Word: morbidly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second story, vaguely science-fiction, centers around Valentine Brodie, a college professor and dabbling sci-fi writer. In a twist of morbid irony, he finds himself amides scenarios all too typical of, the genre he never took quite seriously: Lynx, a wandering planet from outer space, is going to smash the earth, ending civilization as we know it. But a plan to salvage humanity, by sending the cream of the race into space to begin a new, brings the story back to Burgess' theme--the question of just what is worthwhile about humanity and the culture we have created. According...
...watched this segment of the "CBS Evening News" with morbid fascination. But as the reality of the death that had occurred before my eyes set in. I began to feel sick and turned off the television. The image of the victim's face stayed in my head. He had been young, probably no more than 20. Now he was dead, his two decades of life gone with the pull of a trigger, his entire existence made meaningless save for the statisticians. I wondered how his parents, if they were still alive, would react. I cried. Then I got angry...
...defenseless other--the injuries from which would be attributable to the "indirect responsibility" of the dog-owner only at the expense of credible notions of intentionality and responsibility. It is immaterial that the Israeli may have had a "legitimate" aim in "mopping up" (to use that morbid and dehumanizing expression) Palestinian resistance--even though the train of events demonstrated that there was in fact none--and that the Israelis did not intend specifically that the massacres be perpetrated. The use of means with foreseeably inhuman "incidental" effects cannot be justified by reference to some alleged 'legitimate...
...method of death is mostly a matter of morbid aesthetics, tangential to the far more basic and troublesome question of whether society ought to kill criminals. It is not at all clear that capital punishment deters would-be murderers better than the threat of life imprisonment. Yet there is a stubborn popular belief in the unique deterrent power of the death penalty. Even if deterrence were unequivocally disproved, however, public sentiment might still favor capital punishment. The death penalty, say proponents, is necessary to demonstrate that society takes its laws seriously; retribution seems a natural human urge. As the homicide...
Artists of every generation have had to deal with the fear that theirs is the last to walk the earth. There days, fear of extinction seems increasingly rational. It's no accident that much of contemporary writing is obsessed with survival, and poetry is increasingly morbid. Women poets in particular face a struggle for acceptance along with the panic of modern life. One way out of the death trap, suicide, seems at the very least impractical...