Word: straws
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...such statistical straw men get trotted out all the time. People defending the safety of pesticides and other toxins often argue that you stand a greater risk of being hit by a falling airplane (about 1 in 250,000 over the course of your entire life) than you do of being harmed by this or that contaminant. If you live near an airport, however, the risk of getting beaned is about 1 in 10,000. Two very different probabilities are being conflated into one flawed forecast. "My favorite is the one that says you stand a greater risk from dying...
...promised Dutch ban is only the most recent and bizarre in a spate of assaults by European democracies that appear to be targeting the veil as a proxy for what they see as a dangerous spread of Islamic culture in Western Europe. In Britain, former Foreign Minister Jack Straw last month groused that the niqab created unnecessary barriers between people, and prevented communication because meaningful exchange "requires that both sides see each other's face". Prime Minister Tony Blair later added that it created a divisive "mark of separation." Wearing the hijab in schools is against the law in certain...
...power-hungry politicians and money-hungry exploiters who rape our earth in the name of development. Johan Van Der Merwe Hilton, South Africa The Dance Of The Veils Re columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's essay "Nothing to Hide" [Oct. 16], on the controversy surrounding former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's request that Muslim women remove their veils in his office: The political and religious debate between Islamic fundamentalists and the West regarding female modesty cleverly sidesteps the root responsibility as being in Islamic religion or, as Alibhai-Brown says scornfully, in females themselves, "as carriers of original sin." That...
...some 14 million people a week watch and root for her? Because it's easier to hate a straw man--or a straw Mexican--than a person, even a fictional one. And because, as our pop culture shows, Americans' attitude toward foreigners is more complex than the build-a-fencers would make...
...answer to a question from David Frost on al-Jazeera about Iraq's being "pretty much of a disaster" with the apparent agreement, "It has," his spokesman said no admission was intended.) So now his speeches take strange turns of logic around the hardest questions and are populated with straw men bred for easy defeat. Aides say he is frustrated. With good reason: the man who said "what counts is what works" has rendered himself unpersuasive and ineffective. He is counting down the days, knowing a large part of his foreign-policy legacy is failure...