Word: selfishnesses
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...pulled in my horns, had second thoughts. The truth is that my first thoughts were more modest than some memeticists might wish. For me the original mission was negative. The word was introduced at the end of a book that otherwise must have seemed entirely devoted to extolling the "selfish" gene as the be-all and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection. There was a risk that my readers would misunderstand the message as being necessarily about DNA molecules. On the contrary, DNA was incidental. The real unit of natural selection is any kind of replicator...
...prompted a mixture of anxiety and disdain from friends with Senior Gift posts. Maybe they feel the way I did when an alum refused to give to Radcliff College Fund: no special prizes, and above all, no score for me. But the fact that they construe my choice as selfish or unthinking makes me suspect there's something more behind the need to make everyone give. Sort of like Secret Santa, where everyone is assigned a gift and recipient but ends up giving boring little gifts to the sole satisfaction of the person coordinating the affair in the first place...
...extension of one's own--to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egoism through him as through oneself. His own store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being very selfish. On Earth this desire is often called 'love...
...stars are having kids by seemingly disposable men and deadbeat dads are replacing welfare queens as the favorite social villains, Brott wonders, perhaps legitimately, if fathers are a new endangered species. Of men who fail to pay child support, he and Parke write, "But while the image of uncaring, selfish, abandoning men dominate[s] the media, one question remains unexplored: Have these men really run away from their families or are they being chased away?" The two describe the plight of Lloyd R., a divorced father of two who fell behind in support payments when he broke...
Steven Spielberg has been nominated as both director and producer of Saving Private Ryan. Critics have been promulgating the notion, which Spielberg in interviews appears to encourage, that the film has redeemed selfish baby boomers by forcing them to acknowledge their parents' sacrifices--as if baby boomers hadn't grown up reading Sgt. Rock and listening to the fakey tromp-tromp sound effect of marching Nazi soldiers on all those episodes of The World at War. But people these days seem to think of Spielberg less as a filmmaker than as a healer of deep historical wounds (don't forget...