Word: absurdum
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...which means that in the eyes of the Swiss government, playing “she loves me, she loves me not” is roughly equivalent to torturing a small dog with a car battery.Perhaps this should be expected. Switzerland already has animal protection laws ad absurdum. Last month, a set of laws went into effect that require canine owners to take a four-hour course before buying a dog, anglers to take a course on how to catch fish humanely, and pet owners to protect goldfish privacy by not having tanks be transparent on all sides. Only...
...cool, calculated logic to guide its proceedings. Here enters a tricky argument that challenges that calculus through which the council has regained its credibility. Should the council ever make a conscious funding decision based on a magazine’s content? We might, of course, play the ad absurdum game where I suggest Harvard Students for the Confederacy apply for a grant for a “Confederate Flag Day,” or worse, in order to arrive at a suggestion the council would rebuff because of content. (Incidentally, I imagine such an event would have, for many...
...groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Taylor published the dismissive satire A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, sneering that the arguments for women’s rights were also applicable to animals and that this amounted to a reductio ad absurdum of Wollstonecraft’s position. Taylor’s conclusion was wrong, of course, but he was right in asserting that we have the same reasons to respect the interests of all sentient animals—male or female, human or nonhuman...
...absurdum arguments aside, we sincerely hope to see the day that homosexuals enjoy the same rights to which every citizen is entitled. What we dislike is the mistaking of an academic discipline for social acceptance. The desire to find “marginalized discourses, perspectives and theories” should be weighed against the cost and importance of their study and against whether this research could be fit coherently into a larger, less exclusionary whole. Why not have a Department of Gender and Sexuality that could deal with all aspects of these topics? Why break down into ever-smaller groups...
...massacre of Nepal's royal family may have caused us to shake our enlightened heads at the reductio ad absurdum of a country's having three Kings in four days [WORLD, June 11], but what about our own medieval mentality that has us still going gaga over any whiff of royalty? Isn't it time both East and West stopped clinging to long outmoded values, such as inherited wealth and power, that are residual metaphors for divine right? It is time to kiss Camelot goodbye. KATHERINE E. KREUTER Rancho Mirage, Calif...