Writing in 1952, after the first section of the buildings was complete, J. M. Richards, the editor of the Architectural Review, said that Nuffield was "a large-scale example of period-style architecture which has no justification whatever on grounds of consideration for the neighbours and represents missed opportunity of a really tragic kind".
This was even true of Jesus, whose travails in Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" played like the first act of a revenge drama, the one in which the hero is humbled as pre-emptive justification for whatever fury he comes back to unleash at the end.
MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, seeking to cement his legacy as he heads for retirement, simply sits back and invokes the "for the good of the game" clause as justification for whatever he wants to do.
For that reason, the annual celebration of Victory Day is unavoidably political: the defeat of Fascism, nearly seventy years ago, provides an unassailable justification for whatever the Russian state does today.
My point is not that it is wrong to consider the impact of policy on innovation; it is that because the determinants of innovation are not well understood, clever advocates can invoke technological progress as an all-purpose justification for whatever policy they favor.
Today, however, it remains a straw-man justification for whatever the NSA wants to do, a way of scaring you into accepting anything from the desecration of the Fourth Amendment to taking off our shoes at airport security.
It's a technical defense in a copyright suit, not a blanket justification for doing whatever you want online.
"They come to the athletes with the scientific literature, come up with some apparent justification for recommending whatever they recommend," Wadler said.
They are all declaring whoever their enemy is to be a terrorist, and then claiming moral justification for doing whatever they decide to do".
