Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1153 Editor's Choice: 107
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ondolette on not taking no for an answer
[Read the article: Chris Floyd for Glenn Greenwald: Dissent or disgrace]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Floyd is calling for impeachment even if we have to move against the Democrats to make them understand we won't take no for an answer...
... and I completely reject that view. Urge them forward, yes. Replace them with candidates who are progressive and can also hold onto their seats, yes. Work to transform the American political culture and public discourse, yes.
But turn out the Democratic majority in favor of the GOP because if you're not with us, you're against us? No way.
This pernicious idea that the two parties are interchangeable is what gave us the Bush regime in the first place. There were be-all, end-all issues back in 1999 too — it was so important to make a statement about the WTO that it was better, the thinking went, to damn Gore with faint support in order to make it clear that progressives wouldn't take no for an answer.
Do you remember that? It was a really bad idea. It's hard to overstate in the present climate exactly how bad of an idea it was.
Has it really become any better since then?
(And is it even possible to imagine what 8 years of Gore would have been like, by comparison? Perhaps we would be arguing passionately over whether or not Gore's NAFTA renegotiations were strong enough, or whether the billion-dollar subsidies to the post-Taliban government in Kabul should be sustained or tapered off now that the economy is stabilizing, or over the double-digit casualties of our ongoing military presence in Afghanistan — and probably wringing our hands over how this is it, this is the last straw, we're not taking no for an answer anymore.)
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What about delivered produce shares?
[Read the article: Go ask Alice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](I'm picturing Farhad Manjoo eying Alice Waters' iPhone the whole interview, waiting for a chance to ask her about it. Hilarious! Only these two, and for totally opposite reasons, would agree that an iPhone is an "appliance," and equate it with a toaster. But I digress...)
One of the more elegant developments of our era has been the advent of co-op farm shares that allow people to buy farm produce directly from farmers for for easy pickup or delivery to their homes.
It's more generic than Alice Waters' vision of deeply personal relationships with the farmers who supply your food, but it's substantially the same stuff and a lot of busy people would never have access to farm produce at all without their co-op shares. Even in the frozen Northeast, when the farmer's market season shuts down completely for the winter, one can still get one's paper bags of produce.
Now I'm curious as to where that kind of practice fits in with Waters' aesthetic. Surely it's "not as good," but does one at least get half-credit? I would have liked to hear more about intermediary arrangements like that.
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Technology Enables Social Change -- Or Does It?
[Read the article: Working fathers of the world unite!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]These survey results are just the tip of it. I work with a team of engineers from all over the United States — staunch midwestern American conservatives, regular guys (and one gal) who live in generic houses in suburban neighborhoods, don't rock the boat, and keep to the straight and narrow. They don't understand what I see in the crazy big city, with all the immigrants and queers and colored hair and body piercings. Their overall high level of education notwithstanding, they are in short utterly unimaginative in their views of the world.
And they all telecommute from home, most full time, so that they can be with their families more. I don't know the views of their spouses (some of whom also work, some of whom do not), but as we're successful and everyone gets paid well I have to assume that they have little if anything to complain about.
At first I regarded this seemingly extraordinary arrangement — a bunch of convention-loving red-staters casually embracing some wild cyberpunk vision in their work lives — as a sign of the deep impact of information technology. Now that it's possible to do this sort of thing, I figured, it's obvious and inevitable that people will, and it won't necessarily go hand in hand with any (other) subversive ideas about gender and work and home and all of that. Technology creates the impetus for social change in a way that political and cultural forces never could.
Doesn't it?
Well... See, the thing is, technology may be morally neutral but its socio-cultural utility (by definition) never is. We have voice over IP and videoconferencing and fast file sharing (and other developments not directly related to info tech, like low air fares and mobile phones) largely because we really want those things. We really want to be able to work from home, to keep our families close and our jobs at arm's length, take same-day business trips rather than move — and when we do, our society accepts us.
So actually, I think that what it all means is that the shift in gender roles has become so pervasive that the technology has come to reflect it, not the other way around. The right-wing reactionary cranks who see feminism as an all-encompassing force that has become firmly implicated in every aspect and all segments of American life may actually be right.
Unfortunately for them, and nothwithstanding the slope-browed knuckle-draggers in Salon's letters pages, even conservative Americans appear to be enjoying the new matriarchal order just fine.