encourages people to defer their powers of judgment to infinity.
If you judge people, then how can you honestly accept anything from them?
If you look down on that fifty year old waitress handing you that cup of coffee, then maybe you should get your freaking coffee from now on.
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Great article but here's the missing link
[Read the article: Deadly lockdown in New Orleans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The majority of victims and suspects have been young African-American men -- many of them teenagers -- caught up in a drug trade that was reinvigorated, reorganized and made more lethal amid turf wars in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The Salon article linked to here was the one that told us about the drug problem but never said WHICH drugs.
This practice of lumping all drugs together -- and leaving out alcohol -- is a hallmark of the War on Drugs. The theory here is that naming the individual drugs might glamorize them. In other words, we protect ourselves from addiction by using ignorance as our best friend.
The crime crisis is part and parcel of a wider social crisis. Two years after the storm, only one-third of the childcare centers and 45 percent of the public schools in Orleans Parish have reopened. Mental health services for residents suffering from depression, drug addiction and posttraumatic stress disorder are nonexistent.
See, the reason why it's important to know WHICH drugs is because one of those illegal drugs -- the one accounting for about 80% of all drug seizures -- is cannabis. There's plenty of peer-reviewed published research on animals that links PTSD to damage to the cannabinoid receptor system. This link doesn't exist for any of the other drugs people might be using.
Louisiana has no level of marijuana offense that doesn't carry a jail sentence. A first offense with any detectable amount will already get you six months in jail. Second offense for any amount is five years and a third offense with any amount will get you 20 years in prison.
What I would like to know is how many of those prisoners are in there for cannabis.
How much of this hellish prison situation is being caused by ignorant lawmakers locking people up for using a medicinal herb that is actually the exactly right medicinal herb for treating PTSD?
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Poor old humanism sure gets a beating these days
[Read the article: How can I love my Republican parents?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's wrong as hell to objectify people based on their gender but it's right as rain to objectify people based on their politics?
I don't think so.
And what's a one party system called? A dictatorship.
If we're going to have a democracy, then we have to have at least two parties, and since we're such a big fat powerful country, when one party or the other makes a mistake -- yes it could cause someone somewhere a lot of pain.
So work to fix it, and hope the Democrats don't screw up just as badly when we get back in power.
But don't treat other people like objects, because that diminishes the value of your own humanity too.
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Evolutionary psychology is NOT a science
[Read the article: It all goes back to trail mix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's not falsifiable. There are no experiments to reproduce. There is no real data to analyze.
The people in this field are brazenly ignorant. What else would you have to be to ignore the entire field of traumatology and come up with some concocted explanation for rape trauma that contradicts everything actually known about rape trauma?
It's an absolute scandal that any of these people get funded to do science and get to call themselves scientists at all.
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Anonymous
[Read the article: It all goes back to trail mix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Come up with some actual psychological data on some sample population of human beings who existed 20,000 years ago and I'll get off your case.
But until you do, then I'm writing you off as someone who doesn't know jack about science or what constitutes science, and is only is defending this idiotic pseudo-field because of your own personal ideological needs.
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This is nerd gender anxiety on display
[Read the article: It all goes back to trail mix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Look at anonymous. This is how it feels to a woman in science. Only about 5-10% of the men in science are like anonymous, but these types just never shut up.
They're like stalkers. They stalk women and keep trying to force these idiotic conversations on them and it's creepy.
This is the really sick part of nerd culture that made me stop liking physics.
Even if these types only make up a small percentage of the nerd workforce, they are so relentless and crazed, you cannot get away from them, ever.
It's this small minority of dedicated assbites that creates a lot of the so-called "hostile climate" for women in science.
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Tell me an evo psych hypothesis that is in any way testable
[Read the article: It all goes back to trail mix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Really, I want to hear one. How would anyone ever actually test any of this stuff?
There is zero actual data on the psychology of people who lived before written history.
And even after written history, before modern times, we only really know about the tiny minority of people who could read and write.
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And about astronomy, anonymous
[Read the article: It all goes back to trail mix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Prehistoric people and ancient people didn't record diddly about their psychology, but they did leave real actual data regarding their astronomical observations.