Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would be the hegemonic power in an independent Europe. Consider the evidence. The West Germans have built from rubble the most powerful economy in all Europe. Yet an even greater feat may have been performed by the East Germans. They have created a relatively productive economy under the impossible, absurd conditions of Marxist economics. Put these two together and you have what all of Europe understands will be its dominant power...
...German Workers Party. He began making speeches, denouncing Bolsheviks, capitalists, the Jews, the French. Germany had lost the war only because it had been betrayed at home by a "stab in the back." By 1923, as the new Weimar Republic was sinking into deep economic troubles, Hitler staged an absurd "beer-hall putsch" and led a march through Munich. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison (he served nine months). "You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over," he declared at his trial, "but the goddess of the eternal court of history acquits...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivocator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or by fencing with him but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all Hume did not live in a vacuum...
Carswell's further discussion of the O.A. is quite to the point--he himself realizes its superiority to any E., however A. His illustration includes one of the key "Wake Up the Grader" pharses--"It is absurd." What force! What gall! What fun! "Ridiculous," "hopeless," "nonsense," on the one hand; "doubtless," "obvious," "unquestionable," on the other, will have the same effect. A hint of nostalgic, anti-academic languor at this stage as well may match the grader's own mood: "It seems more than obvious to one entangled in the petty quibbles of contemporary Medievalists--at times, indeed, approaching...
That China's aloof and secretive officials would submit to such an interrogation might have seemed absurd a few weeks ago. But the nation's student uprising, now three weeks old, has thrown official China into confusion. Having failed to carry out its threat to crack down on the immense student march that engulfed Beijing two weeks ago, the government last week launched a soft offensive, blitzing the public with self-serving propaganda in support of its policies. When the leaders of the new independent student union announced that they would go ahead with a march across the capital...