Word: trivializing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...growing list of rules and regulations, some of them clearly too stringent and cumbersome. M.I.T. President Jerome Wiesner worries about the effects of the extraordinary amount of paper work required to obtain a federal grant. Usually the scientist, or his university, must fill out endless fact sheets crammed with trivial questions. OSHA wants a copy; the Defense Department requires five or six; HEW, DOE, EPA-all of the burgeoning flock of federal alphabet agencies-can and do demand a full response to their questions, or the grant is withheld...
...basically an unhealthy attitude to believe any social function has to include booze, but the alcohol is just about the only ingredient to ensure a regular House turnout. Holding a weekly cider hour might go over in Tenafly but in Cambridge, weekly happy hours lubricate even the most trivial house functions. Alcohol is no doubt a social crutch, but it is also one ingredient most people in a House will draw around...
...same Wilson described. As the Cuban and his anti-Israel allies use ever more excessive hyperbole to subtlely undermine Israel's moral right to exist, they render real genocide commonplace. At first glance, statements such as Castro's and those of the U.N. anti-Zionist resolution seem trivial. Though their claims are patently false--the Israeli's have not herded Palestinian Arabs into a Dachau or a Treblinka, nor have they set up their own apartheid system based on the idea that Jews and Arabs are different species of humanity--Israel's attackers seem merely to rewrite history for parochial...
...follow. Said a participant: "It was a concise, brilliant exposition. It was better than his Monday speech." Afterward some of the wise men urged using the troop issue to force a confrontation with the Kremlin over Soviet expansionist policies; others advised playing down the matter because it was too trivial. The majority supported the President. Said one of the moderates: "It was a wise choice diplomatically but tough politically...
Mandelbaum's work would just be trivial if directed solely at an academic audience. We could then leave it for the far more brutal reviewers of the professional journals. But at least in part, he has aimed it at a general readership. And to the degree that Mandelbaum's picture is false--to the degree that he recycles the myths that justified U.S. governmental expertise--this book is an extraordinarily scurrilous document...