Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There seems to exist every reason to foresee a crisis in a tacit, longtime, mutual appeasement. Forty five years ago, because of the military intervention of the United States, Mao Zedong, reluctantly gave up his ruthless ambition of sparing none. Across the strait, Chiang Kai-shek thought the same. After spending some time interpreting Mao's "mercy," Chiang also subdued his obsession of recapturing the mainland, and his dream of visiting his hometown one more time gradually faded away. With the United States in between, relative peace was achieved out of a forced balance of explosive tension...
Strike (Mekhi Phifer) works long hours, enjoys the unswerving loyalty of his admiring employees and conducts his small, prospering business with ruthless efficiency. Aside from a persistent, insoluble public relations problem--certain elements in the community despise him--he is a model of the entrepreneurial spirit that we like to believe made America great, and at 19 he has the ulcer to prove it. Strike is a crack dealer monopolizing the trade in a Brooklyn, New York, housing project...
This points to the most ironic of evolutionary psychology's implications: many of the impulses created by natural selection's ruthless imperative of genetic self-interest aren't selfish in any straightforward way. Love, pity, generosity, remorse, friendly affection and enduring trust, for example, are part of our genetic heritage. And, oddly, some of these affiliative impulses are frustrated by the structure of modern society at least as much as the more obviously "animal" impulses. The problem with modern life, increasingly, is less that we're "oversocialized" than that we're undersocialized--or, that too little of our "social" contact...
...indirect response to a book by San Francisco journalist Joan Ryan, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, that dwells on the least savory aspects of elite gymnastics. Ryan decries the sport's preference in recent years forprepubescent bodies and the subsequent eating disorders among many world-class gymnasts. She describes ruthless coaches who virtually starve their charges, athletes who are forced to compete with injuries, and dangerous tricks that have caused fatalities...
What made last week's deal so savory for Eisner was the chance it provided to silence the Furies. Eisner is a deeply competitive man, routinely described as one of the most ruthlessly ambitious in a town not known for the modesty of its moguls. In one grand gesture he erased much of the conventional wisdom about his style and vision: the heart surgery that was supposed to have mellowed him turns out to have made him even tougher; the egomaniac who was accused of driving away anyone talented enough to threaten his regime embraces Cap Cities' formidable president, Robert...