Word: crude
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Lobbyists have charged for years that D'Amato and his staff use crude and even threatening fund-raising tactics, drawing explicit links between contributions and pending legislation in a way that's prohibited by federal law. The charges, first leveled in a 1986 Wall Street Journal article, persist today. Two lobbyists, who insist on anonymity because they fear losing access to D'Amato, have told TIME that D'Amato staff members solicited contributions from them this year during conversations about pending legislation. "It's raw; it's distasteful," one of the lobbyists says. "Al's guys reach through the phone...
...American intelligence officials believe the new documents may confirm their worst suspicions of the Iraqi weapons program. For example, before the Kuwait invasion, the CIA concluded in a secret report that Iraq could cobble together at least one crude nuclear device and detonate it in the western Iraqi desert in a demonstration explosion "to shake the teeth of Saddam's Arab neighbors," as a former senior agency official puts it. Before the latest revelations were made, U.N. officials believed that Baghdad had produced more than a ton of anthrax and botulinum toxin, a small portion of which they suspect...
This idea that modern society is dangerously asocial would surprise Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he lamented the tension between crude animal impulses and the dictates of society. Society, he said, tells us to cooperate with one another, indeed, even to "love thy neighbor as thyself"; yet by our nature, we are tempted to exploit our neighbor, "to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]." The Unabomber, too, in his mode aas armchair psychologist, celebrates our "WILD nature" and complains that in modern society...
...evolutionary psychology suggests that primitive man knew plenty of "restrictions of instinct." True, hatred is part of our innate social repertoire, and in other ways as well we are naturally crude. But the restraint of crude impulses is also part of our nature. Indeed, the "guilt" that Freud never satisfactorily explained is one built-in restrainer. By design, it discourages us from, say, neglecting kin through unbridled egoism, or imperiling friendships in the heat of anger--or, at the very least, it goads us to make amends after such imperiling, once we've cooled down. Certainly modern society may burden...
...only sensible escape from this logical dilemma is to acknowledge that--pending the arrival of perfect and universal racial justice--the true meaning of civil rights principles does not require either individuals or the government to act in ways that are strictly race neutral. Specifically, and to be crude about it, it is O.K. to favor blacks in ways it is not O.K. to favor whites. To be sure, this is a troubling and potentially perilous conclusion. It does not provide carte blanche for all forms of reverse discrimination. But it is the beginning of any honest debate...