Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 56 Editor's Choice: 11
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yes, Ahmedinejad is sure a real civil guy.
[Read the article: Ahmadinejad's New York state of mind]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jesus. How far do you want to bend over backwards to make Iran and its president sound like rational entities? When did this absurd, insane, horrible idea evolve that liberal thought requires one to treat every two views as if both are right? To what depth of relativistic confusion has the world now sunk, where the preceding salon readers, with the exception of the first, haven't the brain cells to objectively weigh the logical validity of Ahmedinejad's statements and arguments against some benchmark of rational, liberal thought and behavior; but rather are so inculcated with the odious postmodern belief that everyone's opinion is equal, that they will stand and -- albeit mumblingly -- defend the absolutely indefensible for seemingly no reason other than to tout their own bullshit pseudo-rebellious credentials, no matter how utterly stupid it makes them sound? What a laugh the Iranian leadership must get out of it; what a joke for someone so clearly hateful of diversity to be defended by the muddle-brained if goodhearted supporters of everything he stands so firmly against.
Urgent notice to Salon readers: Muslim fundamentalists ARE NOT LIBERALS. They, like us, oppose the Bush administration. So too does Pat Buchanan; he's also against the war in Iraq; and he is not a liberal either. He is an antisemitic, homophobic neofascist. And even he doesn't actually advocate publicly hanging homosexuals. Do you see this? Do you see that you don't need to get on Pat Buchanan's side to be against the war in Iraq? Do you see that in your blind hatred for the Republican war machine, you would abandon everything you ever stood for, you would permanently stain everything that will ever escape your lips until the day you die, by excusing, equivocating over, and/or downright supporting one of the most repressive, homicidal, reactionary gangster regimes left on the face of the planet? Of course not, because "it's not our place to judge." Well, then you'd better shut the hell up about every other injustice in the world, because you just undermined your own right to hold an opinion. And it shows from the way you write, and Salon, it shows from the articles you carry.
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@brickbat
[Read the article: Ahmadinejad's New York state of mind]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I went back and read what you wrote again, and I don't think it's a retention problem I'm having. I think it's your staggered, incoherent phrasing, odd hyphenation and wholly invented vocabulary that led me to think you were saying the opposite of what you may have been trying to say. But I mean, if you don't care enough to write even a single complete sentence to get across whatever your confused point may be, you're probably pretty used to being misunderstood by now.
Retain that, why don't you.
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I know...
[Read the article: My laptop was stolen -- I feel like my life is gone!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is the worst feeling; you try to back everything up, but...even if it was backed up somewhere else...I think the worst is knowing that some piece of shit somewhere is looking at your pictures, reading your letters, whatever.
I've had four laptops stolen from me in the last year, so I know. Once I was sitting at starbucks and someone grabbed it off the table in front of me and ran. I got that one back. Later they broke in and took mine and my girlfriends. And the worst, the last one, just two weeks ago, we were in Argentina and I got a call saying they'd kidnapped my girlfriend and were going to kill her unless I gave them a laptop. Which I did, which had all our photos from the year long trip on it, all her artwork for a new children's book, everything... And when she came home, and she hadn't been really kidnapped, we found that our backup DVD was corrupt and not playable.
I wish I had some words of wisdom. I guess it's nice on the whole that some of us can live in this world with no more belongings than fit into a suitcase, and all our ideas so compact and portable. It's nice that ideas are what matter, and you're going to have more of them. I'd like to think the loss of all my old stuff has caused me to live more in the present. It's certainly made me less nostalgic.
You know, the same thing happened to F. Coppola around the same time in Argentina, you can look it up, it's very sad, they took his backups as well...all his screenwriting and everything.
The end result for me has been to realize we're living in a vicious world, and all I have to show for myself are the ideas I generate, and they keep being taken away from me. But you move on. I started booby-trapping my stuff. I bought guns. I'm living on the edge of nowhere and hoping no one will bother me. It's a messed up world, and a lot of people have nothing to contribute to it, nothing good to do in it, so they just destroy other peoples' lives. I don't know. I'm not over it either. I hope they all die horrible painful deaths.