Word: levered
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...favored by a large margin over Barack Obama. The (mostly white) talking heads have twisted themselves into knots trying to explain it. Let me help them out. We in the black community know full well that not enough white Americans will go into the voting booth and pull the lever for a black man to be President, so we don't want to throw our votes away on an underdog black candidate. And 90% of black voters do not vote Republican because, while we might not always know who is for us, we definitely know who is against us. Vernon...
...favored by a large margin over Barack Obama. The (mostly white) talking heads have twisted themselves into knots trying to explain it. Let me help them out. We in the black community know full well that not enough white Americans will go into the voting booth and pull the lever for a black man to be the President, so we don't want to throw our votes away on an underdog black candidate. And 90% of black voters do not vote Republican because, while we might not always know who is for us, we definitely know who is against...
Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene does brain scans of people as they ponder the so-called trolley problem. Suppose a trolley is rolling down the track toward five people who will die unless you pull a lever that diverts it onto another track--where, unfortunately, lies one person who will die instead. An easy call, most people say: minimizing the loss of life--a "utilitarian" goal, as philosophers put it--is the right thing...
...more directly implicated; most people say it would be wrong to do this deal. Why? According to Greene's brain scans, the second scenario--the "up close and personal" intervention, he calls it--more thoroughly excites parts of the brain linked to emotion than does the lever-pulling scenario. Apparently the intuitive aversion to giving someone a lethal push is stronger than the aversion to a lethal lever pull...
Greene explains his findings in Darwinian terms. Back in the hunter-gatherer environment of human evolution, you killed people directly, not by the triple bank shot of pulling a lever that shifted a plate that rerouted a train. So an evolved aversion to the killing of an innocent might be especially sensitive to visions of direct physical assault. Imagining the triple bank shot impacts us less viscerally, causing a weaker aversion that is more easily outweighed by calculation...