Word: reductios
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...calls on the University's governing Corporation to divest from USSR-related firms, and in so doing to cease "bankrolling the Kremlin." But what the Salient, the Republican Club, and individual conservatives are really trying to do is confuse the issue with meaningless comparisons which create a false reductio ad absurdam...
...says, others would take their place. This argument is like Bok's later argument that Harvard couldn't really divest because then it would have to refuse tuition from students paid by dividends from companies doing business in South Africa. In law this line of reasoning is known as reductio ad absurdem. In politics it is known as the oldest excuse for inertia. Who knows what the immediate effects of Harvard divestment would be for South Africa? The psychological/political element, if considered at all, is vastly underestimated I think, and even if the economic effects are slight, the example...
...well as more than a few personal accounts. Many of her points are made with graceful subtlely. Others, while sometimes questionable in their logic, are direct and often funny. At one point, examining the link, among the New Right, of anti-communism and anti-feminism, she cheerfully employs reductio ad absurdum to show her obvious antagonism and impatience with this group...
...notion of an Animal Rights Movement can be faintly satirical, especially if it is seen as the reductio ad absurdum of other rights movements. It smacks of a slightly cross-eyed fanaticism that might have amused Dickens, of battle-axes who file class-action suits in behalf of canaries. The movement has its truncheon rhetoric. Its ungainly equivalent of racism and sexism is "speciesism." Just as there is the male chauvinist pig, there presumably must be (so to speak) the human chauvinist...
...dissipate into a pastiche of the Hollywood studio man, a change in tone that signals Edwards' trepidation at biting the hand that slugged him. Edwards' directing gets in the way of his own script. Every time the charcaters verge on any sort of emotion, they play it for laughs. Reductio ad slapstick...