Department of No Shit Department

[rachelmanija]

The opening paragraphs of the introduction by a psychologist with an alphabet soup of credentials, for Survivors.

This is a book about survivors, that is to say, those who continue to live when others have died. Looked at from one point of view this is very positive, in the sense that anyone who has a brush with death is lucky to survive. However, looked at from another point of view it is profoundly negative, in that one need not have had a brush with tragedy anyway.

It reminds me of the immortal Suicide by Cop: Committing Suicide by Provoking Police to Shoot You.

Comments

[muccamukk]

What do you call the feeling when your itching to fix something, but it's so profoundly flawed that you don't know where to start?

[rachelmanija]

I read that first sentence aloud to a friend who had her six-year-old with her, and they both laughed.

[eglantiere]

whaaaa

[cloudsinvenice]

If they think they have to explain the concept of "survivors", they may not have a very high opinion of their readers...

[rachelmanija]

"Died," by which I mean no longer being alive.

[cloudsinvenice]

But... what is this "alive" that you speak of?

[mildred_of_midgard]

Is it giving the author too much credit to interpret the definition as setting the scope of the book to exclude the other category of "survivors", that is to say, those who survived a difficult but not fatal experience, such as sexual or emotional abuse?

Either way, I still agree it's poorly phrased. It reminds me of my TAing days, grading an undergrad linguistics paper that claimed that the etymology of "broadband" was unknown but speculated that it probably comes from "broad" and "band".

[rachelmanija]

You are definitely giving him too much credit. The entire introduction is exactly as stupid as that paragraph. Here, have another brilliantly phrased pearl of wisdom:

We live in a busy society and indeed all these disasters arose out of our wish to travel quickly from one part of the world to the other and extract the fuel we need in order to do so.

One profiled disaster is Hillsborough, which involved spectators getting crushed in a crowd at a football match.

[yhlee]

I LOL'd. This book sounds terrible.

[staranise]

Ah, for the good old days of the past, where we all travelled by foot and of course no disasters happened ever.

[rachelmanija]

All bad things happened after 1960. ALL of them.

[staranise]

In much the same way television ownership caused airplane passenger deaths.

[muccamukk]

Hopefully the main text is better than the intro?

*hopes it is not possible for the main text to be worse*

[rachelmanija]

The main text, which thank God is written by someone else, is WAY better. It's still not that great, but not hilaribad.

[vass]

"Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry Tay,
I now must conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed."

[rachelmanija]

GENIUS.

[ironed_orchid]

Who do they think is reading the book? Aliens?

[rydra_wong]

I can see how sometimes you need to approach a subject by laying out the very basics so you can then take a look at them, but ...

"This is a book about survivors, who are people who have survived a thing that other people did not survive. Being a survivor is good, because surviving and not dying is good! But also it is bad, because it means you had a thing happen to you that you might not have survived. Maybe it's also bad because other people didn't survive, but this sentence seems to imply that it wouldn't have been bad if they'd died somewhere else and it didn't 'brush' you."

[indywind]

I need to bookmark this for reference.
In moments of self-doubt, when I feel my own writing is not good enough to be published, it will be here to remind me: the bar is really, really low.

[naomikritzer]

I mean

I kind of get where he's coming from? Because I have an uncle who had a stroke in 1988 or so and who due to a confluence of extremely unlikely events was treated with tPA, which was not merely cutting edge at the time but totally experimental. People kept telling him how lucky he was, and he was like, "I am a THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD in EXCELLENT HEALTH who just had a STROKE. That's not lucky."

But

omg