Word: harmlessness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just yesterday, David Weinfeld wrote a little ditty about why it feels good to hate ‘that jerk in section’ and why it’s OK to foster fun, conspiratorial enmities. Maybe he’s right, and these minor maledicent habits are basically harmless. I guess when it comes down to it, hate doesn’t bother me. Intransigence does. Here’s where David and I part company. Forming and maintaining intractable opinions of other people—good or bad—doesn’t make life interesting...
...hated publicly, we might cause a huge brouhaha. There would be all sorts of awkwardness, avoiding of eye contact, forced fake hellos—who needs that? Better to hate privately, and smile tolerantly in public, give more genuinely fake hellos. This form of hatred is healthy, harmless, and a whole lot of fun. It allows us to have all sorts of lively conversation behind our enemies’ backs, and we all know these conversations are spectacular...
...Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which captures differences in blood flow in the brain, researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet of how the placebo effect works. In a study conducted at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Health System, the University of Michigan and Princeton, the subjects were given harmless but frequently painful electric shocks and then provided with what they were told was a pain-relieving cream. After the bogus cream was applied, nerve activity in the brains of the volunteers changed. The prefrontal cortex, involved in easing pain, became more active, while regions involved in sensing pain quieted...
...long been worried that the next deadly global epidemic--a slate wiper, as epidemiologists call it--would be a new kind of deadly flu to which humans have no resistance. And since the 1960s, their fears have been focused on the H5N1 virus, a bird pathogen that is generally harmless in its host species (ducks and other wildfowl) but extremely deadly when contracted by chickens. It was H5N1 that struck Hong Kong in 1997, where it went straight from chickens to humans. Authorities quickly killed 1.4 million birds, and although six people died, the disease never managed to mutate into...
...village of Rawalakot in the Himalayan foothills near the Indian border, he fought alongside the Taliban against the Americans in Afghanistan. Wounded in the fall of Kabul, he was allowed to return home to Pakistan. On arrival in Peshawar, he was interrogated by Pakistani intelligence services and dismissed as harmless in April 2002. Like many Muslim extremists, Jamil, according to his relatives in Rawalakot, viewed Musharraf as too pro-Western. Militants complain that Musharraf betrayed the Taliban and, given his peace overtures to India in early January, they now accuse him of selling out Kashmiri Muslims too. Jamil's rants...