Letters to the Editor
Xanthro
Published Letters: 522 Editor's Choice: 47
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Foley matter must be kept non-partisan.
[Read the article: Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, George Bush and Joe Lieberman]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Republicans are doing enough on their own to keep the issue alive and harming themselves in the process. They desperately would like nothing more than to claim the whole affair is tainted by partisan politics. If that happens the Democratic Party loses the most.
Foley at least resigned, compare that to Jefferson who by any objective standard has accepted bribes.
Allow the Republicans enough rope to hang themselves and make sure we aren’t standing around with the trap door opens.
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Carnage or Gun Carnage makes no difference.
[Read the article: How to keep schools safe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, WeikuBoy where there are guns and a populace that misuses guns there will be gun some level of gun carnage. That doesn’t matter, because sans the guns, there would still be said carnage, just of a different type.
Whether one is killed by a firearm, or a knife, or burned to death, one is still dead.
Culturally, it the US, we tend toward firearms for violence, whether against ourselves or others. In places like Japan, the tend toward blades for cultural reasons, and Japan’s combined homicide suicide rate per capita is much higher than the US, despite more than half of firearm caused deaths being suicide.
We had someone who took great plans to kill children, and it’s naïve to think that someone who brought two-by-fours in order to secure the doors, would have dropped his evil plan simply because firearms were not available.
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The ducks do not suffer horribly.
[Read the article: I want my foie gras!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Notice that the near universal plea of those who demand a ban on foie gras. They take as a given that there is cruelty, and post phrases such as “The ducks suffer horribly, and for what?”
It’s a circular argument. They claim that the ducks suffer, and thus foie gras must be banned because ducks suffer.
The problem is that properly produced foie gras the ducks do not suffer. The two major suppliers in the US use techniques that are both humane and acceptable. The ducks are not nailed down, or kept confined in cages. In fact, the ducks are free to roam around and swim and during feeding time come to their handlers to be fed.
While the method of feeding would not be acceptable to a mammal, it is to birds, as it is how they naturally feed when young, and they naturally gorge themselves as well.
Duck and foie gras are a form of meat, and a very vocal minority opposes all forms of eating meat. Foie gras, despite being one of the best forms of humane livestock treatment in the US gets singled out simply because the market is small.
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HSUS
[Read the article: I want my foie gras!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Foie gras, despite being one of the best forms of humane livestock treatment
If this were really the whole story I doubt the HSUS would be supporting the ban, they are anything but a radical animal rights organization.
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Perhaps the Humane Society, to which I donate yearly, should use data from the United States largest producers and not that of the European Union or small producers in New York.
Every type of livestock production will have those that use abusive practices. The goal should be to humanely treat the animals, which the largest two farms in the US do.
Saying that animals in France are caged and die from rupture livers has no place in the debate because that's not the farms in question.
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Animal Ignorance
[Read the article: I want my foie gras!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I believe that many people purposefully look the other way when faced with the truth behind the food they eat. The information is too prevalent, the visual images too abundant to ignore.
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No, Penny, that’s not the case.
What happens is that people like you, with little husbandry background, suddenly act shocked that animals are killed so we can eat them.
Many of us have picked out a calf or a shoat, shot it in the head, dragged it to a cross beam, hauled it up, slit its neck and drained its blood. Then we’ve skinned it, cut off large sections, and then cut up into smaller sections with band saws. Many of us actually have bone saws. We’ve also taken sections and ground them up for sausage, scrapping as much fat as we could find for flavor.
What we haven’t done is suddenly had some ignorance based epiphany and gasped that bacon comes from a once living and breathing pig.
You complain about the arrogance of the United States while displaying a smugness of knowledge that you have all the answers, and if people would only see that animals are alive that people stop eating meat.
We in the reality based community, both know that the animals we eat were once alive, and we also know animals well enough to not be surprised that animals protect their young, can learn tricks and have many amazing qualities. Since we know animals, we also don’t fall victim to anthropomorphizing these traits. We also don’t compare or equate eating ducks to the slaughter of women and children in Sudan, based on some misguided notion of strong verses weak.
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Scale is important
[Read the article: I want my foie gras!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]if the meat industry thought that doing that wouldn't affect sales then there would be no reason not to allow it would there.
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The reason why meat industries typically do not want processes to be filmed is because of scale.
Most people know what dog shit looks like, most people have encountered it, picked it up in various ways and thrown it in the trash.
That said, most people would be distrubed by the sight of 2 tons of dog shit. It's not that they don't know that dog actually crap, it's just the scale.
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Chaostician and Lieberman
[Read the article: Multistate analysis: Democrats poised to take the House in November]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Chaostician,
The reason why Lieberman is leading is because independents registered voters make up almost half the registered voters in his state. They did not vote in the Democratic Primary.
Far too many people confuse the primary with overall support.
Lieberman is very likely to win the general election, which is why I've been vocal against any plans or ideas to strip him of power in the Senate, because we'll likely need his vote for Senate control.