Letters to the Editor
softdog
Published Letters: 186 Editor's Choice: 8
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The Self-Regard Provokes a Lack of Sympathy
[Read the article: At her majesty's pleasure]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I understand Peter Kurth suffered unfairly dangerous treatment for a minor infraction - nothing can justify rape. I also get what's behind the negative reactions, even if those writing harsh responses couldn't explain it themselves.
Prison is a topic in which individual observations are read in a larger context. Kurth seems to ignore the bigger picture - not his intent, but it comes off as unaware, privileged maybe arrogant.
Not to dismiss his suffering, but the lack emphasizes how this is a middle class white guy experiencing a fraction of the horrors faced by those who outside Salon's demographic. I immediately thought of prisoners who don't get adequate HIV medicine, prison teaching jobs, embassy representatives, personal diaries, etc.
The poor and minority prisoners at much greater risk of harsher imprisonment without trial with less guilt. In Louisiana after Katrina, arrests on minor offenses could result in more jail time without trial than a conviction.
Kurth was wise not to compare himself to the less fortunate, but wrong to not mention them at all. He doesn't touch on how there are others in Wormwood Scrubs are like him, giving the impression he thinks he's the only one "imprisoned unjustly or necessarily".
Then there's Kurth's introduction, in which he admits his mess was largely self created, but keeps implying others were to blame in petty ways.
He admits being "a humorless and probably exhausted flight attendant" implying she's to blame for objecting to being called a cunt.
He says "I was in full-blown air rage, something the airlines used to understand but, on the evidence, no longer do." as if the airline is to blame for diminishing tolerance of enraged passengers. He admits to refusing to leave a restricted area, because he used to see people there "without anyone making a fuss about it."
He says he was provoked when "I'd been given a seat that wasn't tailor-made to form blood clots in my legs." Implying it was the airline's fault, but the next paragraph admits he didn't tell them about his condition.
Kurth would be far more persuasive if he'd admitted his fault without caveats, and then argued it didn't justify prison rape. Instead, his tone of self-regard (intentional or not) make it seem like he learned nothing at all.
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Praise for GG
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since my last few letters to Glenn were critical, I should make it clear I'm a big fan which agrees with most of what he writes.
For example, this is another great essay about the double standards in how pundits are labeled. This is so important because opinion and commentary has increased weight in news, especially on TV, radio and the web.
While there's never been a bias free era of news, the power of pundits to set the terms for real reporting of events has greatly increased. Real research and field observation is expensive or ideologically inconvenient or someting. Pundits gained this clout because they fill the hole in the news cycle left by the (at best) stagnant level of actual journalism.
Too much time is spent on analyzing and speculation about what events mean, and not enough on the events themselves. Thus we get more reportage on what the Iraq funding bill might mean than coverage of the war dead.
It also leads the media to treat a story as old or overdone, instead of realizing an ongoing story is not passe just because pundits are tired of discussing it.
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Don't Endorse Draconian BS
[Read the article: More drunken pirates, fewer teachers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I wish writers like Catherine Price would be so willing to abandon privacy and labor rights with bullshit sentences like this one:
If you're trying to be a schoolteacher or otherwise work with children professionally, it's probably not a good idea to post a picture of yourself under the caption "Drunken Pirate" anywhere -- not even on your own refrigerator.
Bullshit. A photo of an adult engaging in legal and normal behavior in an adult situation is rarely sound basis for employer action. At best such a choice is vulnerable to civil challenges and in certain circumstances may violate labor laws.
It doesn't matter if her career of choice is teaching. It doesn't matter if the photo appeared on myspace rather than a local newspaper. It doesn't matter if it had a wacky caption.
Adults of all vocation appear in newspaper social pages and sporting event photos holding glasses which obviously contain alcohol. Sometimes wacky captions are involved.
Were a school to deny a degree to an education student for being photographed at a tailgate party for the local team, it would be considered absurd. Because it's myspace and a female teacher and a pirate caption, some people seem to think all rights go out the window.
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. It's time we stop blaming the victim when some authority figure crosses the line with such phrases as "not a good idea." I'm sorry, but the point of our nation is we do not have to self-police 24/7. It's not just a principle, it's also often the law.
We are not a nation where the powerful get to act on their assumptions of the moment. We are a nation of laws. Children are not a valid reason to ignore this, unless people allow it to be.