If Obama isn't black, then I guess Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima weren't, either.

I wasted 3 years of my life trying to convert to Orthodox Judaism (my father is Jewish but my mother isn't, so according to Jewish law I'm not technically Jewish) and eventually realized that although pretending to believe in God was a good temporary fix for my deeper psychological problems, eventually the ridiculous nature of what you're doing overwhelms you and you reach a point of total embarrassment. At this point, you admit the inevitable truth--God is an overgrown fairytale, and we are alone on a ball spinning through space without rhyme or meaning. I hope that when the author reaches this point, it isn't as painful and embarrassing as it was for me.

Kudos to Matt Sanchez for giving us all a good laugh during an otherwise tense midterm week. Keep on drinkin' that Kool-Aid, Matt. You'll grow out of it--I know I did.

Not to be a douche, and congratulations for quitting, but, if you think the post-quitting blues are bad with cigarettes, try kicking opioids such as OxyContin or heroin. Even after the initial Trainspotting-style withdrawal, you'll be depressed, anxious, and dysphoric for a matter of months or years. Most people who relapse do so not because they can't deal with the initial withdrawal, but rather because they can't deal with the prolonged state of miserable, apathetic indifference that follows. Thank your lucky stars that you got addicted to a chemical that's socially acceptable and that doesn't do serious, longstanding damage to your ability to experience something as simple as human joy.

"but merely towards teh goal of exposing the corruption and radicalism at the heart of this extremist right-wing movement and to push back"

If you guys need a new copy editor, you have my email address...

The only thing funnier than Achewood are the people on this thread who take it seriously and argue about it. That big "WOOOOOSH" you heard? That was the joke going over all you people's heads.

Not everyone has someone to have sex with, you smug fuck. For those of us who currently don't, porn provides a convenient way to alleviate excess tension in a way that, while it may be undignified, is considerably better than the alternative of keeping the sex drive bottled up like a young yeshiva student or a monk. As long as it's tasteful, sensitive, and non-exploitative (check out or for ethically considerate erotica--needless to say, NSFW), there's absolutely nothing wrong with a single person using porn. While I realize that this letter is based around how porn affects relationships, I was really annoyed by the smug, satisfied tone you took to describe porn, as if it were only the purview of bitter married men too emotionally distant to direct their attention where it's supposed to be, their spouse. For many of us, porn is not a drug, it is not a substance, it is not a numbing behavior that serves to isolate us further from our community--it is simply a way of channelling energy that would otherwise be released in a harful manner.

You write "Like crack, it tends to take over, to push out other hungers that tend to nurture the human community by making us dependent on one another. Since we are dependent on each other we must be civil and loving. If we are not dependent on each other then we needn't be civil and loving. We needn't have community and family. That is the way in which any drug breaks down family and community by isolating its user. Porn isolates its users also, meeting their needs outside the social compact."

Substitue "self-abuse" for "porn," and that could have been taken straight out of a Victorian anti-masturbation pamphlet. Obviously you have never experienced firsthand a REAL drug and what it can do to human relationships. Try becoming addicted to heroin and see how that "breaks down family and community by isolating the user." Then you'll learn what compulsive behavior is really like. Right now, you are simply feeding into our culture's compulsive need to pathologicize everything pleasurable, a post-Victorian need to condemn human joy that takes the form of Overeaters Anonymous, NA, Gamblers Anonymous, support groups for "emotion addicts" and all the other various self-help groups that refuse to admit that anyone is healthy. News flash: we are all dependent on something to get through life, whether it's work, love, sex, achievement, money, faith, heroin, or any of the myriad other incentives society offers us in order to keep on playing the game. That's the way it's been through thousands of years, and that's the way it's going to be until we manage to blow each other up. Turning our basic physiological drives into pathological conditions that need treatment is not only foolish, but contributes dangerously to a society of perpetual hypochondria (witness the recent "rise" in such "diseases" as fibromyalgia, ADD, Morgellons Syndrome, and my personal favorite, "chronic fatigue syndrome").

Thank you, John McCain, for giving Iranian hard-liners ammunition. You may as well be paid by Ahmedinejad, because you're doing his work for him.

RealName, that can't be true, because if you had solid evidence, you wouldn't be posting on Salon, you'd be furiously masturbating (Chas v'Shalom!)to the thought of dead Iranians.

Keep your AA 12-step crap to yourself. LW isn't addicted to anything, and even if he were, that stuff doesn't work for everyone. Telling someone mentally ill that he is powerless and needs to turn to a higher power to feel better is extraordinarily dangerous and insidiously cruel. It may have stopped you drinking, but you people feel the need to preach it in every corner of life. Just accept that it isn't for everyone.

The caption to that picture should be "Elect me, and I'll do for America what I did for New York: have all the homeless secretly gassed."