Writer's block prompts
Jul. 30th, 2010 10:01 amHow close have you come to dying?
The only thing I can think of is when I went on an activities week from school, and we sailed little two-person boats, which I never had time to get good at, but was definitely fun, but once, when the boat turned over (which it did a lot) the cuff of the waterproof trousers I was wearing snagged on a part of the rigging on the mast (I don't know how).
In fact, I don't think there was any danger, but for a second, I was trapped between the panic of "these clothes were issued to me with dire warnings about losing or damaging them, I don't want to tear it, but I'm lying on my back in the sea, I can't see to untangle it" and "if someone rights the boat, is it possible it'd force my head under the water?"
But one of the instructors helpfully told me to kick myself free, which I did.
What is your opinion of the death penalty? How important is this issue in deciding which political candidates you support?
I honestly don't care any more. In principle I oppose the death penalty, and I really, really oppose the death penalty in countries where it's applied inconsistently, without sufficiently high safeguards on not executing innocent people (which is all of them, including countries that accept it as 'civilised' like America, and countries that just have a thin legal veneer over a totalitarian enforcement). But if someone (guilty or not) is facing most of the rest of their life in prison anyway, then the death penalty doesn't seem so different. (I might feel differently if I'm been close to someone who'd been executed, or the victim of a major crime.)
It seems more like a symptom of a prison service wending an uncertain compromise between (a) punishment and (b) helping people become good people, which is a problem from the smallest crimes upwards.
In country where the death penalty was already the norm, I'd oppose it, and especially oppose politicians all gung-ho about executing as many people as possible -- but I'd almost certainly feel the same about them anyway. And I'd be horrified about it being reintroduced in the UK. Which come to think of it, maybe invalidates everything I said above. I suppose the point is that I don't think it's necessarily worse than the alternative, but anyone proposing it is almost certainly not doing so for any practical reason, but because they want to substitute vengeance for pragmatism, which is bad in all sorts of ways.
A more interesting question might be, is corporal punishment inherently less humane than prison (or capital punishment). We all assume it is. It probably is. It's certainly a useful line in the sand to draw, even if somewhat arbitrary, in that it does seem to produce more civilised countries in general. But is that necessarily so?
Do you usually remember your dreams at night?
Sometimes. I generally don't unless I wake up suddenly. They're normally recognisable as bits of experience stitched together with something I've been thinking or worrying about: it seems my subconscious is prosaicly straightforward about it :)
But also, when it says "do you remember your dreams", it seems to mean, do you remember all of them. To me, this feels like "do you snore". You can normally expect to have dreams in phases of REM sleep, and remember what you wake up in the middle of. But I only know that from science, I don't remember having dreams and then forgetting them -- I was asleep. But the question seems to suggest that other people expect to "just know", somehow...
The only thing I can think of is when I went on an activities week from school, and we sailed little two-person boats, which I never had time to get good at, but was definitely fun, but once, when the boat turned over (which it did a lot) the cuff of the waterproof trousers I was wearing snagged on a part of the rigging on the mast (I don't know how).
In fact, I don't think there was any danger, but for a second, I was trapped between the panic of "these clothes were issued to me with dire warnings about losing or damaging them, I don't want to tear it, but I'm lying on my back in the sea, I can't see to untangle it" and "if someone rights the boat, is it possible it'd force my head under the water?"
But one of the instructors helpfully told me to kick myself free, which I did.
What is your opinion of the death penalty? How important is this issue in deciding which political candidates you support?
I honestly don't care any more. In principle I oppose the death penalty, and I really, really oppose the death penalty in countries where it's applied inconsistently, without sufficiently high safeguards on not executing innocent people (which is all of them, including countries that accept it as 'civilised' like America, and countries that just have a thin legal veneer over a totalitarian enforcement). But if someone (guilty or not) is facing most of the rest of their life in prison anyway, then the death penalty doesn't seem so different. (I might feel differently if I'm been close to someone who'd been executed, or the victim of a major crime.)
It seems more like a symptom of a prison service wending an uncertain compromise between (a) punishment and (b) helping people become good people, which is a problem from the smallest crimes upwards.
In country where the death penalty was already the norm, I'd oppose it, and especially oppose politicians all gung-ho about executing as many people as possible -- but I'd almost certainly feel the same about them anyway. And I'd be horrified about it being reintroduced in the UK. Which come to think of it, maybe invalidates everything I said above. I suppose the point is that I don't think it's necessarily worse than the alternative, but anyone proposing it is almost certainly not doing so for any practical reason, but because they want to substitute vengeance for pragmatism, which is bad in all sorts of ways.
A more interesting question might be, is corporal punishment inherently less humane than prison (or capital punishment). We all assume it is. It probably is. It's certainly a useful line in the sand to draw, even if somewhat arbitrary, in that it does seem to produce more civilised countries in general. But is that necessarily so?
Do you usually remember your dreams at night?
Sometimes. I generally don't unless I wake up suddenly. They're normally recognisable as bits of experience stitched together with something I've been thinking or worrying about: it seems my subconscious is prosaicly straightforward about it :)
But also, when it says "do you remember your dreams", it seems to mean, do you remember all of them. To me, this feels like "do you snore". You can normally expect to have dreams in phases of REM sleep, and remember what you wake up in the middle of. But I only know that from science, I don't remember having dreams and then forgetting them -- I was asleep. But the question seems to suggest that other people expect to "just know", somehow...