Letters to the Editor
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wow
the letters in response to paglia are so vicious that i wonder if i even want to be part of this group. paglia is so insightful it hurts. i read and i smile. thank you. but these readers and commentators are just petty. if someone dares not spout their truths then all hell descends. may as well listen to limbaugh if i have to adhere to a party line or else. she would never get tenure at a presitgious place like princeton - that really was the most insipid comment of the day. who are you the president or dean of that institution? are we to kneel at your feet? are you the truthtellers of our generation? perhaps zimbabwe is your cup of tea - march, march to the music of the dictators. these blogs scare me as much as anything on the right. really rabid stuff. they invoke all the qualities they criticize in others - age, looks, smarts, etc. i am still in shock.
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Hey LBS!
Good to see you again...so to speak.
Thanks for the compliment.
The thing is that I don't really have any desire to "do better" than Ms. Paglia.
The great thing about the internet is that I can be my own parental control: if I wanted to protect myself from her, I would.
There's plenty of writing on Salon & elsewhere that articulates positions I already agree with, and they're often very helpful to me when polishing my own presentation of my ideas.
Yes, I think denying global warming is grade-A wing-nuttery.
(PS- I was born & raised in upstate New York. 716, represent! Happy Belated Dyngus Day!)
The reason I don't blow a gasket about the mere internet existence of Paglia's specific wing-nuttery is that she's not stupid, and she invites such a huge volume of well-informed blowback that we're not in danger of her opinions becoming the basis for public policy.
I think Paglia DOES display power, guts and actual thought.
I just think she's dead solid wrong about 50% of the time.
But again, if this is truly a "salon" then there's no rule that all the participants have to be right all the time about everything. And if she provokes with nonsense, so be it.
What she provokes is intelligent discourse around a vast array of issues, and more often than not, she presents things in a way that is fresh & different.
She makes me think...AND she provokes gorgeously poetic, fierce, kick-ass commentary from the asembled populace.
Those are the only 2 things I really come to Salon for.
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Damn you!
Oh, you are so going down to the Hades Paglia. 8th Ring, 4th pit on the right. How dare you reveal your skepticism! We all know skepticism has become obsolete in finding out the truth now that we have the Sacred Oracle to compute for us exactly how tall to the inch the tidal wave that will topple the Empire State building will be. The Oracle even Knows what Alex Rodriguez's batting average will be come October, for it is All-Knowing. It knew 2006 would be the most catastrophic hurricane season in many many years. And don't you dare say 2006 was actually a very quiet season. Blaspheme! The Oracle is Never wrong! It is very smart and very modern! Just like Starbucks patrons. Brains are so old-fashioned and fallible. Yuck! You should really stop using yours, like the rest of us! Then maybe you'd go to more parties! But there is still hope. You had better pay some extra Indulgences to High Priest Gore to salve this terrible transgression. But keep in mind, when you kneel before him to humbly atone, we will be listening. You won't get away with muttering anything heretical under your breath like that dude Galileo did with his "but it still moves" crap.
Ok, I'm off now to fire off an email to NPR to have them take down this dangerous and blasphemous audio recording. It purports to be a debate, but we all know it is the devil's work.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9082151
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The Inconvenient Truth is now scrolling past a Paglia Commentary
After reading Paglia's latest article, I have decided no more. I kept waiting, and waiting since her return to find she had something worthwhile to say. It is not only that I find her opinions largely differ from my own. I can cope with well-written, informative opinions of any stripe. What I cannot abide is the flippant lack of substance and boring presentation at which she wields her thoughts. With the way salon promoted her return, I was eagerly awaiting something that would be the talk of weekly conversations with friends and acquaintances. Instead, I have nothing but disappointment. I receive more substantive and poignant information from "The Fix".
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Christopher 1988---Calm Down!!
Having spent many years in an engineering field, I now enjoy more cerebral readings. Pags mentioned per quote: “radical and profound thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown were the public luminaries of my formative student years. They were true humanists -- erudite, expansive and daringly imaginative. “I thought I might check these writers out for myself.
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Poor Camille
Poor Camille. She hath uttered blasphemy against the Holy of Holies of the RadicalEnviroExtremeist movement. Now the True Believers of the Church of Neo-Pagan Anti-Humanists shall drag her by her heels to be burned at the stake as a Heretic!!
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My Point
Thank you for illustrating further how the Right doesn't understand what science is. We are not decrying Paglia and other Climate Change deniers because they don't "Toe the party line", we decry them because they are ignoring scientific concensus.
And thank you for illustrating my point. 1) I never denied global warming wasn't happening. 2) In my twelve years of registered voting, the closest I've come to voting for anyone on the Right was a purely symbolic vote cast for a Libertarian challenger in a local Oregon election, which the Democratic candidate won by a landslide. But I support Camille's choice to be skeptical, and apparently that makes me a Rightist. I'm with you or I'm against you, eh?
The concensus or agreement among scientists worldwide is that climate change is happening and it is because of human activity.
No, the agreement among scientists worldwide is that climate change is happening and it is partly because of human activity. Nobody with his or her head out of the sand doubts that global warming is happening or that humans don't contribute. That is not the issue.
This is not some political idea or partisan talking point.
My comments regarding Camille and the kneejerk partisan backlash had nothing to do with global warming really. The Q&A did address other issues. However, since you've brought it up, what prevents one from accepting provisional likelihood of a theory while maintaining a healthy scientific skepticism?