Letters to the Editor
kevred
Published Letters: 92 Editor's Choice: 8
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Is the government pursuing these cases with balance?
[Read the article: Is Briana Waters a terrorist?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...because I want to hear stories of such massive, conspiritorial operations directed at the insane Christian terrorists around the country who have been killing mothers, daughters, husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons for decades in violence against family planning clinics. Or perhaps those same fanatics directing and propagating violence against homosexuals. Because any time someone commits violence against someone they've been told to hate by a religion, they're acting on behalf of an organization to the same, or greater, degree than any environmental activist.
Sounds severe when the shoe's on the other foot, eh?
The types of environmental activists discussed here are breaking the law, there's no question about that. But groups who target people for harm and death--and anti-abortion groups do exactly that, every day--are inherently more dangerous to human life than any environmental group. As such, they should be focused on much more intently by the state.
What chills me about what's discussed in this story is that it's another example of property, and the right to make unlimited wealth, being valued more by society than the individual or nature itself. These inhuman, amoral corporate interests are granted the state of "victimhood" over the rights of those who are helpless to defend themselves. And the men with the money always expect the real, living, breathing humans to just roll over and accept their second-class status.
We think of guerilla action as something that only happens elsewhere in the world. But the more that the helpless are devalued by power structures, the more of this type of resistance we're going to see in the decades ahead. How do you think this country was formed in the first place? It's in our DNA.
One day, our descendants will look back on how we've treated animals, ecology, and each other, and will shake their heads that we were so insanely cruel, careless, and in denial about the effects of our actions on the world. In our heart of hearts, we know the types of things that ELF and others are fighting against are wrong, and should be fought against. It's to our collective shame that we turn away and ignore the greed and destruction that these activists are giving their lives to resist.
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Is it just me, or does he sound like Robyn Hitchcock?
[Read the article: The music lover]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I respect Bejar and enjoy the work of his I've heard, but every time he sings, I hear Robyn Hitchcock. Which is not Bejar's fault, but I do. And personally, I'd rather hear Robyn Hitchcock. Which is more praise for Hitchcock than a slight against Bejar.
As for the debate on rock: If you doesn't think there's anything left to say by a white guy with a guitar, keep looking! The popular stuff may be tired, but good stuff is out there. I agree about the tired state of indie rock and the like, as well as the general ignorance on the part of most people of so many great artists and genre-benders. But rock (as an umbrella) is far more fluid than it's getting credit for here. It's been a river that's transported so many other types of music to places they'd never get to otherwise.
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Good questions, but why do we seem to only ask them every four years?
[Read the article: Why Hillary Clinton should be winning]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's ridiculous that we still have an electoral system that's as bizarrely complex and inconsistent as ours, especially with the degree of transparency and openness that we enjoy in this country.
Time and again, it seems like these questions only get asked on major election years. Primary processes, voting machines, voter ID laws, vote suppression & disenfranchisement, recounting procedures, election finance, etc., etc.--these are fundamental issues that shape the way this country works, yet our government and media seem to completely forget about them for years at a time.
It's been 8 years since the voting debacle in 2000, yet it seems that only the tiniest, incremental progress has been made on key issues of voting fairness, and in many cases we've actually regressed, with insecure, malfunctioning electronic voting machines now polluting the process worse than any butterfly ballot ever did and the kinds of nonsense spelled out in this story making elections difficult and unsatisfying.
I'm glad the questions in this story are being raised. But why the heck haven't these questions been asked this prominently all along, and the government held to task until the answers are satisfactory?
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I don't agree that Gladwell "reassured" readers
[Read the article: Where have all the bohemians gone?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Having read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, I don't agree with this writer's assertion that the book was somehow a scam to make people feel like all their snap judgments are correct.
The points that Gladwell was making throughout the book had to do with the fact that there are decision-making processes going on constantly in us, many of them without our conscious awareness or guidance, and that it's important for us to understand this process in order to not make costly mistakes.
As I recall, his examples of successful snap judgments fell largely into the category of people with great expertise and experience being able to make correct instinctive judgments without being able to articulate them, and other people with an almost freakish, more random abilities (such as the fellow who could predict double-faults in tennis).
Along with the examples of success were other examples of when snap judgments go terribly wrong, as in the case of the NYC police officers' mistaken shooting and surveys of instinctive reactions to those of different ethnic groups. Examples like those were included with the specific intent of showing that snap judgments are in no way always correct--but that we're making them constantly, and we should understand what factors influence them.
The message I took away from the book was that we're all wired with our own sets of unconscious assumptions, associations, and decision-making shortcuts that are informed by our individual histories, backgrounds, environmental prejudices, and training (or lack thereof). Depending on that unqiue mix, our snap judgments can be uncannily accurate, woefully wrong, or somewhere in between. To read the book as an unqualified reassurance would be to ignore most of its contents.