Word: imperfect
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unusual thing happened last week. A man who had brutalized and terrorized his nation for a quarter-century was brought to justice. Saddam Hussein's trial and execution were imperfect. But the critics of the trial can't have it both ways. First, many of them told us that we couldn't expect Iraq to be a Jeffersonian democracy. Now they feign outrage that Saddam's trial didn't live up to Jeffersonian standards. Of course the trial was imperfect--but compared to what? The summary judgments accorded by their countrymen to Mussolini in 1945 and Ceausescu...
...Change the Definition. Make it poverty, not pigment. This is an imperfect solution. Yes, a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos are poor, but the majority of poor people are white-and more than a few are Asian. If race-based remedies are supplanted by class-based remedies, the number of African Americans attending elite universities, for one thing, will fall. Tom Kane, a Harvard economist, told me, "You'd need an economic affirmative-action program six times the size of the current racial preferences to [benefit] an equivalent number of African Americans." There's another step that would...
...only way for the situation to be improved—it is not capable of being perfectly “fixed” since it exists in the decidedly imperfect real world—is to shine a great deal of sunlight on a process that is now quite secretive. If universities want to make “holistic” admissions decisions, that is certainly their prerogative. In fact it is probably the only way to build a campus that doesn’t stink of depression as a quick visit to Caltech or MIT will attest...
...Students would of course be identified anonymously. This would allow the public a better idea of just how schools make their decisionbys, and would allow the statistically inclined to run a few analyses seeing how schools treat people from different regions, races, and economic classes. Would this be imperfect? Absolutely, but I still think it would be vastly better than the current system and would allow the public to verify how schools follow through on their own rhetoric...
Dmitrievsky and others are seeking to protect and reclaim freedoms won in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or greater openness. Later, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin presided over a scrappy, imperfect democratic flowering. Activists say that, since he took office in 2000, Putin has tried to bottle up the explosion of interest in human rights, free speech and democratic accountability that took place in the 1990s. Says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in parliament: "The regime has achieved a state of total manipulation...