Yet beneath the bitterness coloring national affairs — down at the level of neighborhood, family, coffee shop, tavern — a tenuous belief in the collective good remains, perhaps moderating national dismay.
I don't know what I'm talking about anymore to be quite honest with you because some time ago I slipped into a white hot rage about anyone anywhere ever using whatever excuse possible such as a half-baked, pseudo-millennial reference to force their insipid and tenuous belief system on an entire world of people.
As Maria's involvement with Javier deepens, Marías draws his readers into a labyrinth of tenuous beliefs and tantalizing speculations, threaded with resonant literary allusions ("Macbeth," "The Three Musketeers," Balzac's "Le Colonel Chabert").
Political scientists such as Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, authors of Democracy for Realists, who study how democracies really work are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people's political beliefs and the tenuous connection of those beliefs to their votes.
The link to Catholicism is easy to understand, seeing as Santa Muerte worship contains many of the same rituals used at the Vatican, while the connection to indigenous beliefs seems tenuous - any number of cultures worship the personification of death in some form.
You can't hate a caricature - they're merely used for the projection of beliefs that have a very tenuous basis in reality.
The possible relation of such beliefs to participation appears even more tenuous.
But the Jets' idealism has been supplanted by myopia, a misguided belief that they could manage an already tenuous situation — pairing the N.F.L.'s most popular player, who starred in the playoffs last season, with their own flawed quarterback, who did not — without it turning into a spectacle.
While the ties to international terrorist cells are more tenuous in this case, it is clear that extremist beliefs played a crucial role.
The religious views they espouse will likely be considered protected one way or the other, so that the government is on tenuous ground in requiring them to contradict their professed beliefs.
When such dreams are frustrated, this bedrock belief in upward mobility predisposes some -- especially those with a tenuous grasp on mental health -- to psychological "strain". In rare instances, severe strain helps forge mass shooters, he wrote.
