His involvement was unilateral and, some could argue, arbitrary.

There should have been an effort to consider the other proposals that were announced. Instead, he just simply froze all of those other considerations in time, and announced that this was it.

Those objecting to the concept of race argue that the taxonomic definitions are arbitrary and subjective.

We have to be prepared for a long involvement. We have to do it not just rhetorically. We have to have the resources, we have to expand our army, our Marine Corps, we have to provide them with the best equipment possible, ... There's lots of things we can do.

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten.

In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly).

Today the Federal Communications Commission empowers America's new media elite with unacceptable levels of influence over the ideas and information upon which our society and our democracy depend,