Letters to the Editor
Aycharaych
Published Letters: 2218 Editor's Choice: 3
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ondelette
[Read the article: Anonymous Liberal for Glenn Greenwald: Giuliani on torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Many of the people who are most abused in prison are members of or suspected members of gangs. How do you feel about imprisoning gang members? How about killers? Same way as pot smokers? Maybe not. But they are entitled to just as much protection from abuse.
The first question that occurs to me is, why do we have gangs in the first place? What is wrong with our society that provides the impetus for such associations?
If gang members violate the rights of others then they should be punished. Whether that punishment is probation or prison or whatever should depend on the severity of the rights violation they committed.
Yes, I think *everyone* should be free from the deliberate infliction of pain of any sort.
Most people just don't pay any attention to the prison issue until it effects them personally, usually through a loved one going to prison.
One final point: Remove the non violent "drug offenders" from prison and a lot of the problems will solve themselves. It is the grotesquely overcrowded conditions in most jails and prisons that allows the deliberate infliction of pain to be so prevalent.
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Ending the drug war is the common sense policy..
[Read the article: Anonymous Liberal for Glenn Greenwald: Giuliani on torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All the blather by Hillary will come to nothing.
People will still be caged for simple possession and minor dealing.
Another question: Legality aside, what is the difference between a "drug dealer" and a liquor store owner?
I also have another family member (not particularly close) that has been dealing cannabis for about 35 years now. He doesn't sell to anyone but those he has known a long time so no sales to children. Does anyone here think he should be locked in a cage?
And Kitt, your answer to my question proves that liberals are basing policy regarding one of the most serious issues of our time on sheerest fantasy, Overton window or not.
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As a late fiftyish caucasian male breederI have no dog in this particular hunt..
[Read the article: Pam Spaulding for Glenn Greenwald: More Obama campaign miscalculations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I grew up in the deep South during the Jim Crow era among the very worst kind of bigots. Luckily I was in the South but not of the South, my parents were immigrants who were utterly shocked at what they found in the South, so I escaped the soul destroying burden of racist bigotry.
Knowing from first hand observation how blacks suffered under Jim Crow I find it unsurprising but absolutely despicable how those same people can turn around and do exactly the same thing to another minority group.
In that respect I see the Black evangelical community much as I do the Israeli right wing, people who have been treated horribly but have not learned the lesson of the Golden Rule.
I strive to be like Steven Colbert and not see skin color, unlike Steven I'm not completely successful at it. Like a hyperbola approaching its asymptotes I get ever closer to my goal but never quite arrive. A sort of Zeno's paradox if you will.
I've been online since the days of 300 baud modems and local BBS'es, one thing I have learned is that communicating one's thoughts to others is a task fraught with misunderstanding and "talking past each other". This is one of the reasons for my usual style of online posting, separating each thought in its own paragraph with short sentences and a logical progression of thoughts. This post is unusually dense and long for me.
Even with all my experience I find that I'm usually misunderstood more often than not. Part of that is because I'm an autodidact and have puzzled out my own philosphy of life almost completely on my own. Thus I have a point of view which rarely coincides well with those around me, even (especially?) my own family. My family loves and cares for me but think I'm exceedingly strange.
My point here is that communication is a very difficult task, particularly so when those wishing to communicate with each other come from diffent backgrounds. So much of our outlooks are based upon unexamined, and indeed often unknown, beliefs and prejudices that it is a rare event when one person actually hears what the other is really trying to say.
If Obama wishes to be the uniter that he claims to be then he is going to have to learn very quickly how to tailor his message to the different constituencies that he is trying to woo.
The incident we are discussing now is clearly due to a lack of adequate communication on the part of Obama. Obama is a black man but I get the definite impression that he is culturally closer to WASP's than he is to the majority of what we normally think of as the black community in the US.
Unfortunately, religion is more of a diving force in our society than it is a force to bring people together. As the GOP has shown so pellucidly, pandering to one religious community has a backlash among all the others.
Obama would do well to reconsider his strategy of trying to bring overt religion into his campaign, the potential for alienating others is not worth the possible gains he might make in the community to which he panders.