The Architecture Of Blame

The structure of society—whether political, social, economic, religious, or familial—can be described as built upon structures of acceptable blame. But what happens when we can no longer persuade each other about where blame for particular actions should land? What happens when the expected scapegoats refuse that role and bystanders question their support of sacrificing “the usual suspects”? René Girard, master theorist of scapegoating and victimage, would characterize this era as one of sacrificial crisis. The Architecture of Blame: The End of Victimage and the Beginning of Justice explores these current critical areas of failed persuasion as symptoms of a deeper and much more profound crisis in our religious, social, and political order. This book offers six precepts addressing the un- or under-theorized aspects of Girard’s theory of scapegoating and sacrificial violence. These precepts, supported with examples from religion, psychology, literature, and history, illuminate the root causes of the current sacrificial crisis in the world. They open a way forward to a future without scapegoats.

One of the nation's chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience. Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world's best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people's experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America's population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction--almost all in urban areas--that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

Gotham City is undergoing one of the most expansive construction booms in its history. The most prestigious architects from across the globe have buildings in various phases of completion all over town. As chairman of the Gotham Landmarks Commission, Bruce Wayne has been a key part of this boom, which signals a golden age of architectural ingenuity for the city. And then, the explosions begin. All manner of design-related malfunctions--faulty crane calculations, sturdy materials suddently collapsing, software glitches, walkways giving way and much more--cause casualties across the city. This bizarre string of seemingly random, unconnected catastrophes threaten to bring the whole construction industry down. Fingers are pointed as Batman must somehow solve the problem and find whoever is behind it all.--From Amazon.

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenomenon is not all bad, Hood demonstrates that it can actually help to pin down responsibility, and he examines different kinds of blame avoidance, both positive and negative. Hood traces how the main forms of blame avoidance manifest themselves in presentational and "spin" activity, the architecture of organizations, and the shaping of standard operating routines. He analyzes the scope and limits of blame avoidance, and he considers how it plays out in old and new areas, such as those offered by the digital age of websites and e-mail. Hood assesses the effects of this behavior, from high-level problems of democratic accountability trails going cold to the frustrations of dealing with organizations whose procedures seem to ensure that no one is responsible for anything. Delving into the inner workings of complex institutions, The Blame Game proves how a better understanding of blame avoidance can improve the quality of modern governance, management, and organizational design.

"As detective Musubi Susono investigates a series of child kidnappings, her own partner is viciously murdered. But when the investigation takes a brutal turn, she is suddenly confronted by the killer--and his vicious Silicon Creature... "-- Cover, p. [4].

The Administration contacts Kyrii and Cibo, encouraging them to keep searching for the Net Terminal Gene which will stop the City from its intractable, chaotic growth. The Admin also warns them of the autonomous Safeguards, vicious entities that attempt to kill off any humans who access the Netsphere without the required Net Terminal Gene. Kyrii is attacked, and a group of humans who have settled on the outskirts of Toha Heavy Industries comes to his aid. Kyrii awakens with a newfound ability to read his surroundings, which allows him mere seconds to fend off an attacker lurking among the humans settlement. In the ensuing battle, Cibo makes a heavy sacrifice, but not before learning a startling truth about her traveling companion...

Few contemporary scholars have done more in their work to develop the idea of responsibility than Nicola Lacey. She ranks alongside thinkers and writers such as HLA Hart and Antony Honoré in developing approaches to understanding responsibility. Like these authors, the influence of her work has spread beyond academia to change the perception of responsibility amongst practitioners. Both Hart and Honoré have during their lifetime had volumes dedicated to their work. This book does the same for Nicola Lacey, marking her ongoing influence and accomplishments in the common law world through a collection of essays by leading international scholars reflecting and interrogating her contribution to understanding criminal responsibility. Additionally, the book aims to promote the best legal scholarship on responsibility in the common law world and inspire the brightest legal scholars through a collection of essays designed to mark Professor Lacey's ongoing contribution to the understanding of criminal responsibility. The role of Professor Lacey's work in this area (as well as others) cannot be overlooked: her scholarship includes not only a prize-winning biography of HLA Hart himself but numerous articles and tomes on the subject, culminating with her most recent work In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions (OUP 2016). This Festschrift, one of few common law publications to pay homage to the erudition of a female jurist, can be seen as a continuation of the themes in this book via reflection and interrogation of her work by leading scholars on the topic. The Festschrift will therefore not only be a celebration of her work but also an attempt to take forward intellectual engagement with the topic of responsibility by continued engagement with her ideas. Each author brings new ideas to bear on her work, touching upon important aspects of responsibility that are current in the scholarship: categorization, frameworks for understanding criminal responsibility and the relationships between them, women in criminal law, the history of criminal law, blameworthiness and ascriptions of responsibility, moral responsibility, the role of politics and political economy. Nicola Lacey is a School Professor of Law, Gender, and Social Policy. From 1998 to 2010 she held a Chair in Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the LSE; she returned to the LSE in 2013 after spending three years as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and the Australian National University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and University College Oxford; and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern for outstanding scholarship on the function of the rule of law in late modern societies; and in 2018, an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice, and Gender Politics.