Word: deflective
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doesn't seem to much matter whatthat result is: "We cannot expect there to be asingle stable solution...but rather a variety ofuncertain and temporary equilibria, with theconversation-stoppers tending to accrete pearlylayers of supporting dogma which cannot themselveswithstand extended scrutiny but do actually serveon occasion, blessedly, to deflect and terminateconsideration." In that list ofconversation-stoppers, utilitarian calculus andKantian imperatives are equally valid...
...lack of support from above, the atmosphere of languid unconcern that permeated the agency's executive suite. The KGB made its own contribution. From the start the KGB assumed that the CIA would look for a penetration after its agents began disappearing. Moscow therefore did everything it could to deflect the attention of the mole hunters and send them down blind alleys...
...wants the U.N. to completely eliminate the sanctions. In 1991, Iraq rejected a similar offer, complaining that it infringed on Iraq's sovereignty.TIME U.N. correspondent Bonnie Angelosays Saddam is unlikely to back down from that stance unless he is given a way to "save face." The U.N. wants to deflect criticism that Iraqi residents are suffering from the sanctions, but still refuses to lift them because itsuspects Iraq is making biological weapons...
Xiaomeng Tong's "Human Rights Hypocrisy" (signed piece, Apr. 5, 1995), raises too many issues for one letter to supply sufficient response. Yet typical of a Beijing party-line invective, albeit a soft-pedaled one, the editorial quietly intends to deflect the international issues at hand between the U.S. and China to matters of "internal affairs," both Chinese and American. Certainly, to point out the U.S.'s inequalities (which we can expect to be exacerbated in the fallout of the Newtonian Congress) is no panacea for China's woeful inability to understand democracy, and Tong's choice to ignore China...
Sheed too knows how to deflect fear with badinage. His denial of denial is especially inventive, and the account of his English boyhood is high spirited, considering that he was permanently hobbled by polio and had to trade in his cricket gear for braces and crutches. Yet catching an early bad break had an unexpected upside. "The period when I might have been learning to adjust to the word [handicapped]," Sheed writes, "was so packed with small accomplishments that it was impossible not to feel like one of the world's winners ever afterwards...