Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 10
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But it really does look and sound like cats fighting!
[Read the article: Catfighting your way to the top]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have to admit, I'm ignorant of the inherent sexism in the term "catfighting" indicated by the posters above, and wouldn't mind being educated about it.
However, I have seen women and girls get into many physical altercations. I have also seen cats (usually males, but whatever) get into physical altercations. They really do look and sound pretty similar. Uncannily so, in fact.
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I'd rather work the booth, thanks
[Read the article: Take your dad to school month]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As an actual man, I can tell you hands-down that I'd rather work the booth than help a bunch of brain-dead, self-absorbed pseudo-men build the damn thing. Luckily, I know very few of these folks.
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Jeffrey is a dork
[Read the article: The latest on the Abercrombie "girlcott"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's trolling because you deliberately cherry-picked some shit you knew would be offensive, and did so (as far as I can tell) just to be an ass.
Relax a bit, dude, and try to offer at least something substantive. You should also consider going by "Jeff." There's just something about a grown man still going by "Jeffrey" that creeps me out a bit.
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Not Everyone Finds Fondling Traumatic
[Read the article: May-December romance, or child abuse?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A letter from Fred B. Ithurburn of Yuba City to the Daily Journal, a legal profession paper in California (I swear this is 100% true):
The Daily Journal reported a case of a 62-year-old lawyer suing a nun for awening him when he was 2 to 4 years old by fondling his testicles and orally copulating him...This trauma apparently caused him to be unhappy in life, and psychological counseling helped him to gain a new understanding. His multiple marriages, alcohol abuse, addiction and unhappiness in life, he was persuaded, resulted in the need for money damges to compensate him for what the nun took from him.
I, too, experienced similar acts from teenage girls at age 4 and have treasured the memories for 68 years of happy times. I have never had psychological counseling to awaken me to my wrong thinking...
I'm trying to think of a pithy comment to go with the quote, but I got nothing.
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Investigator tactics
[Read the article: Sexual assault victim sues defense attorney]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm a PI who works in criminal defense, so I have something of a vested interest in this case. Investigating rape victims is by nature a difficult thing to do, especially from a moral standpoint. But, in order to put on a defense, they must be investigated anyway. It's often unpleasant work, but the fact of the matter is that people are falsely accused of rape sometimes.
That said, I would not condone the reported actions of the investigators in this case, in particular their love of surveillance and serving process at her school. "Investigation" doesn't usually mean tailing an alleged victim and their family and disrupting their lives. On the contrary, these sorts of tactics rarely, if ever, lead to good evidence and are frankly designed to intimidate the victim. Rape cases are successfully defended by thorough background investigations (pulling files at courthouses, really, review of the crime scene evidence, and interviews with friends and family. The victim, if she's interviewed at all, is the last person contacted. If she's a minor, we ALWAYS talk to the parents first. We would never contact her out-of-the-blue.
When the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s)are both minors, investigators need to be aware of biases in their interviewees, especially among teenagers, who are prone to accepting lies and innuendo as fact and whose shifting loyalties make them dangerously unreliable. I spend as much time vetting "friendly" witnesses as I do opposition witnesses.
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Just tacking on charges, probably
[Read the article: Like water for sex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Prosecutors in general pile on the charges in their complaints and try and get the guy for whatever they can. This gives them some wiggle room when they plead the case out, which they do the vast majority of the time. Ultimately, the prosecutor is interested in winning, so calling an alleged victim a prostitute might help him do that--it would certainly prejudice a jury pool to think the mayor's hanging with hookers.
It may backfire on him, though. The alleged prostitute is also a state's witness, who might not come in to testify if she doesn't like how she's been treated. You'd be amazed at the number of rape victims who don't show up in court to testify against their tormenters---not only because of the pain of reliving the experience, but also because poor treatment by law enforcement makes them as hostile to the government as they are the accused.
In one case on which I worked, one of the victims (a single mother of two from a notoriously crime-ridden town) was denied compensation from the state's victim compensation program, who wouldn't pay her medical or mental health bills after her rape (this after law enforcement themselves compelled her to go to the hospital--she ended up on the hook for the ambulance ride and parts of the exam). The reason for the denial? She was a prostitute kidnapped and raped by a potential John. Since she was a prostitute, the program reasoned she had contributed to the crime itself and was therefore not eligable to receive compensation. In her case, helping the police cost her hundreds of dollars which she didn't have and made her feel like a second-class victim.
She refused to show up in court for trial. I couldn't really blame her.
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Suri has a birth defect
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Don't you think? My guess is we haven't seen the kid because there's something wrong with it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with TC's relentless ultrasounding (not sure if that's a word, but whatever).