Word: contemptible
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Houellebecq has a gift for sleepy invective; he has contempt for both freedom and authority. But he's like a bad date--brimming with rank charm but few useful judgments. The great nihilist doesn't even know what a closet Victorian he is. Michel sentimentalizes commercial sex, imagining a Western encounter with the Third World that will be calculating and unglamorous but, all in all, gentle. You might say "gently empty." The empty part is a good bet. Somebody remind the author that the gentleness is not to be counted on. --By Richard Lacayo
...respect from its neighbor across the Hudson River. When you work in Manhattan, as I have for each of the past two summers, you get a pretty good idea of just how much New Yorkers love to scorn New Jersey. City-dwellers, it would seem, generally have the utmost contempt for the Garden State—that is, until they get married, have children and decide to move there for bigger houses, better public schools and, oh yeah, grass...
...Afghanistan and Iraq, which uses essentially imperialist means to defeat fascist regimes and rebuild nations ravaged by them? Orwell was not a pacifist. He had lived long enough among the poor in Britain and France to understand the inequities of the liberal democracies, but he had a splendid contempt for those unwilling to defend them against a greater evil. If he believed that rogue states or radical Islamic terrorists had the means and motive to threaten Western lives and liberties, he would surely have supported the use of armed force to eradicate the danger...
Vellucci, who grew up in Somerville, developed contempt for everything Harvard early...
...wrong she was. Barely a month after the Naadi verdict, in a casual conversation with law colleagues, Nouman said the fateful words, "There's no justice in this country." Someone informed the police, and within hours she was arrested for contempt of court. Taken to al-Zafaraniya police station, she was, she says, brutally beaten for several days in a row, raped and had a hot candle forced into her rectum. "I kept telling the police, 'You can't do this to me. I'm a lawyer,'" she says, smiling sadly at her own naivete. "They said, 'Once you become...