Word: error
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...widely considered a breach of democratic etiquette to question the collective wisdom of the electorate. To suggest that the voters are wrong, let alone to characterize their error in more melodramatic terms, opens you up to charges of elitism. The contention that people have been misled or manipulated, wrote one smug supporter of the probable winner shortly before the election, "reveals an extraordinary contempt for the political intelligence of the public...
...real insult to democracy, it seems to me, is to treat it as some sort of tennis game where victory is the definitive judgment on the players. And the real insult to the electorate is the patronizing attitude that it is a sort of lumbering collective beast, immune from error because it reaches its judgments through some mystical process that is beyond rational discourse, rather than an amalgam of individuals, each one fully capable of being right and being wrong...
These are variations on motherhood's worst-case scenario: you turn your back for a moment or make, under pressure of conflicting emotions, what seems to you only a minor error in judgment, and suddenly your child is snatched from you. For Lindy Chamberlain (Meryl Streep) in A Cry in the Dark, the loss is permanent: she never sees her baby again, alive or dead. For Anna Dunlap (Diane Keaton) in The Good Mother, the outcome is not quite so cruel: she faces losing custody of her daughter Molly, but not the child's death. Yet both mothers find themselves...
Even its most-celebrated effect--crashing thousands of mainframes across the country--was apparently due to a programming error and was not Morris' intent...
Those tallies were higher than predicted for Dukakis. A poll of Harvard students conducted last week showed that 69 percent of undergraduates supported Dukakis, compared to 27 who backed Bush. The poll, conducted by The Crimson from November 3 to 6, had a 6 percent margin of error...