Word: argumentation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sept. 13 issue of The Harvard Crimson, an editorial titled "Making English Official Carries Risk" by Armen Melikian, a special student in the graduate Department of Mathematics last year, made a very passionate argument against recent legislation which would make English the official language of the United States. As the author himself argues, this legislation simply requires "conducting government business in English." However, Mr. Melikian argues that this legislation is "but one item in a hidden agenda by Anglo supremacist groups to annihilate the cultural identity of various ethnic groups that comprise American society...
...greatly multiply their progeny by having multiple mates. And polygamous dynamics get especially powerful, in this view, amid great income inequality, as rich and powerful men feel their romantic horizons broaden, and women--even married women--find such men attractive. (Liberals take heart: here's another pro-family-values argument against income inequality.) In this view, if monogamy is to flourish, brakes on human nature, especially male nature, are in order...
...right brain is winning the argument. But maybe the real importance of the Morris scandal is that it crystallizes a struggle that has been going on for years in the American cultural-political conscience. The dispute occurs at the point where the mess of personal character and ambition and expedient need runs into history, principle or public ridicule. Dick Morris' adventures at the Jefferson Hotel--though meaningless in themselves, and pretty funny, if you are feeling savage--are damaging because they connect in the American mind to larger questions of public trust. Doing so, they ensure that the manipulative cynicism...
...fair for Vice President Gore to link his concern about tobacco with his sister's death of lung cancer. But the problem with so relentless a tug at the heartstrings is that it precludes real argument. "I have suffered so much," the speaker is really saying, "that if you contest me, you deny the power of my feelings...
...Administration, and thus argued for the agency's abolition? Or take a real instance: when the Bush campaign in 1988 speared Dukakis with the story of a horrible crime committed by a murderer let out on furlough, the tactic was condemned as demagoguery. Why? Because the validity of an argument is not proved by the emotional intensity of the proponent...