Tino Balio, in his book The American Film Industry, said that the Production Code meant that American films could not deal with political or social issues ‘in an honest and truthful fashion'. This incisive essay tests out the legitimacy of Balio's claims, using The Lost Weekend (directed by Billy Wilder, 1945) as an example of the Hollywood ‘problem film’. Rather than treating the film as being an entity with a single, unchanging meaning, it is put into its historical and social context, in particular the commercial context within which the studios were working. The commercial imperatives hardly sat well with the reality of a social problem such as alcoholism and this essay reminds us that the prime aim of the industry was to entertain: many of these ‘problem films’, therefore, were as honest and truthful within these confines as it was possible to be.

This book is a crash course in effective reasoning, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions. Logically Fallacious is one of the most comprehensive collections of logical fallacies with all original examples and easy to understand descriptions, perfect for educators, debaters, or anyone who wants to improve his or her reasoning skills. "Expose an irrational belief, keep a person rational for a day. Expose irrational thinking, keep a person rational for a lifetime." - Bo Bennett This 2021 Edition includes dozens of more logical fallacies with many updated examples.

How do states violate human rights norms after legalization? Why are these violations so persistent? What are the limits of legalization for protecting human rights norms? Conventional wisdom offers a variety of answers to these questions, but most often they conflate laws and norms and focus only on state actions that violate both. While this focus is undoubtedly valuable, it does not capture cases in which states violate human rights norms without technically violating the law. Norm breakers are not necessarily lawbreakers. Focusing exclusively on norm violations that are illegal obscures the possibility that agents could violate norms in a legal manner, engaging in actions that are awful but lawful. Presenting rich case studies of the French expulsion of Roma immigrants from 2007 to 2017 and the Czech segregation of Roma children in schools for those with mild mental disabilities between 1993 and 2017, Evading International Norms argues that the violation of human rights norms often continues after legalization under the cover of technical legality. While laws and norms overlap, interact, and shape each other in many ways, they tend to reflect each other only selectively, which leads to the existence of norm-law gaps. Taking advantage of such gaps, states resist unwanted human rights obligations by transgressing international human rights norms without violating the laws designed to protect them—a process Zoltán I. Búzás names norm evasion. Based on a wealth of evidence, including more than 160 interviews, the book shows that the treatment of the Roma by France and the Czech Republic violated the norm of racial equality in a technically legal fashion. Búzás cautions that the good news about law compliance is not necessarily good news about norm compliance and draws attention to racial discrimination against the Roma, one of the largest and most marginalized European minorities.

How do states violate human rights norms after legalization? Why are these violations so persistent? What are the limits of legalization for protecting human rights norms? Conventional wisdom offers a variety of answers to these questions, but most often they conflate laws and norms and focus only on state actions that violate both. While this focus is undoubtedly valuable, it does not capture cases in which states violate human rights norms without technically violating the law. Norm breakers are not necessarily lawbreakers. Focusing exclusively on norm violations that are illegal obscures the possibility that agents could violate norms in a legal manner, engaging in actions that are awful but lawful. Presenting rich case studies of the French expulsion of Roma immigrants from 2007 to 2017 and the Czech segregation of Roma children in schools for those with mild mental disabilities between 1993 and 2017, Evading International Norms argues that the violation of human rights norms often continues after legalization under the cover of technical legality. While laws and norms overlap, interact, and shape each other in many ways, they tend to reflect each other only selectively, which leads to the existence of norm-law gaps. Taking advantage of such gaps, states resist unwanted human rights obligations by transgressing international human rights norms without violating the laws designed to protect them—a process Zoltán I. Búzás names norm evasion. Based on a wealth of evidence, including more than 160 interviews, the book shows that the treatment of the Roma by France and the Czech Republic violated the norm of racial equality in a technically legal fashion. Búzás cautions that the good news about law compliance is not necessarily good news about norm compliance and draws attention to racial discrimination against the Roma, one of the largest and most marginalized European minorities.