Word: argumentative
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...least that's the argument put forward in last week's New England Journal of Medicine. Ideally, say Dr. Walter Willett and Dr. Meir Stampfer of Harvard, all vitamin supplements would be evaluated in scientifically rigorous clinical trials. But those studies can take a long time and often raise more questions than they answer. At some point, while researchers work on figuring out where the truth lies, it just makes sense to say the potential benefit outweighs the cost...
...Siebel Systems software to Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, according to Siebel executive Frank Bishop. Racicot, a Siebel director, followed up with a phone call to Ridge. Racicot says it is "insulting" to suggest his political role might help his lobbying. "I've never found that a bad argument and a good relationship carried the day," he tells TIME. He promises "heightened sensitivity" to avoid appearing to put the interests of his business clients over those of the President. It's a pledge likely to be tested...
...blackface by Eddie Canton ("Mandy"), Al Jolson ("To My Mammy") and Bing Crosby ("Abraham" in "Holiday Inn"). Some of Berlin's coon songs offered what now seems like subversive social commentary. Beneath its jarring title and setting, the 1915 "A Pair of Ordinary Coons" could be making an early argument for people of color (unlike whites) as part of the human majority: "In Honolulu we pass as Hawaiian... And in Araby we make them think we're Arabians/ We pass through all these places/ On the faces/ Of a pair of ordinary coons...
...argument against prime-time booze is that it's bad for the kids, that we can't just sit by and allow their precious innocence to be shattered by the occasional advertisement for Absolut. That seems a little ridiculous considering the TV landscape is already clogged with beer commercials featuring half-naked women with no discernible brain power and men whose primary goal in life is to be as drunk as possible as often as possible. Or better yet, let's make sure kids are seeing their fair share of fast food advertisements. Yes, of course...
Reaching back to early Marxism and forward to postmodernist literary theory (to say nothing of the practice of body piercing), Hardt and Negri finesse the argument by showing that both sides are right, yet both manage to miss the point. Globalization is a phenomenon with revolutionary, liberating potential--but in the process, it can crush the spirit of those for whom changes in social and economic structures are deeply disturbing. The trick is to find structures that preserve the economic gains of globalization without becoming just other forms of colonialism...