Word: myopic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Noble Savages. Until recently, anthropology accepted the myopic judgment of Philosopher Thomas Hobbes that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Primitive peoples were construed as somewhat stupid living fossils, stalled in the path of progress. Today, though, experts seem more inclined to endorse Jean Jacques Rousseau's vision of the noble savage living in a Golden Age. And they go so far as to suggest that present civilization, despite its vast artistic and material advances, is in some ways no real improvement on the past. "It is still an open question whether...
...whuppa-da-whupp through the revolving door into the Victorian lobby of Brown's Hotel, Dover Street, London W.I. To an experienced counterespionage agent, his disguise probably would have appeared too perfect, and therefore suspicious. But there were no M15 types on duty at Brown's ?only a myopic receptionist too vain to wear her National Health Service spectacles and a concierge who had been with the house for 43 years and certainly knew a well-to-do Yank tourist when he saw one: blue suit, rep tie, white handkerchief folded so that exactly half an inch protruded from...
Round Robin. The reaction was immediate and nearly hysterical. Backbenchers collected 125 signatures calling for an immediate withdrawal of Cross-man's rates. Asked one Laborite: "Why should the edentulous and the myopic be expected to correct our balance of payments?" Further, a round-robin letter, sponsored by right-wing Laborites, demanded a secret ballot by Labor M.P.s to determine whether Wilson should remain as Prime Minister and party leader. In a move without precedent, Parliamentary Labor Party Chairman Douglas Houghton warned Wilson that he could push his union reform through Parliament only at the risk of blowing apart...
...this myopic viewpoint the fact that the fire suppression creates jobs in backwoods areas, and you have a magnificent sacred cow. Many Alaskan prospectors and Indians, for instance, depend heavily on firefighting for their annual grubstakes. It is widely believed, but yet to be proven, that native villagers start their own fires if their village crew has been idle during the fire season. Last year, the Federal Government spent $9.2 million in Alaska alone to suppress fires, most of which were started by lightning, and many of which occurred in distant wilderness areas. If controlled forest fires really...
Above all, the antipragmatists have focused on the Viet Nam war as a classic case of myopic "crisis management." What seemed immediately workable, they say, was quickly done without regard to moral and political consequences. Noam Chomsky, a leading war dissenter, has lambasted such thinking in his acute if intemperate book, American Power and the New Mandarins. Chomsky cites one Far East expert who assured a congressional committee that the North Vietnamese "would be perfectly happy to be bombed to be free." Another scholar proposed that the U.S. tame China by buying up all surplus Canadian and Australian wheat...