Word: ploy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Conservative Ploy. Labor's backbenchers, a traditionally insecure lot, are plainly worried that the issue of union reform may cost them their jobs. Without the prop of union treasuries and union electoral support, Labor candidates would virtually lose by default. In this dire situation, some backbenchers began wondering aloud in the corridors whether Labor might employ a favorite Conservative Party tactic-that of changing Prime Ministers whenever party popularity plummets. This ploy enables the party to shift the blame for past errors onto the shoulders of the outgoing leader...
Showing the flag is an ancient ploy that has worn a bit thin. Richard Nixon's decision to show American military might last week was an appropriate reaction in the face of severe North Korean provocation. But he may have overdone it somewhat. In response to North Korea's destruction of a U.S. EC-121 spy plane over international waters, the President gave sailing orders to Task Force 71, a 40-ship armada assigned the task of protecting future reconnaissance flights near North Korea...
Unable to meet burgeoning budgets from a shrinking tax base, East St. Louis has survived for the past 15 years by the euphemistically named ploy of "judgment financing." While borrowing from banks, which invariably have to sue for repayment, the city has remained a step ahead of its creditors by taking advantage of an Illinois law that permits it to float bonds without public consent. This kind of Micawberism has driven the city so deep into the red that debt service accounted for 35% of 1967's property-tax revenues and threatens to devour more than half...
...Ploy No. 4: "You made me do it." Feuer sees terrorism as the natural climax to student movements, since after all what Freud's "primal sons" want to do to Father is symbolically kill him. In Feuer's version of history, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I, reads like this: the young Bosnian student Gavrilo Princip "finally achieved his place as a father-destroyer . . . even though it also meant the destruction of himself and the maiming of European civilization...
...Ploy No. 5: "I don't care what happens to me." Feuer believes that student movements have a morbid need for what the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini called "the touchstone of a martyr." The suicide rate in student movements has been conspicuously high. In Japan, at a peak of student unrest, suicide (the "ultimate test of one's sincerity," the ultimate thwarting revenge on Father) became the No. 1 cause of death among those under...