Word: dismissiveness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tadesse, the perpetrator of the bizarre murder-suicide which claimed Ho's life. Those of you who left Cambridge soon afterward may not be aware that the bill for Tadesse's memorial service (in addition to Ho's) was footed by none other than Harvard University. Let's immediately dismiss the financial issue--the cost was peanuts to Harvard and nothing or practically nothing to any student. But the fact of Harvard's having paid sends some very interesting messages...
...morning, consensus for a retaliatory attack had formed among the nato allies. But U.S. officials knew they faced a major difficulty. What about Holbrooke and his diplomatic team, which was getting ready to lobby Milosevic? If NATO launched air strikes, would Milosevic, the Serb strongman, react with anger and dismiss Holbrooke's overture? After conferring on the phone, Talbott and Christopher decided that the air campaign could cripple the diplomatic initiative, but that Washington had no choice. "Diplomacy was dead without the force," said a State Department official. By 7 p.m. Washington time, the first warplanes were launched...
...reception of the Fuhrman tapes follows a well-established pattern of denial about the virulence of racism that extends far beyond the field of law enforcement. In part be cause of the conservative backlash against affirmative action, it has become fashionable to dismiss black and Latino complaints of discrimination as either mere pleading for preferential treatment or hallucinations, until an incontrovertible piece of evidence such as the Fuhrman tapes comes along. Then, inevitably, a surge of moral condemnation washes across the country like a cathartic wave--and subsides without any lasting effect. By the time the next ugly story surfaces...
...addition to the unsettling threat of mano-a-mano violence, the ancestral environment featured periodic starvation, incurable disease and the prospect of being eaten by a beast. Such inconveniences of primitive life have recently been used to dismiss the Unabomber's agenda. The historian of science Daniel Kevles, writing in the New Yorker, observes how coarse the "preindustrial past" looks, once "stripped of the gauzy romanticism of myth." Regarding the Unabomber's apparent aim of reversing technological history and somehow transporting our species back toward a more primitive age, Kevles declares, "Most of us don't want to live...
Maybe not, but Stephen Neuwirth, a Nussbaum deputy, told Senate investigators that Nussbaum suggested to him that Thomases and Mrs. Clinton were concerned about "unfettered access to Mr. Foster's office." White House officials dismiss all the maneuvering as innocent...