Word: fatalism
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...difficult enigmas with intelligence and straightforwardness which, perhaps, when you comprehend. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after he crossed this great land, "Americans have all a lively faith in the perfectability of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent, and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow...
...turn, the job of the journalist in Argentina becomes difficult--if he decides to probe the plight of missing people. Cox explains that reporters at The Herald are under a great deal of pressure not to make mistakes, because any mistake could prove fatal. Fatal in what way? Cox says quietly the most innocuous thing would be the government deciding to close the paper and jail the editors. The violence in Argentina is so severe that an incorrect judgement on the part of a writer or editor could result in being "machine-gunned down in the street...
What about "Blue Valentine?" "She went out one night without me and got in a fatal accident," he murmurs. "Luckily, no one was hurt." Instead, befitting his new line of work, Waits rolls down the boulevards in the safe anonymity of a rented sky-blue Monte Carlo...
...proceedings if a committee concludes that there was a violation. "Every time an officer uses a firearm," says Lieut. Thomas Flanagan of the New York police department, "he knows that a lot of people will be looking over his shoulder to see if he did right." In New York, fatal shootings by police dropped from 93 in 1971-the year before the department adopted a new deadly force policy-to 28 last year...
...Stephen Jay Gould writes that the young Teilhard, then a student in England and Dawson's friend, could easily have supplied some bones. One bit of evidence: a Teilhard letter written years later to the British scholar Kenneth Oakley, in which the priest commits what Gould calls a "fatal error." Teilhard says that Dawson personally brought him to the site where the second skull was found. "This cannot be," says Gould, because Dawson "discovered" the skull in 1915, after Teilhard had been mustered into the French army and shipped to the front...