The office of New York City's public advocate is meant to be a people's ombudsman vis-à-vis the mayor and City Hall, potentially making it a useful tool for HQ2 critics and outright opponents.
But perhaps this frustration with formal indecency reveals an unusual decency in his taste and self, which also means he never uses cruelty in his reviews – the easy tool for a critic when wit deserts them.
Where the cause will not die Silence in the court of King Paul Pulling out the stops The unkindest cat Reprints Related items The Tutsis: The &ldquo Jews” of AfricaAug 19th 2004 Lessons of a genocide: Rwanda, rememberedMar 25th 2004One of the most effective tools for silencing critics is to accuse them of "divisionism" or of propagating the "ideology of genocide".
If the detainee were to be sent into Saudi custody, he could be imprisoned there under a counterterrorism law that has been used by Saudi officials to arrest and detain citizens accused of posing a security threat, but which human rights groups have also criticized for being overly broad and tool for imprisoning government critics. .
But by dismissing the SAT as "a test of mental dexterity" and "a tool for class segregation," critics of the SAT miss the point.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's administration, which began the campaign, says the ads are a valuable tool for recruiting businesses, but critics say they are a backdoor way of elevating the governor's stature, even though they do not mention his name and he is prohibited from appearing in them.
They recoil at the notion that they are propaganda tools for Cuba, as critics suggest.
But the police have also long used it as an expedient tool for suppressing dissent and incarcerating government critics, petitioners, whistle-blowers, rights activists, members of underground Christian churches or banned religious sects, and others deemed a "threat" to public order.
The difference should matter for critics.
But for critics it was precisely that.
