Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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Don't go.
[Read the article: My company wants me to move to California ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yeah, Cary's right on this one.
I love California, personally. But that's what's required, for anyone who wants to live there.
Otherwise, mundane concerns like the high cost of rent easily trump any pluses you might find. Merely feeling so-so about the place isn't enough. And if you find yourself outright uncomfortable with the prevailing social Zeitgeist of the particular part of the state where you find yourself residing, you'll be miserable.
It appears that if you've found yourself an idyllic living situation, already. It doesn't seem as if it took too long to put together a list of what you like about the place.
It sounds to me like the sort of location that you want to savor as not being "discovered", for as long as possible. Not so easy to find that in California. Tougher all the time.
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Skylark and Elephanman: two perspectives
[Read the article: Torture and the rule of law]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]skylark, from page 1:
all my life I was told by my government and by the history books that the Nazis, the "Japs", the Russians, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans - they were the bad guys. They imprisoned people without cause, and then they tortured them.
We were the good guys. In peace and war we followed the laws and the rules of the the civilized world. We protected the innocent and we never, never, never tortured anybody.
It's painful for me to see the actual truth that while our past was not always totally pure, our present leaves no doubt that we are now definitely bad guys.
Our economic and political standing in the world is diminishing, but those losses are minor compared to our loss of moral leadership. I hope I live long enough to see that moral leadership restored.
That's all this is about for me, to. That's all this has ever been about.
And the only "response" that Bush Republican apologist Elephantman is able to manage, found on page 3:
Glenn Greenwald and Niall Ferguson need to get their stories straight.
According to Glenn, torture and government-sponsored mayhem are recent creations of the Bush Administration. But according to Niall Ferguson, we've been evil from the beginning of time.
War is hell.
-- Elephantman
Elephantman's point, on the specific matters being discussed? You're supposed to guess about that.
How phony can you get, Elephantman? (Readers are invited to search my letters archive for a sampling of selected Elephantman quotes and exchanges with Salon posters, for previous examples.)
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@Phonyman
[Read the article: Torture and the rule of law]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Elephantman, trying again:
As with the war on terror.
Where's the declaration of War, Elephantman? For that matter, where's the evidence of a War being fought against us, on American soil?
There was a much higher number of "terrorist" incidents during the era of the Vietnam conflict- assassination of major political officials, hijackings, bombings. But neither Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon ever attempted to fan the flames of hysteria by characterizing those acts as all-out assaults on the republic that amounted to an insurgency within our borders. Neither sought the power to legalize torture, or to imprison people on executive order. And when Nixon's covert wiretapping and surveillance programs were revealed, it led to him being thrown out of office.
There is no state of War within U.S. borders- any more than the strafing of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City signalled a state of War.
If George W. Bush hadn't committed the country to large-scale overseas invasions and occupations of two foreign lands, the very idea that the USA is somehow "at War" would be seen for what it is- hysteria. A few terrorist incidents directed at US property over a period of years does not constitute a War- even if one of them made for an all-timer of a photo op.
Any official body trying to draw up a War Resolution for a "War On Terror" would founder on the inherent incoherence of the concept. For that reasons, Bush and his cronies prefer to wheedle, insinuate, and use veiled threats to gain complicity for their framing.
In 1954, Puerto Rican gunman from the FALN got into the House of Representatives and sprayed the floor with gunfire, wounding five Congressman. But President Dwight Eisenhower didn't use that as an excuse to say that Puerto Rican terrorist groups had thrown the country into a state of war, and to exploit matters by trying to implement a police state.
This probably had something to do with the fact that both President Eisenhower and the American public still had a fairly fresh idea of what "a nation at war" actually resembles.
A binary choice. It is either a war that must be won, including (but certainly not always) the use of the tools of war, or it is a 'law enforcement' problem.
As pointed out ceaselessly in direct responses to your apparatchik party line, at various times during the 20th century, international conventions established some conditions for warfare that took some of the worst practices off of the table as lawful activities. The USA was one of the nations that helped establish those standards. But ever since the GWB administration, a 1984-ish turnabout and memory wiping effort is in place, to make it seem as if the notion of unlawful practices in war is an invention of the "Anti-American Extreme Far Left." And your own record of statements show you to be a perpetrator/victim of that campaign.