Letters to the Editor
bonerici
Published Letters: 28 Editor's Choice: 2
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i'm sick of salon tooting religion's horn
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Three hundred letters in half an hour about how brilliant and righteous and brave the Athiests are?
The heathen doth protest too much?
there are three things salon is:
1) an awful source of indie music. sorry salon your musical taste is terrible
2) the best liberal usa based web site in the world
3) full of religious mumbo jumbo
Just because it does great liberal reporting doesn't mean I will stop bitching about the things it does wrong. I protest so much not because I hate salon.com but because I love it. THAT is why you hear the thunderous sound of agitated atheists.
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trying to care
[Read the article: The coddled "terrorists" of South Florida]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]i read this article, tried to care, but couldn't. I'm more concerned about the high school students down the street making pipe bombs for fun. The headline overhyped the article.
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how can you not understand global warming
[Read the article: Blood-and-guts politics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Camille people say you are smart, but how do you get away with statements like this:
Climate change, whether man-made or (as I think) natural
300 million years ago our world was locked in an ice age. It was called the Karoo ice age. Now the reason for this was that back in the day wood didn't decompose. Because animals couldn't eat it, bacteria couldn't eat it, carbon was getting locked away. This was the Carboniferous age. The world was encased in ice and snow. The only possible way out of this ice age was for the carbon to be released back into the air. And luckily for the world it did. Termites evolved the ability to eat wood. And that saved the world because the termites ate the wood and farted carbon back into the air in the form of methane, co2 levels went up and the earth warmed up.
The current series of ice ages in the Quaternary are caused by Antarctica sitting on the south pole. Today we humans are acting just like the termites did to end the Karoo ice age, we are eating carbon and farting it back into the atmosphere with our machines causing global warming.
If you like you can debate whether or not global warming is bad. Maybe a little global warming is good. We can debate how dangerous it is. We can debate that the dangers of global warming are nothing compared to the way we are creating a desert in our oceans and burning down the rain forests. But you can't be considered a legitimate intellectual if you ignore science and proclaim there is a debate on the causes of global warming. This faux debate holds us back from the real debate, the one the scientists can get wrong (because juggling the elements of human society is not their job), the debate over how much effort we should put into fighting global warming and how much effort we should put into other environmental struggles. That's the real debate.
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strange but true
[Read the article: Too great to be good]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is something weird about the past, it's strange, it feels funny, why did people act the way they did, it's so stupid, why? The way they talked, the things they did, all so very strange.
I think that Daniel Day-Lewis was perfect in capturing this strange otherworldliness. Too many times when we see historical films, it's really just anachronism after anachronism, you see strong female personalities railing against the patriarchal system, sensitive men that understand that women need a career, and always of course, this feeling that today, 2008, we have the best ethics of the last several hundred years, oh wait I mean, today in 1898 . . . it's just unbelievable watching most period pieces.
Daniel Day-Lewis is 1898. It's not comfortable! We don't understand him. He's ACTING. Except he's not acting. He is the strangeness of that time. He is realism, but it's a realism that we no longer understand. We look at the world with our 2008 eyes and when we see an 1898 man, we go, "What a faker." He is a product of his period.
It reminds me a lot of George Clooney's fast talking con man in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" where Clooney's Evertett is clearly a product of the time, he couldn't exist today, but because the 1930's are recent enough, we can feel for Clooney's motivations of his character.
Daniel Day-Lewis is reaching further back, and it's because of this that his Daniel Plainview seems indecipherable. Only it isn't indecipherable. Everything is in plain view, but only if you are able to go back in time, and put yourself back before the turn of the century.
Daniel Day-Lewis had pitch perfect acting, in a flawed film.