Monday 25 March 2013

Lost for words, Lord of the Flies and Night

In both Lord of the Flies and Night the number of people being affected by violence is greater than the number of people committing it. In Night the Nazi soldiers kill, beat and starve the prisoners of the concentration camps while under the threat of death they cannot say anything. In a similar way in Lord of the Flies the group looks as Jack slowly goes insane and escalates his violence but nobody says a word. Like the quote from Edmund Burke "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". People in both situations believed it is too dangerous to stand up and because of that allowed them to continue spreading the violence.

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Mob Mentality and Lord of the Flies.


There are many examples of mob/gang mentality taking over the minds of the children on the island. The community and lack of leadership got the kids to behave very strangely in certain situations. Mob mentality is a  real phenomenon and it happens in Lord of the Flies. The main example of mob mentality in Lord of the Flies would be when Simon is killed by the group without any single person having a reason to kill him, but after being put in that mob situation where no one person is thinking clearly but just acting the same way the person next to them is. Afterwards they all regret the action they took but in the moment they do not think but only act. Piggys death can also be attributed to the craziness going on in the heads of the kids on the island, Roger goes insane without supervision and thinks he did nothing wrong in the group.

Monday 18 March 2013

Social media and Law enforcement



How does Law Enforcement use social networks to help catch criminals?

There are many ways the police can use social networks to their advantage when trying to enforce the law. Some of the more common ways include:

Monitoring underage drinking and driving under the influence. By being able to see posts on Facebook about people drinking while underage with the date embedded into the photo police are able to charge underage drinkers with the help of social networks. In a similar manner officers are able to find out who and when went driving while under the influence of alcohol.

Informing the public. Police officers with the use of Twitter and other social media are able to spread news of a criminal at large or wanted person very fast to a lot of people. This speed of information allows the public and the police to react faster and provide information faster that will be useful in finding the criminal.

Going undercover. Officers create fake accounts on popular social websites in order to try and befriend criminals and lure them into doing criminal activity, such as dealing drugs and ambushing them when they gather enough proof.

Infamous Genocides


Genocide is "the deliberate and systematic destruction of, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars.While a precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.


1. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocidal mass killing that took place in 1994 in Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days over 500,000 people were killed, according to a estimate. Estimates of the death toll have ranged from 500,000–1,000,000, or as much as 20% of the country's total population. It was the end result of a long fight between the minority Tutsi,  who had controlled power for centuries, and the majority Hutu peoples, who had come to power in the rebellion of 1959–62.


2. Pol Pot's devastation of Cambodia. Under the leadership of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge government they caused the deaths of around a Quarter of the entire countries population in an "effort" to bring the country back to what he called "Ground Zero". Ground Zero' was his idea of what a utopian society should be. In order to reach this perfect society, all the citizens would have to be peasants who lived life on a subsistence level.


3.The Armenian Genocide is the intentional destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. Through massacres the Ottomans killed around 1-1.5 million Armenians because they considered them to be second class citizens and undeserving of life. Modern Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide and denies it to this day. 


4.The Nanking Massacre was a genocide that took place in Nanjing, China during the Second World War. After the invasion of Nanjing, tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were raped and murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army.There were mass executions by machine gun fire, and also other more gruesome methodsThe number of poeple killed is estimated at around 200-300 thousand people. Some of the Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II by the Allies for their war crimes. Even today, many Japanese people naively believe that the Nanking Massacre was faked.