Over all, the poll seems to indicate that residents have adopted a reflexive, almost defiant position on their city's resilience.
But this, said Mr. Abraham, "is the the most defiant position a public official has taken since the days of Orville Faubus".
But the Iranians have maintained a defiant position over the nuclear issue for years, a stance that has increased fears that Israel, which considers Iran a major threat to its existence, would pre-emptively attack suspected nuclear sites in Iran.
Oman's remarkably defiant position was a bit like Belgium standing up to Germany in the EU - one small state taking a stand against the express wishes of the overwhelmingly dominant member of the club.
It's a gently defiant position to be taking, the band conscious that what they're doing marks a sea change from the no wave and punk-funk tendencies that dominated US indie music throughout the noughties.
A few days later, a fleet of American and British heavy bombers were in the air, less than an hour from their Iraqi targets, when Annan — who had been trying once again to get the Iraqis to reverse their defiant position — received a letter from Saddam agreeing to let the inspections resume.
The breakdown between JPMorgan and its primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, was illuminated during a Senate hearing in March and in a report by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which described a bank that sometimes took a defiant position with regulators.
Even atheism is such an active position that it creates a defiant stance of what is "not there," much like the fabled elephant-in-the-room.
Another Western diplomat hoped the defiant Kurdish position could be balanced by the fact that Sunni Arab and Turkmen nationalists in Kirkuk and Nineveh did surprisingly well in the elections, and so far they remain adamant about opposing Article 140.
Although there was some hard wisdom in her conclusion — "the next ten years would be better spent in appointing truant officers and looking after conditions in the homes from which the children come" — her defiant segregationist position was happily taken up by whites of the same persuasion.
