Word: absurdities
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...highbrow form of the assault is the ongoing frenzy about political correctness, whose object is to create the belief, or illusion, that a new and sinister McCarthyism, this time of the left, has taken over American universities and is bringing free thought to a stop. This is flatly absurd. The comparison to McCarthyism could be made only by people who either don't know or don't wish to remember what the Senator from Wisconsin and his pals actually did to academe in the '50s: the firings of tenured profs in mid- career, the inquisitions by the House Committee...
...plow through the literature of Afrocentrism is to enter a world of claims about technological innovation so absurd that they lie beyond satire, like those made for Soviet science in Stalin's time. Afrocentrists have at one time or another claimed that Egyptians, alias Africans, invented the wet-cell battery by observing electric eels in the Nile; and that late in the 1st millennium B.C., they took to flying around in gliders. (This news is based not on the discovery of an aircraft in an Egyptian tomb but on a silhouette wooden votive sculpture of the god Horus, a falcon...
...instead of reinvigorating the place with new faces and new ideas, Bush seems to insist on hiring only those who've passed some absurd loyalty test...
...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...
...dogged Brown ever since the bushy-browed onetime Jesuit seminarian first vaulted into the governorship in 1974. What most characterized his administration was incessant questioning of the status quo. Long nights were spent brainstorming about everything from cost-cutting to energy conservation -- and virtually no idea was considered too absurd to be dismissed out of hand. Recalls state controller Gray Davis, who was Brown's chief of staff: "Upon learning that Nevada had reneged on a tentative agreement to provide greater environmental control over Lake Tahoe, Jerry spent several minutes debating the merits of invading Nevada." Liberal on social issues...