Word: absurdism
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...Macedonian conflict borders on the absurd - at least through the prism of NATO's wishful thinking. The troubled Balkan nation appeared to accelerate down the slide towards full-blown civil war Monday as ethnic-Albanian rebels fought government forces for control over Tetovo, Macedonia's second city which is claimed as an unofficial capital by the rebels. At the same time, Macedonians driven out of their villages by rebel forces in a familiar spectacle of Balkan "ethnic cleansing" vented their rage on Western embassies - and, inevitably, a McDonalds - in the capital overnight. The facts on the ground suggest a rapid...
...have started to realize that in order to sustain public support, they will have to root out the thuggish elements themselves. "You'll never see us breaking a window or hitting a policeman," says Cassen of France's ATTAC, which boasts 30,000 paying members. "We think it's absurd and provides a means of criminalizing the movement. We're doing everything we can to marginalize the violence...
...Population growth in Japan is already at zero, and its people are steadily aging. Europe is heading toward that fate quite rapidly. To believe that aging populations can achieve sustained, accelerated growth is absurd?or a symptom of the arrogance of economists who ascribe low growth almost entirely to failures in economic policy, although policy tinkering has modest impact. As for the U.S., its demographics are O.K. thanks to immigration, but its private-sector debt levels and reliance on Asian savings to sustain its consumption habits are daily becoming more horrifying...
...reported that a Japanese madman stabbed eight schoolchildren in a suburb of Osaka [WORLD, June 18]. Some will argue that if knives were illegal in Japan (a country with a long history of swords and such), this awful attack wouldn't have happened. It's pretty absurd to claim that if knives and blades were made illegal now, this sort of killing would not happen in the future, but haven't we heard something like that before? KURT MAUSERT Saratoga Springs...
...Elsewhere, the old ways of thinking about the "national interest" - that guiding light of the Westphalian system - have fewer adherents than they once did. Not long ago, the national interest of, say, the Netherlands could be defined by a necessity to protect Dutch blood and soil. It would be absurd to imagine that the modern Dutch think that way now. For a sensible Dutch government, it makes sense to define the things that really matter in terms of the international opportunities available to its companies, and in the commitment to global environmentalism that its citizens apparently avow...