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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 76 Editor's Choice: 13
Don't forget that on television, the ER patient is always revived by the persistent doctor after angrily brushing aside his defeatist colleagues. And since the participants in the Victory Caucus seem to conceptualize war at the level of a TV drama, maybe they're hoping that blurting out "Clear!" and applying the paddles one more time will bring the corpse to life.
A man who's been married three times isn't fit to lecture me on the virtues of lifelong monogamy.
So lady Camille watches ten minutes of "An Inconvenient Truth" and finds that sufficient to dismiss Gore as a con man? Does Paglia take the same approach to scholarly research I wonder? Does she start rolling her eyes 10 pages into a book or 10 lines into an article and start snorting and rolling her eyes? How are we supposed to take this woman seriously on any topic when she confesses to such intellectual shallowness?
Isn't it funny how in any social mud wrestling match,(i.e Rosie and Trump) Paglia always manages to find a way to come out on the side of the wealthier and more powerful contestant?
One of my biggest beefs with the genre of futurism is that it consists for the most part of people breathlessly telling us about all the wonderful things that OTHER people are going to invent, or which will just 'happen' - while we sit around and watch in amazement. All we need to do to reach the Singularity is let Moore's Law run it's course. In 25 years, we'll all be immortal thanks to medical and cybernetic breakthroughs accomplished by...someone. And so on.
The future is what we make it, with the emphasis on "we make". Sitting around waiting for other people to deliver it to us in the form or technological wonders inevitably leads to the kind of disappointment Simon describes. The "Star Trek" future isn't just about technology - the technology Gene Rodenberry envisioned was made possible because of a transformation in human values, and a shift towards a more compassionate and inclusive society - and that's a future any one of us can bring about by our own efforts.
The fact that Google might be slightly less sinister than other web giants hardly qualifies them for status as tragic victims of an unfair persecution campaign. Yes, they're the most visible. Hopefully, sustained attacks on their unethical policies will make the others softer targets in turn.
Rob Anderson, on what basis do you blithely assume that people who read comics and graphic novels are not also well-versed in literature, including the classic?
Nothing more, nothing less. It has no greater meaning as a phenomenon beyond what it is: an endless crawl of momentarily entertaining links that scroll off into oblivion without impacting our culture or our lives in the slightest. There's nothing wrong with that - but there's nothing TO it, either.
Davies' ideas have been floating around at least since William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" mostly unchanged since that time. I find the idea that we're living in a virtual reality simulation especially annoying, because it's untestable and by definition, mysticism, not science. There is no feature of the observable universe that forces us to turn to, or even consider, the simulation hypothesis. It's an interesting conjecture, nothing more. And if I'm wrong, I invite Davies to propose an empirical test to prove it.
"All those professors chattering away about free trade and exchange rates and immigration -- to what end?"
For the end of the free exchange of ideas. It wouldn't be very controversial to say that the internet accelerated progress in biological research simply because scientists in distant locations were able to communicate with each other and discover where they were duplicating each other's work. I expect the same is true when people in any scientific discipline suddenly have a chance to talk to each other on a daily basis. In that context, I can't imagine how economic blogs could possibly NOT have a positive benefit.
From Sarah in London: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
Can we get that inscribed on the entrance to every government office, institute, parliament, congress, academy, school, library, temple, church, mosque and shrine in the entire world? Would that be difficult to set up?
"In other words, Gore has surrendered to Bush again."
Huh? I don't get that at all. He's moving on into a bigger world than American beltway politics, trying to mobilize people on an issue of global importance that dwarfs transient electoral concerns. That's not surrender - it's growth. No one's going to care about the 2008 election in 100 years. But they'll remember the efforts of people like Gore.
I'm a 40-something with a fair number of 20-something friends and coworkers who are driven by the belief that if they're not "successful" by 25 they never will be. What can you possibly say when you encounter an attitude like that? If generation Y is doomed to a life of indentured servitude, it's servitude to the limiting definitions they've been willing to ascribe to.
Seriously, who's going to download the thing? A few adolescent nerds looking for bragging rights on Digg? How much of a loser would someone have to be to spoil it for themselves?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
