Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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Uh...
[Read the article: WayLay]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... sorry, but, who said that Carol Lay was leaving in the first place?
And who said that Kansas O'Flaherty was her replacement? Is there any reason not to assume that Salon has simply had the good fortune to pick up yet another strip, and has decided to take advantage of the opportunity to rearrange the schedule a little bit?
I mean, pardon me if there was some big headline article and I just happened to miss it, but I'm having a hard time understanding where all this angst and vitriol is coming from. If Waylay had been leaving for good, surely Joan Walsh or someone else with Salon would have said something. Right? We don't invent complex conspiracy theories when simple explanations are adequate?
Or is that me being naively reality-based again?
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rooibos on doing over
[Read the article: Britain in "moral collapse" over rape?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It starts off with one or two huffy commenters playing devil's advocate and speedily descends into misogynist groupthink.
Hey, now, I wasn't playing devil's advocate, and I'm not particularly huffy. (Really I'm not, I'm nice. I swear.)
What I am is old enough to remember how bitter were the arguments a generation ago over whether there really is all that much sexual abuse going on, or if it was just bitchy feminists causing trouble and trying to emasculate everyone and take the fun out of bars, college life, and so on.
And, yes, judging from a quick perusal of the "contributions" to this thread over the past day, the latter view is alive and well, and I suppose it's realistic to expect that there will be slope-brained reptiles with mommy issues talking trash about women for a long time to come. But my point is that here's a conservative politician coming right out and saying that yeah, okay, this is a real problem, and even if his solution is unimaginative and censorious the idea that the premise isn't up for debate anymore is, quietly, a significant milestone.
Don't you think? Or am I being naive?
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About time
[Read the article: Bill Richardson's big ouch ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"The concepts are not contradictory, Wolf. They are complementary."
Hallelujah. It's about time our leaders started saying this.
Anyone "in the business" (and not just a crypto-fascist toady) will tell you that torture is a method of psychic annihilation, not information gathering.
This is hard to think about, and to talk about, but apparently even liberal Americans have been poisoned enough that we have to go back and relearn some basic stuff. The idea with torturing someone is that you destroy them as an individual, and they will say and do anything to get you to stop torturing them.
Okay? Think about that, as unpleasant as it is. They will say and do anything. It doesn't matter if it's true, or false, or insane or whatever. It's not a good way at all to get information out of someone, and governments — even ones with a wicked side — whose goals have been counterintelligence rather than sadistic destruction learned long ago that there's no point in going there.
That's not to say that the US government hasn't been disappearing people and interrogating them, since before Bush, before Clinton, before the entire era of the modern CIA. It's also unpleasant to think about that, but we have to.
The thing is, as unpleasant an idea as it is, capturing a high-value spy and "turning" them through manipulative techniques is not the same as routinely torturing political prisoners. You can condemn them both as immoral, but you cannot meaningfully condemn them as the same thing. Maybe it's only a matter of degree, I don't know — philosophers can debate that one. But it's a profoundly great degree if it is.
The big difference between the Bush era and the entirety of American history before that is that we have crossed that big, bright line. Some of us want to stay here — and the reason they put forward is because we have to, we must, for our own security.
And the liberal intelligentsia in the United States has so lost its way that with few exceptions it has been unable to articulate the only realistic, sane response — that the very idea is utter horse pucky.
Hopefully whatever strange affliction Barack Obama has caught on the campaign trail is contagious.
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LBS on strategy
[Read the article: Bill Richardson's big ouch ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The question we all struggle with is what strategy will help us get this country back on track.
This is indeed the question! But it may not be that hard to answer, at least broadly.
For one thing, we as a people have both carrots and sticks we can apply to our elected representatives — or those who aspire to be. Some of these carrots and sticks are obvious — votes for one, word of mouth in favor or against another.
But Chris Dodd's fundraising success after his FISA stand has got me thinking — what if every letter we write to a politician contains a check as well, for some small amount of money made out to their election campaign? If we like a decision they've made recently, now they have a reward. If we don't like it, they get the check but it's voided. "See?" we say, "You've cost yourself more than just my vote."
Anyway, even if that particularly isn't such a hot idea, hopefully the more general concept is clear — we as citizens have to engage more with these people. They're used to never hearing from us, even now in a time of progressive discontent, and that's one of the first things that needs to change.
Yes, that means engaging with and maybe even supporting Democratic presidential candidates (say) whose views on certain issues we find unpleasant or wrong-headed. But honestly, do we require moral perfection of everyone around us before we'll even work with them?
. . .
Okay, some of Salon's readers probably do. But seriously though, as much as we wild-eyed radicals might be grumpy about differences of view or pace of change or whatever, surely we must all hang together, you know?