Word: fatuous
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...this drawing of uncrossable lines and issuing of fatuous fatwas is supposed to be a bad habit of the left. When right-wingers are attacking this habit rather than practicing it, they call it political correctness. The problem with political correctness is that it turns discussions of substance into arguments over etiquette. The last thing that supporters of the war want to talk about at this point is the war. They'd far rather talk about this insult to General Petraeus. It just isn't done in polite society, it seems, to criticize a general in the middle...
...film is inter-spliced with Falklands' footage - together with anti-immigrant racism lends undue emphasis to the seamier side of the country's recent past. A Sunday Times review by critic Cosmo Landesman dismissed the film's portrayal of 1980s (predominantly) white-working class as "unconvincing," railing against a "fatuous" attempt to link the war in the Falklands with the one that Combo wants to fight back in England...
...concerns her final move, to France, along with her husband and their child. It's easily the least interesting part of the book as it's also the most narcissistic of an already intensely self-involved work. It ends poorly, with pointless photos of her French chateau alongside a fatuous interview by her publisher. Filled with advice like, "shopping can pick you up, just by distracting you from grim realities..." It reads more like a spread from InStyle magazine than a continuation of the earlier, penetrating work. Giving benefit of the doubt, it could be read as failed sarcasm...
...1830s, evidence began to accumulate that the extended solitude was leading to emotional disintegration, certainly in higher numbers than in communal prisons. In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, deploring solitary confinement for the "semi-fatuous condition" in which it left prisoners. The case was narrow enough that its effect was merely to overturn a single law in a single state, but the court's distaste for the idea of solitary was clear. "The justices saw it as a form of what some people now call no-touch torture," says Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of history...
There was a time when we could count on the movies to slip a $2 whoopee cushion under the seats of the rich and fatuous. Charlie Chaplin once said all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a pretty girl, a cop (representing befuddled authority) and, of course, his immortally anarchic self. All Groucho Marx required was the divinely distracted Margaret Dumont to play the stuffy rich lady he was determined to unstuff. Those movies permitted their subversive stars to invade the ballrooms and bedrooms of the privileged, if only to bring their inhabitants back down to earthiness...