Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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Rumbles in the design economy
[Read the article: Betrayal: A Silicon Valley way of life]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This isn't necessarily a story about cheating. It's a story about how technological knowledge spreads.
An apt characterization, but there's something worth digging into even more here.
Since the dot-com crash and especially with the rise of outsourcing the American tech economy has been characterized by a marked deficit in creative labor. There's been a continuous unslaked demand in what you might call the "design economy" for people who can innovate, invent and design rather than merely operate, build, or code. We as a people simply aren't educating ourselves well enough or fast enough to keep up — and societies which haven't yet reached their info economy climax ecology (which is to say pretty much the entire rest of the world) aren't in any position to fill the gap.
Or at least, they weren't until now. What's different about the conflict that Andrew Leonard mentions here is that, as he implies, it represents a threat higher up on the food chain of American complacency. It's like we've said, "Okay China, fine, basic programming and manufacturing have been internationalized and we can wrap our heads around that. But now you want to do get into design-intensive work too? No fair!"
We're already taking a back seat to the Europeans in sustainability. Is high tech going to go the same way? A society with the work ethic, spirit of invention, and wealth of human ability that the US possesses ought to be setting the standard, not thrashing around in a jealous fit (however traditional that may be in Silicon Valley) trying to preserve its cozy position for as long as possible.
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Salon a hotbed of Clintonist fellow-travellers?
[Read the article: Last thoughts]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Salon has a history of centrist Democratic leanings, which (unsurprisingly) have led it to Clintonophilia on many occasions.
So what?
I don't agree with all of that agenda. I would have liked (and still want) Salon to be more critical of the assumptions of centrist liberal thinking. But just because I disagree with some of the magazine's views doesn't mean that the whole editorial staff are Clinton fifth columnists.
Let's everyone repeat together: "likes Hillary Clinton more than I" is not equivalent to "is a wholly-owned Clinton propaganda mill."
Heck, if it were then every time I was out with nice, decent liberals I would be paralyzed by the constant fear that they were secretly on the payroll of the Clinton campaign, to a man, woman, and child.
And that's crazy talk. We all agree about that, right?
Don't we?
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Enough high-mindedness! Let's have some sharp elbows.
[Read the article: How Barack Obama swept to victory in Iowa]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It was not entirely a high-minded conversion experience.
Politics, even little-D democratic politics, boils down to horse-trading in self-interest. Beware the high-minded converts! The Iowa caucuses remind us that the roots of our government are in small groups of people getting together to thresh out their differences and make the deals they need to make to get things done.
And more power to Barack Obama, who, it seems clear, won by betting on voter involvement and then finding ways to make it happen. If sanity (or some measure of sanity, anyway) is to prevail in November that's what it will take.
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What's wrong with duty?
[Read the article: Barack delivers, Hillary disappoints]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But her opposition then sounded dutiful rather than impassioned.
That's because that's the kind of person Clinton is — dutiful, rather than impassioned.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being motivated by a sense of duty, as old-fashioned as that concept may be. In fact, when it comes to Social Security, I tend to trust people driven by a relatively uncreative sense of duty over those whose passions inspire them to tinker with a system which everyone with a political memory longer than a mayfly's knows is doing just fine despite all the talk of impending disaster.
If one is going to measure a candidate's viability, though, based on the passion of her rhetoric, Clinton will never be satisfactory. She just doesn't have it. It's not in her nature.
Another consideration that Joe Conason didn't include in his observation is that Clinton's husband campaigned in 1992 as a true outsider, appealing by necessity to young people and those disenchanted by politics as usual. In this he found himself squarely at odds with his own party establishment (for which they still haven't forgiven him). The fact that 15 years later Clinton herself is on the other side of that relationship vis a vis Barack Obama ought to be a glaringly obvious warning sign.
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Right to choose
[Read the article: Womb for rent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm no anthropologist but I suspect that reproductive transactions hugely predate the monetized, globalist form that Judith Warner is feeling so icky-poo about. The Biblical Old Testament is full of Israelites making deals over who gets whom pregnant, child-swapping, and any number of other soap-operatic developments.
Call me crazy but isn't this a case of a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices? One of the things about free choices is that they're free, you know? Some women pay money to not get pregnant. Others pay to end pregnancies.
So if some women accept money to get pregnant, and they do so of their own volition, on what basis do we say that what they're doing is wrong?
The thing is, from a biological point of view, women are baby-making machines, just as men are sperm-donating machines. Do we worry about the dehumanization of men making money from contributing to sperm banks? Or of women who are egg donors?
Granted, those purer forms of paid gamete donation aren't in the same league as being pregnant. But that's a choice for each woman to make, isn't it?