Word: infliction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most appropriate tribute would be an hour and a half of silence. For Pinter was the master, virtually the copyright holder, of the pregnant pause that never gives birth. Words hurt in his plays, but the withholding of them can inflict deeper wounds - on the characters in his plays and on some of perplexed members of the audience. "Pinteresque" came to suggest an edgy break in an uncomfortable conversation, and the playwright tended to these ellipses like a doting mother. "I did change a silence to a pause," he said about a scene in one of his plays...
...Gist: Chances are you underestimate your capacity for cruelty. Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments in the 1960s and '70s demonstrated that we're conditioned to inflict pain on complete strangers when impelled to do so by an authority figure. Milgram's experiments - linchpins of any freshman psych class - were simple. Volunteer participants were enlisted to help with a study purportedly tracking the effects of punishment on learning. When the "learner" made an error, the volunteer was told to administer an electric shock. Milgram found volunteers were disturbingly willing to follow orders, even as voltage levels increased in intensity...
...this film, a misanthrope’s delight. Films like this seem to exist only to prove Hobbes’s rage-fueled philosophical vision: that man cares only about his self-interest and that life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Characters self-inflict tracheometries, saw their arms off, murder their compatriots to survive, and still end up dead. “Punisher: War Zone:” Not only does the protagonist get to realize his sadistic fantasies, but the film’s creators realize their own upon the audience, as they...
...information, Nuhu Gagara, admitted that local politicians and businessmen had paid youths to stir up violence, even buying weapons, including firearms for them. This tactic, called "godfathering," is familiar in Nigeria around election time. "I think it was instigated by influential people who used these youths and religion to inflict maximum effect and chaos in the streets," Nankin Bagudu, a local human rights activist, said. "They tried to mobilize people to fight and attack along party and religious lines...
...Each new detail that emerges about the city's three-day ordeal points to multiple failures by the security agencies, including the failure to intercept and heed intelligence; the failure to contain the terrorists and the damage they were able to inflict; and the failure to capture more than one terrorist alive in order to ascertain their identities, motives, origins and affiliations. But these failures are neither startling nor new. Indian security experts have for decades pointed at the need for a better intelligence-gathering system, from the police post up. And they say India needs more police officers...