The Ethical Assassin

Author : David Liss
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2007-01-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780812974546

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The Ethical Assassin by David Liss Pdf

Edgar award-winning author of the popular historical novels A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption, David Liss showcases his amazing versatility with this brilliant new tale of contemporary suspense: a literary thriller set in Florida, where killing is a matter of conscience. No one is more surprised than Lem Altick when it turns out he’s actually good at peddling encyclopedias door to door. He hates the predatory world of sales, but he needs the money to pay for college. Then things go horribly wrong. In a sweltering trailer in rural Florida, a couple whom Lem has spent hours pitching is shot dead before his eyes, and the unassuming young man is suddenly pulled into the dark world of conspiracy and murder. Not just murder: assassination– or so claims the killer, the mysterious and strangely charismatic Melford Kean, who has struck without remorse and with remarkable good cheer. But the self-styled ethical assassin hadn’t planned on a witness, and so he makes Lem a deal: Stay quiet and there will be no problems. Go to the police and take the fall. Before Lem can decide, he is drawn against his will into the realm of the assassin, a post-Marxist intellectual with whom he forms an unlikely (and perhaps unwise) friendship. The ethical assassin could be a charming sociopath, eco-activist, or vigilante for social justice. To unravel the mystery and save himself, Lem must descend deep into a bizarre world he never knew existed, where a group of desperate–and genuinely deranged–schemers have hatched a plan that will very likely keep Lem from leaving town alive. David Liss skillfully interweaves a gallery of eccentric characters with a multilayered plot characterized by its unpredictable twists and turns. The Ethical Assassin is a brilliant, darkly comic novel that will leave readers in suspense until the very last page.

Author : Kenneth R. Himes, OFM
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2015-09-03
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781442231573

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Drones and the Ethics of Targeted Killing by Kenneth R. Himes, OFM Pdf

Drones have become an essential part of U.S. national security strategy, but most Americans know little about how they are used, and we receive conflicting reports about their outcomes. In Drones and the Ethics of Targeted Killing, ethicist Kenneth R. Himes provides not only an overview of the role of drones in national security but also an important exploration of the ethical implications of drone warfare—from the impact on terrorist organizations and civilians to how piloting drones shapes soldiers. Targeted killings have played a role in politics from ancient times through today, so the ethical challenges around how to protect against threats are not new. Himes leads readers through the ethics of targeted killings in history from ancient times to the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then looks specifically at the new issues raised through the use of drones. This book is a powerful look at a pressing topic today.

Author : Miguel Sicart
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2011-08-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780262261531

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The Ethics of Computer Games by Miguel Sicart Pdf

Why computer games can be ethical, how players use their ethical values in gameplay, and the implications for game design. Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry (and the accompanying emergence of computer games as the subject of scholarly research), we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of game designers. He argues that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games (using Bioshock as an example), multiplayer games (illustrated by Defcon), and online gameworlds (illustrated by World of Warcraft) from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay.

Author : Ajay Muppirala
Publisher : Notion Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2017-08-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781947586475

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August Shock Waves by Ajay Muppirala Pdf

It is 2017 and a Lebanese has been ordered to spearhead a sinister mission which, if successful, would trigger the Third World War. A beautiful girl with an IQ over 160, is diagnosed with a heart condition as rare as her intellect, is caught in the vortex of love and death. A first-generation billionaire is determined to eliminate the corrupt, bloodsucking politicians aided by a manifesto known only to a few as The Cleansing Protocol. His chosen mode of retribution – vigilante justice. A radical fanatic has come into the possession of a fully transportable thermonuclear weapon destined to the nation that he hates the most. At the Crypto Box, the young ingenious recruits set in motion every module available to them, to prevent a catastrophe so devastating that it would make the world forget Hiroshima. From the historically-relevant alleys of Delhi’s Chandini Chowk to the opulent city of Moscow, and from the most clandestinely run nuclear weapons’ laboratory to the headquarters of R&AW, embark on an absolutely thrilling ride that would surely make you experience a cocktail of unadulterated emotions. Discover love, hatred, suspense, ingenuity, hope... in August Shock Waves

Author : Ward Thomas
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2014-06-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780801471681

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The Ethics of Destruction by Ward Thomas Pdf

Many assume that in international politics, and especially in war, "anything goes." Sherman famously declared war "is all hell." The implication behind the maxim is that in war there is no order, only chaos; no mercy, only cruelty; no restraint, only suffering.Ward Thomas finds that this "anything goes" view is demonstrably wrong. It neither reflects how most people talk about the use of force in international relations nor describes the way national leaders actually use military force. Events such as those in Europe during World War II, in the Persian Gulf War, and in Kosovo cannot be understood, he argues, until we realize that state behavior, even during wartime, is shaped by common understandings about what is ethically acceptable and unacceptable.Thomas makes extensive use of two cases—the assassination of foreign leaders and the aerial bombardment of civilians—to trace the relative influence of norms and interests. His insistence on interconnections between ethical principle and material power leads to a revised understanding of the role of normative factors in foreign policy and the ways in which power and interest shape the international system.

Author : J. Bowyer Bell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781351315425

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Assassin by J. Bowyer Bell Pdf

Assassination as a political act has a long history, predating the murder of Julius Caesar and continuing into our own time. The murder of the mighty has long fascinated artists and rebels but only rarely has it been studied in a scholarly manner. In Assassin, J. Bowyer Bell combines existing historical evidence with years of personal interviews with terrorists in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The result is an incisive study of that enigmatic figure, the revolutionary killer. As Bell makes clear, the motives of the actors, and effectiveness of assassination, vary widely across time and place. Assassination in many parts of the world has not only been a normal political act, rational, explicable, but also often effective, in some cases taking fewer lives in the transfer of power than an election. Likewise, there have been all kinds of assassins--personal, psychopathic, professional, ranging from lonely failures trying to make their mark to authorized agents of the state. Using the assassination of Henry IV of France as a historical backdrop, Bell writes about contemporary political murder from the perspective of one who has studied the subject of political violence for decades. Bell has met with or known well the perpetrators, conspirators, and intended victims of assassination who have escaped. His interviewees include a radical Irish revolutionary leader, an American Arabist diplomat, a spokesman for the PLO, and the president of a Mozambique liberation movement. The itinerary of his investigative journeys covers most of the flashpoints of contemporary political violence. The people and places studied here at firsthand are engaged in a deadly game. The attrition rate is often high, the power fleeting, and the consequences often unforeseen. If past is prologue, assassination is to be with us for years to come. The volume will be essential reading for those engaged in the prevention of political violence and terror as well as historians and political scientists.

Author : John Bowyer Bell
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2024-06-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781412817592

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Assassin by John Bowyer Bell Pdf

Author : Peng Hsiao-yen
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2019-10-23
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9789888455690

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The Assassin by Peng Hsiao-yen Pdf

The Assassin tells the story of a swordswoman who refrains from killing. Hou Hsiao-hsien astonishes his audience once again by upsetting almost every convention of the wuxia (martial arts) genre in the film. This collection offers eleven readings, each as original and thought-provoking as the film itself, beginning with one given by the director himself. Contributors analyze the elliptical way of storytelling, Hou’s adaptation of the source text (a tale from the Tang dynasty, also included in this volume), the film’s appropriation of traditional Chinese visual aesthetics, as well as the concept of xia (knight-errant) that is embedded in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist worldviews. There are also discussions of the much-celebrated sonic design of The Assassin: the nearly exclusive use of a diegetic film score is a statement on the director’s belief in cinematic reality. Underlying all the chapters is a focus on how Hou reinvents Tang-dynasty China in contemporary culture. The meticulously recreated everyday reality of the Tang world in the film highlights the ethnic and cultural diversity of the dynasty. It was a time when Sogdian traders acted as important intermediaries between Central Asia and the Tang court, and as a result Sogdian culture permeated the society. Taking note of the vibrant hybridity of Tang culture in the film, this volume shows that the historical openness to non-Chinese elements is in fact an essential part of the Chineseness expressed in Hou’s work. The Assassin is a gateway to the remote Tang-dynasty world, but in Hou’s hands the concerns of that premodern world turn out to be highly relevant to the world of the audience. “This book promises to be a useful companion to the film The Assassin. Contributors to this collection have convincingly and compellingly elucidated some of the film’s most difficult features. The result is a rich and wide-ranging analysis of one of the most beautiful films of our time.” —Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang, The University of Texas at Austin “This collection of essays unfolds the many layers of The Assassin by speaking to its aesthetic achievements, reinvention of genre conventions, deep historical engagement, and philosophical substance. It exceeds the sum of its individual parts by building a vibrant cross-disciplinary conversation among a diverse group of accomplished scholars, who contribute original and compelling insights on the film.” —Jean Ma, Stanford University

Author : Linda A. Bell
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0847678458

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Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence by Linda A. Bell Pdf

Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995. Moving beyond the traditional feminist ethics of care, Linda A. Bell places an existentialist conception of liberation at the heart of ethics and argues that only an ethics of freedom sufficiently allows for feminist critique and opposition to a status quo imbued with violence. She offers a critique of Aristotelian, utilitarian, and Kantian ethics, analyzing each approach from feminist perspectives and showing how each fails women and others who resist oppression.

Author : Joyce G. Saricks
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2011-03-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781591588078

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Read On...Audiobooks by Joyce G. Saricks Pdf

With more than 300 original annotations in some 60 thematic lists, this one-of-a kind compilation opens the world of audiobooks to listeners and librarians alike. The demand for audiobooks is booming, yet materials that help listeners make choices of what to listen to have been in short supply. Read On...Audiobooks: Reading Lists for Every Taste fills that gap, helping match reader interests and mood to titles that might please them. Written by Joyce G. Saricks, a well-known writer and speaker on readers' advisory, the book offers original annotations for more than 300 audiobook titles, grouped according to some 60 themes, fiction and nonfiction. Lists are organized by character, story, setting, language, and mood/tone. Each entry provides a plot description and discusses the appeal of the narrator. In addition to helping patrons, the book will assist librarians with collection development and listener's advisory, creating displays that include audiobooks, promoting the collection, and especially, with understanding the special dynamic that exists among listeners, narrators, and audiobooks.

Author : James Wasserman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2001-04-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781594778735

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The Templars and the Assassins by James Wasserman Pdf

• An examination of the interactions of the Christian Knights Templar and their Muslim counterparts, the Assassins, and of the profound changes in Western society that resulted. • Restores the reputation of the secret Muslim order of the Assassins, disparaged as the world's first terrorist group. • Dispels many myths about the Knights Templar and provides the most incisive portrait of them to date. A thousand years ago Christian battled Muslim for possession of a strip of land upon which both their religions were founded. These Crusades changed the course of Western history, but less known is the fact that they also were the meeting ground for two legendary secret societies: The Knights Templar and their Muslim counterparts, the Assassins. In The Templars and the Assassins: The Militia of Heaven, occult scholar and secret society member James Wasserman provides compelling evidence that the interaction of the Knights Templar and the Assassins in the Holy Land transformed the Templars from the Pope's private army into a true occult society, from which they would sow the seeds of the Renaissance and the Western Mystery Tradition. Both orders were destroyed as heretical some seven hundred years ago, but Templar survivors are believed to have carried the secret teachings of the East into an occult underground, from which sprang both Rosicrucianism and Masonry. Assassin survivors, known as Nizari Ismailis, flourish to this day under the spiritual leadership of the Aga Khan. Wasserman strips the myths from both groups and penetrates to the heart of their enlightened beliefs and rigorous practices, delivering the most probing picture yet of these holy warriors.

Author : Patrick D. Anderson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 118 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2022-04-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000613513

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Cypherpunk Ethics by Patrick D. Anderson Pdf

Cypherpunk Ethics explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto, for short—to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age. Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy—crypto anarchy and crypto justice—and examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. Rooted in theory but with very real applications, this volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of digital media, communication, journalism, philosophy, political science, critical data studies, sociology, and the history of technology but also to technologists and activists around the world.

Author : Erik Champion,Juan Francisco Hiriart Vera
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2023-12-18
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9783111253473

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›Assassin’s Creed‹ in the Classroom by Erik Champion,Juan Francisco Hiriart Vera Pdf

The open world role-playing Assassin’s Creed video game series is one of the most successful series of all time, praised for its in-depth use of historical characters and events, compelling graphics, and addictive gameplay. Assassin’s Creed games offer up the possibility of exploring history, mythology, and heritage immersively, graphically, and imaginatively. This collection of essays by architects archaeologists and historiansexplores the learning opportunities of playing, modifying, and extending the games in the classroom, on location, in the architectural studio, and in a museum.

Author : Matthew Evangelista
Publisher : Polity
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2008-08-04
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780745641096

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Law, Ethics, and the War on Terror by Matthew Evangelista Pdf

In recent years the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians by al Qaeda terrorists has plumbed the depths of criminality and immorality. Yet it is the response to those attacks, particularly by the United States, that has provoked widespread accusations that the anti-terrorist cure may be worse than the terrorist disease. This book explores the key legal and ethical controversies that arose in the wake of the brutal attacks of 11 September 2001. After the Cold War, progress in human rights and limitations on warfare created an impression that "global civil society" had emerged to challenge the dominance of states and establish new norms to guide their behavior. The events of 9/11, however, witnessed a reassertion of state prerogatives, reflected in challenges to the Geneva Conventions and the stigma against torture. Focusing on core debates about preventive war and the implications of targeted assassination, kidnapping, indefinite detention, and the torture of suspected terrorists, Evangelista asks whether state practice will further undermine the very norms of international law and morality, or whether efforts to combat terrorism can be brought back into conformity with ethical and legal standards.

Author : Stephen Leigh
Publisher : Astra Publishing House
Page : 461 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2013-05-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781101620007

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Assassins' Dawn by Stephen Leigh Pdf

Neweden is a world whose gods are death and fate, and it’s here that the Hoorka have arisen: a guild of assassins, whose single law is that the victim must always retain a tiny but finite chance of escape. If the victim can survive until dawn, they may go free. But the rich and powerful don’t care to have their will thwarted, and so the Hoorka must deal with the consequences of their own ethics. Gyll, the leader of the Hoorka, also has dreams of taking the guild offworld into the growing society of the Alliance, which is trying to reconstruct a shattered, worlds-spanning empire. Is that dream a genuine possibility, or will exposure to other cultures doom the Hoorka entirely? Gyll must confront internal struggles within his own people, the dangerous politics of Neweden, and the twinned threat and promise of the Alliance. The Hag of Death dances around them, mockingly. Can the Hoorka survive to see the dawn of their own success, an Assassins’ Dawn?