Letters to the Editor
jwr_12
Published Letters: 141 Editor's Choice: 45
-
Liberal Bias: 'Direct Evolution'?
[Read the article: The Big Idea: Accelerated Bioremediation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]After reading this article, I'm afraid I have to say your bias is showing. Your source--a so-called 'expert'--claims that nature hasn't yet evolved a way to handle the toxins that humans have released into the system over the past 150 years, since most of these toxins are new or never reached such concentrations before. This implies that natural organisms develop evolutionarily as random mutations make them more or less able to deal with environmental pressures. Heck, your researcher even comes out and says it: he and his lab see their work as a form of "direct evolution"!
Would you call a mousetrap an example of evolution, given that its springs are irreducibly complicated? I mean, you can't get a mousetrap to work without having all the parts there! Get it? Just like a mechanical object needs all of its parts to eat toxic sludge, so too biological things can't eat sludge unless there's an Intelligent Designer (See the book, "On People and Pandas," if you need help grasping this.)
Rather than using evolutionary science to create methods of combatting ecological peril, I recommend we work from a premise that is as plain as the nose on your face: bacteria, sludge eating and otherwise, were either created by God as defined by a certain subsect of 20th century American Evangelical Christianity (aka 'God'), or by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Answer that riddle, and you'll be doing some real reporting!
Your piece shows how disconnected modern science has become from the ideas of the Dover School Board!
John
-
Hear Hear
[Read the article: Plame games]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'd like to second the opinion, expressed by Russell Durbin above, that Scherer's article fails to distinguish between pure 'spin' and substantive political argument.
Reporting on opposing strategies simply as strategies--without evaluating their underlying truth-claims--seems to me to be irresoponsible. I think we should go back to the old practice of calling 'spin' only that which attempts to cover up facts to which most reasonable people would agree. Calling everything 'spin' suggests that there can be no truth that supercedes political boundaries--or that as a nation, we're so into being liberals or conservatives or whatever that we aren't interested in things like fairness and reality. I think the people as a whole still make the distinction; but I think journalists tend to lose sight of it, and get sucked into permanent horse-racing.
-
Terrified
[Read the article: Miers is gone. Who's up next -- and when?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have to say that I'm a little scared of what's going to come next. While I don't think Harriet Miers was a good nominee (to put it mildly), Bush will now be under tremendous pressure to appoint a raving rightist to the bench. And although the Republicans will pay a long-term political price if he does so, in the short term they will seek to approve this ideologue-nominee, and if they do (I'm not sure how the politics of a filibuster would play out) that will be awful.
In the end, the collapse of this mediocrity could take what's left of the political center with it.
-
What an insult to Protestants Eckstein makes!
[Read the article: Jews and the Christian right: Is the honeymoon over?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This was a superb article. Perhaps the most poignant / shocking / outrageous moment for me, was when Y.Z. Eckstein, of the IFCJ, argues that religious Christians are "very different from the Jewish community ... If their pastor says black is white and white is black, well, the pastor said so."
So let me get this straight. A man who has spent a good portion of his life trying to support a Jewish-Christian political alliance--and therefore has spent a lot of his time working with certain Christian churches--believes his partners are a bunch of authoritarian fanatics, willing to believe black is white on the say so of their pastor? I don't blame him for being scared shitless, if he thinks that his "friends" are already outfitted with such mental jackboots!
My take on this is that Eckstein himself is prejudiced against protestantism, the original Christian church of all believers. I have no sympathy for the Christian right, and despair at the idiocy and indeed fanaticism of some of its followers and leaders. But then again, I'm not trying to coordinate interfaith dialog (while cynically believing, as Eckstein seems to, that my partners are closet authoritarians). I'm just trying not to indulge in broad, lame stereotypes about Jewish-Christian differences, in the name of partisan politics. Politically it might be convenient to turn reality into an ethnic joke; philosophically and historically, though, its appalling.
-
For DD
[Read the article: "Never have the freedoms we cherish seemed so imperiled"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Senator Byrd has been fighting this president very hard--despite advanced age and increasing frailty. He has spoken, eloquently, at every step of the way, with an eloquence matched by few of the Presidents' opponents, Democrat or otherwise. His speeches during the approach to the Iraq war are chilling in the accuracy of their predictions of everything that has happened since.
Senator Byrd is no longer majority leader, and his caucus is fragmented. I see many faults in the current Democratic leadership. But Byrd does not deserve your sarcasm. He has stood against this tide--driven by crony journalism, crony politicians, and frankly nutty philosophy--in an admirable way. If and when the tide turns, it will be in part due to Byrd's efforts.