Movies have become torture
I pretty much stopped going to the movies in theaters quite some time ago, and I don’t even watch many at home any more. I don’t remember when the turning point was, but I do know that at some point … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Violence
Remember when?
Remember back to when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie seemed a strange and unfathomable aberration? Never such innocence again.
Continue reading →About those guards in Benghazi
A reader alerted me to the following, written by someone who purports to have had a long career as a US Foreign Service Officer. If correct, it sheds some light on certain questions that have come up in recent discussions … Continue reading →
Security? What security?
Ace writes about the deplorable lack of security at the Benghazi consulate. I can’t find a link in Ace’s post, but the information seems to come from this Politico article: The Benghazi consulate had “lock-and-key” security, not the same level … Continue reading →
Obama’s statement on the death of Ambassador Stevens
Here’s the text of Obama’s statement on the murder of Ambassador Stevens. Some excerpts: The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. We’re working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats. I’ve also … Continue reading →
Anders Breivik: sane and sentenced
The Norwegian court has found mass murderer and political terrorist Anders Breivik both guilty and sane, and sentenced him to the maximum. Unfortunately, that’s only 21 years. The good news is that the sentence can be extended if he is … Continue reading →
The goals of Soviet torture
From Martin Amis’s book Koba the Dread: …[T]orture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. And … Continue reading →
The shooter at the Sikh temple
The first thing to say is that this was an abominable act. Information on the shooter is coming in slowly, but the best we can tell so far is that he was a white supremacist who had been discharged less … Continue reading →
James Holmes’ psychiatrist and the duty to warn
James Holmes’ psychiatrist Dr. Lynne Fenton warned the university’s threat assessment team that he might be dangerous, and, tragically, nothing was done to stop him—at least, nothing effective: Sources have told KMGH-TV that the threat assessment team never had a … Continue reading →
Speculation about the Aurora perp
So far, the information we’ve gotten about James Holmes doesn’t really fit the portrait of the usual perpetrator of mass murder. That doesn’t mean that, as more facts emerge, he won’t seem to have been unstable and isolated, and to … Continue reading →
Mass murder in Colorado
When I first read about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, my thoughts went to the victims of the horror, and my initial impression (before the shooter had been identified) was that the perp would turn out … Continue reading →
To spank or not to spank
Here’s a Yahoo article that says some recent research indicates that spanking leads to increased mental illness. But this Slate piece says Yahoo’s wrong: Despite the Yahoo headline, and many others like it, the study, published in Pediatrics in early … Continue reading →