Word: pointless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is violence of a special kind, not "brother, can you spare a dime" stuff but anarchic, pointless, Clockwork Orange violence. It is particularly reviled because it is perfectly senseless. We tend to call serial murders senseless, but we know that buried deep inside a Wayne Williams lies a horrible, though perhaps unfathomable, purpose. We suspect a reason, some powerful, twisted logic. Anomic violence, on the other hand, is truly senseless. Thus crimes of madness elicit from us revulsion; crimes of need (like Jean Valjean's) sympathy; but crimes for fun, for a video game, for no purpose, elicit rage...
...same White House official conceded, however, that it would be pointless for the Administration to send a budget so stripped of popular spending programs that it would be "dead on arrival" on Capitol Hill. He insisted that the final product would be "credible." The big questions were whether the credibility would extend to cutting the defense budget and the big middle-class entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare...
...strike, he said, "It breaks my heart to see what is happening to our country today. This terrible strike is being carried on by the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser's army and Hitler's army. They never gave in. The strike is pointless and endless. We cannot afford action of this kind...
...only is this subplot illogical and a waste of time, it tears down all the suspense the MacGuffin is supposed to create. Odell makes ludicrously pointless decisions like having Supergals' roomie the cousin of Lois Lane, or having Selena's exhenchman Nigel (Peter Cooke) a math teacher at Lee's school...
...well be that all the feverish last minute issue-spinning is pointless. The race will be decided by a special group of young, white, suburban voters: the 9 percent of the electorate that is still undecided. Since national elections tend to sway the undecided voters in a local election, the feeling in North Carolina is that Hunt and Helms are hostages to the political fortunes of Mondale and Reagan. They are thus both representative of and subject to the national forces that will decide the tenor of the next four years...