This is how the Lorraine Hotel looked last night (January 13, 2007) at 9 pm. I had never been to Memphis until this weekend, so I had never before visited the Lorraine (it is now a preserved historical site). It was eerily quiet last night, not at all the way…
I have long known that one should never ever congratulate a woman for being pregnant unless one knows (really really knows) that she is happily pregnant.
About seven years ago, my wife told me that one of the women living in our neighborhood was pregnant. This surprised me, because I knew that Sally (not her real name) had told me that she had no interest in having children.
About an hour later, though, while I was walking about a neighborhood art fair, I saw Sally. I walked up to talk with her. I commented that we hadn’t seen each other for quite a few months. She gestured toward her abdomen and stated “I’ve put on some weight since then.” I had noticed that she had, indeed, gained considerable weight. Therefore, I stated “Congratulations!”
She asked, “Congratulations about what?”
I instantly knew that I had broken a very basic rule and I was now paying for it. Sally wasn’t pregnant. I quickly mumbled something like “congratulations about this year’s art fair.” Sally was a volunteer in charge of the art fair. She looked at me as if I was acting strange, but then we talked a bit more before parting ways.
When I got home, I asked my wife how she knew that Sally was pregnant. She said that one of the other neighbors had told her. I had assumed that my wife had talked to Sally herself and learned about Sally’s pregnancy firsthand. Instead, rumor had been turned into a …
President Bush is going to send more than 20,000 more troops into Iraq and spend billions of more dollars to carry on a hideous war. Why? To protect Americans from terrorists, he tells us. Bush convinced Americans to invade Iraq by accusing Iraq of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans. This argument suggests that the deaths of 3,000 people is a horrible thing.
Whenever 3,000 people die, it is a horrible thing. It might justify hundreds of billions of dollars, though certainly not the diversion of money from programs that save equal numbers of lives. 3,000 deaths justifies the deaths of more than 3,000 soldiers, we are told. I don’t agree with this. The political party that argues that there are clear moral rules (the Republicans) isn’t convincing me.
Does it make a difference that 3,000 innocent Americans die on the same day rather than over the course of a year? I wouldn’t think so. A death is a death, in my opinion. And 3,000 deaths are 3,000 deaths.
Therefore, shouldn’t the 16,000 murders that occur every year in the US require a response five times bigger than the invasion of Iraq? That’s 3,000 every ten weeks. Shouldn’t it require focused efforts to protect these victims? Shouldn’t it require a revamping of our entire criminal justice system, especially our prison system, which so often trains criminals to be even more vicious, rather than preparing them for ready for release? Where is our war on criminal violence? …
Friday evening, I did something I rarely do: I watched one of those pseudo-news shows, the kind that generally focus on soft news that everybody but me seems to be interested in. Generally it is some kind of pop culture junk like Brittany’s latest antic (WHO is Brittany anyway and why does everyone but me know her by first name?). But a Friday night spent under a cozy quilt, nursing a slight malaise left from New Year’s, left me sprawled in a recliner with a TV remote and nothing worth watching. I happened to catch Primetime, an ABC show that left me deeply disturbed.
The show was about the Milgram experiment conducted in the early 60s and a 2006 similar replication of the experiment. In 1961, just a few months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment to test to what degree people would obey authority even when it was in direct conflict with their personal beliefs.
The subjects of the experiment were people like you and me. They were asked to participate in experiment about whether pain assisted the learning process. The second individual, complicit in the experiment, was set up in another room as the “student.” The “teacher”, the actual subject of the experiment, was placed in front of a panel of switches labeled with increasing voltage. Whenever the “student” missed a question, the teacher was directed to flip the next highest voltage switch, giving the student an apparent electric …
I have already read about 15 of these short essays published by Edge. It's hard to stop, because the answers are especially thoughtful and well-articulated. Daniel Dennett's response is representative of the quality of these responses. Here is an excerpt from Dennett's response, entitled: "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique…