Boot’s outrage at Yahoo rings hollow

Max Boot’s Sept. 14 column “Just following orders in China” is a model of selective outrage.

Boot accuses Yahoo of “shameful behavior” resulting in the arrest of Chinese reporter Shi Tao, in punishment for his having told the truth about the government. Funny, I don’t recall Boot accusing Karl Rove for his shameful behavior in exposing one of our own CIA operatives, to punish her husband for having told the truth about the government. Boot quotes from the State Department’s most recent human rights report that the Chinese government continues to commit “torture and mistreatment of prisoners, leading to numerous deaths in custody; coerced confessions; arbitrary arrest and detention, and incommunicado detention.” Hmmm, sounds vaguely similar to our own country’s numerous and serious abuses.

Seems like a case of the Boot calling the sandal black.

HERB WEINBERG

Marina del Rey

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Boot tells us of the Yahoo capitulation, for bucks and business, to the Chinese regime. Talking about intrusion into the privacy of e-mail, here is a shocker, at least to me, a writer and teacher for 60 years. I had an e-mail bounced back to me recently , because I mentioned a matter I had used for teaching in a notorious novel by the late William Burroughs, that novel’s title, “THE NAKED LUNCH.” The ISP that blocked my criticism of a cultural situation in the U.S. seems to have read my e-mail, by means of some “bot” or filter, and its objection was to the word “naked.” This is really dismaying, disheartening and downright scary.

I tried again, without caps, and merely wrote a sentence with the word “naked” in it, viz., “the naked truth.” That trial e-mail was also blocked. And my letter was to a legislator in Illinois. Anyone for a police state right here at home these days?

JASCHA KESSLER

UCLA professor of English

and Modern Literature