Word: absurdum
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This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser...
That is the way great ideas end, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but through reductio ad absurdum. You know investment bankers are not satisfied until every good idea is driven into the ground like a tomato stake...
Thinking so may be a comfort to Democrats, but it is the reductio ad absurdum of election analysis and the first step toward losing the next election. How long can Democrats go on missing the point? After a while -- say, a quarter-century -- a pattern begins to emerge. Since 1964 Democrats have lost every presidential election save one. And that one (Carter in '76) was a squeaker and a fluke, coming immediately after Nixon's fall, the Ford pardon and the biggest gaffe in the history of presidential debates (Ford liberating Poland...
...Index, with its acontextual presentation of pre-cooked information represents the ultimate reduction ad absurdum of fast-food culture. But its not a bland offering, as the biases of the editors are clear. When the hyper-trivial is left aside, the statistics in the Index take potent swipes at the American zeitgeist and all its hypocricy and self-indulgence...
ANTI-APARTHEID activists would have been hard-pressed to imagine a more damning reductio ad absurdum of Harvard's policies toward South Africa than the University's new South African Internship Program. The program is ill-conceived, poorly planned and, as it currently stands, will actually hurt Black South Africans--the ostensible beneficiaries of the new internships. It was conceived out of short-term political expediency and claims to benign results for malignant activities...