This was actually a little better than I expected. The author makes a pretty good case that Berkowitz was not the sole killer involved with the "Son of Sam" killings, and that he had connections to people who were possibly involved in all manner of shadiness, primarily drug dealing. I'm willing to buy that, and I'm willing to buy that Berkowitz put in some effort to appear crazier than he actually was prior to getting caught. So its interest lies in the details that emerge in conversation, and about how the perpetrators understand what they have done. But surely much of that is a question of memory. It’s not as if he’s interviewing them as they come off the battlefield. The events they recount happened a long time in the past. I don’t give many books 1* as I can usually find a thing or two about a book that I enjoyed. Ultimately, I found Julia Shaw’s book so frustrating I’m surprised I even finished it. I think that enslaving someone is one of the worst things we can do to another human being, but calling slavery evil feels like letting slaveholders off the hook. It is greedy. It is selfish. It is harmful. But it's the result of broken systems and an individual's broken values rather than some fundamental and immutable aberration within the slaveholder.

We may think that our labelling of others as evil or bad is rational, and our behaviour towards such individuals justified, but the distinction may be more trivial than we expect. I want to help you explore the similarities between the groups of people you consider evil and yourselves, and to engage with a critical mind to try and understand them...Let me help you find your evil empathy.

How to Vote

Sometimes there's too much minutiae, reporter politics and intrigue -- this district attorney, that reporter, this article, that detective. Lordamighty. This is already an incredibly complex web of connections, without all of that stuff, so I felt there's some sections that could use some abridgement. Terry also throws a lot of theories around which aren't fully explored. It's implied that some of the Son of Sam murders were committed to distract from other crimes. That's an interesting idea, but I didn't feel it was resolved. By trying to understand paedophilia we are not dismissing the realities of child sexual abuse, nor are we condoning or normalising the issue. Instead, we can work towards a world where we are in a better position to deal with the reality of the issue. Paedophilia has always existed, and always will. Flippantly dismissing it as an aberration helps no one. It’s a predicament that Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a fast-living demon now finds themselves in. They’ve been living amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and, truth be told, have grown rather fond of the lifestyle and, in all honesty, are not actually looking forward to the coming Apocalypse. Think about the worst thing you have ever done. Something that you are probably ashamed of [...] Infidelity. Theft. Lying. Now imagine everyone knew about it. Judged you for it. [...] For our decisions we see the nuances, the circumstances, the difficulties. For others we often just see the outcome of their decisions. This leads us to define human beings, in all their complexity, by a single heinous term. Murderer. Rapist.”

He talks a lot about the fascination we have with these men, and in particular he talks about the moral issues we have when we struggle to understand them. ” Baumeister is an experimental psychologist. He takes evil to be intentionally harming another person who is undeserving of such treatment. His focus is on how the perpetrators of evil experience what they do, their perceptions of it. He argues that people who commit evil generally don’t see what they do as evil, but rather as some sort of justified response to a difficult situation. Yes. And he’s appropriately cautious about that. These stories have been told many times, and they’ve become sanitised in the retelling. What’s interesting is that sometimes new things emerge. He’d have these discussions, and at the beginning he’d ask, ‘Have you ever killed a child?’ And the person would say, ‘No. Never….I would never kill a child.” Then they would talk a bit more, and the old man would add: “But, well…there was this one time when a woman was holding a child, and she wouldn’t put him down, and she ran away, and then we shot and killed them both. But besides that one time, no! Well, maybe one other time…’ What’s revealed in this sort of conversation is fascinating and at the same time horrible. Among those operatives are Temudjin Oh, of mysterious Mongolian origins, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice under snow; Adrian Cubbish, a restlessly greedy City trader; and a nameless, faceless state-sponsored torturer known only as the Philosopher, who moves between time zones with sinister ease. Then there are those who question the Concern: the bandit queen Mrs. Mulverhill, roaming the worlds recruiting rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, under sedation and feigning madness in a forgotten hospital ward, in hiding from a dirty past.Do you see this inability to let people get close as a common human trait? For example, I think there are similar types of characters in your book, Union Atlantic, with the 21st-century hard-nosed power-hungry New Yorkers. The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women.

Quite a hard one to rate. I attended the author’s talk which was rather fun and raises many interesting topics and convinced me to buy the book. When we start to scratch below their scary surface, even the worst killers turn out to be human beings. And, looking at the data, it seems that human beings largely kill for the same reasons that they do many other things – to find human connections, to protect their families, to achieve their goals, to acquire things they think they need. They do it to deal with basic human emotions like anger and jealousy, lust and greed, betrayal and pride...If your murder fantasies were deeper, and you had less to lose, you too might act on them. People have been predicting the end of the world almost from its very beginning, so it’s only natural to be sceptical when a new date is set for Judgement Day. But what if, for once, the predictions are right, and the apocalypse really is due to arrive next Saturday, just after tea? For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ”It’s a controversial book, of course, and very provocative. Arendt explains her famous idea of the banality of evil in relation to Eichmann and what he said at his trial. She suggests that the Nazis, like Eichmann, who were responsible for such evil acts were stupid, short-sighted and ordinary. They were clownish. Rather than reflecting malevolence, their actions were unthinking and routine. But she also makes claims about the complicity of Jews and others working with the Nazis, some of whom may have thought they were doing the best they could to rescue people, others who were acting out of self-interest and personal gain. She thought many more could have been saved if they hadn’t played along with the Nazis. And she also fumed against the hypocrisy of the Israelis, as with their outrage against the Nuremberg Laws, when their own laws didn’t recognise a marriage between a non-Jew and a Jew. No wonder her book provoked such a furious reaction. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein. Generally, the people who discuss this book are either conspiracy nuts who believe the government is spying on them through their cereal or something equally crazy, fundamentalist Christians who are eager to prove that Satan is out to get everyone or professional skeptics who have an axe to grind against the former two and a desire to look very smart and very clever on top of it. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell was hard work to read simply because it was so graphic and disturbing and will remain as one of my most thought-provoking books of war and its awful effects.” Booksareme