Letters: Oct. 5
UNFOUNDED CRITICISMS
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of statepress.com - Arizona State Press's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query.
438 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
UNFOUNDED CRITICISMS
UNFAIR COMPARISON
A satirical stance (In response to Daniel O’Conner’s Sept. 29 column, “Sticks, stones and cupcakes.”) O’Connor certainly plays well to a modern audience, with race-baiting headlines like “Liberal Berkeley Racism?” But, to pretend like anyone has a full enough answer to his “Why can’t there be ‘White Pride?” question as to fully quell socio-political controversy surrounding race would be laughable, and I’m not going to play at such an effort. To answer his question, the Berkeley College Republican’s demonstration was an accurate and effective satire if college education was as important as baked goods. Where satire normally trivializes its subjects, this trivialises the entire set of moral choices of Affirmative Action. Social policy has moral costs to some groups that are balanced with moral benefits for another group. The trick of it is figuring out how to balance these moral costs and benefits to be socially acceptable. Democracy, like markets, tend to do this well when the greatest amount of information is available to all actors. Markets and democratic processes tend to fail in situations where concepts (for this issue, race) are reified, set above all other calculations and made into wholly separate classes of attitudes. When the Berkeley College Republicans boiled affirmative down to baked goods, they undoubtedly pissed people off. But, calling people “racist,” like calling people “heathens” or “heretics,” is a totalizing status that breaks down democratic processes and complicates the moral “price of policy.” I hope his question, then, is not actually the product a misunderstanding about the ways democratic processes work philosophically, but a trick of rhetoric to help people analyze their own ideas about race with a more critical and, importantly, less totalised eye. Levi John Wolf Undergraduate A happy life (In response to David Colthart’s Sept. 30 column, “The conscience of a carnivore”) We get caught up in the extremes. It’s also worth thinking about how healthful an animal that has been so poorly nourished and treated can be for us. I would much rather eat a cow that got to get adequate exercise, proper food (meaning, food that they can actually digest, which is not the case for factory farm cows) and sure, got to be pretty happy up until slaughter day, than I would a cow who had to stand up to its knees in its own feces, eating food that made it sick, pumped up with antibiotics. I think as consumers we need to demand transparency when it comes to what we’re eating. If it’s factory farmed, it should say so. None of this picture-of-a-pasture when that animal didn’t spend a single day around grass. Colleen Stinchcombe Statepress.com reader Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
END IT NOW!
THE OPPOSITE EFFECT
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
OH, THE HYPOCRISY…
A POPULIST DEMAND: IMPEACH OBAMA
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE GAMES
ALIVE AND KICKIN’
UNNECESSARY CRITICISM
REAL DEFICIT HAWKS WOULD TAX THE WEALTHY
DON’T CARRY ON CAMPUS
WE MOURN THIS DEATH
HOW ABOUT A WALK?
STOLEN GUITARS AND RARE ROSEWOOD
THOSE FAITH-BASED IDEOLOGUES
NO LOVE FOR THE RAIL
AN UNPRESIDENTIAL PRESIDENT
WALK THIS WAY
This website uses cookies to make your experience better and easier. By using this website you consent to our use of cookies. For more information, please see our Cookie Policy.