Word: discredit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...acquire comes only from a rigorous and mathematical inquiry into nature. The tenets of theology or the moral virtues—the most important knowledge for the soul—may have had greater priority in previous societies. Yet the innovation of our age has been to discredit such matters as necessarily spurious and speculative and thus not the subject of real intellectual activity. What matters to moderns is the data—and in its slavish devotion to the data, science gained its intellectual pre-eminence...
...Until this week, critics of so-called gay marriage used that same undemocratic argument to try to discredit the new right, which is why the Vermont legislature's April 7 vote to legalize marriage for gay couples mattered so much: it was the first time in U.S. history that a first-branch institution, one that has to face voters in short order, actually granted equal marriage rights. (The California legislature has twice voted for marriage equality, but advocates couldn't muster enough votes to override Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's vetoes). Lesbian and gay Americans, who will celebrate the 40th anniversary...
...seriously imagine that Washington will alter its support for Israel, but Khamenei, by citing one of the ideological pillars of the Islamic Revolution (hostility to "the Zionist regime"), was in effect admonishing Iranian leaders to keep the U.S. at arm's length. (The Supreme Leader's efforts to discredit the U.S. initiative by invoking Washington's ties with Israel could have been helped by Israeli President Shimon Peres' issuing a scolding New Year's message of his own to Iran's people hours after Obama's.) (See pictures of Iranian society, caught between tradition and modernity...
...security release, then Obama is irrefutably wrong in denying its exposure. Evidence of torture will be damaging to America’s reputation around the world, but it nevertheless deserves to be heard. Should such evidence later be revealed by a non-governmental source, it would even further discredit American ideals...
...Administration has a chance to hit the "reset" button before the Congressional debate over the Budget begins in earnest. The rosy forecasts presented with the document will be powerful leverage for those who want to discredit that entire package as the work of charlatans who want to make the results of their recovery plan look better than they possibly could be. Changing the basic assumptions behind the Budget means going through the entire document, program by program, and resetting the investments and returns on the investment for each one. The $1.75 trillion deficit would grow, or some programs would have...