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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
raj
Published Letters: 122 Editor's Choice: 11
I'm surprised that you took Crain's statement at face value, esp. because he did keep Fordham's sexual orinetation out of the paper. More egregiously, he refused to "out" Ken Mehlman, one of the more obvious high level GOP "closet cases". The first thing that the Blade's new editor did was fire the ex-sex worker "journalist", known as "Jeff Gannon", another of Crain's innovations. It was amazing how Crain could chastise people for not supporting gay marriage one week and keep Mehlman in the closet or have a phony like Gannon give an op-ed.
THe glass closet exists because of people like Crain, as well as prissy people like Len Downie. The Post's willingness to wallow in Monica-gate doesn't put it in much of position to be protecting gays who disenfranchise other gays and hide behind a lot of courtesies and rationalizations.
For the record, Doraville, GA isn't that Southern. Like its neighbor, Chamblee, it has absorbed a great many immigrants from SE and E Asia, and is not far from a corridor where most peope are from southern Mexico.
Virginia has a long way to go before becoming Cleveland or St. Louis. Webb promises to break a streak of truly weak Seantors: Warner, Robb, Allen. And the Dem governors from Wilder to Kaine would be considered conservative in real bellweather states like Washington, Ohio, or Michigan. And Ollie North happened not that long ago.
Outside of NoVA, Virginia is still stuck with the neo-Feudalism and hardshell Protestant conservativism of the traditional South. Midwestern conservatives can be dragged kicking & screaming toward something new, but Southerners won't even do that. And although NoVA is more liberal than say, metro Atlanta, it's still too Southern for a lot of people who live across the Potomac. When stroll down Clarendon Road in Arlington, I start getting flashbacks of living in Atlanta.
May be 10 years from now, Virginia will be more obviously "purple", but until then this boosterism about a new Virginia just seems like a new version of Washingtonian myopia--usually from people who crossed a bridge into DC.
I just left the South for DC. The South is still distinctly different--I'm a Midwestern native, whose also lived in the NE and spent a lot of time on the West Coast for work and family. Places like Georgia aren't going to turn Blue any time soon---outside of Atlanta (S of Buckhead) and its immediate suburbs to the East & South, Georgia is solidly Red. Virginia remains distinctly different from its neighbors even in the DC area. Still, there are several Souths--A border state like Tennessee actually should be competitive for Dems and it had 2 liberal Seantors 15 yeasr ago. Alabama and Mississippi are hopeless, tho. The 50 State strategy is a good idea vbecause it helps build state parties, but national elections are won in classic swing states----Florida is the only one in Dixie and its been listing Red. The Great Lakes States, Oregon, Washington, & Pennsylvania are worth more effort and have more electoral votes. Shifts in the intermountain West (which is growing faster than most of the South) are probably a more important trend to follow than the glacial transformation of Virginia or the occasional brightspot in NC.
Wallace's response is even more curious than his interview. He responds most directly to the most tangential of comments, rather than those from persons most familiar with psychology or Buddhism. He also take the rather odd position of characterizing cognitive science in antiquated terms, while invoking a methodology that has its roots in the same era as those which he criticizes. One of the many ironies is that conciousness is a standard part of ever intro psychology text and is often the issue that draws people into the filed. The methods used to explore conciousness, over time, include experimental hypnosis, psychophysiological measurement, mood induction, use of psychactive substances, various forms of newuroimaging, and many variations on self-report. Introspection, in the Jamesian sense, is limited by situational, and individual differences in self-observation and recall. Only some of these differences can be addressed through some form of training or discipline. Even so, many forms of self-report continue to be used in cognitive science, and in psychology, in particular. Only the most presumptuous and arrogant would assume that any one method of exploring conciousness is the sine qua non of the field.
The exploration of Buddhist mediatation, in particular, has been a part of North American psychology for decades and is an important aspect of psychology in Buddhist countries such as Thailand. This continues to be neglected in Wallace's assertions.
Wallace tries to establish himslef as not speaking for all forms of Buddhism, yet he does not really identify the Buddhist bases for his assertions. The narrowness and lack of scientific sophistication of his resposes is very much at odds with the sense of empricism that is part of Buddhist belief and practice. It also negates the effort to reconcile cosmology and science by persons of other faiths.
The normal response to all of this in a Buddhist tradition would be to return to meditation, in hopes that mindfulness and other aspects of "right conciousness" would enable an underatnding of the bigger picture and the renunciation of worldy desire (and arrogance).
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"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
