Letters to the Editor
mattrhames
Published Letters: 43 Editor's Choice: 2
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Some of the rhetoric is incredible
[Read the article: Jonah Goldberg's deeply "conflicted" thoughts on war and torture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People running around in circles debating the nuance of Torture is ironically painful to watch.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ writes in the Wall Street Journal an article called "Democrats and Waterboarding" with a subhead: The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.
Right off the bat, something interesting. Since we know that Democrats are the party on record against waterboarding, that means that being 'soft on terror' appears to mean not torturing.
But then, in the article, he makes two incredible statements:
"Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy."
Emphasis mine. So, he's advocating that Democrats should be for something that he's personally against. Perhaps it's this bizarre position that gets him tied up in rhetorical knots because the very next paragraph in the piece goes like this:
"There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives."
To recap his argument: I, Alan Dershowitz am advocating that Democrats follow the policy of the Nazi government which proved that torture (which I am against) works.
The shorter version: "Hey Democrats, why are you against something that was good enough for Hitler?"
http://tinyurl.com/3273es
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The word diet
[Read the article: Michael Pollan's manifesto on eating well ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Only we marketing people could take a word that means 'what we eat' and turn it into a word that means 'what we don't eat.'
Someone on a diet is not eating something. Even though, we're all on a diet, all the time. Change that word back, and people might begin to think more about the food they eat as opposed to the ones they are avoiding.
And I love 'locavore'. That's us.
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Money
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It seems, here, that we're willing to accept the notion that sports teams make money. In Buffalo, we're all sitting patiently watching the wildly profitable Buffalo Bills play a few games in Toronto because they'll pay something like $1,000 for a ticket.
Outside of a few rumblings on sports radio, we don't care.
Maybe it's because the Buffalo Bills already moved to a different city -- Orchard Park -- for the express purpose of making money. The browns left. Teams move, for money.
But this is a little different, and in some ways the similarities are interesting. England invented football. The US invented American football. And while American football is still almost exclusively an American game, they can't help but watch the way people watch football and wonder how they can get their hands on the money (an estimated 1 billion people worldwide watched Arsenal v Man U in a league game in November).
That leaves fans sitting back and 'hoping' they'll stay in our town.
If we're not going to be outraged, maybe we'll pick another sport instead. Really.
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Rockstar curling
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I hope this isn't a writer's strike thing, and it's for real. In Japan, they did a curling reality TV show that was one of the highest rated. As a devoted a long time curler, people ask me about the game. Here are the six great things about curling:
1. Winner buys the loser the first drink (losers get the second, and a drink doesn't have to be beer, but probably should. All curling clubs have tables of eight (it's four on four).
2. Anyone can play. Fat, skinny, old, young. I've seen 92 year old's play. I've seen 300 pounders play.
3. It's something to do in winter. If you live in a place that has winter, you get this.
4. You can quit anytime. No curling commentator has ever said: you gotta hand it to 'em Chuck, they stuck in there till the end. In curling, you can and should quit when you know you're not gonna win.
5. It's mildly athletic. Yes fat guys can play. But it isn't sitting on a couch flicking channels. Sweeping is as tough as you want to make it. At the highest level (like Tiger has shown in golf) fitness matters.
6. There's a podcast called thecurlingshow.com that interviews the top players in the game that attracts 30K+ listeners an episode. The players are down to earth and thrilled to be interviewed. In other words, the top curlers in the world are incredibly accessible.
I think all of this would make for great TV. And curling is just quirky enough to be a hit.
Rock on.
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Switch phones
[Read the article: GOP politics in a nutshell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because of telecom amnesty, I switched phones. I had one of the big three, and cancelled it. I'm with CREDO. Anyway, the phone company called to ask why I switched. I told them I disagreed with their corporate policy. She asked which one. I told her it was her company's position on FISA and immunity for something we don't know about. She said thank you and hung up. I felt a morsel of power.