Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 124 Editor's Choice: 2
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What is a fanatic?
[Read the article: Male circumcision no help to women?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A fanatic is a person who violates a moral rule (without justification) to follow some command, usually religious. The charge of fanaticism, in my case, is misplaced.
I have followed Bernard Gert on common morality, but there are more empirically informed views. Stephen Pinker, in a recent NYT magazine article writes,
"When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity...The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense.
The emphasis one places on these universal themes accounts for their cultural variability. I don't happen to have the conservative emphasis on family; it's not a sign of a fanatic to hold responsible the members of one's own family for actions one considers unjustified.
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Spitzer should have handled it differently
[Read the article: The tragic fall of Eliot Spitzer]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Spitzer should not have appeared with his wife by his side to apologize or resign. The purpose of that was to frame politically damaging and potentially criminal activities as if they were personal, family matters. Spitzer would not have shown the targets of his own prosecutions the consideration he seems to expect if they had appeared in public to apologize with their silent, suffering spouses.
Instead, Spitzer should have waltzed to his press conference arm-in-arm with one of his favorite prostitutes and announce something like this: "Today, I have had a change of heart. I propose to legalize prostitution north of Albany. That will help close the state budget shortfall of $2.2 billion dollars, and it will bring prosperity to economically depressed regions in our state. Thank you."
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Adding insult to injury
[Read the article: Mirror, mirror on the Wall]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Spitzer should not have appeared with his wife by his side to apologize or resign. The purpose of that was to frame politically damaging and potentially criminal activities as if they were personal, family matters. Spitzer would not have shown the targets of his own prosecutions the consideration he seems to expect if they had appeared in public to apologize with their silent, suffering spouses.
Instead, Spitzer should have waltzed to his press conference arm-in-arm with one of his favorite prostitutes to announce something like this: "Today, I have had a change of heart. I propose to legalize prostitution north of Albany. That will help close the state budget shortfall of $2.2 billion dollars, and it will bring prosperity to economically depressed regions in our state. Thank you."
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Spitzer's only "logical" recourse
[Read the article: Misadventures in logical reasoning -- and lessons learned from the Spitzer scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Spitzer should have waltzed to his press conference arm-in-arm with one of his favorite prostitutes to announce something like this: "Today, I have had a change of heart. I propose to legalize prostitution north of Albany. The tax revenue generated by legalizing prostitution will help close the state budget shortfall of $2.2 billion dollars, and it will bring prosperity to economically stagnant communities, some of which resemble ghost towns, in our state. Thank you."
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Check out limitv.org
[Read the article: Slave to the boob tube]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Regarding no television before 2 years, consider the following excerpt from http://www.limitv.org.
"Doctors sometimes refer to the enormous brain development that occurs in the first few years of life as a 'wiring' of the brain, i.e., making connections between the billions of neurons with which we are born. TV watching in these crucial early years may affect this wiring. That is, if the hours of TV watched exceed a certain level, a child's brain may be wired to respond more to the TV environment (rapid changes of sounds and images) than the natural environment. That level has not yet been determined, but since the AAP recommends no TV watching for the first two years of life, we could assume the level is quite low. It is for this reason as well that LimiTV recommends little-to-no TV through age 4."
Elsewhere limitv.org notes that the flickering images of television contributes to neurological developmental problems in children under 5 years of age.
I believe that the overall effect of television on cognitive development is wildly out of proportion to exposure, and that the effort to separate the wheat from the chaff is not worth its sustained assault on your intellectual defenses: brief exposure to television depresses cognitive ability in every measurable category.
I have been TV-free for years. Getting rid of the TV certainly helped when I was pursing a doctorate in mathematics.
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Typos!
[Read the article: Slave to the boob tube]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]s/pursing/pursuing/ etc.
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Concerning smugness
[Read the article: Slave to the boob tube]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My decision to get rid of my television had to with eliminating unnecessary distraction. You have a finite amount of time on the planet. You can spend can spend your time productively or you can waste it. For some people, watching television is a productive use of time; for me it is a waste of time. Contrary to expectation, I don't have the time or the energy to be superior to people who watch television.
I doubt that admitting an innate aversion to the medium is tantamount to smugness. If I were to smugly assert that protracted exposure to television is correlated with a tendency to assume that the TV avoidant personality is a smug, supercilious snot, then that would be smug.
Now it turns out that a substantial body of research supports the hypothesis that television contributes to health problems in children, such as obesity, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, emotional problems such as reduced self-esteem, and developmental problems such as reduced manual dexterity. It is reasonable, not smug, to want to avoid a medium that contributes to disabilities.
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Prior negative experiences need not be repeated
[Read the article: Slave to the boob tube]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Advertisements for television abound in every medium. It isn't necessary have to keep sampling it to know that it is not worth your time, that television programming hasn't improved, and that it hasn't suddenly abandoned its propaganda model in favor of something else.
Haven't you learned from experience? I'll decide what experience is sufficient, for me.
As for secretly owning a large screen TV, that's as fatuous as it is false.