Word: argumentativeness
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...France extends its other citizens. In fact, they're demanding exactly those things the followers of bin Laden hate most. Perhaps, some retort, but setting cars alight and attacking cops are significant acts of violence, and a psychological step closer to actual terror acts. All that's needed, that argument goes, are that the demands of today's rioters be redirected toward jihad. It's true that France has been woefully unresponsive to banlieue aspirations. But mercifully few people there are ready to adopt bin Laden's radical worldview. You're more likely to find those who have done...
...national politics, the modus operandi is simple: win points for your political argument by changing the terms used in the debate...
...some years now, BGLTSA has been tilting at windmills to transform Harvard’s “gendered” bathrooms into “gender-neutral spaces.” The argument for the change is that those—and here’s another term to add to our overpopulated lexicon—“identifying” as transgendered feel alienated from gender-specific bathrooms, that they cannot be classified by those silhouetted stick figures, and so require a totalizing change to make them feel comfortable...
...Eventually, such battles hit the wall of reality. Such was evident at a recent speech by Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 on “Feminism and the Autonomy of Women.” Mansfield’s argument that women might now feel more liberated by staying in the home and raising children is controversial enough. But those expecting it to be condemned at the hands of feminists, eager to see women stay in the workplace, would have been surprised. Instead, the bulk of criticism came from BGLTSA types, outraged at Mansfield’s heteronormativity...
Mansfield stood his ground, properly calling those examples marginal and ultimately irrelevant to his core argument. But many have not been so steadfast with reality. When the proposition of changing Tuft’s “heteronormative” housing confronted the university’s president, he found it hard to respond in the logical way—that heteropresumption is the way of a world where the huge majority are straight—and instead invented a nonsensical excuse underpinned by a worry that sexually transmitted diseases would increase if the sexes were mixed...