Word: claptrap
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...amoral”—for better or worse, it simply doesn’t see the world through these goggles of good and evil. (As one online commenter on Brooks’ piece put it, the president’s logic is pure “Manichaean claptrap.”) This division in outlook helps explain why some have compared Obama’s speech to Bush’s revamped Manifest Destiny—while policy-wise the two presidents may be apples and oranges, they have something far deeper in common...
...market in carbon or reduced emissions. Global warming has become a new religion, with the Kyoto Protocol as one of its articles of faith. The idea that we can control a global climate governed by a billion factors by dickering with a couple of politically selected gases is carbon claptrap. Leon Wilbanks, Salem, Oregon...
...more or less opaque manifestation of the real world—which can conveniently only be accessed by philosophers. Rorty lauds the German Idealists and the Romantic poets for their rejection of external reality, but, in their fetishization and spiritualization of the Self, he sees mere Platonic claptrap. In Rorty’s view, humans and the world have no fixed essence or meaning. Instead, they are in perpetual flux, constantly dissolved and recreated by the language we use to make sense of our experience...
...time; those clever enough to have bought in on the ground floor felt particularly wise, confident of their stock-picking skills. Considering the T1 offering (priced at $3.30), the best piece of advice that came my way was from a revered political commentator. Cutting through the financial claptrap with the elegance of a boy apparatchik, he suggested that because so many voters would become Telstra owners, the stock's price would always be politically sensitive. Hence, governments would provide the dominant player with a favorable regulatory climate. Even though we lived in Sydney's suburbs, our family could now enjoy...
...environmental impact. They adhere to Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman’s famous saying that a company’s only “social obligation is to increase its profits.” To them, incantations of the collective good are just sweet-sounding claptrap, and morality is viewed as a matter of personal preference. You want to marry someone of the same sex? It’s your life, love whomever you want. You want to fry your brain on drugs? Go for it. Just don’t come crying to the government when...