Letters to the Editor
Bill Owen
Published Letters: 508 Editor's Choice: 6
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@InMemLogos
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Susan Sontag's conclusion is not really supported by her premises. Death of the book? What does that mean? As we know it? How does "interacting" destroy anything? Nothing about an e book will prevent anyone from reading it in the way it was intended. If you want to read War and Peace on an e book without looking up a word, or making the text bigger, go ahead. The only difference is that you won't have killed any trees, wasted good clean water, polluted with nasty chemicals, or have burned any oil.
Seriously, it's the environment. This issue alone is far far more important than clutching desperately to an obsolete technology. We are killing ourselves with paper and plastic. This is not an exaggeration, there will not be any books, e or otherwise if we suffer a global environmental collapse. The forests are the lungs of the planet, and the home for it's remaining wildlife. Destroy it and we destroy everything. The "death" of a destructive and counterproductive practice, no matter how loved, is a small price to pay to help save the world.
Take all the arguments here and replace "books vs e books" with 78's vs LP's, 8 tracks vs cassettes, cassettes vs CD's, letters vs email, radio vs television, movies vs DVD's, film vs digital, and you will see the same arguments we are having here over e books. These are technologies that we either don't miss or still have, but in an evolved form. Personally, I don't miss 78's at all.
As Charlie Heston might have said, "They will take my buggy whip from my cold dead hands."
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There's only one sure way to determine Scalia's views...
[Read the article: Who would Antonin Scalia torture?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Call Jack Bauer.
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I'm being brief today
[Read the article: Who would Antonin Scalia torture?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Isn't a life sentence a death sentence anyway? So what's the hurry?
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Some thoughts on the death penalty....
[Read the article: Who would Antonin Scalia torture?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you execute people you will inevitably execute (torture?) innocents.
D. Micheal Risinger of Seton Hall School of Law, puts the overall wrongful conviction rate at around 3%. Kill em all Scalia has this to say about that... "That would make the error rate [in felony convictions] .027 percent - or to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent." - Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in Kansas v. Marsh, June 29, 2006
Even in Scalia's dark world, some innocent people would be executed, in my world, roughly 3% would be. Even if he is correct are Scalia's numbers acceptable? Perhaps you might say so in the abstract, but I doubt you would feel that way if it was a friend or relative.
And here is something really interesting for you law order and torture types. My feeling that your lust for the death penalty is all about revenge - bloody revenge. Unfortunately for you, jurisdictions with a death penalty tend to have a much lower conviction rate due to the fact that juries, at least the ones without salty on them, are more likely to acquit in a death penalty case.
As for deterrence, I used to work in the prison system here in Canada, and have spoken with dozens of federal prisoners including many murderers. I used to ask them if they thought they were going to get caught. The answer was always no. Of course! Who commits a crime if they think they are going to get caught? And if you don't think you will be caught, what matter the penalty? Roughly 80% of our 500 murders a year are domestic, in those cases it almost always a case of someone losing it. Again, no thought as to the penalty. Deterrence assumes a rational actor, unfortunately it is precisely the irrational, the deranged and the damage who commit such acts and they are, by definition, impervious to being deterred by some putative penalty, no matter how harsh. England used to have 150 capitol crimes, pick pocketing was one of them. Unsurprisingly for those of us who have studied the questions, public hangings were considered a field day for pick pockets! They were watching people get hanged for pick pocketing! Where was the deterrence effect?
BTW in Canada we have not executed anyone since 1962, our murder rate is 1.85 per hundred thousand (2006) vs America the rate is among the highest of developed countries, at around 5.5 in 2004, with rates in larger cities sometimes over 40 per 100,000.
As far as the death penalty being torture, Dostoevsky, who himself was condemned to death by the tsar, said, and I paraphrase from memory, that there is nothing worse than knowing the hour and the minute of your own death, and further, knowing that that death is inevitable. He said that even a man taken into the woods by robbers has hope right up until the moment the knife slices his throat. For him it was the death of hope that is the worst thing. This torture is unavoidable, the method is almost irrelevant, and I am sure that in many cases it comes as a blessing.
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The "truth" about why the tapes were destroyed
[Read the article: 9/11 Commission: Our investigation was "obstructed"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]After three days of "enhanced" interrogation which included water boarding, teeth drilling and shocks to the genitals they asked Abu Zubayda who he worked for.
"Cheney", he replied. "Cheney"