Letters to the Editor
blunderdog
Published Letters: 494 Editor's Choice: 10
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Not Funny
[Read the article: Is rape ever funny?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's a lame sketch. There's nothing wrong with the attempt, though. It was a reasonable premise, it just falls flat.
On a serious note (if one's intended, I often can't tell), I'd opine that the idea that people can "decide in advance" about what can and can't be joked about is a threat to free speech.
My experience of how humor works is that it's not inherently rational. If you can only decide whether something is funny AFTER passing it through your intellectual filters first, I'd say you don't have much of a sense of humor.
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Anyone else ready?
[Read the article: Beware the pink posse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Come on, let's do it!
There are so many examples of horrible injustices daily that we'd have our work cut out for us, but I'd be thrilled to join the "gang" that would actually do something to improve our situation.
It's an interesting aside that the media (I never thought about this 'til I read the post) would refer to such a situation as "vigilantism." Of course it is, but significantly, by pretending that people's moral judgement might be about "vigilantism" rather than the original cause of the grievance, the media never has to examine the context of the story.
Vigilante 1 has pursued and killed an armed, bloody man who he saw running from a multiple-murder crime scene.
Vigilante 2 has thrown a bucket of mineral spirits over a Humvee parked in a handicapped space of a mostly empty parking lot.
A lot of people might feel differently about those two cases. It seems evident that one isn't necessarily "pro" or "con" vigilantism.
PS: There's no question India's democracy is functioning hecka lot better than ours.
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Just to Mention
[Read the article: The real two-state solution]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Israel exists because a buncha people fought a freakin' WAR to take the land from the few remaining non-Zionist landowners and their numerous tenants. At the same time, they beat back nation-state attacks from several sides and retained their territory.
So can everyone back off the whole "Israel has no claim to territory" notion? They fought a war!
The only thing the Zionists/Israelis did "wrong," relatively speaking, is they didn't kill all the...unfriendly...residents when they took the land.
That's why the USA gets a say, too. We were smart enough to kill all the Indians. (Not technically every single one, but close enough...reservations took care of many of the rest. This wasn't 300 years ago, either.)
As for the neighbors--by now, every nearby state has acknowledged Israel's existence, and most of them are actually tolerant, with the exception of the fundamentalists we tend to pay disproportionate attention to. Every practical leader in the Arab "accepts" that Israel isn't going to be dumped into the sea anytime soon. They've got nukes.
Maybe that's as good as it gets. Israel's looking at about even returns if they'd just round up and murder all the Palestinians as if they would create a new, fully-autonomous Palestine on the West Bank.
I personally think the catch is Israel can't afford to give up the water and that kinda overrides everything else.
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Not Yet, Nah
[Read the article: Is race dying? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]After a paragraph of public opinion statistics:
These findings are evidence of a coming sea-change in America's racial landscape.
Or perhaps they just demonstrate that a complicit fourth estate can very effectively (and rapidly) shape public discourse and influence public opinion.
If the media portrayal of a targeted group is unflattering, comfortable media consumers who don't perceive themselves as members of the targeted group will distance themselves (in self-conception and discourse) from that targeted group.
The media has been presenting the "poor black" as criminal, drug-using, violent, uneducated/stupid, and irresponsible for so long that no one who takes surveys wants to identify with or relate to that population. No matter what color their skin.
Most of the effectiveness seems to be a result of a near-hysterical retreat from honest discussion of "race" as it ties into the class warfare which is being waged. Al Sharpton is presented as a "community spokesman" on TV. What "community" is he representing?
Anyway, I'd say we're nowhere near the post-racial world Gary hints is to come. We've just briefly forgotten some of our tribalist bigotry because, for the moment, money is what matters most. If we ever return to times of more equitably-distributed wealth, race is gonna come roaring right back at us.
Multi-racial identity can help, but it doesn't solve the "problem" of different peoples wanting to share communal values which neighbors cannot tolerate.
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4 out of 19
[Read the article: Iraq? It's always bad for the Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]benchmarks, was it?
Yeah, look at all the evidence that security is improved.
We have great security in the US, and our central government can't accomplish anything useful either.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
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Herd Investing
[Read the article: Green investing 101]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you want to "be green," why put money into the stock market?
We've been told by everyone for some time now that the stock market is the bees knees. We have to invest in it for the future. If we don't, we'll ...die? Go broke? Be poor(er)?
For some reason, it's rarely questioned *why* everyone is supposed to invest in stocks. As has been mentioned, shareholders don't really steward their corporations. And mutual funds completely divest the fund shareholder from the corporate entities that the fund owns shares of.
Why not buy gold? Or real estate?
Oh, the stockmarket has outperformed everything over the past 50 years. But not the past 20, oddly.
Hmm...how long 'til you retire? That stock market thing is starting to look a bit dicey.
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Public School Education, Here
[Read the article: Four things we don't believe]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm with Obama too. No clue what is meant by "Clintonian."
Other than, "of or relating to the Clinton clan."
There's no consistency of thought or action amongst Bill/Hillary that I would even TRY to extract into an adjective like that.
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Well...
[Read the article: Clinton: I will be the nominee]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe she knows something about the electoral process that we don't know.
Like how to rig voting machines, or something. Wouldn't surprise me at all.