Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...drawn in 1774 when British authorities ordered a surveyor to set the line between the colonies of Canada and Vermont at the 45th parallel, the exact midline between the equator and the North Pole. Local historians have cited records of liquor rations brought along on the trip. And these explain why, they say, when the survey was through, the border was set more than a quarter of a mile too far north. But for that British rum, Derby Line would have been firmly in Canada for the past 205 years, and the border in an unsettled, and much less complicated...
...tape. When vacancies appear in a country's quota, refugees are ordered to go, even if the country is Norway and their relatives are in Arizona. Says Hong Kong's UNHCR Director Angelo Rasanayagam: "We take the necessary measures to those who refuse an offer. We explain the realities. We disabuse them of their illusions." Explains one volunteer caseworker who quit a Hong Kong refugee program in disgust: "Those who refuse are told they'll go to the bottom of the list or be sent back to Viet Nam. If these people were really numbers...
Liberal education and enlightment notwithstanding, "straight" people often speak from their liberal heads and act from their fear-ridden guts. This may explain in the final analysis the recent non-discrimination clause regarding sexual preference passed by the Law School, concomitant with the bigoted actions of the residents of Stoughton and Cambridge...
...change of political hue. Most neoconservatives, he says, have fully arrived in America after a climb from deprivation. Quite a few are Jewish, and Steinfels views the Holocaust as shattering to any faith in human nature. He also notes the long Jewish struggle against the quota system to explain neoconservative impatience with extreme forms of affirmative action...
Perceived in that manner, the new pessimism seems only the old optimism turned upside down. Surely a better way to explain the neoconservatives' views is not to deal with their motives but to measure their reasons for turning right against the political and social reality that Americans have been confronting for the past 15 years. Steinfels' provocative volume might have been better served by getting down to more tough cases. He repeatedly reprimands his subjects for not blaming society's weaknesses (self-indulgence and galloping consumerism, for instance) on the free-enterprise system. He might have pursued...