>> Nate wrote:----------
>>Shirley
>>Jackson's rural community seems like a heartland utopia ... with
the slight
>>kink that once a year they sacrifice a member of the community
because
>>that's the way it is.
>Just a slight kink there.
The degree of that kink will be addressed below ... I would argue
that Shirley Jackson's society is MORE HUMANE than ours ... based on the
fact that in the story there was no mention of some ethnic groups having
considerably shorter life spans than others....So I will ASSUME that all
people in the town had an equal chance of living a decent life ...
>>I contend that Ms. Haugaard's students make moral
>>judgements based on expediency rather than absolute right and
wrong. Their
>>apathy is only important in that Ms. Haugaard might lower their
grades ...
>No, their apathy is important because it shows that they
uncritically
>accept the validity of killing others in the name of superstition.
It
>shows that their critical thinking skills have turned to shit. And
people
>think the witch hunts couldn't happen today.
Lets see ... inside the U.S:
People don't die in the war on drugs.
People don't die from welfare reform.
Waco was pretty reasonable.
The conservative right's rhetoric has nothing to do with abortion
clinic bombings.
Illegal immigrants have it pretty easy once they make it across the
border.
Fag bashing is a myth.
More liberal rhetoric goes here.
The point I made in my original post is that people DIE from state
sponsored witch hunts all the time. Americans DON'T give a shit, or even
support the hunts in the name of some kind of bullshit moral stance, making
your assertion about "critical thinking" moot. What have you done to add
preserve a human life today?
My second point would be that The Lottery has nothing to do with
witch hunting. It seems to me that its a lot fairer to randomly pick
members of society and kill them then it is to shorten whole groups of
people's lives because of the color of their skin or their nationality. On
the other hand, from a rational point of view I guess it depends on which
side of the gun you're standing on ... or are all those statistics
correlating mortality to income AND race simply anomalies?