Letters to the Editor
rodian
Published Letters: 134 Editor's Choice: 9
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@farnsworth
[Read the article: The mommy wars rage on]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm afraid the justification for the video is the Pfizer ad you (rightly) despise. I'm looking at three ads right now just typing into a simple text box. One ad is for the Air Force for chrissake. And I thought Salon was a bastion of liberal group think. I wonder how many Salon readers are going to click that and decide to join up. There is still enough good writing to be found that I stick around; but I must say that I don't think Joan Walsh has really done a very good job with the place. It's sort of what's it's always been, but with a lot more annoying ads of every kind. Maybe to get a few more dollars Salon should start spamming everybody.
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straightforward achievement
[Read the article: Hillary's slick willies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'd be interested to know how Chris Richards, the first writer Camille responds to, distinguishes between "straightforward achievement" and "the darker political arts". It's easy to recognize achievement in a high jumping contest. Mathematicians don't have such a hard time of it either. But after that, all of the sciences go soft, and facts and opinion and conjecture get all mixed up; and more disagreements than not end up in petulant name-calling, as in Bierce's definition of BIGOT, n. "One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain."
I don't want to come of as a hypocrite - I certainly enjoy a bit of trollish behavior from time to to time. But let's admit it: it's cheap entertainment. It doesn't take much effort to spew vitriol; and adding a dash of wit doesn't really make it taste better. Isn't it better to use that energy to build something up, than to tear something down?
Hmm, seems my after dinner cocktail is making me go all happy happy. Tomorrow things may be different.
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alpha beta what?
[Read the article: Hillary's slick willies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]By the way, aren't alpha males (and females) by definition rather solitary creatures? Alpha figures with a coterie of alpha followers? What exactly are we talking about here? I thought this discussion was really funny - but it's also absurd...
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look upstream
[Read the article: Media hypocrites love personality politics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]More of a question than a comment, really. I also feel we are victims of a ruling class of media "elites" who's whoring worship of power uber alles betrays their shallow understanding of history, of economics, of science. The media aren't alone, however. It's the same sort of "to the winner go the spoils" laizzes faire worldview which also plagues the world of finance. Listen to some of Condi's geopolitical rationalizations sometime. Nietzsche is not dead, I'm afraid: he lives on in the vapid comic book hero fantasy world of wannabe cowboys (and girls) who virtually define what we call the "professional class".
Where do they come from? Anyone who's spent any amount of time in higher education can attest that a huge number of our ostensible mentors (with some exceptional exceptions, of course) are terribly status conscious overachievers who's lack of real accomplishment causes them to cling to fads and trendy flotsam in desperate hope that this will keep them from drowning. Are the problems we see - with the media, with Wall Street, with Washington, with Corporate America - indicative of a deeper problem: a sad and sorry system of higher education? Particularly those so-called "elite" institutions who churn out our so called "leaders"? Our MBA mills? We have Masters of this and Masters of that who know how to pick out a nice suit and little else.
How do we know who to trust? How do we know what to read? How do we know which opinions matter, and which are pure bullshit? We live in an age where curating, of rating, of sifting through vast amounts of information and rating it have all received unprecedented attention. This is a world formerly ruled by academia. This is, in a very real sense, why they exist. Where are they now? Has the bright light of academia been extinguished by lawyers and bean counters? Why are these institutions polluting our media and our boardrooms with vapid pretenders? Aren't they supposed to filter the wheat from the chaff?
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what about manufacturing costs?
[Read the article: Ask Pablo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I enjoyed the article; thanks.
I wonder, though, if this analysis is still a little over-simple. It's great to include the raw material costs, but what about the cost of manufacturing? The iron in the engine block has to be cast; it has to be machined; it has to be bolted into the car frame - and all of these things are done in factories by big machines. Where does the iron come from? Is it recycled or produced from ore? What goes into recovering scrap metal? What goes into the trucks and cranes and trains involved in extracting raw material from the earth? Do the same analysis for battery anodes, window glass, copper wire, radial tires, etc. This all turns into a really big and complicated connected graph, with many many inputs and outputs.
Central planning economies tried (still try, I guess) to figure this stuff out; but as far as I know, they never did very well at it. We're left mostly having the market sort out the relative costs and benefits - with the (big) caveat that a lot of costs - like the cost to the environment - aren't properly taken into consideration. I'd love to see who's done the most work trying to figure this out, and how far they got.
It's a really fascinating and important subject. Too bad it doesn't occupy more of our attention. Now I have to go find out if Hillary has been doing more shots or if Obama has done any work on his bowling score.