There are dozens of books by black writers supporting the victimhood-centered ideology I argue against that make no pretense of being based on anything but anecdote.
The reason Kennan considered the United Nations a bad idea was that it is an organization based on the pretense that every nation can subscribe disinterestedly to international legal principles — when nations are always, and rightly, interested primarily in preserving or extending their own power.
The reason Kennan considered the United Nations a bad idea was that it is an organization based on the pretense that every nation can subscribe disinterestedly to international legal principles when nations are always, and rightly, interested primarily in preserving or extending their own power.
To turn a blind eye to suicide based on the pretense that they'll "just try again" demonstrates a profound ignorance of the psychology of suicide, and a callous unwillingness to consider the struggle of another human being.
Fear of rejection by my friends should they learn the truth was the mechanism that held my self-oppression in place; it took the advent of gay liberation some years later to show me that friendship based on the pretense of a false self was a contradiction in terms.
The fact that her friendship was based on false pretenses is what hurts her more.
In particular, the war in Iraq, based on false pretenses and carried out in wrong ways, is a primary cause of ISIS.
Trying to make your mate believe what you believe and get involved based on false pretenses is apt to create problems or resentment in a relationship.
Writers in Communist countries inevitably focus on what Ivan Klíma once called the "intriguing plots offered by the totalitarian system" — "the humiliation of man, life based on lies and pretenses" — and State repression and terror also tend to distill the writer's art, giving it a metaphysical rather than a material heft, a poetic rather than a literalist cast.
Rather: we're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.
