Letters to the Editor
Jim Douglas
Published Letters: 9 Editor's Choice: 1
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Female arousal drugs
[Read the article: Do women want a sex-drive drug?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So instead of slipping roofies into drinks, we'll advertise enough so that women will want to buy their own date rape drugs. All this on the same day that Salon leads with "In America, seduction is dishonest."
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There are other objections than religious ones
[Read the article: Why I won't stay silent anymore]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I really wish that I could be pro-choice. I can't empathize with the pile of cells that becomes a fetus. I feel for mothers that have to be put into terrible predicaments because they are pregnant, and would love to be able to make these problems go away. I really wish that the fetus wasn't a human life and that claims that it was were simply religious ones that could be dismissed. But what I wish is not reality - as much as I want to be pro-choice, I cannot shake the opinion that the fetus is a human life.
One need only type a few keystrokes into google to find a wealth of scientific definitions of life. Almost all of them involve a system devoted at one level or another to reproduction - birds and bees breed, viruses replicate their DNA, even mules, which cannot breed, have cells that are alive and attempt to keep the mule alive (and thus the system, which is devoted toward sustaining that continuity, is alive).
By this definition, once that clump of cells implants itself into the wall of the uterus, these cells are capable of replicating themselves to form a fetus (now that they have the capability of taking in nutrients), and are thus alive. But do they constitute a human?
Many pro-choice groups will argue that these cells are like another organ of the mother. However, in their desire to protect womens' rights (a very noble one, btw), they overlook one important fact - those cells have different DNA. The biological bar code that identifies each of us to our descendants is different between mother and developing fetus. It is a fundamentally different life form, and as inconvenient a fact as that may be, it is the truth. I cannot, myself, empathize for what amounts to a blob of goo, but that doesn't mean it isn't human at its earliest stage.
So by scientific definition, that fetus is a human life form. Now, whatever level of importance you want to lay onto that definition is your option, and the option of every pro-choice supporter out there. However, understand this: when you make your own definition of life you are redefining it solely to suit your goals. There's a universal definition available to us whenever we want to consider it, we just have to be willing to abandon our personal ideations and look at reality, as unfortunate as that reality may be.
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Diluted
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No, Ruth didn't hit against Satchel Paige, but he didn't get to fatten his home run totals on the Jeff Weavers of the world, either.
It was said only once earlier, but even though there were no minorities in baseball in Ruth's time, there were only 16 teams, starting pitchers generally pitched every third day, and you didn't have a cluster of mediocre middle-relievers (Babe Ruth himself threw 35 complete games in 1917!). If minorities had been involved, we'd be talking about how because of expansion there's absolutely no way to compare his numbers to anyone today. But branching out to other cultures and nations has allowed the game to double the numbers of teams while retaining a relatively consistent level of pitching quality.
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We need neuroscience to tell us this is innate?
[Read the article: We're prejudiced, now what?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How about plain ol' logical deduction?
Hypothetical situation - a kid is looking out his car window at a passing farm, points and says "look, mom... doggie." The mother corrects the child and says "no, that's a cow." She might add "cows say moo" or "cows are our spiritual superiors," but mostly, the kid is - on his own - subconsciously comparing what he knows about dogs to what he sees in the cow. His brain might assume that all cows live on pastures. Or it might conclude that all cows are brown. Or both. And more. But the brain has made patterned decisions based on previous information and new information, and this is precisely how we all learn until our brains are developed enough to start thinking logically.
Which brings us back to race. I remember, as a youngster, seeing a black man for the first time in the store, pointing to him, and saying "Look, Dad, Isiah Thomas!" Now, according to my father, the man looked nothing like Isiah Thomas, and he had to correct me. But my five-year old brain thought "black man = Isiah Thomas." And this same process, to a continually smaller and smaller degree as we age, continues. Our brains spot patterns and notice trends (msot wrod pzuzels wrok uendr tihs pcipnlrie), especially when those have been pointed out to us ahead of time (such as the classic double picture of a young lady/old woman) - very useful in most arenas, not so much in trying to avoid subconscious racial profiling.
So what I'm getting at is that, yes, it's neuroscience (unless our consciousness resonates on some level outside of our brains), but it seems ridiculous to me to claim that we have a "racial center" of our brain when the patterning that occurs in human learning easily explains this trend.
Jeez, the last thing we need is a group of human guinea pigs unable to identify other peoples' faces because overzealous scientists and media spurring them on mistakes the human "face recognition and processing" area for some sort of "magic box of prejudcial mystery."