Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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What makes The Wire different
[Read the article: Hot off "The Wire"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What makes it special, what makes it novelistic, what makes it the greatest show in the history of television, is simply this:
Over course of 60 episodes, covering 5 years in our time and probably 8 in theirs, these characters have changed.
They are not the same people they were when we first met them. Some have changed a little, some have changed a lot, but every one of them has grown or shrunk or faced something and come out better for it or run away and come out worse.
On the Sopranos, for all the hype about its greatness, no one really changed. They became more of what they always were, sometimes less, but never any different.
But these guys. Reginald didn't even exist until Episode 59, although we all got to watch him becoming. McNulty, a guy who took his kids on a stakeout and had them follow a drug dealer through a flea market, has a conscience now. Lester, who was always the rock keeping everyone steady, has none. And for the people who think they haven't changed, like Carcetti, there's always someone like Bunny there to remind them.
This episode made me feel like they actually wrote every single day of these characters lives, and then decided which parts to show us.
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Who's the leak?
[Read the article: Hot off "The Wire"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Pearlman.
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@Elephantman
[Read the article: The cold price of hot blood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No, Rumsfeld had it wrong. His decision to cut the initial deployment by 2/3 (after it had already begun) is one of the reasons this is going to wind up costing us so much. If he had stuck to his commitment and sent 300,000 troops from the start, there would have been no uprisings, order would have been established and maintained immediately, and we'd already be out of there.
Of course, if he had stood up and told GW that he wasn't going to be party to some dumbassed personal vendetta against a country that had no part in attacking us in the first place we would have saved a lot more.
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Are we doing the right thing?
[Read the article: The cold price of hot blood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yeah, but only because leaving after destroying anything resembling a stable government would be the wrong thing.
Gonna put this out there again, Elephantman, because I am truly interested in hearing how this can possibly be defended - Rumsfeld caused every problem we have faced in Iraq since after we defeated their military by cutting the troop deployment from 300,000 to 100,000. I remember like it was yesterday, sitting in my office and hearing old Donald bragging about how we were going to be able to do this on the cheap and thinking to myself "We're going to lose this war because of this idiot." And I was right. We're still there, Americans and Iraqis are still dying, and there is no end in sight, at least none that doesn't involve leaving these people with no government at all and making the situation exponentially worse.
We went in there and removed the only person capable of leading that country, due to his own policy of killing anyone who could possibly oppose him to be sure but we knew that going in, with not enough men to keep the peace and a plan that was blown to smithereens by a SecDef who wanted to kick things off with a nice press release. And we did know what would happen going in, because that's why we let Hussein live the first time we went there.
Don't talk about heroes on the ground and then defend the asshole who cost all those lives and limbs in the same paragraph.
Point being that anyone who thought we were going to be able to get out of there in less than 10 years after the initial screw ups had to be mildly retarded at the very least. And anyone who can't see how badly we have screwed this up is just fucking stupid.
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@Paul Dirks
[Read the article: Shocking new revelation: Unchecked government powers get abused]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree. It seems, more and more, like these guys just do this shit and wait to see what happens. When there are no consequences, they do it some more. Why do things the right way when breaking the law is so easy?
And these are the people who are bitching about Obama's house.
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Read Seth Godin
[Read the article: Does "Obama Girl" help Obama?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The "problem" for Obama (or any other candidate in the New Age) is that they can no longer control the message through traditional means. The answer is that they have to "be the message". And that means either telling nothing but the truth, or lying a lot more effectively than anyone has ever had to at this point in history.
It's always rather amusing when we act so surprised that we were right all along. Mathematicians have been talking about self-organizing systems for years, and now that we have impressive evidence that they were right it's a huge shock. The reality is that the old system - artificial heirarchies and barriers to socialization - was broken and couldn't be sustained. Something was going to come along and change things. If it wasn't the internet it would have been the collapse of civilization through one mechanism or another, but we were always going to return to relatively small, internally logical yet transitive social structures at some point. Right now we are like lottery winners who don't know what to do now that some of our problems have been solved, but we'll damn sure find a way to spend the money.