Letters to the Editor
ggrazevich
Published Letters: 33 Editor's Choice: 3
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What "counts" as consciousness
[Read the article: The light's on, but is anybody home?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think what matters to families and loved ones of a person like the woman in the study may not be what scientists can agree constitutes consciousness, but what they themselves perceive as a meaningful response. Burton uses the analogy of driving to work and "unconsciously" performing myriad meaningful tasks (like stepping on the brake when the brake lights of the car ahead flash on) while being "conscious" of just one thing (the news on the radio). It may be more useful to imagine levels or degrees of consciousness during that commute that differ depending on the task or stimulus: the driver is attending to the news, but is inattentively or automatically responding to signals inside and outside the car. All the while, the driver is certainly "conscious," or we might simply say "aware," of driving, as opposed to, say, walking or playing tennis. What might matter most to the loved ones of a person in a vegetative or "unconscious" state, is that there is enough "going on" inside that person's brain to "count," in their minds, as "being there" (allusion to Kosinski deliberate, of course). It's easy to forget that the Schiavo case was not really about what "counted" scientifically as consciousness, but what "counted" legally as guardianship. Had there been no legal dispute, few people would have begrudged her parents their perceptions of their daughter's mental state, no matter how demonstratively wrong they may have been scientifically.
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How very telling
[Read the article: Clinton rocks the vote in the Granite State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Note that she says she is "gratified" not "grateful." It may be merely a personal linguistic quirk, but "gratified"--pleased or satisfied--connotes entitlement or deserving, while "grateful" merely expresses thanks or gratitude (quite different from gratification).
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Postmodern journalism at its best
[Read the article: CNN's John King responds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because it's not just about what we saw and heard on CNN, it's about what we didn't see and hear. It's like the silences in Pinter, right?
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Webb was great last year
[Read the article: The Democratic response]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But what has he done for us lately? Both he and Jon Tester have been huge disappointments. After a solid year of touting in the left-wing blogosphere, after elation at their election, they've dropped from the radar entirely. The progressive netroots arguably made the crucial difference that sent them to Washington, and they, embarrassingly, have not only failed to step up and lead but ended up wasting time and political capital on things like condemning MoveOn.
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Senate Intelligence (?) Committee
[Read the article: The courts and Congress affirmatively conceal and protect lawbreaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Note that the vote not to investigate, along party lines, was before the 2006 elections. Then Rockefeller became chair. Given Rockefeller's support of telco immunity, we can't expect him to have the committee open an investigation now, but why wasn't he pressured for a quid pro quo back when his bill got reported out: "OK, we'll vote to immunize the telcos, but you have to conduct a complete public investigation with the committee, come what may." At least then some grain of truth might have come out. Is there any way to leverage him now?
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Teflon
[Read the article: What Howard Kurtz means by "media scrutiny"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My one hope in all this is something that at this point is still just a vague impression culled from media coverage, blogs, personal anecdotes, etc. Perhaps Obama is "our" Reagan: a teflon candidate (teflon president-to-be), who seems to appeal to independents and even members of the other party, perhaps not for logical, coherent reasons, but just because, and who, though vilified by a small group of people, inspires and recharges his base while being well-enough-liked in a fuzzy kind of way by the rest of the electorate. I never understood the Reagan appeal, and probably Kurtz and his ilk will never understand the Obama appeal, but wouldn't it be some lovely historical symmetry?
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Changing attitudes toward privacy
[Read the article: The banality of the surveillance state]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I recently attended a conference for companies, government agencies, not-for-profits, etc. in the information industry and was shocked by the generational divide regarding privacy. The main thrust of the conference was the intersection of Web 2.0 technology (social tagging, wikis, blogs, etc.) with traditional (often proprietary) information databases. Speakers in their 30s and younger barely mentioned privacy in their presentations--it was left to older participants in Q&A sessions to raise the issue. I was particularly disturbed by a presentation by a young library director (!) who said in response to a question that online privacy should be "opt out"--people want to share information, they think it's fun, the things you can do online are less useful without rich information behind them, so the default setting should be to let everyone else see my information unless I go to the trouble of hiding it by "opting in" to privacy features. I think that the born-digital generation has a "you've got nothing to worry about if you've got nothing to hide" attitude, and it will take some significant, widespread, and well-publicized abuses to change their outlook.
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Were the feds investigating prostitution?
[Read the article: Misadventures in logical reasoning -- and lessons learned from the Spitzer scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Or were they investigating suspicious money transfers? The stories I read online (and a blog post at FDL) said that Spitzer's bank ratted him out for suspicious funds transfers (which, by the way, shows that Spitzer was either stupid or liked the thrill of possibly being caught). The original focus for the investigation was, naturally enough, possible bribery since the transfers were being done by an elected official. Wiretaps in bribery investigations seem very much in order. The prostitution angle only came in later, when the feds discovered what the shell corporations were all about. Now, maybe the source for this scenario was lying. And probably the investigators were salivating even more when the bribery angle turned out to be salacious. And almost certainly the leaks were politically motivated. I think we can be sure that another US Attorney, say, oh, Patrick Fitzgerald, would have handled things a bit differently. But should the investigation have been dropped once it was discovered that it was not bribery but merely prostitution involved? As much as we would have liked to have seen a Republican official involved in something like this rather than a Democrat, I don't think this should have been swept under the rug or even downplayed by the investigators.