Have your say

Across the board

Re: 50-50? (Oct. 17). I have no bias to either side of the NHL lockout, but if we are going to share, then do it across the board. Owners pay players handsomely to begin with and they want a bigger cut of the profits, too. And if the league loses money, what accountability is there to the players?

Also, in the true spirit of sharing, it would make sense that any endorsement contracts the players receive also be split 50-50 with the league and owners.

Fair is fair.

KEN MCINTYRE

Winnipeg

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Historical background is needed to understand Ian Hudson's Oct. 13 column, NHL's owners offside. The U.S. is ranked 95th in income equality, behind such countries as Nigeria and Sudan. Wage equality and a fair wage for the worker, in this case the hockey player, are the basis for this prolonged negotiation. The NHL moguls make this statistic even more blatant.

WILMA SOTAS

Winnipeg

Driving to distraction

While I agree with the restrictions on cellphones and texting while driving, I think there are many flaws with the approach being taken. I can play with my CD player, loading and selecting music while I drive. I can get lunch at a drive-thru and juggle eating a sandwich, fries and a drink while I drive. This is much more difficult and distracting than talking on a phone.

A taxi driver can play non-stop on his electronic devices. All this is legal, but talking on the phone isn't. Either enforce laws to make people stop all major distractions while driving, or don't.

This is a pathetic money grab. It has nothing to do with safety.

GEORGE ANDREWS

Winnipeg

Psychology has role

Both Dan Lett, in his Oct. 15 column, Good advice, but nobody will take it, and Mia Rabson, in her column in the same edition, Bullying is a crime -- treat it that way, fail to realize the role that psychologists can have in regard to driver education and in preventing and treating bullying.

Lett comes closest when he alludes to psychological factors such as false confidence being paramount in causing driver-educated teens to have more accidents than teens who learned to drive on their own. This comes as no surprise to psychologists, but psychological factors are often ignored in creating public policy.

For example, calling bullying a crime, as Rabson recommends, only panders to the right-wingers. Doing so will not decrease bullying; it will increase it. To do so ignores psychological and psychosocial factors that cause bullying.

Bullying does require adverse consequences, but psychological therapy for people who bully and their families should be the first-line approach to prevention. Yes, awareness days and tool kits will do little to prevent bullying, but the psychological-treatment approach needs to be in place before punishment.

It is not either-or. We need awareness, therapy and consequences. If society continues to ignore psychological factors that cause problems, and psychological treatment that can prevent them, it will do so to its continued detriment.

BRUCE HUTCHISON

Winnipeg

Logical fallacy

In her Oct. 15 letter, Proof of cowardice, Shahina Siddiqui salutes 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai and condemns those responsible for shooting her. I agree completely. However, she resorts to the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy when saying these thugs are not true Muslims.

Many believers justify murder with their sacred texts and imaginary gods. In a related letter that day, Tayyab Pirzada writes, "Muslims love their Prophet Muhammad more than their parents, children and even their own selves." "Loving" anyone long dead more than they do their own children, parents and themselves is amoral and leads, as we have seen, to murderous slaughter of innocents.

Tayyab and reasonable Muslims need to realize how much this pains me as a secular humanist.

Letter writer Sohail Temoor says if today's leaders followed Muhammad, many of our problems would be solved. I can do better than Muhammad. Crying children will be better cared for when we stop wasting time, effort and money on religious superstition.

Temoor says Muslim women are absolute owners of their property. Perhaps this is true, but owning a car you are forbidden to drive, buying a dress you are forbidden to wear or having a face you are forbidden to show suggest otherwise.

BOB RUSSELL

Winnipeg

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Letter writer Shahina Siddiqui is a voice of reason on a volatile situation that has plagued her home country of Pakistan for many years. She notes how Pakistan endures "demons of hate and anti-Muslim extremists" that have besieged her country of birth. We as Canadians are fortunate to have leaders such as Siddiqui come into our midst.

Those of us who profess a Christian faith should pray for Pakistan and its leaders to be bold and stand up against tyrants and champion justice as young Malala did. But as we pray for Pakistan, we should also pray for our own country and our Christian zealots, even in Winnipeg, who do all they can to denigrate Islam instead of being ambassadors of peace such as Jesus called us to do.

KEN REDDIG

Pinawa

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Tayyab Pirzada and Sohail Temoor should be relieved they live in a country where men and women truly are equal. They should also be glad they are living in a secular country with real laws, not those written by misogynistic old men full of self-pity and self-loathing and fully indoctrinated in radical Islam.

DON HERMISTON

Winnipeg

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I am not Muslim and am not familiar with the Qur'an.

But it seems to me that a glaring error in transcription must have occurred in the Tayyab Pirzada letter.

I think it much more likely Muhammad's purpose in buying the boy was to set Zaid free, rather than sell him.

Then Zaid's decision not to return to his family illustrates the devotion inspired by Muhammad.

ALLAN ROBERTSON

Winnipeg

Adding a charge

Re: MD pays in sex-for-drugs case (Oct. 17). Why is Dr. Randy Allan not being charged for drug trafficking? He was selling OxyContin for sex.

DARRYL SEGAL

Winnipeg

A telling pronoun

Gordon Warren's Oct. 13 letter, Cleaning up the mess, lays out his criteria for the next mayor. A telling phrase in his shopping list is "His other first mandate." How ironic that in an edition of the Free Press that has a feature article on Susan Thompson, Warren's language creates the impression that the next mayor should be male.

Perhaps that's why Judy Wasylycia-Leis was unsuccessful last time: outdated ideas like Warren's about who is qualified.

KEVIN LONGFIELD

Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 18, 2012 A11