Letters to the Editor
Jkalos
Published Letters: 507 Editor's Choice: 3
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man
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]i can't use these html tags worth a damn.
"drafts with no deferments" = quote from the man in the well, rest is mine.
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I'd be happy
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]if someone could invent an ad hominem fallacy filter for comments sections. Wouldn't that be cool? Some entries would just show up blank in part or in whole, as the fallacies were simply blocked.
Come one, computer geek genuises! Invent the ad hominem filter!!!
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WT
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]part of what i tried to do with my kids, but didn't have the full resources of a society to do it (to address you invitation to dream of a utopia) was somewhat in line with Aych's hint: to let them develop in ways natural to them to discover what their type of intelligence was (for all intelligence is not measured by the ability to deal with analytical problems under pressure). And to fit it in with the real rythym of children, who need play and freedom as much as other things. Logic, art, music, dance, first aid, meditation, interpersonal skills: think of the things we could develop in our children across the years with all the time and resources we have. What if elementary school teachers were one of the most prized professions in our society? What if the lower the "grade" (awful term:we would ditch that too: children develop at different rates) the higher the teacher qualification would be? And another poster said something grand: what if each rite of passage was tailored to the type of intelligence and stage of development of each individual? Some would make music, some would write, some would dance, some would just be damn fine integrated peaceful souls, some would climb mountains.
Ah, William: you've set me off dreaming.
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WT
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]yeah I heard kurt vonnegut speak about thirty years ago, and he said to totally deal with the crisis in education we need only pay the teachers more than the bankers and cut the class
sizes by more than half.
the way I have come to put that in current terms is: start teachers out with salaries at about 100,000 a year and make the requirements correspondingly stiff.that would be a start.
Imagine if only the very, very best of us were teachers (i imagine a kind of navy seals type of process for teachers lol to seperate the very best from the merely good), and they were trained and compensated and supported. But for that, my dear, I
am afraid philosophers would have to become kings.
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And I hasten to add
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]by philosophers I do not mean philosophy professors. I once realized that if they ever start looking for the philosophers to put them into a new Gulag, that the best place to hide would be in an academic philosophy department. No one would ever think to look for a real philosopher there.
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Bill Owen
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ha. I remember when one of my daughters, then about fifteen, heard bush say that on tv. She laughed at him and said: who would believe that, dad? Is he an idiot? fiercely proud I was of her.
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Morris
[Read the article: The Obama passport snooping and the unchecked surveillance state]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was going to be at that corner at 1:OO, you can't use that meetup point. And we all use GREEN hats now.
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@ondolette
[Read the article: The Obama passport snooping and the unchecked surveillance state]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]your post on the banality of the surveillance state was a very clear and helpful summary. Thank you.
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@Arne on inefficiency of searches, etc.
[Read the article: The Obama passport snooping and the unchecked surveillance state]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Though I think I have taken ondolette's post just a little earlier to heart: the point is the effect of the general searches. They are not actually looking: they are just part of the general conditioning. Thus no need to remove folks like your friend off the list, because even his searches fits the general purpose.
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Hume's Ghost
[Read the article: The Obama passport snooping and the unchecked surveillance state]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]thanks for the Paine quote and the reference on the Republic of Letters.
By the way, studied Hume quite a bit in graduate school: good stuff. Loved that History of England, too, my dear departed.
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Great analogy, Glenn,
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the one with the surgeon. And how surreal is it getting when this person is named "Slaughter." I feel like I am in a Joseph Heller novel. Soon Major Major Major will be coming around the corner, running from Yossarian.
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Ondolette for president
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]he wrote:
"1) Remove our troops.
2) Bring in humanitarian aid and resettlement experts.
3) Assess the size of the reparations.
4) Put the perpetrators on trial in an international tribunal."
Absolutely.
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Yes, Cindy Ross:
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]thanks for the poem. These guys never go away. It is always the same, isn't it? Each generation waking up to the same damn things one after another: the hard reality of the things that are in the saddle, and ride us. Samsara.
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Can you imagine
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]how much Thomas Jefferson and the others would hate what our country has become? I mean, if you've read them at all or studied what they had to say, that should be clear. How did some brilliant, insightful fellow put it recently: God damn America. I don't think Thomas Paine could have put it better.
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Settembrini
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nice links to the Dienstag stuff on political theory: I was not aware of him. I approach these issues out of Vico studies.
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Luigi or Lodovico?
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]or another?
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Settembrini
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One week a pistol shot in the air, the next in one's own head: one tough fellow.
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You know
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]sometimes I feel like if I don't laugh I will cry (apologies for my lame attempts at wit on this thread). The way the world is going, I feel one second away from a shrieking moan.
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Man, omooex,
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]you sure ratified my mood of melancholy this day. The bipartisan desire for american hegemony might indeed have worked out different in the details, but who can doubt that any administration would have tried to control that energy source? sometimes I even wonder, now, if "screwing it up"--i.e. decimating iraqi society so that it could be more easily manipulated--was not part of the bipartisan plan as well.
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Which is not to say
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that I think of some explicit conspiracy, but just that a significant majority of the corporate elite following out their self-interest results in a de facto "plan".