The opening paragraphs of the introduction by a psychologist with an alphabet soup of credentials, for Survivors
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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.
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.
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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".
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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.
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*hopes it is not possible for the main text to be worse*
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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."
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"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."
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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.
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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