Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1359 Editor's Choice: 75
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Obedience is maladaptive too
[Read the article: School for housewives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If a wife always keeps silent and bows down to her husband's opinion on all matters, then basically these exists only one opinion in that family and only one machine for reacting to the world and creating opinions in response.
This is maladaptive because it fails to take into account the human capacity for error. What if the husband's point of view is wrong?
If there are two independent opinions in the family, then when one of them is wrong, the other one has a chance of being right.
So it's more likely that there exists approximately one right opinion in the family.
What do I mean about right opinion? In this case, I mean the response to a given survival challenge that does the most to promote the health of the family.
I am arguing that families with the capacity for forming two independent opinions are better able to survive unforeseen challenges than families where there is only the capacity for one opinion.
This is why feminism is inevitable and keeps reappearing even stronger after every cycle in history when it has been quashed.
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One potential good thing about home schooling
[Read the article: School for housewives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Christian mothers will be FORCED to learn math and science if they want their children to end up qualified for careers in well-paying fields.
If they decide to keep rejecting science, then their children won't be able to compete in the job market, and they'll fail in their goal of achieving social dominance because they'll start falling down the socioeconomic ladder.
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Just looking at his face hurts
[Read the article: Al Gore's win, America's loss]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's like I can hear him say, "You don't deserve to live, so shut up and go away."
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Here's a nightmare I can imagine
[Read the article: School for housewives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A kid who's ready to learn calculus, being home schooled by a mom who's never going to get farther than basic algebra.
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Let's not be so glib about the effect of war on sensitive young artists
[Read the article: "I only dread one day at a time!"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Schulz, known to his intimates as Sparky, went into the army a sensitive only child ("a mother's boy," as a sympathetic corporal referred to him) and emerged, to quote his own Brokaw-esque formulation, "a man."
A sensitive artist becomes "a man" after going to war?
There's probably miles and miles of pain and abuse and witnessing things people ordinarily shouldn't see and doing things people ordinarily shouldn't do behind that glib trope.
His generation couldn't talk about how much their war hurt, because their war was heroic, and heroes aren't supposed to admit to being in pain.
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Reporting on science demands higher standards than reporting on culture
[Read the article: Roundup: Are Republicans secretly crushing on Hillary?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But Dr. Mark Mitchell, president of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice, tells Reuters, "The latest studies show there is no safe level of lead exposure."
The problem with this is now we have to take his word for it. I'm sure he's correct. I don't think he's lying.
But sometimes people do lie. Sometimes they definitely do lie about science. It's heartbreaking, but true. That's just how politics is. That's what politics makes people do.
That's why it's always a good idea for the reporter to check the studies herself, just to be sure. And then give us the journal citations, so we can check them too.
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Glenn open up your eyes and look around
[Read the article: The Beltway Establishment's contempt for the rule of law]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals -- who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.
Glenn -- open up your eyes and look around, before you make me ill.
Remember where you work. You work for a publication where they can't even mention cannabis when it's killing breast cancer cells.
You're working for a Gray Davis Democrat. And that means tough on crime and that means these poor prisoners you're moaning about mean absolutely nothing. Nobody at Salon cares one bit about these poor prisoners you're talking about.
You are as clueless as a newborn baby, Glenn, to start going off on the poor powerless prisoners of America. You know perfectly well that Joan Walsh only cares about prisoners who can help the Democrats win in 2008. The only prisoners who fit her standards are the ones in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
You're never hear going about 100 or so brave medical marijuana providers who are now lined up on the launching pad for 10 years in federal prison each in California.
Because those are the kind of people whose lives do not matter in Salon. And neither do the poor prisoners you're talking about. Their lives do not matter here, because they can't win elections.
They might as well just all drop dead tomorrow, because nobody cares and nobody is going to care, because they can't win elections, so who the hell needs them?
So stop pretending that anyone cares. It makes you look silly and sentimental.
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If she keeps doing work of this caliber
[Read the article: "Persepolis"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you look down the list of awardees for the Nobel Prize in literature, you'll see that a great many of them are writers who broke new artistic ground while portraying the most intimate dynamics of life in a repressive system.
Perhaps in the future, Ms. Satrapi will become a source of vexation for Nobel judges forced to consider whether a graphic novel counts as a novel.
As for me, I hope the DVD version contains a commentary by the author.