Word: powerlessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sheer number of simplifications involved in the political message tends to undermine its effect; the novel should remain the story of Falin and Kit. There is something truly poignant in the image of two powerless people huddled in a house in the Midwest while the warring national powers fight overhead...
...strip he moves to a country shack to get away from it all only to discover an even more determined isolationist living under the floorboards. Climbing down to "see how an anti-social person lives," he finds it packed with "counter-culture" material goods. A friend to the powerless by being powerless himself, TMCM worries about the environment, feels alone at parties, and just generally gets tense and anxious. Obsessed with all the drudgery that fills up his day he rushes to complete it all only to end up standing around not knowing what to do with the free time...
...arrested. Their blood lust was fanned by exactly the kind of rumors that fueled the slaughters in 1947: Muslims had abducted teenage girls, or slaughtered cows, which are worshipped by Hindus. The mobs burned families in their houses, demolished mosques, raped wives and daughters. Community police insist they were powerless, but if history is a guide, many probably stood back approvingly. The government in New Delhi, led by Atal Behari Vajpayee and his staunchly pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), didn't send in the army to cool things down for several hours. By the weekend, more than 300 people...
...mushroomed. Specializing in the resale of mobile phones, these outlets offer not only 24-hour service, but inviting price tags, with the bulk of their handsets in the $100 range. Police believe most of the phones are stolen, but complicated Czech proof-of-ownership laws render them almost powerless to prosecute. And in a country where almost 11,000 cell phones were reported stolen in the first eight months of last year, the police seem equally helpless to prevent the crimes. "How can you stop the theft of something that you can hide in the palm of your hand?" asks...
...strike is the essential tool of labor; it is the reason that hundreds or thousands of individually powerless individuals can exact just compensation from practically omnipotent institutions. The reason that Harvard wants to prevent its workers from striking—because a walk-out would paralyze the community—is precisely why workers must retain the right to do so. Without the strike, or at least the threat of one, labor negotiations are necessarily heavily weighted on the side of the employer...