Word: complexities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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History is no guide. Nations are not some natural, organic phenomenon but complex accumulations of strength, alliances and enmities. And the passion for nationhood has swung between eras of consolidation and fragmentation: the single-state world of the Roman Empire; the 500-odd nations of the 1500s Renaissance. In the post-cold war age, people impatient with the map they've inherited appear to be caught in between. A globalized economy is melting down the relevance of nationhood at the same time that the dispossessed's unrealized yearnings to be a state are gaining legitimacy...
...whether females are any less inclined to seek a diversity of partners, should the opportunities arise. Basing your answer on the behavior of women in recent times is a little like studying giraffes in a zoo and concluding they can't run. Most cultures, at least of the complex, "civilized" variety, have penalized women who stray or have taken sadistic measures to prevent that from happening in the first place, from raping or killing them to labeling them "cheap." In parts of Latin America and the Middle East, "honor killings" of wayward daughters or sisters are common and treated indulgently...
...legend, conveniently located in the public domain, from which it can quarry inspirational tales of resistance to tyranny, redemption from injustice. From The Life of Emile Zola to Braveheart, audiences bedeviled by the ambiguities of modern life have derived moral instruction and emotional uplift from these transformations of the complex past into simple, glowing metaphorical guides to right behavior...
Selling peace in the Balkans is a tough proposition. But in the complex talks between Kosovo's ethnic Albanians and their Serb rulers that adjourned last week in France, peace found a new promoter: Veton Surroi, a 37-year-old ethnic Albanian. The negotiations ended on a difficult note. Surroi and the other Albanian delegates agreed to a peace plan that would allow them limited self-rule for three years. As part of their agreement they made an unusual request--that they be allowed two weeks to return to Kosovo to sell the idea to their fellow Albanians...
...something the rest of us don't. Can the soul live best when it lives simply? This is one of the many metaphysical questions Divinely Inspiredstruggles with. It will provide no answers, nor does it intend to. We see evidence of some ultimate order, of something divine in the Complex and gorgeous patterns of curves and colors, and evidence of the truth in the eyes of an old man. But, as with everything religious, the answers are ultimately left for us to discover...