Letters to the Editor
Rob Seaman
Published Letters: 44 Editor's Choice: 4
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Palimpsest
[Read the article: The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Technology is inherently boring. The implications of technology are what is interesting. What electronic media have in common with all other media since cuneiform is the reader. People have been reusing documents since papyrus was invented. Presumably Lascaux has some overpainted handprints and depictions of megafauna.
This seems a revealing glimpse into a critical historical place and period that will be revisited far into the future. I'm not too worried that the writer will be renditioned (but his 8-year-old should be), but certainly drones (unpiloted autonomous workers) throughout the government will be set to cleansing innumerable web sites. Considering this administration regards "freedom of information" as an oxymoron, it isn't clear how much will be sacrificed.
The larger question is not the continued accessibility of currently visible online works - public access is a tool of propaganda - it is the preservation of the undisturbed contents of vast archives that may later become accessible to historians, journalists and citizens. (Should any of these three groups remain extant.) Does federal law protect only the overtly intended text of government documents for future generations - or rather the specific physical or electronic expression of those documents, steganography and all?
We've had a major news "anchor" (never was a better metaphor) entrapped with manipulated physical documents. How long until some spawn of Rove embeds a concocted palimpsest meant to sway an election or topple a public or private official?
This may be the single best justification for the WayBack Machine.
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Here's my mandate, damn it!
[Read the article: Why Bush hasn't been impeached]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can't simultaneously argue that half the country wants to impeach, but that we haven't spoken clearly on the subject or that our anger hasn't risen to the necessary level to trigger action. Impeachment is a dish best served cold - isn't that the message from the Clinton impeachment?
Or maybe you can argue this, but then you can't distinguish yourselves from the so-called establishment media. There is right and there is wrong. If we don't impeach Bush, what crimes and misdemeanors would it take to ever impeach again?
From the day his daddy's Supreme Court gave him the White House - to with whatever "gifts" his own Supreme Court will trammel our grandchildren - this has been a presidency focused on the destruction of the Constitution and the subversion of the rule of law.
Impeach the two of them and let the chips fall where they may. The civil war in Iraq didn't have to be. Open left/right civil warfare in America is long overdue. The alternative is to choke on our own craven actions.
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Yin AND Yang
[Read the article: What is the meaning of life?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of the possible answers tendered so far to "What is the meaning of life?", the Golden Rule is closest to the correct one. It misses the essence, too, however - not because the GR is not good and true and useful, but because it isn't an answer to life, but rather a strategy for living.
I clicked through to Eagleton's review of Dawkins' screed on religion. His critique of Dawkins' arguments could be applied just as well to Eagleton's own. Both authors have feet of clay and choose to wrestle with opponents of straw. The context for the meaning of life is surely much broader than just the meaning of human life. Dawkins knows this when not jousting with windmills, but Eagleton appears not to. Perhaps to be an apologist for Marx requires first being an apologist for humanity.
The best answer to the narrowness of Dawkins' caricature of religion is to be found in Dawkins' transcendent "Ancestor's Tale". And the best rejoinder to Eagleton's circumscribed purlieu might be found in his own "How to Read a Poem" - for instance in his analysis of Auden's poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts", beginning:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;Meaning arises not in semantics, but in the synthesis of a personal worldview from disparate, often conflicting, facts and conjecture. This synthesis is aided by casting our nets widely and by reading not just deeply, but broadly. Science AND poetry AND philosophy.
The meaning of life is in the apposite opposite. The tautology of an oxymoron.
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Rare Earth
[Read the article: We are meant to be here]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There really ought to be a way to search a thread, if only to avoid duplicating reading recommendations.
Just a suggestion that folks might enjoy considering the arguments put forward in the book, "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe" by Ward and Brownlee. These arguments don't tend to devolve to dancing on the head of a pin arguments about the anthropic principle, but make a lot of sense. Folks that just want to marvel at the cosmic oooh, ahhh factor might google Olber's Paradox or the "collapse of the wave function".
One might also want to consider synthesizing Davies' not too outrageous extension of the standard model of QM with Dawkin's notion of the extended phenotype. If current day peeping Toms are responsible for collapsing the grandpappy of all wave functions during the Big Bang, that certainly is one heck of an extended phenotype...