Word: argumentation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whether the earth is more likely to be destroyed by nuclear war or an asteroid collision, as well as the last spoken words of great men. One might defend the current system by arguing that first-years, more than other students, will benefit from these non-traditional classes. This argument, it seems to me, has its logic entirely backwards...
...second-rate magazines. As James M. Fallows '70 noted in last Sunday's New York Times, the mainstream media "missed the message" in its election coverage so far by focusing on politics as a game. He writes, "Sizing up Lamar Alexander against Bob Dole is like having a preseason argument about whether the Yankees or the Dodgers might go all the way this year." Isn't the difference that something greater is at stake? And doesn't the media, as independent power holders, have a responsibility to present politics as such...
...most substantive Afrocentrist charge against the Greeks--that they stole their best thoughts from Egypt--is not a new argument. As Lefkowitz notes, the Greek historian Herodotus thought the Egyptians believed souls could transmigrate from human to animal form; he apparently did not know that the Egyptians had no such faith, as their elaborate funerary rituals make clear...
Afrocentrists claim that Greek philosophy is based on an Egyptian "mystery system," embodied in the secret initiation rites of certain ancient religious cults. Lefkowitz makes the ingenious but plausible argument that the little we know about those ceremonies comes not from historical sources but from an 18th century novel, Sethos, by the French Abbe Jean Terrasson (1670-1750). His fanciful speculations about old Egypt were incorporated into Masonic rituals. Thus the Afrocentrists' purported knowledge of Egypt, Lefkowitz contends, can be traced back to the mystical lore of black Masonic lodges in the West Indies...
...decline of American democracy. Of course, we have seen politically inexperienced rich men try to spend their way into high office before, but at least they could claim to be self-made, or they started with an office lower than the top one. Forbes is a very good argument against the American idea that every child can aspire to be President. How far we have come from the days when a man had to claim to be born in a log cabin to run. Forbes' "new idea" is yet another tax break for the rich disguised in pseudopopulist rhetoric...