Word: smug
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...such sweeping clarity. Instead, the authors prefer to present their findings in the numbing language of social science. "Since the early 1970s," the study states, "the economic status of blacks relative to whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated." Consider what that single sentence reveals about white America's smug belief in the healing virtues of progress and prosperity. After nearly two decades, five Presidents, periods of both activism and apathy, largesse and laissez-faire, the result has been at best stagnation...
...that an embryo deserves protection from the moment of conception. With Roe in place, politicians could pay rhetorical homage to the pro-life movement without having to act on their professed dislike of abortion. Pro-choice groups, confident that the Roe ruling had established an unassailable constitutional right, grew smug and complacent...
Still, it has moments of wayward life, especially in contrast to the smug torpor of Star Trek V, which William Shatner directed from a script by David Loughery. That "final frontier" mentioned in its title is nothing more than your standard black hole, through which the starship Enterprise is commanded to navigate by a not very menacing religious fanatic named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill). He imagines he will find God lurking back of this particular beyond. What he finds instead is, of course, a false deity manifested in the form of an unpersuasive special effect...
...clear from these arguments that Harvard should not be so smug in rejecting the notion of greeks on this campus. But another issue that arises from this discussion is that of the final clubs. They are in many respects similar to fraternities and sororities (in selective membership, for example); yet Harvard does not recognize them on campus. Why should greeks be treated differently...
...children so seemingly normal went so horribly wrong, the obvious question is Why? The youths, described by police as smug and remorseless, have offered only one motive: escape from boredom. "It was fun," detectives quoted one suspect as saying. "It was something...