Hi Brad, At 19:22 20/05/02 -0400, you wrote:
Prising one para from your posting: <<<< My father was a salesman, and he was an honest salesman who sold an honest product. I believe that, in general, if one does not make a sale, one should look first at how one failed to do a good job of selling, and only as a last resort blame it on the customer not appreciating it. >>>> Your father may have been an honest salesman, but it depends on what he was selling -- as to whether the customer really needed the product or not. <<<< (Similarly, when terrorists blow away multi-billion dollar assets, we should look first at how we failed to construct our country in such a way that such defeats would not be feasible, and only as a last resort blame the terrorists for taking advantage of the opportunity we gave them.) >>>> Surely, you're not serious, are you? No conceivable society could protect itself against malevolence either from without or (particularly) from within. For example, if I had a mind to -- as a practising industrial chemist 40 years ago -- I could probably still be able to manufacture sarin or some other nerve gas or toxic chemical which could cause thousands of deaths on the London Underground or from a drinking water reservoir.* The possibilities are enormous! (*In case the FBI or MI5 are reading this, I can assure them or anybody else that I would actually not get away with this. If my better-half saw that I was not at my usual station in my den with keyboard in front of me and teapot at my side, and was concocting mysterious chemicals, she would surely make sure that the men with white coats would come and take me away.**) (** . . . which leads onto yet another thread which Harry posted yesterday -- about the increasing isolationism in society. If I were to leave my home and live alone in a flat, such is the anonymity of modern society that I could almost certainly get away with manufacturing chemicals, or making bombs, or plotting other things unobserved. It's very significant that almost all particularly nasty murders in modern society are carried out by loner males who never socialised and whose personalities were never known by neighbours.***) (*** . . . though it should be mentioned that most nasty murders take place within marriages and families. But, here again, so many occur because most families don't really know what goes on in other families -- even if they live next door -- because we have become so individualised. For example, the number of wife-batterers who are never discovered and exposed is enormous, according to those charities which are knowledgeable about these matters. But, even in Medieval English villages, a wife-batterer almost certainly never got away with it for long. During the charivari events on Saints' Days [at least 40 every year], when fellow villagers mocked and exposed errant individuals [by stuffing straw down their chimneys, or by peeing in their beer, or by leading them about the village in horse harness, etc], they would soon change their ways -- or even more persecution would follow next time!) Keith __________________________________________________________ “Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.” John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
