Letters to the Editor
firefly82
Published Letters: 333 Editor's Choice: 30
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Wow. Just wow.
[Read the article: I let my friends stay with me and now they're evicting me!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If it were me, I wouldn't go. Don't give them any further confirmation that it's okay to bully and take advantage of their friends.
If your name is on the lease, you have a huge leg up. But get a lawyer ASAFP. Look up legal clinics or housing advocacy groups in your city if you can't afford one. I think you can't afford NOT to have one.
In the case that it is a housing discrimination/evicting women with children issue, which I highly doubt, I'd tell them they're welcome to stay. But I'm not going.
But don't take my word for it--take your lawyer's.
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Non-visual ID
[Read the article: Veiled women allowed to vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of course veiled women should be allowed to vote. But I'm always thinking things are no-brainers and end up surprised....
To say veiled women can't vote is as good as saying that women who hold any religious belief requiring veiling can't vote. Seems like a redundant spoonerism, but it's religious discrimination, plain and simple, if women of a certain faith cannot both sincerely uphold the practice that their faith requires AND participate meaningfully in democratic government.
And what does it say to radical Islamic leaders if one of the world's leading stable democracies legislates that one cannot both freely practice her faith and have a say in her own government?
Furthermore, in the States at least, ANYONE can prove their identity non-visually, with other pieces of non-photographic documentation: leases, phone bills, Social Security cards, letters from school officials, etc. I have never had to show photo ID to vote. Why shouldn't conservative Muslim women have the same options regarding non-visual ID as everyone else?
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: )
[Read the article: Veiled women allowed to vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Very good, ChillyDogg.
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Rules of the media
[Read the article: Hit her, baby, one more time]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sonia wrote <<Regardless of what anyone may say, here is a woman who has followed all the rules fed women by the "media" (I know, it's a loaded term), and still she's being ridiculed and beaten down.>>
We need to somehow re-teach our youth--boys and girls alike--and ourselves, that doing what other people say you should and following rules are not enduring values or foundations for building a life and a self. ASAP.
I agree about the kind of culture we have that lures young women into these disasters. But the media would be powerless to do this if young people were pushed to think about what's important to them, what do they value, how do their consciences demand that they live, instead of to follow the right rules to get into the best college, have the most stuff, perfect life, right looks, etc. And parents and schools are as guilty here as the trash media. We don't teach kids to find their own self-sustaining values, but to follow certain certain sets of arbitrary rules instead of other sets of arbitrary rules.
The posters who are linking the Britney meltdown with how we got into Iraq have something here, and I think are making this very point in a more roundabout way.
I had it figured out by early adolescence that doing what other people wanted me to--whether they were peers, teachers, authority figures or purported experts--tended to get me hurt, humiliated or in trouble. I think it's time we learn this lesson on a massive cultural scale.
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Boys ARE important, and I like them.
[Read the article: Fear of a female planet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Au contraire, gitaiba. As far as reproductive technology has come, and is yet to come, for what can be done in a lab, you guys are still awfully important in natural populations.
Genetic diversity is vital to long-term population health. Say a population has one male for 100 females, and impregnates all of them, and the filial generation has 50 boys and 50 girls. Now there are 50 males available next time around, but they all have the exact same Y chromosome. If there's a mutation on that Y chromosome, all males in the population now have it. It may or may not be harmful, but now it can't die out or be selected against--there's no other allele (variation of the gene) to do that. Selectability amoung various alleles in response to changes in environmental conditions, or microevolution, is what keeps populations adaptable.
And that first guy's other chromosomes--each of his offspring only gets one or the other from each pair. When they mate, and no matter what, their only choices are their own half-siblings, they'll just be recombining his genes again. This is why populations like the Amish (sorry to use such a stereotyped example) are at such risk for severe genetic disorders from intermarrying--the defects in a few people's genes are just getting recombined with each other. In large number populations, a defect in one chromosome copy is usually offset by a good copy from the other parent's contribution. In large populations, a huge amount of genetic variability gets endlessly reshuffled into novel combinations. In a very small or severely inbred population, the possibilities just get narrower with each generation.
Imagine endlessly reshuffling a deck of 1000 cards, or one of four. Which gives you better options for response to environmental stress? Cheetas are in this very predicament--they've been re-bred from such decimated numbers that there were only so many gene variations to go around--every cheetah alive today is essentially a clone of every other. Say an environmental stress arose that was fatal to a particular cheetah genotype. Oops, it's the only genotype they have.
Okay, sorry for the treatise.
Brightstar? Normal male behavior is as diverse as are individual males. Ditto for female behavior. Also for standards of beauty and what constitutes attractiveness. Some of us actually like, and are attracted to, genuine, self-assured people who have more interesting things to do than endlessly taunt anonymous strangers over imagined personal slights. Some people don't like idealized, stereotypical perfect people, but real, imperfect, individual ones whose feelings don't fall easily into your angry simplifications.