Abstract: Alan Dershowitz’s book examines recent acts of global terrorism and analyzes the reasons why terrorism is successful. In an effort to reduce the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks, Dershowitz discusses different proposals that would deter terrorism while striking a balance between security and liberty. One of Dershowitz’s most controversial proposals calls for the use of judicially sanctioned torture to force a terrorist suspect to reveal information that would prevent an imminent terrorist attack. This Book Review explores the justifications for judicially sanctioned torture and ultimately argues that such a proposal would be morally and legally prohibited.(emphasis mine)
Introduction
In the wake of September 11, 2001, FBI agents suggested that they might resort to torture to compel terrorist suspects to reveal information necessary to prevent a recurrence.1 A senior FBI aide stated, “it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure . . . where we won’t have a choice, and we are probably getting there.”2
While many countries have condemned torture, the reemergence of this issue in public debate reflects the extent to which terrorism currently threatens national security.3 In his timely book, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge, Alan Dershowitz analyzes the reasons why terrorism has succeeded thus far and offers proposals to deter terrorism while striking the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties.4 Dershowitz confronts and raises many difficult moral and legal questions regarding the extent to which our democratic society can effectively deter terrorism while continuing to uphold fundamental values of liberty and privacy.5 He argues that it is possible to deter terrorism on both a macro level, by confronting different types of terrorism, and on a micro level, through controlling it on a smaller scale.6
Dershowitz begins with the premise that some terrorists are rational actors who crave attention to their cause.7 Policies that address the root causes of terrorists’ behavior, therefore, do not deter them but merely reward them with the attention that they crave.8 Thus, in order to deter terrorism and preserve national security, society must punish terrorists through collective accountability and incapacitation.9 To this end, Dershowitz offers various proposals to increase our sense of security without eroding the liberty that is central to a democratic society.10 ...
...Biblical Hebrew has two additional conjugations, both of which have an extra prefixed letter waw, with meanings more or less reversed from the normal meanings. That is, "waw + prefix conjugation" has the meaning of a past (particularly in a narrative context), and "waw + suffix conjugation" has the meaning of a non-past, opposite from normal (non-waw) usage. This apparent reversal of meaning triggered by the waw prefix led to the early term waw-conversive (in Hebrew waw hahipuch, literally "the waw of reversal"). The modern understanding, however, is somewhat more nuanced, and the term waw-consecutive is now used.
Used with verbs, the prefix has a double function. It is still conjunctive, but also has the effect of altering the tense and aspect of the verb. Weingreen gives the following example.[1] If one considers two simple past narrative statements, one expects to find them in the perfect tense:
šāmar hammeleḵ eṯ dəḇar YHWH
שָׁמַר הַמֶּלֶךְ אֶת דְּבַר יהוה
The king kept the word of the LORD
šāp̄aṭ eṯ haʿam bəṣeḏeq
שָׁפַט אֶת הָעָם בְּצֶדֶק
He judged the people in righteousness.
Šāmar ("kept") and šāp̄aṭ ("judged") are simple perfect qal forms, and they are the citation forms (lemmas) of these verbs. If however these two sentences are not separate but in one continuous narrative then only the first verb is in the perfect, whereas the following verb ("and he judged") is in the imperfect (yišpôṭ) with a prefixed waw:
A šāmar hammeleḵ eṯ dəḇar YHWH wayyišpôṭ eṯ-haʿam bəṣeḏeq
שָׁמַר הַמֶּלֶךְ אֶת דְּבַר יהוה וַיִּשְׁפּוֹט אֶת הַעַם בְּצֶדֶק
The king kept the word of the LORD and he judged the people in righteousness.
Conversely, in a continuous narrative referring to the future, the narrative tense will be the imperfect, but this becomes a perfect after the conjunction:
B yišmôr hammeleḵ eṯ dəḇar YHWH wəšāp̄aṭ eṯ-haʿam bəṣeḏeq
יִשְׁמוֹר הַמֶּלֶךְ אֶת דְּבַר יהוה וְשָׁפַט אֶת הַעַם בְּצֶדֶק
The king will keep the word of the LORD and he will judge the people in righteousness.
The internet is no stranger to sudden bursts of popularity. From the hundreds of millions of views of Rebecca Black’s Friday to the million of fans of the science-based stick figure cartoon XKCD, we’re quite used to seeing sudden inexplicable jumps in popularity. Nonetheless, it it is still quite surprising to see the explosive growth of Trolley Problem Memes, a page built around variations of a simple ethical thought experiment, little known outside the corridors of academic philosophy.
The basic set-up: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. What do you do?
Sounds pretty simple, right? But what if you add a twist? What if, instead of pressing a lever, you had to push a fat man down a bridge in the hopes of stopping a trolley? What if the situation is probabilistic instead of deterministic? What if you could combine questions of epistemology or metaphysics to a seemingly straightforward question of ethics? What if you could reference philosophy, pop culture and history, and add a dash of weirdly macabre humor?
This is the premise of trolley problem memes. You’d think it’d get old really quickly, yet at almost 2 months of age and over 40,000 followers on Facebook, TPM is very much alive and kicking.
It’s difficult to overstate just how remarkable this is. As of May 31st, Trolley Problem Memes has 44,020 followers (less than 2 months after its creation). The great utilitarian John Stuart Mill has a mere 25,000 followers, while Peter Singer, arguably the single most famous ethicist today, has just 31,000 likes on Facebook. The Facebook group Utilitarianism has just over 1,000 members, while the philosophically-inclined do-gooder group “Effective Altruism“ has about 10,000. Nihilist Memes currently has more followers (763,000 likes), but nihilism has always been more popular among the jaded angsty teen crowd. To put it bluntly, the popularity of Trolley Problem Memes is simply inexplicable.
To attempt to explain the inexplicable, I had a Skype interview with Aljoša Toplak and Haris Sehic, the two young Slovenian creators of Trolley Problem Memes: ....
a) I seldom use my credit card unless I am buying something online or large like appliances, furnace, air conditioner. I usually pull out a $1000 to $5000 at the beginning of the month depending on what I intend to spend money on that month. Based on this article looks like I am going to have to keep records of how I spend every dime.
b) Start by drinking your own pee..
c) That's what your tax forms are for...
d) bad idea.. pee is full of toxins that your body is excreting. urea is one. now if you had access to a still you could probably distill your pee and extract pure water from it....
e) This is not freedom. It is close monitoring by a government who wants to know who you call, email, text, and how much money you have and where you spend it.
This is slavery, but the slaves don't know they are slaves.
f) Hillbillies have a leg up on the competition....
"...cowboy builder... "
They came thundering over the horizon and across the Canterbury Plains in a swirl of dust and heat and beating hooves, nail pockets flapping wildly in the wind and spirit levels at the ready in the saddle holster. A posse of cowboy builders and renegade chippies mounted up and rode for the corrals of the Christchurch CBD, that earthquake-ravaged, dodgy city of the South.
From every point of the compass they came, holed up for years in the dead end gulches of shonky jobs. The "Do It Yourself Boys" - masters of the celebrated dwang, joist haulers and concrete-pad lads, warriors of the skill-saw and angle grinder, the chisel champs and jackhammer jocks, the under-cut boys; the "no-job-too-small-for-cash crews" camped out in the wastelands of far-flung suburbia. Meanwhile, across the ditch, from Caboolture to Gundagai, the bad boys of the rivet-gun and crow bar gangs hearing the call - saddled up and rode out. Not one Trade Certificate between them.
A scenario maybe that belongs to a chemically induced state of euphoria or short film treatment of the same. The DIY tradition lives on, last vestige of colonial self-sufficiency whose origins go back to settlement times and a healthy distrust of authority.
In Australia there existed once upon a time the sugar bag carpenter. I met an old codger at a pub in Bondi Junction - claimed he was the last of that old breed, and I believed him too; in fact, I wrote a poem about what he told me that sweltering summer afternoon on the eve of the new millennium. The poem, Sugerbag Carpenter subsequently appeared in my collection, Unmanned (1999). The poem kicks off like this:
Them days all you needed was a blunt saw & an axe thrown in a sack. If you could drive a 3" nail through a pound of butter you got the job and that's a fact - ask Bob the Builder who shook the hand of Banjo Patterson though no one believes him...(I emphasized "cowboy builder" and similar things.)
In Alaska, a team of oil workers board a flight home; however, they cross a storm and the airplane crashes. Only seven workers survive in the wilderness and John Ottway, who is a huntsman that kills wolves to protect the workers, assumes leadership of the group. Shortly after they learn that they are surrounded by a pack of wolves and Ottway advises that they should seek protection in the woods. But while they walk through the heavy snow, they are chased and attacked by the carnivorous mammals.
Written by Claudio Carvalhoand
... When it comes to issues of faith and the will to survive, that's when "The Grey" really jumps up and above the bar for its genre. The story is told in such a way that when people die, it's not for our entertainment, but to highlight the unpredictable nature of ... nature, and life and death. As Ottway wrestles with these same issues, its Neeson's performance that makes it hit home...In the final minutes, Liam Neeson's Ottway character yells to the skies that now is that time when divinity - if there be anything divine in this feral universe - show itself to him... for he is at that point the very last man standing.
Nestorianism is a Christological doctrine advanced by Nestorius (386–450), Patriarch of Constantinople from 428–431. The doctrine, which was informed by Nestorius' studies under Theodore of Mopsuestia at the School of Antioch, emphasizes the disunion between the human and divine natures of Jesus. Nestorius' teachings brought him into conflict with some other prominent church leaders, most notably Cyril of Alexandria, who criticized especially his rejection of the title Theotokos ("Bringer forth of God") for the Virgin Mary. Nestorius and his teachings were eventually condemned as heretical at the First Council of Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, leading to the Nestorian Schism in which churches supporting Nestorius broke with the rest of the Christian Church. Afterward many of Nestorius' supporters relocated to Sassanid Persia, where they affiliated with the local Christian community, known as the Church of the East. Over the next decades the Church of the East became increasingly Nestorian in doctrine, leading it to be known alternately as the Nestorian Church.
Nestorianism is a form of dyophysitism, and can be seen as the antithesis to monophysitism, which emerged in reaction to Nestorianism...
Arianism is the nontrinitarian heretical, theological teaching attributed to Arius (c. AD 250–336), a Christian presbyter in Alexandria, Egypt, concerning the relationship of God the Father to the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Arius asserted that the Son of God was a subordinate entity to God the Father. Deemed a heretic by the Ecumenical First Council of Nicaea of 325, Arius was later exonerated in 335 at the regional First Synod of Tyre,[1] and then, after his death, pronounced a heretic again at the Ecumenical First Council of Constantinople of 381.[2] The Roman Emperors Constantius II (337–361) and Valens (364–378) were Arians or Semi-Arians.
A shammes (or shammas) is an official acting as the beadle, sexton, and caretaker of a synagogue (from the Hebrew shammash, “to serve”). What my dictionary says about shamus is “US slang: a police or private detective, probably from shammes, influenced by Irish Seamas, James”.
The origins of the shammes go back to Talmudic times. In those days his title was chazan, which did not denote a cantor but a synagogue overseer. He was a versatile individual with responsibility for the synagogue building, the conduct of services, the allocation of seats, the supervision (and sometimes teaching) of children, and even acting as court official and sheriff.
In time the offices of chazan and shammes were separated. The chazan chanted the services; the shammes became the general factotum whose duties ran from community administration to announcing lost property and proclaiming the results of law suits...
...The Jungle Book, and King Louie in particular, has been criticized as playing into racial stereotypes. Was that a concern when adapting the film?
Yeah, it was a concern. But I’ve decided to make it not a concern. I know what the lyrics say and how squeamish you can get about that. But we’ve done some things with casting that I’m not going to give away, but that I think will remove that element. I know what the lyrics of [“I Wanna Be Like You”] say, but look at the original—it’s sung by Louis Prima. He’s the King of the Swingers. It’s something I think where the racism is in the eye of the beholder, you know? If you look at that as racist, doesn’t that say more about what you’re projecting on to the character? There’s clearly politics in the [British] accents Disney used, but I don’t think we’ll be using accents at all...
Times were indeed so bad that even qualified specialists could not count on re-employment once they had been dismissed.Indeed!We have gone through such times.
...proving conclusively what all these screens opiates tended to demonstrate: that everyday life itself is a fairy tale.
"Before we get home, I'm going to deke down the Danforth (or "down the Mortimer" or "down the Dawes" or "down the Victoria Park" or whatever definite articulate road we may be near!) and pop into the jug milk store!"Jug milk store.
NPI stands for Negative Polarity Item, and they’re called that because they tend to be found in the scope of negation and serve to emphasize that negation. Classic examples are any, ever, and even, which sound great in negative sentences like (1-4) but pretty weird in the positive equivalents in (5-8).*
(1) I don’t love anyone.
(2) We are never, ever, getting back together.
(3) I don’t even know myself.
(4) I don’t want to go to sleep either.
(5) *I love anyone.I came up with "a tinker's dam" (or "damn", if you must) as in "I don't give a tinker's dam" versus "I do give a tinker's dam." Obviously a negative polarity item.
(6) *We are ever getting back together.
(7) *I even know myself.
(8) *I want to go to sleep either...
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