Word: argumentative
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...course, Pappin’s argument is little more than an attempt to deflect blame from his own views. Are we seriously to believe that Pappin was pretty neutral about this whole homosexual vs. heterosexual thing until he took a few Moral Reasoning classes or sat through a few lectures in an introductory class to philosophy? It would take a lot to convince me that his words are anything but long-held personal views cushioned with what he has picked up from Harvard...
...Speak your minds, dream a little, tell people some truths they don't want to hear. Get angry. Be funny. But, above all, provide a real alternative. The Republicans offer smaller government. The Democrats, at their best, offer serious government. A direct clash on those principles would be an argument worth having, and one the country badly needs...
When TV provokes a philosophical argument about evil, the subject matter isn't usually more profound than Rob's treachery on Survivor. But CBS tapped deeper passions when it announced its flagship mini-series for the May sweeps: a biography of the young Adolf Hitler from adolescence through his rise to power. Jewish leaders charged that the mini-series might make Hitler sympathetic, by showing him out of the context of the Holocaust, or blame his evil on an unhappy youth. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd suggested that the network was using the project to court young viewers...
Crake is the low-key mad scientist in Margaret Atwood's rueful tale of mad science, Oryx and Crake (Doubleday; 374 pages), a book about an awful future. He's the kind of guy who says things like "Let's suppose for the sake of argument that civilization as we know it gets destroyed." He didn't intend that remark as a commentary on the book he's in, but it certainly could apply, especially if you factor in his next line: "Want some popcorn...
...world with notions of cause and effect, presence and absence, positive and negative, either and or—conventions of thought which become fetters when naturalized as logic. After the organic joy of thought has been exterminated, we drive the mental engine onward through the formal ruse of argument. Our very ideas are bellicose, formed to know their enemies and seek to destroy them. Our delight is in the death-march of the argument over the novel notion, the heady idea: the sound of data crunching and uncertainty crushed beneath jackbooted convention. We drown the daisies in concrete and leave...