For what it's worth, I'll probably read the Pinker book.

VM, there are two reasons that I can see. 1. The Turkish authorities refuse to acknowledge and have imprisoned people just for suggesting it happened. By recognising the holocaust, we show our solidarity with those people. 2. When a people are oppressed by another, it can be helpful to recognise thi...

I'll echo what the others' have said Chris and recommend that you go to see someone about your situation. From what you've described I'd say there's a good chance you're having problems with PTSD.

Well, briefly, one example would be in the case of autistic people, when educating them we tend to focus on pushing them towards behaving in ways that we find acceptable, but which they find intolerable. It's very much a case of changing the person to fit the system and not the other way around. It ...

Well, I've only read the first chapter so far, so it may be that Zimbardo tackles treats the question in more depth later in the book (there are several references to it in the Index), but I think he may want to avoid getting bogged down in what constitutes evil and instead wants to examine what mak...

This is always a difficult one to answer. I think that there is probable that they'll be a little ashamed of our reluctance to make adjustments in response to environmental problems. I also think that they'll wonder about our failures to intervene to stop recent genocides. There's a movement at the ...

It strikes me as an odd way to view the situation if only because I don't think that we can really say that morality was built up in the nineteenth century. I think that the twentieth century events listed might be viewed as forming part of a pattern where the world began attempting to deal with tec...

So I ordered this book today after reading a little bit of the Cambridge companion to Arendt. Anybody wondering about ordering the book might want to do the same, since it's available free online.

Hi Jan, welcome to Booktalk. It seems like this would be a good place for you since many of the books you just listed have been discussed here in the past. Don't worry about dumb questions, you'll find that all most of us do is ask or answer dumb questions. My advice to you is to find a thread that ...

Initial Impressions I have to say that this was probably one the most depressing chapters I've ever read - at least for non-fiction. Zimbardo manages to cover most of the major atrocities of the twentieth century. The excerpts from interviews with some of the Hutu murderers were particularly chilli...