Letters to the Editor
melthough
Published Letters: 1343 Editor's Choice: 103
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@mizbinkley
[Read the article: Sister, can you spare $2 million?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I know there are many facilities that provide abortion services exclusively. Perhaps this is an east-coast phenomenon. The services are concentrated because they are squeezed out of Catholic and other conservative areas. The PP clinics I have been to did not perform abortions, actually (again, it is different in different parts of the country), so it would not have occurred to me to use PP as the standard. I don't think of them as an abortion clinic but as a place to get well woman care. Do you live in Missouri? I don't know what the situation is there, but I imagine in a conservative state the services might be concentrated into a few larger-scale facilities in urban areas.
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Ignore feature, and auto-generated, thread-specific pseudonyms
[Read the article: Who are you, Anonymous?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There are a few posters whose tunes I can name after just one note, and I don't continue reading. Perhaps there are people who would like to ignore anonymous posts altogether.
That said, I do not think I would ignore all anonymous posts if there were such a feature. At Broadsheet and at Since You Asked, very personal issues come up, and some of the best letters are about personal experiences that people would not like others to be able to trace to them - particularly if their one-shot-deal handle is actually their real first and last name. I have posted anonymously for this reason a couple of times. The accusation of cowardice is not aimed at these folks but at those who have gotten a reputation and can't weasel out of it by changing their user name anymore, so they start posting the same ideas anonymously (as though we don't know who they are...).
I liked the idea of the anonymice being assigned distinct pseudonyms for a particular discussion. The first person to click the anonymous checkbox could be Anon1 for that set of letters. The next Anon2, etc. Besides doing away with Anonymous altogether (which would detract from Since You Asked and Broadsheet, IMHO), that seems like it might be the easiest solution to implement from a technological point of view. And it would resolve a heck of a lot of confusion and impose a measure of accountability while still providing anonymous protection for those who wanted it.
I am also sympathetic about the letter-tracking feature which one Anonymous spoke of. (For one thing, I think if I post anonymously the letter-tracking links to letters signed by my user name!) Perhaps there could be a sell-by date on this letter-tracking feature? Especially since letters about the many discussions we joined two or three years ago would not even be comprehensible if read out of the context of the original article. Nor would they be particularly interesting, in most cases. I don't see a need for this feature at all, really, but if it must be there, perhaps it could be just one month at a time? Knowing people could track only the last month's letters might make people who have revealed lots of personal information over time more comfortable posting under their pseudonym instead.
Finally, in cases like that, it would be nice to be able to appeal to get a new user name.
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@webcelt
[Read the article: Subpoenas and special prosecutors, oh my]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I'd rather Congress moves directly to impeachment, starting that first if they insist on a special prosecutor as well, and let the criminal prosecution wait until either impeachment fails or Gonzales is gone."
Well, I wrote to my congresspersonages - one of whom is Leahy - in support of impeachment. (Not that useful, since the State of Vermont has passed a resolution calling for impeachment, but hey, I try to do my part.) They all answered me very thoughtfully and sympathetically, and the underlying message was that this is what building the case for impeachment looks like. They did not say this explicitly, but as I see it, impeachment will not be a separate thing from these hearings; the hearings are building to impeachment. If we're going to do this thing, we can't let them fall through any loopholes. This is how they build the case. It is agonizing, but I think this is the path.
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Decades of militant feminism
[Read the article: Roundup: Fake wombs and (even faker) female superheroes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Surely you do not mean to say that the fleetingly popular writings of one person constitute "decades of militant feminism." No M16s or grenades involved - no violence of any kind - so, first of all, drop the "militant." Second of all, we can credit many forces with creating international disasters, and the legacy of patriarchal institutions on that score is far worse than that of feminism.
I do agree with you, healthyskeptic, that the guy quoted here sounds like a real jerk. But I don't agree that Broadsheet is the neat feminist equivalent of his organization. I don't always like or agree with the articles here, but I almost always find the writers and most of the commentors to be capable and encouraging of open-mindedness.
It is also fairly obvious that feminism has enabled human progress, but transition is difficult and imperfect. So be it. I am willing to acknowledge that and try to deal with the lingering imperfections like a reasonable adult rather than declaring other people's ideas international disasters. People like this ManKind spokesman have done far more to sully feminism's name than Andrea Dworkin did - but, as I have mentioned before, I think it's time we renamed our movement; the name is an inheritance from another century, and I think it is outdated. The new name should encompass the entirety of reproductive, sexuality and gender issues, which is why 'humanism' doesn't cut it. Got any ideas?
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On Humanism
[Read the article: Roundup: Fake wombs and (even faker) female superheroes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Are you suggesting for example that humanitarians should stop calling them self that, and call themselves "feminists and masculinists united for male and female wellbeing" or something?"
No. I am suggesting that it is not humanists' primary goal to address gender issues. But if it were, I guess we healthy skeptics would just dismiss them by calling them militants. rotfl