Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1358 Editor's Choice: 75
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Why it matters that science is about deep thoughts
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Take electricity and magnetism. Until the 19th century, these were regarded as separate physica phenomena. It was only the search for a deeper thought that motivated physicists of that time to search for a connection between the two.
Eventually the search was a success. Maxwell was able to write down mathematical rquations that described both electricity and magnetism as the two intertwined halves of a single unified theory of electromagnetism.
One class of solutions to those equations consist of waves that travel at the speed of light. That's how radio waves were first discovered. Soon after that, wireless communication was born.
Radio and TV were born out of a deep thought, not out of a bag of tricks. It was a deep thought that there could be a single mathematical framework for two seemingly different physical phenomena. That deep thought determined who were are today.
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I apologize david sugarman
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm feeling a torrent of emotion. I kind of turned off the physics part of my mind after Larry Summers.
I feel overstimulated now because I do care. I thought I stopped caring about deep thoughts but I still do.
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See the thing that bothers me in my "single issue"
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There are deep thoughts behind cannabinoid science. There's something really deep in there. Deep knowledge about the mind-body conenction, all kinds of relationships in the brain and body that are tied together and unified by the cannabinoid system.
But the War on Drugs has dumbed the country down to the extent that nobody is able to express these deep thoughts or discuss them openly.
And Salon is doing its part to maintain the dumbing down, because this dumbing down is what works best for politics in 2008.
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It's more complicated than that -- PLEASE crack open a book or two, okay??
[Read the article: Afghanistan's next top model]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]On a much more encouraging note, the show seems to have been sparked by a progressive, up-and-coming generation of young Afghan women.
I wish you writers at Broadsheet would take the trouble to crack open a book or two about Afghanistan before you write about the country.
"The Tragedy of Afghanistan" by Raja Anwar gives an extremely detailed history of the time when socialists ran the country. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to continue writing about this country.
Now read this:
Afghanistan was once a socialist country. Afghanistan has had at least three generations of progressive women so far.
The problem is, as always -- as is true in America also -- the progressives constitute a minority. They're the urban educated elite.
The battle in Afghanistan has always been between the urban well-educated elite and the rural less-educated majority.
Mazar-i-Sharif is in the north of Afghanistan. Mazar was the capital of the anti-Taliban insurgency led by Massoud, the Lion of Panshjer, who was assassinated by the Taliban the day before 9/11.
Mazar-i-Sharif is not exclusively Pushtun as is the south of Afghanistan. This is an ethnically mixed area with Turkmens, Tadjiks and Uzbeks living alongside Pushtuns.
So the very strict Pushtun interpretation of Islam is not the predominant way of life there.
By the way -- another thing for which Mazar-i-Sharif is famous for is cannabis. There's even a strain of cannabis named for Mazar-i-Sharif.
The Sufi saint Baba Ku, who taught the Afghan tribes the secret of using hashish to cure the plague, hailed from this region, as did the Sufi poet people know today by the name Rumi.
So this event is happening in the most liberal region in all of Afghanistan. That doesn't mean it's going to be tolerated anywhere else and that doesn't mean there is an entire generation of young Afghan women who are as progressive as the women being reared in the historically liberal and ethnically mixed north.
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That's the tragedy of American feminism
[Read the article: Afghanistan's next top model]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You don't ever have to crack any books. You don't have know anything about the country you're talking about.
All you have know is: Bikini evil! Cosmetics evil! Suntan evil! Thin women evil!
It's a very simple system of knowledge. It's much easier to manage than the complicated stuff you find in books.
You don't even have to know the difference between Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar.
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And another thing
[Read the article: Afghanistan's next top model]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The burqua was considered mandatory among Pushtun tribal people in the Pushtun regions in sputhern Afghanistan. The Uzbek, Tadjik and Turkmen women in the north did not wear this garb. Even when the Taliban held Kabul, they did not hold Mazar, because Massoud's army was headquartered in Mazar.
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Girly-man had nothing to do with 9/11
[Read the article: The 9/11 backlash against women]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The girly-man comment was Arnold frustrated over a purely state-level problem. One of the problems that frustrated him was a state prison system that was in a human rights crisis.
He was trying to solve that problem, but the so-called Democrats refused to cooperate.
And it was Gray Davis who helped the system get into such a human rights crisis, because Gray Davis despises the kind of girly-men who file lawsuits because of prison abuse.
Gray Davis is a man with contempt for the weak.
Now Gray Davis has too much political intelligence to ever call anyone a girly-man in public. But just look at how he responded to all those lawsuits over human rights abuses that ended up in federal court.
He didn't respond at all. He treated the judges with white hot contempt.
If Gray Davis had been in charge of Abu Ghraib, nothing about that place would have been the least bit different.
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Rule of law
[Read the article: Red, white and mercenary in Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's supposed to be a good thing, right? Isn't that what we're supposed to be teaching those lawless insurgents who maim and kill with impunity?
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Misinformation about breast cancer definitely abounds
[Read the article: Happy Breast Cancer Awareness Month!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some people actually believe that the active ingredients in cannabis can kill breast cancer cells and that the body's own cannabinoid system might be part of the body's anti-cancer defense system.
What's especially shocking is that these misinformed people have in jobs in science doing cancer research and even get their research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Last week we learned that drinking alcohol -- any kind! -- increases women's risk of developing breast cancer.
This goes to show why alcohol is illegal and should remain illegal, no matter how many alcohol users end up in our overcrowded prison system as a result of their refusal to give up alcohol.