Word: instruments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that athletic ability is a frivolous, unpraiseworthy attribute, especially when compared to more "Harvardian" skills such as grade-getting or piccolo playing. This is an elitist attitude which exemplifies much of what is wrong about Harvard. The ability to get good grades and the ability to play a musical instrument are merely skills. Like any other skills, they are acquired by a combination of innate ability and practice. They are also ethically neutral; they can be used for ill as well as for good. I see no magical distinction which makes them "better" than the ability to play hockey...
Finally, I have a hard time accepting Katz's distinction between murdering innocent American civilians and innocent "foreigners." Perhaps he is correct that the latter is often considered a legitimate instrument in achieving some greater good. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to condemn those who reject this morally perverse assumption...
...discussion of murder within the context of foreign policy changes things. The fact is, killing foreigners is an instrument of almost every state's international strategy. To advocate military action against another state, even when justified, is still to advocate the murder of foreigners--and sometimes even of innocent foreign civilians. An example of this might be the bombing of the German city of Dresden during World...
...still seeking a peaceful way. We want a South Africa for all its people, Black and white, where we will live amicably together as God intended us, as members of one family, the human family. And so we ask, help us the last peaceful instrument available to us: your pressure. For nothing in South Africa has changed without pressure. My dear friends, I wish to declare here my endorsement for election to the Board of Overseers of Kenneth Simmons, John Plotz and Gay Seidman." (Bishop Desmond Tutu, LLD '79, January 10, 1986 at the Kennedy School...
...failure, and a highly sophisticated radar mapping of Venus by two robot Venera probes. Earlier this month the Soviets dazzled the international scientific community with their Vega 1 and Vega 2 inspections of Halley's comet. Each Vega flyby was preceded by a swing past Venus to drop an instrument-laden balloon into the planet's dense atmosphere...