Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1113 Editor's Choice: 106
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nabalzbbfr on religion and names
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If he wanted to clearly indicate that he is a Christian, he would have adopted a *CHRISTIAN* name instead of the overtly *MUSLIM* "Barack Saddam".
I'm shocked at this new revelation! Surely there must be some vast left-wing conspiracy at work in the "MSM" when they refuse to report how the candidate, presumably born something like John Smith, adopted a new name in order to sound more North African. This bizarre choice must reflect a cunning desire to confound the question of his ethnic ancestry, not to mention his religion — since everyone knows that anyone with a North African name is Muslim, with the sole exception being the large numbers of Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, followers of folk religions, Roman Catholics, miscellaneous evangelical Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, probably a smattering of Bah'ai somewhere in there because those people are like kudzu, and Mormons.
(The lattermost are particularly insidious — but you can always tell those people by their names, too. See how easy this is? Rest assured, readers of "Unclaimed Territory" and of Salon, these and other highly scientific principles of ethnography have us well-protected — and if anyone would know, it's someone who goes by the name 'nabalzbbfr.')
Unless, of course, the "MSM" stories about Obama having grown up United Church of Christ are true, in which case he is clearly part of a fringe left-wing devil-cult masquerading as a mainstream Protestant denomination.
Now, you might object that the UCC seems reasonable and decent (in that they don't hate gays; they don't think that the world is flat, that dinosaurs didn't exist, or that pi equals exactly 3; they object to torturing people; and so on) but that's the kind of opinion you'd expect from a left-wing dupe. Granted, it's an opinion weighted heavily in their favor by common human decency and a cognitively sound relationship to the natural world — but clearly anyone who adopts those values is calling into question whether they're really a Christian.
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Where's the incentive to mitigate?
[Read the article: How much is that earthquake in the window?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If catastrophe reinsurance is rated according to a sound evaluation of the likelihood of the catastrophe occurring, then it seems like it would be a huge step forward in disaster management.
Imagine a scenario in which insuring coastal America against flood and storm damage becomes more and more difficult as catastrophe bond ratings plummet into the junk range — the only way to reverse the trend is through massive preventative engineering, adoption of strict flood-minded building standards, and a long-term decline in atmospheric greenhouse gases. If nothing else gets Americans to care about something, hitting them in their pocketbooks does it every time.
(That the same principle applies throughout the world goes without saying, but the rest of the industrialized world and in particular Europe seems to already be embracing the concept.)
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On a more practical note
[Read the article: If the first date isn't great, why go out with him again? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Something like:
"I had a really nice time with you, and I especially appreciated [your choice of venue/your stories/your butt/whatever], but I don't see a romantic future for us and you deserve to know that up front. Good luck with your search for the right person, though I'm sure you won't need any, and thanks again for a pleasant [evening/afternoon/whatever]."
often does the trick — unless the goal is actually to not put a decisive end to the affair, because having someone dangling is gratifying. In that case there's no real nice way to put it, because it's fundamentally kind of mean.
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Ché Pasa on standard-setting
[Read the article: National Review reporter caught fabricating; where is the "liberal media"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So how is it these minor comptes and comptesses have so much sway over their -- ahem -- "colleagues?" ... Does no one have any critical faculties any more? Has the 'Reagan Revolution' been so successful that no one under the age of 45 can even imagine the concept of critical thinking?
To be fair, people who are in their 40s and 50s now were in their twenties and thirties in the 1980s — they were the Reagan Revolution, to a large extent. So let's not fall all over ourselves to give folks of that cohort a pass.
But in a larger sense, the answer to the question Ché Pasa poses is essential to the full recovery of American liberalism. How did educated, intelligent people in this country end up in thrall to the right wing master-narrative of history?
Is it as simple, as some people suggest, as a reaction against the Vietnam-era counterculture and the excesses of the New Left? Do liberals today just reflexively reject any radical critique of power as a way of scorning their parents' generation?
Or is there something deeper at work, something to do with fear of instability and aversion to responsibility for change — a need to cling to any understanding of politics by which everything may be seen to be alright?
Avoiding those questions dooms American liberals to repeating the same sorry history. (Or I suppose we could just die off and let the kids clean up after us — they don't seem to have the same trouble grasping the truth. But "eventually they did all die" hardly seems like a legacy to strive for as a generation.)