Letters to the Editor
Tom 70
Published Letters: 142 Editor's Choice: 17
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cruel and unusual
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Vick ruined his football career, lost millions in future income, went from hero to pariah and is about to go prison, and it's all his own stupid fault. Yet while he's waiting around to be locked up, the poor miserable motherfucker can't even take a toke to ease the pain. Yes, he's dumb, but this sure is a vengeful society we live in.
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Thanks
[Read the article: Douglas Schoen and Hillary's slimy pollsters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... for that link to Ezra Klein's marvelous review of Mark Penn's new book. It was a perfect complement to your post, Glenn.
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W.E.S.
[Read the article: Douglas Schoen and Hillary's slimy pollsters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bravo for trying to pound a sense of humor into this forum, but, as you can see, it's going take a lot of work. Soldier on.
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Food for thought
[Read the article: The latest revelations of lawbreaking, torture and extremism ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn, a couple of months back you scolded some of your readers for their apparent hopelessness and sense of surrender, and, although a few of us thought that was unfair, you made some good points about how destructive that pessimism can be. Yet it wouldn't be hard to read your posts over the past couple of months collectively as pretty hopeless themselves. And even if they're actually not, it's unquestionable that your posts are breeding hopelessness in your readers. Just reading through this forum on a regular basis shows that the very truthfulness and clarity of your analysis is making a whole lot (though not all) of your readers feel (rightly or wrongly) like there's nothing we can do.
The few here who do offer hopeful advice about how to get out of this mess typically suggest either a mass movement of civil disobedience, which is inspiring but highly unlikely, or a stay-the-course plan of strategic voting and letter-writing, which is well intentioned but (to be brutally honest) not at all inspiring, or supporting a third party that we know isn't going to take power. I know I'm generalizing here, but I think the weakness of the optimistic suggestions we see in this forum only suggests an overall paucity of solutions and ends up reinforcing our general pessimism.
I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, Glenn, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. If frustration turning into hopelessness is a serious problem, then I think we've got a serious problem among those of us who are deeply opposed to what the Bush Administration is doing. It's not your job to design political solutions for all these problems, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with focusing on diagnosing the condition without offering a cure--those tasks are separate and equally valuable. Nevertheless, I'm not sure how you'd square the important work you're doing with your strongly held feelings about the need for persistence and resolve, which requires a belief that we can actually change things. It seems to me, regrettably, that your blog is inadvertantly chipping away at that belief.
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@Dana Runs
[Read the article: Why the T in LGBT is here to stay]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you for so eloquently being the first here to give a rational justification for why the T should be included with GLB. Stryker was so busy personally attacking Avrosis that she barely attempted to justify this, yet she herself acknowledged that homosexuality and bisexuality are issues of sexual orientation but "T" is an issue of gender identity, and so by definition it's the odd one out. One can fully support T rights but question the attachment to GLB on purely rational grounds.
So about employment discrimination, you say:
... much of being gay or lesbian overlaps with gender identity and expression. It is not the straight-acting gays or the lipstick lesbians who get the brunt of employment discrimination, but the femme guys and butch girls. And this, at its root, and even though is conceptualized as sexual orientation discrimination, is actually gender expression discrimination. It is less about sexuality than it is about violating cultural imperatives surrounding gender.
But if this is true, doesn't it undercut the validity of the demand for equal rights? I thought that the strength of the argument for equal rights--along with the constitutional support for it--was that employers can't discriminate against someone just because of who they are (black, female, homosexual, transgender, etc.), which is something a person can't control. However, employers are given all sorts of legal freedom to dictate how people look and talk and act, so if the discrimination here isn't about who these minorities are but how they express themselves, then what grounds do we have for criminalizing that discrimination? We can find it morally repugnant that employers should force people to follow cultural imperatives about gender, but that's an issue of regulating behavior, not of categorical exclusion, and it's a far lesser offense than discrimination based on someone's fundamental identity as a human being. Your analysis is very persuasive, but where does it leave you in terms of fighting discrimination?
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Dana
[Read the article: Why the T in LGBT is here to stay]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"We determine that the best way to do it is to provide explicit protection in statutes for matters associated with the protected class of people."
Damn, that can't be easy.
Thanks, though, and I'll check out your blog.
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Ask Native Americans!
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have to agree with the few posters here who've said that it's warped to discuss this without considering what the majority of Native Americans themselves think about it. Somebody mentioned a poll that said 80% of them like Chief Wahoo--is that true? Or is Bellecourt's opinion representative? Since it's fair to assume that the baseball team and its fans aren't using that name and that image with racist intent, these are the only questions that really matter. If Native Americans on the whole approve, keep the mascot. If they're offended by it, dump it.
Honestly, the notion that we white people should decide what's offensive and what's not in this situation (somebody here actually said "Who cares what Native Americans think?") is more racist than any of those mascots could ever be.